Tag: Mindfulness

The Sacred Withdrawal: When Spiritual Sadhana Becomes Your Raison d’être


What looks like retreat to the world is often the most courageous advance inward. In this deeply personal reflection, I address a well-meaning piece of advice — that I shouldn’t “shut my door” simply because someone hurt me. But my withdrawal from worldly engagement is neither sudden nor born of wounded pride. It is the culmination of a 50-year spiritual quest, a decision quietly forming since December 2021, now firmly made. Drawing on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, I explore how most of us mistake the shadows of the material world for ultimate reality — and how spiritual sadhana is the very act of breaking free from those chains. As Rousseau reminds us, man is born free, yet lives everywhere in bondage. True freedom isn’t found in the world’s noise; it is discovered in the sunlit stillness beyond the cave. This is not an escape. This is a homecoming.

What Consciousness Really Is—And Why the More You Study It, the Less You Know


What if the thing you understand least is the very thing happening inside you right now? In a wide-ranging conversation with science writer Michael Pollan, Ezra Klein explores one of philosophy’s oldest, and most stubbornly unsolved, puzzles: consciousness itself.

Pollan spent five years researching his new book, diving into everything from plant anesthesia experiments to psychedelic trips to Zen caves in New Mexico. What he found wasn’t clarity; it was deeper, more beautiful mystery. The more rigorously scientists try to pin consciousness down, the more it slips away.

This conversation covers the surprising science of how thoughts actually form (hint: your body usually knows before your brain does), why children may be more conscious than adults, how mind-wandering is secretly your most productive mental state, and what philosophers mean when they say consciousness might be a universal field rather than something your brain generates.

It also asks urgent questions about the modern world: Are our smartphones quietly shrinking the richness of our inner lives? And what would it mean to reclaim sovereignty over your own mind?

A rare conversation that leaves you knowing less, and wondering far more.

Psychiatrists Are Now Teaching What Ancient India Knew 3,000 Years Ago—and It Could End Your Suffering (The Non-Issue of Body-Mind)


There is a question so deceptively simple that most of us never think to ask it: when pain arises in the body or sorrow rises in the mind, who is it that is aware of the pain? Who is watching the sorrow?

We are so habituated to collapsing the observer into the observed — to saying “I am sad” instead of “sadness is arising” — that the distinction seems merely grammatical. But this small grammatical shift conceals one of the most profound insights ever articulated by human civilization, and it is an insight that has now been independently arrived at by the ancient wisdom traditions of India and by cutting-edge clinical psychiatry and psychology in the West.

The central claim is this: you are not your body-mind and its fluctuating states. You are the Consciousness that is aware of those states. And learning to rest in that awareness — to become the witness rather than the sufferer — is the gateway to the deepest peace available to a human being.

Modern psychiatry calls it the “observing self.” Advaita Vedanta calls it sakshi-chaitanya. The Stoics called it prosoche. They are all pointing at the same truth — and that truth could change everything.

Giving Myself Carte Blanche


What does it mean to give oneself carte blanche without becoming irresponsible? In this reflective piece, I explore a deeply personal decision: to spend most of the day in deliberate solitude. Not as withdrawal. Not as rebellion. But as a conscious turning inward.

Rooted in the wisdom of Nisargadatta Maharaj, this practice centers on abiding in the simple yet profound sense of “I am.” Beyond roles, beyond relationships, beyond achievements—what remains when one rests in bare awareness?

This inward freedom does not violate the moral boundary articulated by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” Instead, it is an experiment in inner sovereignty—an attempt to discover whether sustained attention to the “I am” can transform not only solitude, but relationship, responsibility, and presence itself.

Is solitude an escape, or the highest form of engagement with truth?

Conversations on Love & Spirituality with Oumaa (https://oumaa.com)


Conversations with Oumaa (https://Oumaa.com) I said: Is “love” always transactional? That is, do we “love” only when some need of … More

Modern Way to Live Vanaprastha Ashram


Vanaprastha Ashram is often misunderstood as withdrawal from society. In truth, it is a withdrawal from compulsion, ego, and the need to constantly prove one’s worth. Traditionally associated with midlife or later years, Vanaprastha marks a shift from achievement to understanding, from control to clarity.

In modern life, this transition does not require forests or seclusion. It can be lived in homes, workplaces, caregiving roles, and leadership positions. Psychologically, it aligns with the brain’s natural movement toward emotional regulation, pattern recognition, and meaning-making. Spiritually, it softens identity without erasing responsibility.

Vanaprastha allows one to mentor without ownership, serve without depletion, and remain socially engaged without being entangled. It is particularly relevant for those experiencing midlife questioning, leadership fatigue, caregiver exhaustion, or spiritual burnout.

To live Vanaprastha today is to stay present in the world while loosening one’s grip on it—fully engaged, yet inwardly free.