Umbartha Beyond Thresholds

Umbartha, a Marathi word meaning ‘threshold’ was originally chosen as the name for a business venture that Manisha Billimoria started in 2014 in a small way with exhibitions and sales of authentic Indian clothing such as sarees sourced directly from the looms of rural Bengal and Gujarat as well as Indian jewelry handicrafted by local Indian artisans as well as cottage industries in Sri Lanka. This was the crossing of a threshold for Manisha who had arrived as a young bride in Sri Lanka in 1996 having had her own fashion designing career in Pune. In 2013 Manisha embarked on a study of psychology and counseling and passed out in 2015 with a certified qualification enabling her to begin counseling on a professional basis. Gradually she crossed yet another threshold when she closed down her store and began full time counseling in the same premises having also qualified as a practitioner of Art Therapy, REBT (Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy),EMDR(Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing)and SST ( Single Session Therapy) methods of counseling. She now shares the premises with colleagues in the same field and Umbartha has taken on a whole new meaning as individual men and women or couples come there to seek counsel, direction, life coaching or just a listening ear and cross their own thresholds into a new way of looking at things.