On suffering, stillness, and the light that was never lost.
Who I am
I am a father, a founder, someone who has struggled with mental illness, and at one point — I was an inmate.
Unshakeable one day, shattered the next. And somewhere in the wreckage of what I thought my life was supposed to look like, I found my truth.
Mental health has met me from nearly every side — as a caregiver, as the founder who built a place for others to find support sooner than they otherwise might, and finally as the patient, carried through wild, swinging manic episodes that revealed from the inside everything I once believed I understood from the outside. Each vantage taught me something the others could not. The last taught me the most.
The Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads helped me find myself when I was most lost, and writing is as near as I come to pointing at what cannot be said. If life has taught me anything, it is that suffering, once understood, becomes the most honest teacher there is.
Consciousness is limitless. The mind is Nature's instrument — originally clean like a child's, conditioned into duality through the process of adulting. Liberation, therefore, is not arrival. It is deconditioning — the removal of what was never true. Unlearning is harder than learning, because you don't have a map or a plan.
In the stillness of mind, the soul reveals itself.
The Cause
It began in 2013, in a conversation with my wife — a psychologist — as I dropped her at an internship tucked into an inconvenient corner of the city. I asked why anyone would practice somewhere so hard to reach. Because, she said, people don't want to be seen walking into a therapist's office. The hiding was the whole problem.
So I asked: why not build something anonymous and easy, where nobody sees nobody? She said it would be a good thing to build. I said I would.
The idea never left. It kept returning, often pulling me back into my own younger years — the peer pressure, the loneliness, the grief of losing loved ones. I didn't know if help would have changed any of it. I only knew I needed to build this, as much for myself as for anyone.
We launched on October 10th, 2016 — World Mental Health Day, and, as it happened, my birthday. We had offered professional support, for free, for anything a person might be carrying — and still, people hesitated. Not for lack of need, but because reaching out meant admitting they had one.
In the years since, more people than I ever expected have reached out from around the world — and many of them stayed long enough to talk.
Having been the patient too, I can only imagine what my illness, and the actions it drove, put others through. I wouldn't wish for anyone to suffer in silence. Reaching out for help is not a weakness — it is strength.
The Book
It begins with a question I first asked at five, to my Grandfather — who am I? — and the quiet void that question opened. It moves through a year I could not have scripted: a mind that began to outrun me. I wanted to cure cancer, build gurukools, trade options — grandiose plans arriving faster than I could hold them; I felt like a storm. I stared down the sun to see who would blink first. One moment God's son; the next, a terrified child with no idea what he had just done.
The story my distorted mind was showing me was out of sync with the reality. It ended in a freak accident: a car turned into a gas chamber, 16 pepper projectiles, no ventilation, 27 minutes of burning and choking. And still I told the Sheriff I took orders from no one but my Grandfather. He had died in 1992.
Then a cell in Santa Clara County Main Jail — where the same question returned.
What I found there was not what I went looking for. Reading the Gita in confinement, I understood for the first time what it had been trying to tell me all along. Calm arrived where it had no business arriving — a nurse, tending a wound, once asked how I could be so calm, and all I could say was: do I have a choice? I was learning trust in circumstances I never imagined. If I could trust strangers with my eyes closed, why not God?
I wondered how every inmate around me had once been an innocent child — and how far the process of adulting can carry any of us from who we truly are: a manifestation of love.
It is not a story of escape, for there is no escape really. It is a story of discovering the silence of the soul that was snubbed by a loud mind.
Jail Set Me Free is a memoir tracing an arc from confinement to clarity. It is ironic that liberation revealed itself through confinement.
A Philosophical Memoir
From the manuscript
Who am I? Why am I here? Where was I before? The story my distorted mind was showing me was out of sync with the reality. Thirty-seven years later, I sat by the desk in my cell — finally scratching the surface of what was always within. As ironic as it is, it was jail that set me free.
I will walk through the tunnel even when there is no light flickering at the end. If there is light, it will find its own way. And if there is none — who am I to demand it? There is a strange solace in darkness, like a winding road almost home at dusk, tired from the day.
An invitation
I offer one-on-one spiritual coaching for those moving through a hard passage — the same inner work these pages describe. Not advice, and not therapy. A place to reflect, and to see beyond the thoughts and feelings that so often engulf us.
Reflections
These notes are shaped by my two most significant inspirations — Advaita Vedanta and the Bhagavad Gita — held not as philosophy but as instruction, and tested in my own hardest hours.
We treat the mind as a thing we have — a restless companion that never settles. But look closely and there is no such entity, only a movement: consciousness looking for itself. The mind does not seek; the mind is the seeking. Which is why no achievement ever fills the void — a search cannot be satisfied by scenes. And finding is not the mind's death but its completion: a search party disbands the moment the child is found.
The mind is a pendulum, swinging between poles on every unbearable question — hero and villain, hope and despair, cling and reject. Duality is not its flaw; it is how it runs. Illness only turns up the amplitude, the swing so wide and fast that the structure finally becomes visible. And what you notice then is the fulcrum: the swinging is not the ground. Awareness is the still point the pendulum hangs from — and the moment it is seen, the swinging doesn't have to stop. It simply retires.
