Kana, meaning 'to see or dream' in Tamil, is envisioned as exploratory space to find and re-author the stories in us – some inherited, some given and some said. The practice rooted in Narrative Practices, Expressive Arts Therapy, Queer Affirmative, Intersectional Feminist and Trauma informed care.

Kana offers a therapeutic space that invites

• Feelings of worry, tiredness, inability to sleep
• Bodily pain
• The feeling of stuckness
• Procrastination
• Climate-centred worry
• Mapping grief, belonging, transitions
• Unpacking inherited stories
• Reimagining identity
• Exploring 'self' through arts, metaphor, and movement
• Building relational identities and navigating relationships
• Making space for joy, stillness, and new beginning

We might work through conversation, expressive arts, children's picture books or memory walks. The practice is fully online with 60- or 90-minute sessions.

My community mental health work explores care in contexts often neglected by traditional biomedical health systems. My work has been with coastal and small-scale fishing communities, Adivasi communites, young people, and grassroots organisations to build community mental health and wellbeing models that centers agency and systemic justice.

Jwalapoo Kootam

Through the Jwalapoo Kootam, I facilitated a narrative and expressive arts-based group to explore the Adivasi identity of women in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve to hope and dream of a world that they would want to create, for shared meaning, and movement building.

Ria's Little Island

Ria's Little Island is a project that was born out of the loitering with young people on how they cope in times of adversity and their connection to their natural world through picture books and play.

I also serve as an advisor to Project Solace, which documents narratives of Solastalgia, climate grief and coping in communities.

My work in communities is from a preventive mental health stance that create room for conversations on coping, hopes and aspirations, and documenting intersectoral pathways to better livelihood, health, environment and wellbeing. This work is held through deep listening, participatory action, and the belief that communities hold wisdoms of survival that need to be amplified—not pathologised.

Living close to forests and oceans has shaped how I understand mental health—not only as an internal experience but as one profoundly connected to the land and sea.

The loss of ecosystems, displacement, and biodiversity change are not just environmental concerns. They fracture identity, unsettle community bonds, and create new layers of grief and uncertainty.

As a Dalberg Fellow for Public Engagement on Climate and Health, and through my work at Dakshin Foundation, I engage with:

• Climate grief and eco-anxiety circles
• Heat-stress and mental health impacts
• Story-based education on climate and emotions
• Community narratives on loss, belonging, and resilience
• Co-designing toolkits on mental health and ecological change

This work resists expert-led interpretations of community experiences. Instead, it listens. It invites new metaphors. This work holds space for ecological worry, anxiety, reimagination and cultural memory as central to healing. It honours the grief and the hope that lives in people whose landscapes—and lives—are changing.