Ripples on a Global Pond

The book addresses the person who wants to make a major life change, like that of emigration, and emphasizes the pitfalls and consequences that such a decision would hold for not only the person, but also for his or her loved ones. It therefore also addresses the loved once back home, and those immigrants who already have been in the new country.

`Emigration is a psychological process of transitional change. It filters through everything, ripples across your world, and is often a devastating experience. But it also can be a soul-searching journey where you may find that your destination does not necessarily lie in the city in which you will have arrived, but at a place much more personal, somewhere deep within.'

This unique and timely book looks at what and why emigration works for some, but not for others. It highlights the meaning of the endless yearning for loved ones back home, the intensity of loss experienced on various levels of your life, and the interaction between the different cycles with their unique phases that run parallel, overlap, lapse and relapse. There are your own developmental phases, those of your family members individually, those of families as units going through their own cycles of development and change, and those of the family who had to stay behind. How do these different, but so similar, entities come together in the emigration melting pot, especially when you are exposed to the impact of culture shock?

The book explains the link between the psychological, neurological and immunological aspects when you experience the intensity of emigration stress and its impact on you. It helps you to identify those issues beneath the surface that you have never realized exist, and you learn how to deal with these in order to make it work in the new country. You will understand the powerful role of social, emotional and spiritual intelligence in shaping your new life.

It suggests new and effective ways of coping through transitional change, motivates you towards greater understanding of living as being a mindset - that it is your own subconscious, and often unconscious mind, that will drive you towards your end goal, even if you have to reset your goals from time to time (often very necessary during the process of adjustment in the new country).

The book brings to the fore those most inner insecurities so synonymous with the process of emigration; the turmoil of looking for what is right and what is wrong, of discovering that there is not really a right and a wrong, only the reality of your own truth. A subjective truth that often guides you, making you do things you did not really had in mind for yourself, and a realization that you will have to reconsider your usual coping skills, values and beliefs. Are they outdated in your new surroundings?

Are you resilient and resourceful enough to deal with doubt that accompanies your decisions, to endure the power of emotional pain when it unfolds? That `for-ever-yearning' for loved ones, the question of `where-exactly-is-home', the difficulty to come to terms with the different faces of loss, the ongoing cycles within cycles of change: personal cycles, family cycles…?

However, many already have made it through the emigration process and lead meaningful, often highly successful, lives in the new. You can too. Once you have coped with the challenges of the different phases of the process, there is the victory of being able to look back, and to see how strong you can be; how strengths are interwoven into your inner self. It sometimes only needs that little bit of digging to find them - perhaps where you have expected them the least. It is to ride the ripples of change that run almost endlessly through your life's global pond of change.

Easy it is not. It is a long and lonely journey into the unknown, also into your inner unknown - a journey riveting in its capturing power of almost never-ending processes of adapting, and of re-sourcing your resources that often threaten to run out.

Existentially and spiritually speaking, it may be a road towards self-actualisation, of self-discovery and finding your place in the universe, of wanting to leave behind your seal on life's peculiar parchment-scroll.

But, it is also a very real and down-to-earth experience with the need-to-do necessities and the think-of-everything things, yet, still driven by your own subconscious motives and real self. It is this self who will become the victor over its emigration or the victim of its immigration. The choice will be yours; its consequences yours to deal with.

This book tells of the ups and downs of many immigrants in and around London during the first decade of the new millennium. Many of them I have interviewed formally; others I have helped therapeutically; others I have socialized with as an immigrant myself having lived and worked in London for almost ten years. All of us product of the same: to create a home away from home…

So, when you pack your bags and go through your to-do list, do not forget the most important ones: social intelligence, emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence - and this book. You will need them, all of them, as your new address is not only a telephone call away; it is also miles of emotional cycles - emotional miles, which will either stretch or shrink depending on how you will deal with the issues involved.