Rebel Justice - changing the way you see justice
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We never think about it until it impacts our lives, or that of someone close.
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Rebel Justice - changing the way you see justice
Stepping Into Freedom: Soma Devi's Path from Teacher to Holistic Practitioner and Author
Soma Devi's journey from teacher to spiritual practitioner and author exemplifies the profound transformation that's possible when we honor our authentic selves. On this episode of Rebel Justice, Maria from The View Magazine speaks with Soma about her debut novella "The White Dove" – a poignant story following a young Sikh girl named Simrat as she navigates the complexities of cultural identity between British society and South Asian traditions.
What makes this conversation particularly compelling is how Soma reveals the deeply personal origins of her work. "The White Dove actually started as my own personal therapy," she explains, describing how journaling helped process her experiences before realizing others might benefit from her story. This therapeutic writing process, which took three years to complete, eventually transformed into fiction to allow Soma the emotional distance needed to tell her truth while preserving its authenticity.
Throughout the conversation, Soma offers profound insights into the challenges faced by South Asian women caught between cultural expectations and personal desires. Rather than advocating for dramatic life changes, she suggests starting with small acts of self-discovery: "Slowly begin to listen to yourself, slowly begin to take small steps into what brings you joy." This gentle approach acknowledges both the importance of cultural heritage and the need for personal evolution. The discussion extends beyond personal journeys to examine how cultural pressures ripple through communities, creating environments where "secrets are kept and lives are ruined just to save face."
Her story reminds us that creating meaningful change often begins with the courage to share our most vulnerable truths – and that in doing so, we create possibilities for others to find their own path to freedom.
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Welcome to the View magazine's Rebel Justice podcast. This week, maria from the View is joined by spiritual practitioner, healer and author, soma Devi. After working for over two decades as a teacher, soma decided to take a leap of faith and follow her passion for helping people and train to become a holistic practitioner. As well as now working for Amina MWRC, an intersectional organisation based in Scotland that empowers and supports Muslim, black and minority ethnic women, sommer is also now working on her next novel.
Speaker 1:Sommer's first novella, the White Dove, tells a story of honour-based oppression and a journey to freedom and safety. The story follows a young Sikh girl called Simrat from adolescence through to adulthood, as she navigates the complexities of identity. Living in a British society is a British South Asian Indian, balancing cultural expectations with the pursuit of her own dreams. In their conversation you'll hear Soma discuss some of the challenges she had to overcome as a first-time author, the responses she's had from people who have read the book and felt seen in her story, and how her lived experience shaped both her debut book and who she is today and how her lived experience shaped both her debut book and who she is today.
Speaker 2:We will be focusing on five themes and we shall start with the journey and the inspiration behind the White Dove and your path as a new author. What inspired you to write the White Dove and how did your upbringing in Glasgow as a South Asian woman shaped your perspective as a writer?
Speaker 3:Sure. So the White Do dove actually started as like my own personal therapy. So it was actually me just journaling on a lot of the experiences that I had growing up and throughout my life was the whole intent behind it was to just basically help me. But as I was writing the book, um, or the journ, and carrying on with the kind of therapeutic work, I realised that you know what, there's perhaps a message in here for someone else, and that may have been just one person. So I thought you know, why not turn it into like a memoir or something that other women could possibly reflect on or look at or refer to as okay? There's someone else who has a similar story that I have. I'm not so alone and it's a common and these are common experiences that I've had. So then that was kind of the reason behind writing the white dove. So it did start off as like journaling and therapy. Then it moved on to like a kind of a memoir style.
Speaker 3:But then what happened was when you're writing a book, you kind of you go back and forth a lot and I just felt like I was reliving a lot of the experiences in the books. I decided that it would be easier for me as a writer to do it from a fictional perspective. So I created the character Simulet based on myself and it helped me to kind of step out of the kind of lived experience and to talk about my experiences from her perspective. So she's very close to my heart, Gosh, it's probably shaped it quite strongly actually, because the whole book is about my experience. So Glasgow is home to me and it shaped who I am. Glasgow shaped who I am, but being in the South Asian community has also shaped who I am and all of that is conveyed in the story.
Speaker 2:What challenges did you face while writing your first book? It's also shaped who I am, and all of that is conveyed in the story. What challenges did you face while writing?
Speaker 3:your first book and how did you overcome them? Yeah, I faced a lot of challenges. I think I had a lot of personal challenges and also how to get the book published was really challenging as well. So I think, personally, writing that book took me three years and when you do read the book you'll see it's not a big novel, it's more like a novella. But it took me three years because it was a challenge to write, because I would go back and live through those experiences again.