They tried to stop the mind, and it fought back. Then someone stopped trying, and simply watched — and the mind settled on its own, the way muddy water clears when you stop stirring it. This is the Sakshi, the witness who watches without interfering: not a state you achieve, but the still awareness you already are.
In the depth of despair, one seeks hope. And hope works — the way a rope works for a man in a well. It pulls him up. But the rope is not the ground. It is still the well.
The Mind, Loyal To Its Wounds, Replays What Broke Instead Of What Healed. To Resist Is To Re-Live. To Release Is To Evolve.
Consciousness is like an energy source, and it powers acceptance, hope, and despair alike. Whatever you put its might behind gets illumined — a thought is inert, an image on unlit film, until the light of attention falls on it and makes it vivid. Engage a thought and you feed it your light; simply acknowledge it, without engaging, and you withhold that power, and it drops. Which means the choice was always yours. And the fear that a thought might engulf you is the final trick — how could a wave engulf the ocean it rises in, or a storm engulf the space it moves through?
We imagine we are the ones holding on — to a hope, a person, a version of how things should have gone. But turn it around: whatever you hold on to, you are held by. The grip decides where you can stand and how much of the present is even available to you. So release is not generosity toward the thing you let go of — it is the recognition of who was captive all along. You were never holding it. It was holding you.
We say time heals, as if the clock does the work. It doesn't. What we call healing is the loosening of a grip — and time only stretches that grip until distance defeats it. Picture a hand clinging to a branch while the body walks on: the further you go, the more it strains, until it tears or lets go. So the honest answer to "how long will this take?" is exactly as long as you hold on, not a day more. The only real freedom is opening the hand before it's torn open.
Fearlessness is not the feeling of being brave. It is the quiet fact of having checked. A fear we only avoid stays pristine — untested, and so it swells to the full size of the imagination that built it, larger every year. Living it through is the only audit; you enter the room you dreaded and find a floor. And freedom follows on its own, because every fear was a fence — a person's freedom is exactly the size of their unlived fears.
Not the gritted-teeth kind. That is suppression wearing acceptance's clothes. Effortless acceptance arrives on its own — when the demand that things be otherwise has quietly put itself down.
Mourning and morning — the same sound doing opposite work, and both necessary. If there were only ever morning, and you had never known night, you would not recognize morning at all. Grief is the night that makes the day legible; it is how attachment loosens and dissolves. It is not a punishment for having loved. It is contrast — and without contrast, nothing can be perceived at all.
The moon's phases are the biography of every mind. Full moon is the mind turned wholly toward its source; new moon is the mind turned entirely away — and yet the light still pours onto its far side, unseen. Every dark night of the soul is a new moon: the light was never withdrawn, only the face was turned. Clouds may hide the sun, but they change nothing behind them. Not one phase in the history of skies has ever taken a single ray from the sun.
Even in free fall, something is aware that you are falling. That awareness never left — it is watching the drowning. So the practice is not to climb back to a calm you lost, but to notice that the noticing is already happening. Who knows you are falling? That knower is the ground.
I will walk through the tunnel even when there is no light flickering at the end. If there is light, it will find its own way — and if there is truly a light, it must be within me too. The light at the end was always an illusion; the light is within the one crossing. Later still, the last turn: the walker is within the light. Darkness is visible only to light. The one who thought he walked through the dark was luminosity itself, calling the corridor dark because he kept looking for a light out there — the one place his own light never lands.
The Roots Don't Stake A Claim, Yet They Hold The Tree. Calm Is Not Afraid Of Storm — It Is What The Storm Happens In.
We usually locate grace in good fortune — the thing that went our way. But that makes the divine a dispenser of preferences. The rarer, truer grace is the ability to receive any event whole, without a flavor: to take even what disappoints without splitting it into the half you wanted and the half you feared. That splitting was always the mind's one trick, and living in the split is most of our suffering. Grace is simply what is already working in you when you stop flavoring, and show up.
We Arrive Untouched, A Circle Complete. Yet Spend Our Lives Searching For What Was Neither Lost Nor Discovered.
For most of my life I looked for love as if it were something I lacked and might one day acquire. It turned out to be the only thing I ever was — which is precisely why it was the last thing to be seen. The eye cannot see itself. What finally fell away was the auditor: no claims, and no disclaims either — neither the boast of having it nor the performance of humbly denying it. Just love, unmonitored, the way a child barrels into a room.
Sakshi, the witness, catches you after the wave has formed — you see the fear and do not drown in it. Ehsaas catches you before: before the wave rises, when there is only the felt sense, not yet split into liked and disliked. The witness frees you from the story; Ehsaas returns you to the ground it was written on.
Na Paana, Na Khona — Hona Hi Pyaar Hai. Na Aas, Na Pyaas, Sirf Ehsaas.
Reach Out
Whether it is mental wellness, philosophy, the book, or simply something you carry — I welcome the conversation.