RISHI R. BHARDWAJ
Born in North York, Canada, Dr. Rishi Bhardwaj spent many years of his childhood and early adulthood education in India. The cultural assimilation had been difficult, as he often quoted a friend (who was also Indian but came from the West) as saying, “I feel like I am an Indian in America, and an American in India.”
His parents were both very well educated. His mother was an electrical engineer who surpassed all odds that were against women in education to gain a respectable job with one of the top telecom companies in Canada. His father was a family doctor, naturally gifted intellectually yet eccentric. Life on paper was perfect; a child of gifted parents yet the wheels of karma did not allow an easy path forward.
‘When an immovable force meets an immovable object’ is the relationship his parents had. There was tremendous turmoil in his parent’s relationship from the beginning. His mother gave up a thriving career for her husband and moved to India to pursue a more cultural education for her children at his behest. This move, however, opened the doorway to unhindered violence and drug abuse.
TO INDIA AND BACK AGAIN
Amid brewing chaos, Rishi was distracted with efforts towards cultural assimilation. Language and cultural barriers hindered his childhood, and so, he filled his time studying. What he couldn’t make up through language and culture, he made up through knowledge of math and science. He studied in some of the most well-respected schools in India, including medical school and as he moved from one educational tier to another, his parents had to move back to Canada because their financial resources had fallen short.
It was during these pivotal years in India that life became a mix of truly bad and truly good. Medical school in India was freedom from home and chaos. It was a place of camaraderie and kinship, fun and hard work. Yet, the breaks flying back home to Canada were difficult. His mother’s condition worsened. Through the years of loneliness and abuse, she developed severe depression and psychosis.
MOVING FORWARD
In those days (and still now), women struggled tremendously. Sharing one’s emotions or seeking help was not the norm, and leaving one’s husband was considered blasphemy. The co-dependency through pain and attachment eventually led to his mother’s demise. She succumbed to a violent death in India, on the exact day Rishi completed his residency training in Houston, Texas.
On that day he not only felt immense pain but also immense relief. He knew that his mother would only be freed from pain through death as she was locked in the depths of darkness and solitude.
As Dr. Bhardwaj tried to move forward from this painful experience yet he never felt free from the past. Treating patients with medications was never fulfilling as he began to see a different type of pain in others. He saw the pain of past experiences and unexpressed emotions, that were also in himself, in all his patients. He began to realize how these experiences were fueling their current physical and emotional discomforts.
RISHI R. BHARDWAJ TODAY
He was Chief Resident at Baylor College of Medicine and a distinguished resident at Weill-Cornell Methodist in Houston, Texas where he completed his training in Internal Medicine. He spent many years working with critically ill patients, providing end of life counseling and support to those who were dying and their families. He saw needs beyond that of medicine and to provide that he studied spirituality, meta-physics, and psychotherapy. He also trained to become a Life Coach to help motivate those to action when they were stuck in the past.
He feels blessed to have a beautiful and loving family. He looks at his past through constant awareness and hopes that his family finds freedom from the pain he experienced through love and joy.
Today, he believes that achieving wellness cannot be done without the integration of all parts of our past experiences.
“I truly believe in treating the whole: the mind and the body, the past and the present. They are not mutually exclusive and if we make it so then we will never truly be able to help.” Rishi R. Bhardwaj MD
REASON FOR WRITING
We all have had a myriad of experiences that subtly make their way into our subconscious mind and subsequently show up in our physiology and our behaviors. This is often the cause of our inability to maintain a healthy lifestyle and healthy relationships, whether that be at work or at home.
This collective experience is forgotten as we journey forward through our life but the feeling always remains. What others have told us, shown us or expected from us creates a blueprint of our thoughts and actions.
This book is supposed to be a gentle guide through our life. It is meant to help us understand why we make certain decisions along the way and the impact those decisions have on others. It is meant to open up a path toward better understanding of our life journey through awareness, compassion, and forgiveness. It includes the various phases of life at a biological, physiological, emotional, and spiritual level.
Who we are and where we are going is often a simple choice that happens quickly before we know it. He hopes to give us back control over our lives and to help us make conscious decisions moving forward.
There is tremendous suffering in the world. This suffering has become a self-fulfilling prophecy and our society can never heal until we look at our individual selves closely before looking at others. “To know Thyself” is not about leading or following others but looking deeply into one’s own self, prying away at the inner thoughts and beliefs that make us who we are, and to dismantle persistent thoughts so that one can live a life of true freedom and joy.
Rishi R. Bhardwaj 