Speaker 3:So that was really challenging for me and I think the way that I overcame that was that I would write intuitively. So rather than setting a time in the day like oh, monday morning 9 to 11, I'm going to do three hours of writing, it would be very intuitive. So whenever it called to me, then I would get up and I would just write, and very often that would happen in the middle of the night. So I'd wake up at like two o'clock in the morning like right, I'd have this surge of energy and inspiration and then I would just write. But also, when I was going through challenging times or reliving a trauma, then I would use that avenue and that platform to write from as well. And that helped me, because I felt lighter afterwards and I also felt like, okay, well, this book is going to help someone out there, it's going to send a message out there to other women, to other people that have had similar experiences, and I think that gave me the inspiration.
Speaker 3:Inspiration, it gave me the motivation to keep going and also had some very good friends and family around me. That really encouraged me in terms of like the professional part of it. It was really hard. I've never like it was very new to this arena, so I didn't know how to go about publishing, how to go about editing, none of it. So I did a lot of research myself, just went onto google and just found it okay, how do you start writing a book? And then I realized I needed an editor, proofreader. So I sourced an editor and she was realigned right away. Like it was just an instant connection, like I loved her style of writing and she was really supportive and I've also given her a mention in the book as well. So she really actually supported me through my journey and really helped me to develop my writing skills actually. So she wasn't just an editor to me, she actually helped me to expand on my ideas and developing my own personal writing style, which I think is quite unique from any other maybe, perhaps writing style that you find out there. So she was a really big support and the rest of it, I have to say I googled like how to publish and the kind of way to go about it and it was really hard because, when the book was completed, I did reach out to several publishers, and that whole arena is quite complicated, because you can have genuine publishers that want to publish your book and there's no 50 50 split but a lot of publishers want to take ownership of your book.
Speaker 3:And there's no 50-50 split, but a lot of publishers want to take ownership of your book. And that was something I was very conscious of. And there was a couple of publishers that reached out with deals but they wanted to take ownership of my story, and I thought, well, I can't do that, I can't have the story changed because the story is so it's, it's, it needs to be as authentic as it was. So then, that's why I decided to go down the self-publishing route. So that's kind of yeah, a challenge aside.
Speaker 2:First, moving forward is the inspiration and what influenced your writing journey. Which authors or books have inspired your writing style and storytelling approach?
Speaker 3:such a good I've got a very unusual reading. My own taste in reading is very unusual. I started off with Black Flowers in the Attic and then I went on to different genres, like the historical novels, philippa Gregory, and then I took a huge big gap and I just read nothing but non-fiction. But then I came across this book called Dying to Be Me by Anita Mirjani, and although her writing style isn't similar to mine and her writing style probably didn't inspire my writing style, but it was her purpose and reasoning behind writing that book that helped me to want that actually was. It was once I read that book that led me into it. I'm going to start like turning this into a book, because her whole point of that book was she wanted to share her experience and maybe in sharing her experience she gave other people hope, inspiration, resonance, and I think that is the main purpose behind the white dove is that I want to instill hope. I want to instill this feeling of like you're not alone, like there are other people out there that have had similar experiences as you've had and and there's a solution and there's a way to improve your life or to grow from these experiences. So I think that came from Anita Mojani's book.
Speaker 3:I don't think there's a writer out there that has inspired my type of writing. I think it's very unique to me in that it started off like a memoir, so it's very kind of diary style. I know the feedback I've received is very much like people have felt like they are reading someone's diary and it's very personal and that really impacts them quite heavily emotionally. So I'm not sure I mean I'm sure there are other writers out there that do have a similar style, but I haven't personally come across any particular writer that has inspired my writing style. But I'm sure that I've drew on the many books I have read and been inspired by many of the books I have read in the past were there any specific cultural or literary influences that helped shape the themes in the white dove?
Speaker 3:yeah, I think I think like see, to be honest, the themes that the white dove is all about my personal experience and my personal experiences are not themes. So what's happened is the themes have come afterwards and they're now being talked about and they're now being raised. So a lot of awareness has been raised because of my type of story. So, rather than me deriving the story from current themes, I think the themes just came out themselves because that was my lived experience. But I also know that there are some women out there South Asian women out there who have very similar stories and they are beginning to talk about it in the wider public. And, of course, there's now a raised awareness about, like coercive, coercive control, forced marriage and honor abuse. It's something that is being talked about quite a lot, which I'm happy to hear, because with that raised awareness, we can actually start creating some change.
Speaker 3:But for me, this is life. This was my life. So it wasn't a theme, it was my life and for many women in my culture during the period that this book was kind of written in or told from, it was their life as well. So and I've not read another book like this and it's probably why I have wrote it the way that I've written it is because it supports my personal journey, and I'm hoping that this book will make other people feel like less of an outcast, because perhaps if I had read a story like this when I was going through all of my lived experience, it maybe would have helped me. I guess the cultural influences are my life experience and the lived experience of many other women.
