A Sacred Space to Be Whole: Reimagining Mental Health Through a Spiritual Lens

While Shivam Gosai was sitting with a Hindu client, he listened to them talk about their experiences. The client told Shivam that they had seen Lord Krishna, a Hindu deity. That moment felt intimate. The client was vulnerable, speaking from a place of deep spiritual connection. Shivam paused. He wasn’t looking to assign a diagnosis, but rather to fully listen. “If I try to pathologize it, that shuts down the whole conversation,” he shares.

In clinical settings, these types of stories often raise red flags. Clinicians may deem them symptoms of mental illness without considering context. But as a licensed mental health counselor for the Psychotherapy & Spirituality Institute in New York, Shivam understood how spirituality, particularly within Hinduism, is often misunderstood in modern mental health care. The clinical language of diagnoses, symptoms, and protocols fails to account for the complexities of a community whose worldview is deeply interwoven with spiritual traditions and ancestral frameworks.

Rather than fragmenting the person into categories of illness, Shivam considered an approach rooted in wholeness. It was grounded in the idea that people are already complete, even when their experiences don’t align with dominant cultural expectations.

According to a study by the Pew Research Center, 1% of the U.S. population identifies as Hindu — over 3.3 million people. While there is limited data on the mental health needs specifically of Hindu Americans, a report conducted by The Asian American Foundation found that 70% of South Asian youth living within the U.S., which includes Hindu Americans, reported mild to severe symptoms of depression. Yet, only 59% of this group felt comfortable speaking to their parents when having a tough time emotionally or mentally.

“One of the challenges in our communities is the silencing around mental health,” says Dr. Pallavi Tutapady, a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist. This stigma, combined with a system that rarely includes spirituality in healing models, leaves many Hindu Americans feeling unseen and unserved. And even when they do find a therapist, it’s not uncommon for spiritual experiences to be met with suspicion or silence. “My therapist’s eyes went dead,” one client told Shivam when speaking about his past clinical encounters after the mention of spirituality. The clinician didn’t know how to respond when the Sacred entered the conversation.

Spirituality is not a major component of American mental health care. While the system has achieved remarkable advancements, it still carries limitations. “In counseling training, there was very little discussion about spirituality… I had to bridge the gap myself,” Shivam says.

Pallavi shares a similar dissonance during her psychiatry training. “We use the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] to diagnose, and while that’s important, it’s also crucial to ask: Who is this person, and how can I help them in their wholeness?” Dominated by a model of symptom identification, even existential questions like “why am I here?” or “what does this suffering mean?” can be funneled into diagnostic criteria rather than explored as calls for spiritual reflection.

The problem isn’t just that clinicians don’t know how to talk about God, but rather that the system doesn’t allow space for the Sacred. And yet for many Hindu Americans  — and other faith traditions, too — spirituality isn’t just a compartment of life. It’s the ground on which life is built.

Imagine a mental health care system where the mind is not separate from the soul. What if the system welcomed people as whole, sacred beings instead of broken puzzles to be fixed?

This is the vision of mental health that both Shivam and Pallavi are quietly cultivating. It’s a vision that integrates modern mental health care with spiritual teachings inspired by a Hindu philosophy called Advaita Vedanta.

Rooted in the idea of non-duality, Advaita Vedanta teaches that the self (“Atman”) is not separate from the divine or ultimate reality (“Brahman”). One’s internal experience and the sacred truth are connected and people are whole. “Psychology is a manifestation of Ishvara [the divine],” Shivam shares. “When we look at someone’s psychology like their thoughts, feelings, or behaviors, it’s Ishvara.”

By bringing Advaita Vedanta into their mental health care work, the therapeutic space becomes sacred as a result. It’s not just a site for recovery, but for flourishing. Through breath, presence, and dialogue, Shivam and Pallavi help clients reconnect with their wholeness that Vedanta insists has always been within them.

