Bina Salimath

I came to counselling through my own lived experience, and my approach to this work has been shaped by both my personal journey and more than 12 years of experience supporting others. I have come to believe that while we may be shaped by the cards we were dealt, especially in childhood, we do not have to be defined or limited by them. My mission as a counsellor is to offer a safe, compassionate space where you can be who you are without judgment, pressure, or the need to have everything figured out. My counselling is geared toward supporting you in your desires and goals for your life by cultivating a greater sense of safety within, strengthening trust in your own decision-making, and learning to give yourself permission to move beyond old patterns.

My approach is relational, person-centred, community-oriented, and culturally responsive. I draw from my lived experience, Western counselling approaches such as attachment theories, feminist and decolonial theories, CBT, DBT, and family systems and Vedic/Hindu worldviews. My work is guided in part by the Hindu concepts of svastha and dharma: being established in oneself and living in greater integrity and alignment with oneself and others, with a sense of health, balance, and harmony.

Depending on your counselling goals, we may use practices such as journaling, introspection, movement, breathwork, family genograms, ecomaps, ancestral work, and narrative approaches. For clients who wish to draw on Hindu or yogic traditions, I incorporate cultural practices of pranayama, Yamas and Niyamas, Jyotisha Shastra, and Vedic and Puranic stories as part of the therapeutic process. I also support you to draw from your own cultural stories, family memories, and collective archetypes to bring healing, insights, and direction to your life experience. This is particularly significant in understanding transgenerational patterns of suffering, ambiguous loss and trauma where there is a collective history of harm perpetrated on population groups. 

My approach is designed to hold you in a safe space as you develop greater insight, flexibility, self-trust, and agency to move towards a life that feels more aligned with who you are.