Speaker 2:I want to touch a bit upon about your transformation from a school teacher to a spiritual guide and its impact on women's well-being. So, as we know, you used to be a teacher. What led you to transitioning from teaching to becoming a spiritual and holistic practitioner?
Speaker 3:It was a real kick in the guts. I have to say I'm passionate about teaching. I loved my career in teaching. I loved it. What drew me to that career was the whole point of it was that I want to be able to make a difference in other people's lives, and that's what's always been my value. Throughout the whole time that I was teaching, this life was going on, all of this lived experience was going on. The writing of this book was going on and I was developing my skills as a therapist, developing my skills as a coach. That was always going on in the background. So it therapist, developing my skills as a coach that was always going on in the background. So it was always there and I was always a teacher and that. But then I got.
Speaker 3:I think I got to a point where teaching the passion I was kind of losing the passion a little bit. It was almost like I needed to make another step in another direction and I could feel that passion dissipating. And I think when that happened, my health actually started deteriorating as well, which was another sign that maybe I need to try something else. Maybe I need to move into a different arena, a different field, and I've always been driven by the holistic and spiritual practices because they've helped me, like they've totally, totally transformed me inside and out, and I wanted to be able to do this for other people. And I knew that I had a skill, I had a gift, I had balance, I had wisdom that needed to be able to do this for other people. And I knew that I had a skill, I had a gift, I had balance, I had wisdom that needed to be shared. And it didn't really work well with teaching.
Speaker 3:So I had to take a real leap of faith and it was a very scary leap of faith because teaching offered me security, offered me stability, offered me, you know, a healthy income. And I was in a place where I was really comfortable and I was kind of questioning it the whole time. Like Soma, do you really want to do this? Like this is a real leap of faith. Like you're leaping into the unknown. You have no financial backing, you've got no other avenue of making any income. My children thought I was crazy because they're like you know, let it go, that's such a good pension.
Speaker 3:But you know, that way it was just something inside of me, it was a calling that I had and I had to answer the calling and I've learned through my life that when I get these callings that it's best not to ignore them. So I chose in this time, rather than kind of like suppressing it, I chose to let it lead. You know, I took that leap of faith, um, following quite a bit of hardship, like it wasn't an easy transition to make. It was a transition, but I'm not regretful. I miss teaching, I miss the children so much, and there's often times I'm like, should I go back? But then I also feel like if I did that, like you know, there's people out there that need to hear my story and need to learn and need to be supported. So I'm just going to continue on this path and just see how it unfolds.
Speaker 2:There's no plan. What advice would you give to women who feel stuck between cultural expectations and personal desires?
Speaker 3:oh, it's a hard one for me like I've always had this intrinsic I don't know this nature that I always wanted more and I felt like I needed more and that kind of drove me in a lot of the decisions I made and the lived experience that I had. None of it was like, none of it was easy. It was all frightening and I think for any woman out there like if you're, you're feeling like you're in a situation where you're not able to be yourself and speak your truth and be your truth and live authentically and you feel oppressed by the cultural expectations that we have on us as South Asian women what I would say is slowly begin to listen to yourself, slowly begin to take small steps into what brings you joy and what brings you inner peace. And that could be as simple as like stepping out of your home into the local park and going in and having a walk in nature and cleaning your head and doing that for yourself. It doesn't need to be anything huge. It doesn't need to be, you know, like a big, massive leap of faith.
Speaker 3:I'm not asking people to kind of leave their families, leave their husbands, like what I did. I'm not asking anyone to do that, but it could be like very simple practices that bring you back to yourself and that simple one step will take you to another step and take you to another step and begin to cultivate your own sense of self. Like, who are you without the family, without the culture? Try and find out who you are without, because very much we are molded by culture and by society and we lose ourselves. You don't really know who you are when you strip all of that away. So begin to slowly peel some of those layers back and like find out who you really are, in whatever shape or form that you can do that, and that might be like listening to a song that may not be culturally like acceptable, or dancing in the kitchen, or just be in yourself and try and thrive on that and bring that part of your personality up and out.
Speaker 3:So I don't think it's anything like huge that you need to do. I think it's very small baby steps. Like what I did was extremely there's a lot of stigma attached to it. There's still a lot of stigma attached to it and but I was one of the first to get divorced in my whole like family lineage, so it was quite a big deal. So I wouldn't say to anyone leap out into that, but take small steps to rediscover yourself and find out who you are, without the cultural expectations and the societal expectations how does simrat's story reflect the broader struggles of women in south asian communities?
