top of page
Published by HarperCollins India
frequently asked questions
Here are some questions that you may have as a parent or a care giver while reading this book. If there is anything else that you may want to ask, please feel free to use the Contact form to send us a message and we'll get back to you.
Why is it called Unstuck?
Think of a time when a certain situation triggered a fear response in your body. When the body felt tight, the stomach turned, palms felt cold and your body became motionless. This is a state in which a body is ‘stuck’ and helpless.
To un-stuck from this state of inaction or inertia, our minds require a practice of recognising the feeling, seeing feelings for what they are and making friends with them.
To un-stuck is a practice that first and foremost requires us to recognise the feeling and recognise that we are feeling stuck.
I bring up the same idea of recognition in this book. Knowing your fear, knowing that it comes and goes from your body, knowing you can make friends with that fear and be kind to it has potential for bringing rest to the body and brain.
With quiet cues strewn about the book, Tara goes aahhhhh is my effort to introduce the presence, texture and nature of fear. In the book, fear comes as a surprise, overwhelms, gets misunderstood, finds recognition, even care and then disappears, somewhat. Suggesting that fear is not a quiet, passive creature. It is wild, it comes and goes, scares us senseless, and makes us do weird things. But when it feels seen, not as an enemy but as a force that lives within us, it no longer feels like an impossibility but a funny friend with quirks etc.
Understanding these feelings, recognising them and making friends with them is a lifelong practice and the sooner we start, the sooner we find rest in our bodies and brains.
I have lived my whole life hearing adults tell children ‘don’t feel scared of ____’ and I wonder if any of those adults, hand on heart, could honestly claim that they aren’t scared of life, of bosses, impending doom, cops, their own mothers, sudden sounds, nightmares that catch you off guard, heartbreaks, fallings into open pits, snakes, staining new white shirts, dying, etc. Feelings when left un-felt and unexamined can morph into demons that paralyse adults into inaction.
Why are we talking about mental health with such a young audience?
Words such as fear, anxiety, loneliness, and grief are part of a vocabulary that is, unfortunately, quite inaccessible in its entirety to a young mind. Even when a child borrows these words from adults, their operative state of stuckness and getting unstuck from such feelings can be just as baffling as it is for adults. For a child, a feeling - felt but not named or not explored constructively can have a long-term impact, such as depression and anger issues which surface later in teen years and adult life. Here, a book, an object that provides them some resting space, can become a portal for accessing these feelings and starting a lifelong journey of awareness and embodiment.
This is a wordless book. How do I read it with my child?
The story is about a little girl whose toy-friend dinosaur is thirsty one night. She braves the darkness and walks to the kitchen to get him some water. As she opens the refrigerator, her own shadow scares the dinosaur and then her. This is when she first encounters her fear. Fear that takes over her completely, she runs, she hides, she fights, but fear is undeterred. It is only when she trips and her fear picks her up that she realises that maybe she doesn’t know her fear, and it might not hurt knowing what her fear wants from her.
There are many nuances hidden in the drawings. When I read the book, I don’t tell the story; rather I ask questions about what it is that a child is seeing on a page. Sometimes its a wild answer. Sometimes they see more than what I had put on the page. I gently guide them to see that Tara is scared, and her fear is scared too. And that fear is not our enemy but rather a friend that comes and goes. When it comes back, it is trying to tell us something about ourselves and we must listen carefully. That it is also okay to be scared. We are all scared sometimes.
Why pop-up?
Movement engages a young learner and nudges them to move beyond their current state of mind. Think theatre or dance - here the movement in the immediate environment, in the body, or engagement with space helps activate a sluggish state of being. It motivates the child to be a part of the experience and engage the body and the
mind - exciting, even for a short period, a state of stuckness.
In my experience of reading this book aloud, I have noticed that children are curious about how the book opens up and characters come jumping out. They move around the book, wanting to find out where those characters were hiding. This alone makes me so happy because for that period of time, they are disengaging from the dominant screen viewing that many have become habituated to. That physical movement stirs their curious minds while they explore these new ideas and concepts.
What was the inspiration behind this series?
This series is born of my own struggles with mental health, my curiosities about brain wiring, neuroplasticity, meditation and a nagging feeling that if someone had made this book when I was young, maybe things would have been different for me!
A huge inspiration behind this series is the tireless work of Tara Brach. Her words have guided me and helped me in my lowest and highest moments these past few years. No amount of praise will ever be enough so I urge you to look up her guided meditations.
Vimeo
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter
Youtube
bottom of page