Have you ever caught yourself saying something to yourself that you would never say to someone you loved?

Most of us have. The harsh inner commentary, the impatience with our own mistakes, the language we'd never use on a friend but use on ourselves constantly, almost without noticing. We tend to think of this as just "how we talk to ourselves" — background noise, mostly harmless.

The Hidden Messages in Water asks you to reconsider that. Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto's photographs showed water exposed to words like "love" and "gratitude" forming intricate, symmetrical crystals — and water exposed to words like "hate" forming broken, disordered ones. It's worth saying plainly: the scientific community has significant reservations about Emoto's methodology, and this isn't a session built on treating his findings as settled fact. But the book's central provocation is worth sitting with regardless of where you land on the science — because your body, like the glass of water in his photographs, is listening to everything you say to it, all day, every day.

This session isn't about proving or disproving a theory. It's about what changes if you take the question seriously.

Why This Book, Read Together

Some books are best absorbed alone. Others open up entirely differently in conversation — when someone else's reaction to an idea reshapes how you're sitting with it yourself.

This is a book built for the second kind of reading. Its central idea is simple enough to discuss without needing to have finished every page, and personal enough that everyone in the room will have a different, genuine reaction to it. Some people leave moved. Some leave skeptical. Both responses are welcome here — because the value of this session isn't agreement, it's honest reflection on your own relationship with the words you use, especially the ones aimed at yourself.

What This Session Explores

• The core ideas of Emoto's research, discussed openly — including a fair look at its scientific reception and critics
• What it might mean, practically, if your body responds to your own self-talk the way water responded to language in his experiments
• The words and phrases you default to under stress — and whether they're ones you'd want "witnessed," in Emoto's framing
• Simple, grounded shifts in self-talk that don't require you to believe anything mystical — just to take your own words seriously
• A genuine group conversation, not a lecture — where differing reactions to the book are part of the discussion, not a problem to resolve

Is This for You?

✔ You're curious about the book, whether or not you've read it yet.
✔ You've noticed your inner voice can be harsher than you'd ever be with someone else.
✔ You enjoy discussion-based sessions over guided, instructional ones.
✔ You're open to sitting with a provocative idea without needing to fully accept or reject it.
✔ You want a space to reflect on language — yours, and the words you receive from others — with people genuinely thinking it through alongside you.

No need to have read the book in full. Come with whatever curiosity you have.

Meet Your Guide — Akanksha Srivastava

Akanksha has a gift for making even the most abstract ideas feel immediately personal and useful. Warm, clear, and genuinely relatable, she doesn't guide conversations from a distance — she sits inside them, asking the questions that turn a book's big idea into something you can actually recognise in your own life.

In this session, she won't tell you what to think about Emoto's work. She'll simply create the kind of space where thinking about it — honestly, together — becomes easy.

Reserve Your Spot

Your body has been listening to everything you've ever said to it.

Come find out what you've been telling it