Speaker 3:I think that the white dove highlights the impact that all these teams have on south asian women on a personal level. So as much as there is a broader struggle, absolutely, but I think it highlights the impact it's having on the well-being of South Asian women and how that then ripples out into communities, and I think it also shows how important the community is, but very much it's detrimental to mental health and the physical safety of women as well, and that comes from a mentality like our communities come from, a mentality and a culture that is deeply rooted back in India or Pakistan and we've brought that here with us, but we brought it here in an unhealthy fashion, I think. So like our communities have this need to hold on to tradition and to hold on to cultural values. That has made our communities an unhealthy place to be, where you know secrets are kept and lives are ruined just to save face and not reflect badly on the culture or on the family.
Speaker 3:And I think this book highlights how that impacts women on a personal level, like the kind of traumas and wounding that all of this state, like all of this kind of, carries itself with you, like you carry it with you and you pass it down. It's not something that's just kept with you. You then pass it down ancestrally, you know, through our dna, and I believe in all of this kind of energetic kind of quantum healing kind of stuff. So I believe that if I'm experiencing oppression and trauma and wounding like I'm going to pass that down, so I I need to clear it for myself, I need to clear it for my culture, for my community. So I think the white dove shows the impact that it has on a personal level, but also shows the way in which you can change that and how you can perhaps create a better way of being for yourself and that will create better communities and it will create a culture that is more cohesive, it's more balanced, it's more harmonic.
Speaker 3:And I do believe that there is a bit of change taking place. I think that our, the next generation of women, are a lot less tolerant not all of them, but I am beginning to see a little bit of change. I'm hoping that. You know the white dove helps women to to see. Well, you know I'm not alone in this. There's someone out there who's had the same experience, the same budgets. But look at the way she has, or look at the way I have like moved out of that and how I've created a different life for myself have you received feedback from readers who connected with Simrat's journey?
Speaker 2:how has that impacted you? Yeah, it's been beautiful.
Speaker 3:When I, when I published the book, I didn't think one person would read it. I just kind of put it out there with a really good intention from the heart. But the feedback that I've had is like it's been really heartfelt and I've received a lot of love and a lot of like energetic hugs, like people have sent me energetic hugs and they felt like a resonance with the story and they're they're very much. The feedback is that you're so brave, you're so courageous to speak your truth, to tell your story, and you know, like, how did you go through all that? How are you where you are with all of that experience, all that lived experience, and I'm like, well, the book tells you how I am, where I am from all that lived experience.
Speaker 3:So some women have felt inspired. Some women have just felt a heart resonant. Some women have felt hope. Some readers they're not all just women readers a lot of like. There's some male readers that have reached out and what they've said is that you know they didn't understand this perspective and they now have an insight and a perspective as well of like what it's like to be a south asian woman but it isn't just exclusive to south asian women like yes, our needs and our traumas and our wounds are very unique to us, but there are also women from all sorts of cultures that will have experienced very similar things.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, the feedback has been really beautiful and it's given me hope and my final question for you is about the future and looking into what you will be doing next. What projects are you currently working on that continue your advocacy for women's empowerment? And I also wanted to ask if you think of going back into teaching again at one point.
Speaker 3:So there's a few. There's probably two strands there's a personal strand and there's a professional strand. So I work for a women's organization called Amina MWRC. So it's a women's resource center, but they also work on behalf of BME women. So I do training and engagement for Amina, who are an organization who advocate for south asian women who have suffered from the many, the lived experience that I've experienced. So coercive control, domestic violence, there's so many strands to that.
Speaker 3:So through that I guess I am supporting the social justice issues through them and with the work that I do with them. And they're a great organization, I think personally I am just trying to put myself out there as much as possible and raise awareness about my story and I simply do that by reaching out to organizations and just offering and donating my book for women to read in these organizations and these charities. And I attend small events where I do kind of book Q&As. Any opportunity I get to tell my story or raise awareness, I try and take it, and it's so important as part of that to be honest and authentic about the impact that it's had on me so that people also can like hear that and resonate with it. But I'm also working on the second book now. So there's going to be a follow-up to the white dove which I've started working on. So I'm working on the first draft just now. I don't know how many years it's going to take me.
Speaker 3:I'm hoping now that I'm not really teaching and I'll have more time and it won't take three years to complete it. But I'm also considering kind of venturing into different genres as well, maybe like a self-help or self-care book. That would be something I'd quite like to do as well. So a couple of personal projects, and then there's a professional strand there as well.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much to Maria and Soma. We are the Rebel Justice podcast brought to you by the View magazine, an independent media platform by and for women in the justice system. For more about the View, please check out our website at theviewmagorguk you can find us on x formerly twitter at rebel justice, on facebook and instagram as the view magazine and on linkedin we are the view magazine. Please like and subscribe to the show and do leave us a nice review if you like what you've heard and found it informative.