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.
For most of my life, my mind was seeking happiness, not knowing it was already within. There isn't really an entity called the mind at all — the mind is the seeking itself, consciousness looking for what it already is. The question that ran my whole life, who am I, I first asked at five. What I was looking for was never outside me. It was the one looking.
The mind swings between poles — hope and despair, holding on and letting go. This isn't a flaw; the mind is polarized by its very nature. A bipolar diagnosis is only the amplitude — how wide and how fast the swing. Slow, gradual swings kept me stuck in the mind for years, never wide enough to reveal the mechanism. Underneath every swing there is a fulcrum, a still point it hangs from: awareness itself. Find it, and the swinging simply retires.
For a long time I tried to control my mind — to distract myself, to stop it, to empty it. Nothing worked. Then one day I stopped trying, and simply watched, without judgment. And the mind, feeling itself watched that way, began to settle on its own — the way muddy water clears when you leave it still. This is the witness who watches without interfering: not a state I had to build, but the stillness a newborn already rests in.
When we're in despair, we reach for hope. And hope works — the way a rope works for someone stuck in a well. It pulls you up. But the rope is not the ground; it's still the well. Hope lives in the future, always one outcome away. Despair is the same thing in reverse. One builds castles in the air, the other digs graves in the ground — neither is the ground you're actually standing on.
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 what powers every experience. Whatever you put its might behind gets illumined — a thought has no power of its own until your attention falls on it. When you acknowledge a thought without engaging it, you don't lend it that power, and it drops. And the fear that a thought might engulf you is the trap: how can a thought engulf consciousness, the very medium it exists in — how can a tsunami engulf the ocean?
For a long time I held on — to relationships, and most of all to an imagined future I wanted. Hope is the easiest thing to hold on to; it feels virtuous, so we rarely question it. Then a simple thing became clear: whatever you hold on to, you're held by. I thought I was holding the future I hoped for. It was holding me. Letting go isn't generosity toward the thing you release — it's the recognition of who was captive all along.
They say time heals everything. But how much time? The truth is, the past is past the moment it's gone — we just find the recent past harder to get over, because the mind likes to cling. It's like a monkey holding onto one banana tree while the rest of us keep walking forward: the further you go, the more the stretch strains, until the grip snaps or you let go. Time doesn't heal — it just stretches, until the distance loosens your grip. The real freedom is opening your hand before it's torn open.
My biggest fears were being alone, and losing those I loved most. A fear you only avoid stays untested, growing to the full size of your imagination. In my case, life walked me straight through them — though I'd never say you have to go looking for your fears. There's a gentler door: when you truly live in acceptance, there is nothing left to fear, because even the worst coming true would be acceptable too. Fear only survives on the belief that some outcomes must not be allowed to happen.
Not the gritted-teeth kind — that's just suppression, not acceptance. Real acceptance arrives on its own, when the demand that things be otherwise puts itself down. And it isn't resignation: resignation says nothing I do matters, so I give up; acceptance says the outcome was never mine to control, so I act as cleanly as I can and let go of the result. What's left isn't the peace of getting what you wanted — it's a ground that doesn't move when the circumstances move.
We build something, and in time it comes apart. Grief is not a punishment for having loved; it's part of the same movement that made the thing — creation and dissolution, one process. The breath does it with every inhale and exhale, the heart with every contraction and expansion. And a single sustained note is not a symphony — music lives in the movement between notes. Grief is that contrast; it loosens the grip, and dissolves the attachment that was holding on.
When something painful comes, there's a pull to get over it quickly — to prove you've healed. But grief isn't something to rush or perform. Some waves are owed more soaking than others; a small loss may pass in an afternoon, a deeper one takes far longer, and it should. The freedom isn't in grieving fast, but in grieving completely: letting the wave finish at its own pace, instead of clinging to it or forcing it down.
The moon's phases are the story of every mind. A full moon is the mind turned fully toward its source; a new moon is the mind turned all the way away — not gone, just facing elsewhere, while the light still pours onto the side we can't see. Every dark night of the soul is a new moon: the light was never taken away, only the face was turned. Not one phase, in all the nights there have ever been, has ever taken a single ray from the sun.
When everything falls apart, the mind goes into free fall and reaches for questions that have no answers. A mind in pain is drawn to them the way a tongue keeps going to a broken tooth. But even in the free fall, something is aware that I'm falling — and that awareness never left. I don't have to climb back to it; I only have to notice that the noticing is already happening. Who is it that knows you're falling? That knower is the ground.
I wrote this in my darkest stretch: I will walk through the tunnel even when there is no light flickering at the end. That was all I had. Then it became clear — the light at the end is an illusion; the light is within the one crossing. And later, 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 the light itself, calling it dark only because he kept looking for it out there, ahead.
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 think of grace as the good thing that happens — the ruling that goes our way, the door that opens. But that makes God a dispenser of preferences. Grace lives somewhere else: not in the event, but in the ability to view it wholly, without a flavor. When something hard arrives, the mind's first move is to split it — into the part we wanted and the part we feared — and live in that split. Grace is when the seeing comes whole instead.
We Arrive Untouched, A Circle Complete. Yet Spend Our Lives Searching For What Was Neither Lost Nor Discovered.
We often call it love when what we really mean is holding on. But attachment needs the other person to stay, to be a certain way, to make us feel secure — and it suffers the moment that grip is threatened. Love asks for none of that; it simply wishes the other well, whether or not it serves us. Attachment says, be what I need. Love says, be well. Attachment tightens when it's afraid; love stays open.
For most of my life, I looked for love as if it were something I lacked and might one day find. It turned out to be the only thing I ever was — which is exactly why it was the last thing I could see. The eye can't see itself. All those years weren't a delay; they were the answer slowly removing everything that wasn't it. What was left needed no defending: no claims, and no disclaims either. Just love, pure and carefree, like children, before they learn to hold anything back.
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.