This is a book for our times, with war and conflict, job losses, increasing loneliness and growing anxiety and fear amidst people at large. Post pandemic, we have all been buffeted by things out of our control. The human race can be amazingly resilient but at the same time it is also very fragile, becoming more so in the construct of modern living in nuclear families lacking the healing support of people and companionship. Is there a way one can build resilience?

Neena Verma, a leadership coach with a multi-disciplinary background across organisational psychology, appreciative inquiry, grief psychology and depth psychology, brings to us her own unique and original model for deep resilience. Verma, who had earlier authored Grief, Growth, Grace, on the complex subject of coping with grief from her own lived experience, takes it a step forward with this book on rising above trauma and life-crises. Verma is no stranger to grief and trauma. Her book A Mother’s Cry, A Mother’s celebration was written after the loss of her 22-year-old elder son Utkarsh.

Testing times

In her moving introduction to Rise, Verma describes how her faith and hopefulness had been tested time and again. She had not one but four episodes of Covid-19, a freak accident, transient ischemia, all of which overwhelmed her. She could have lost her bearings. “By almighty’s grace, expert medical care and my son Pratyush’s care, I recovered warmer, wiser and kinder,” she writes. Elsewhere, she notes that while Utkarsh, her lost son, has inspired her understanding and practise of resilience, it’s also her scholarly studies, research and experience as a grief and growth coach that has led to the conceptualisation of her “deep resilience” model.

This book, she says, is written to be “like a gentle sherpa and mindful coach that will help you kindle, create, activate, deepen and put to practice your resilience mindset and deep resilience.”

Through her own reminiscences and the stories of others, Verma embarks on a profound exploration of what leads to resilience. And, these stories are what make the book come alive. It is through these stories that Verma arrives at a definition of resilience, which to her is “a combination of virtue, mindset, capacity and personal resources that enable an individual’s ability to recover from adverse, stressful, challenging, trying or traumatic circumstances, adapt to life in the aftermath, restore healthy functioning and grow stronger.”

The book is divided into three parts. Part One dives into the life-storms raging in our world, how to learn to endure these and recognise our vulnerabilities. Part Two is where the meat is, where we are exposed to the deep resilience phenomenon, and where Verma’s creation, RISE, is explained.

RISE stands for a four aspect model — “Restorative Adaptation”, “Imaginal Growth”, “Supple Strength” and “Expansive Emergence”.

Each of these four foundational aspects that interplay with each other are expanded upon and explained in depth.

Part Three is devoted to nourishing deep resilience every day and every way in our lives.

The book is beautifully structured and brilliantly articulated. Verma, who is also a poet, wields her pen with magic — the storms that plunder and the inevitable rainbow on the horizon is expressed in verses that convey far more than mere prose. It’s a book that requires slow and mindful reading though. The stories are illustrative of the concepts she unpacks but there are too many of these concepts for the lay reader to grasp at once. Sometimes there are too many adjectives strewn that also slows down the reading.

Also she brings in references to several psychologists’ works so very often, if you get deeply interested, then you will start Googling them — for instance, I felt the need to look up Carol Dweck’s theories on personality change.

There are also plenty of exercises that she sets for the reader to do. So you have to halt and internalise, and then reflect and question yourself.

It’s a book that should be definitely on your bedside to equip yourself with the fortitude to cope with whatever fate throws at you.

Title: RISE — The Deep Resilience Way

Author: Neena Verma

Publisher: Rupa

Price: ₹395

Published on April 12, 2026