One of the simplest and most important shifts these clinicians make is in how they begin a session. Rather than jumping into symptom checklists, they create a spiritual container which may include moments of silence, tea, or meditation. “Even on Zoom, we begin with a breath. It’s a way of saying that we are stepping into something sacred,” Shivam shares.

This presence allows clients to settle into the room and into themselves. Pallavi uses guided imagery, a tool to help patients observe their thoughts without becoming them. One exercise is called “Leaves on a Stream,” where she guides patients to observe thoughts or feelings and imagine placing them on leaves floating down a stream. “You are the witness,” Pallavi says.

Western psychology tends to separate the psyche from the Sacred, but for Hindus, this connection is ancestral. It’s embedded in prayer, in japa (mantra repetition), and in daily rituals that weave the material and the divine. “People want to talk about spirituality,” Shivam notes. “Whether they are implicitly bringing it into the conversation or not, I’m often listening for spiritual themes. When they are talking about death, what does that mean for them? When they talk about karma, what does that mean for them? Is this how they see the world?”

For clients who grew up in Hindu households but have since felt disconnected, this form of therapy can be a powerful reconnection to spirituality. And for those who are actively practicing, the therapy room becomes a rare space where they don’t have to split themselves in two.

The Advaita Vedanta philosophy has tuned the ears of mental health practitioners like Shivam and Pallavi to reflect deeper on their own experiences and thus deliver holistic mental health care to patients. “It’s necessary for practitioners to reflect on their own experiences and address why there sometimes is a hesitancy in asking about certain topics. It’s important to sort that out because that may affect the fullness of the care that we provide to patients,” Pallavi shares.

“Growing up in a Hindu household, I had to split my identity with Hinduism on one side and the whiteness that I’ve inherited on the other side. I had to code-switch,” Shivam recalls. “Creating a sacred space where clients don’t have to code-switch is important because those protectors that they carry with them throughout the world can then soften.”

This tension between Hinduism and whiteness reflects a deeper fragmentation that many people experience when parts of themselves feel incompatible with dominant cultural expectations. Therapies that draw on Advaita Vedanta offer a way of moving beyond these dualities. They allow people to see themselves not as separate selves, but as whole. “They’re full and complete,” Shivam says. “There’s just something getting in the way of them seeing it.”

When Pallavi references stories from Hindu texts with her patients, she’s not just indulging in a metaphor. She’s helping patients locate themselves in an ancient lineage. “We can pull from common parables or stories and build that into a therapeutic space,” Pallavi shares. “That creates trust.”

As Pallavi puts it, “Spirituality, psychiatry, and psychology can have a home together.” This integrated model doesn’t negate medical science, and Pallavi still prescribes medications. Shivam still draws on psychology techniques from his clinical training. But both see these tools as part of a larger picture, tools that support, but do not define, the journey toward feeling whole.

And while this integrated model may cater to spiritually oriented patients like Hindu Americans, Shivam also notes that it requires care and sensitivity when used generally. “I acknowledge that spirituality has also hurt a lot of people,” Shivam shares. “It’s either been forced upon them or not allowed them to express their individuality.” So, he listens for those themes and adapts his care as needed.

Shivam and Pallavi are addressing the spiritual hole of the American mental health care system. They are, each in their way, building a new kind of mental health care. One that is built with a loving foundation. It’s not about replacing Western models, but about expanding them to include spiritual frameworks that already exist in the lives of their clients.

For Hindu Americans, whether devout or culturally rooted, this approach creates a space where they don’t have to code-switch, don’t have to hide, and don’t have to fear their deepest experiences will be dismissed or pathologized. Instead, they are seen in their fullness. In their sacredness. Just as when Shivam paused to listen as his client described seeing Lord Krishna, the point was not to diagnose but to honor the experience as part of a whole person.

Mental health care that honors the whole person doesn’t ask, “What’s wrong with you?” It asks, “What helps you feel whole?”

And in this framing of centering the Sacred and loving by listening, healing begins.

By Suraj Arshanapally