The Catching Force

The Catching Force arose from a chance meeting in Goa between Cosima Somerset, a twice divorced British woman, and Father Joe Pereira, a Catholic priest who ministers to alcoholics and other addicts. "Addiction is a physical ailment as well as a mental one," he tells her, "and my approach is to treat the body and the mind through yoga".

For ten years, Cosima follows Father Joe around the world, keeping a diary of his astonishing healing powers through yoga and learning of his own remarkable story. "I had never met anyone like him before - somebody who embodied the principles of uprightness, goodness, compassion and discipline."

The Catching Force is more than a biography about a man of faith and his journey from a small town in India to the slums of Calcutta and Mumbai to work with Mother Teresa and then, following her death, to carry on her work among alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes and thieves. Above all, it is a story of hope, of a healing dynamic arising out of defeat and humiliation; the catching force of unconditional love that enables Father Joe to heal pain through the gift of yoga and to replace desperation with a new life of freedom and happiness.

Cosima's book is a story of extraordinary perception about one man's love of humanity that guides him through a cruel, unequal and often dangerous world, interwoven with Cosima's own challenges with debilitating depression.