In Sail Beyond Trauma, Dr. Sunayana “Sun” Shivangi Pandé brings psychology, neuroscience, yoga and metaphysics into a trauma framework shaped by decades of study and her own life.

“I had always seen this world as a place that I’d rather not be in,” Dr. Sunayana Shivangi Pandé said to WorldsEdge Media.

Pandé was four when she experienced gun violence during a hostage situation in New York. She survived sexual trauma, became suicidal in her early twenties and entered a coma at 23. Pande was diagnosed with Cancer at age 19, it returned twice, including stage four which she began receiving chemotherapy treatments. When she became the mother of an autistic daughter who depended heavily on her care, staying alive took on a different meaning for Pande.

“I had to do everything in my power to stay alive and functional for this little girl,” she said.

This is the type of vulnerability that was poured into Sail Beyond Trauma: Discovering Freedom with Kappal Otti Holistic Therapy, which received the -International Impact Book Awards’ Outstanding Literary Achievement honor in Psychology, in September 2026. Pandé, a naturopathic doctor, therapist, metaphysician and transformational coach, asks what trauma requires from the whole person.

Kappal Otti is a Tamil phrase Pandé uses for “steering the ship.” With this method, the body is the anchor, while the mind is the sail and the soul provides a form of navigation. This approach brings together neuroception, breathwork, narrative reframing, meditation, yoga and spiritual practice.

“I don’t think that healing ever means being done with trauma,” Pandé said. “We are given waves that come at us from different directions.”

After her coma, Pandé traveled to India and studied at The Yoga Institute in Mumbai. Founded by Shri Yogendraji in 1918, the Institute describes itself as the world’s oldest organized yoga center. Its director, Dr. Hansaji Jayadeva Yogendra, wrote the foreword to Sail Beyond Trauma and describes Pandé as a former student.

“My meditation practices became first and foremost priority for me,” Pandé said.

Her education expanded from psychology and neuroscience to metaphysics, religious studies and consciousness.

 “I started to study the confluence of psychology, neuroscience, metaphysics, religious studies and quantum physics,” she said, describing her work as a bridge “between the seen and the unseen.”

A study published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry looked at 64 women living with chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD. After 10 weeks, 52 percent of the women in the trauma-informed yoga group no longer met the criteria for PTSD, compared with 21 percent in the control group. The findings suggested that yoga can do more than calm the mind — it may help people feel safer in their bodies and better regulate fear responses trauma leaves behind. 

Kappal Otti brings together practices that are already being studied independently — yoga, breathwork, emotional regulation and nervous-system awareness — then pushes the conversation further by connecting them with narrative work, spirituality and the way we make meaning from what we survive.

Pandé isn't presenting her system as something science has fully caught up with yet. Sail Beyond Trauma is part of her effort to build that bridge. 

One of the book’s strongest examples in the book comes from intense chemotherapy sessions. Pande's treatment became so painful that showering, water, touch and bedsheets hurt. Unable to imagine returning for another infusion, Pandé created a personal narrative: if the choice were between her receiving treatment or her toddler receiving it, she would choose herself.

“I would tell myself the story repeatedly every day,” she said.

She knew the story was imagined. The chemotherapy was not. For Pandé, reframing meant changing the meaning she carried into an experience, not pretending the experience was different.

Her philosophy is integrated into Life in the Bliss Lane, a platform she built to reach people beyond one medium. Dr. Sun knows her ideas will not reach everyone through a book alone, and her daughter’s autism and learning differences made that especially clear.

“Sometimes they need content fed to them in a different way,” Pandé said.

So the work is being translated into courses, video, animation and digital tools designed to meet younger and neurodivergent audiences where they are through an app and online platform. Pandé has written more than 100 books, but the larger idea is access — creating more than one path to experience healthy conversations about trauma, consciousness, healing and the inner life. 

Then there is B.I.T.C.H. — Bliss Institute & Transdimensional Consciousness Hermitage. Pandé says the Bliss Institute houses her books, courses and intellectual property, while Hermitage is a queer spiritual space honoring ancient queer deities of India.

She chose the acronym deliberately.

“We own that power,” Pandé said. “There is absolutely nothing negative about a woman having knowledge, utilizing that knowledge, leveraging laws of nature, utilizing that for completion and bliss.”

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