From a Doleful to a Soulful Life: Healing, Hope and Inner Power | Dr. Coomi Vevaina | TEDxYouth@LPHS

Dr. Coomi Vevaina opens her talk with an analogy about packing for a ski trip to Alaska — while most people know to prepare for the cold, almost no one is taught how to prepare for the inner challenges of life such as anger, fear, depression, and guilt. She cites a World Health Organization projection that depression will be the world's biggest pandemic by 2030, which motivated her to share her personal journey in the hope of equipping others with greater hope and courage.

Vevaina describes her early life as deeply unhappy — she was labeled a loser and a dreamer, publicly humiliated in school for struggling with math, experienced financial hardship, emotional volatility, a chronic inferiority complex, and seven miscarriages. She developed a deep victim mindset and was consumed by self-pity, frequently identifying with lines like 'I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed.'

The turning point came in her late 20s when she attended a talk by an American Jungian psychologist who argued that happiness is a matter of choice. Initially furious and dismissive, she was given books and Joseph Campbell videos to explore. That night, a small inner voice asked 'What if he's right?' — and she decided to give inner work a try. She began consuming books, attending courses, and fell deeply in love with literature, psychology, and wisdom literature. Through literature, she developed self-awareness, psycho-literacy, social awareness, and environmental awareness.

From psychology, she internalized the truth that the only person she could change was herself. She adopted the metaphor of a snow globe — when life shakes us, we feel fragmented and scattered, and we fabricate stories about ourselves and others. She began peeling off psychological layers, confronting her social masks and unconscious parts, and occasionally glimpsing what she describes as an innermost core immune to life's dramas. She emphasized that self-realization is not a one-time goal but an iterative, lifelong process.

Wisdom literature taught her the importance of stilling the mind, illustrated through W.B. Yeats' line 'things fall apart, the center cannot hold' and the symbol of a wheel with a still center — representing an unchanging reality amid constant change. She also references the vesica piscis as a symbol of the union of opposites.

A transformative encounter with a former student — once a militant poet who believed in violence for social change but who later became peaceful — reinforced her belief that inner peace translates into outer and global peace. This led her to shift from oppositional 'anti' thinking to constructive 'pro' thinking, arguing that anti-energy is destructive while pro-energy is productive and healing.

She then introduces her CARS model — an acronym for Commit, Act, Review, and Share — as a practical framework for personal change. Using jealousy as an example, she walks through committing to change, taking action through self-talk or proven techniques, reviewing the effects of new thought patterns, and sharing insights with others on the same path. She anchors this in Gandhi's chain of transformation: perceptions become beliefs, beliefs become thoughts, thoughts become words, actions become habits, habits become values, and values become destiny.

Vevaina concludes by describing her evolution from competitive self-versus-other consciousness to cooperative self-and-other consciousness, and ultimately toward unity consciousness — while honestly acknowledging she still slips and falls. She urges the audience not to succumb to despair, to recognize their uniqueness and shared humanity, and to draw on the immense reservoir of inner strength she believes exists within everyone.