This Is Not the End of a Thought Book. It Is the Beginning of a Conversation.
I did not write these thirty essays to give you answers. I wrote them to give you company on the questions.
I began this journal in 2009. Not as a platform — I didn’t know what platforms were. As a practice. A place where the thinking that happened in the studio, in the classroom, in the space after a performance when the music had ended but the silence was still alive — could find a form. Could become a sentence. Could reach someone I would never meet.
Seventeen years later, I am still here. Still writing from that same place: the place where the practice speaks. Where the tradition and the present moment meet. Where the ancient and the emerging are in constant, generative collision.
The world has changed enormously since 2009. The conversations we are having about AI, about consciousness, about the collapse of meaning and the search for it, about the body and the earth and the feminine and the future — these would have been unrecognizable to the person who sat down in 2009 and tried, tentatively, to say something true in public.
But the questions have not changed. They are older than this journal, older than me, older than the tradition I inhabit. They are the questions that have driven every serious inquiry in every serious tradition on earth: Who am I? What is this? How should I live? What does this body know that my mind does not? What does the tradition carry that the present moment cannot provide? What does the present moment require that the tradition has not yet learned to offer?
These are not answerable questions. They are liveable ones. The difference is everything. An answerable question closes when you find the answer. A liveable question opens, every morning, onto the same territory — and every morning you find it slightly different, slightly deeper, slightly more mysterious, slightly more full of what cannot be said but can, perhaps, be danced.
My Invitation
I write these essays not as a guru but as a fellow practitioner. Not as someone who has arrived but as someone who is genuinely, irrevocably, joyfully in the middle of the inquiry. I have thirty years of practice behind me and, I hope, thirty years ahead. The practice deepens. The questions multiply. The answers become, mercifully, less insistent and more companionable.
If something in these pages has spoken to something in you — bring it to the practice. To the Kathak salon. To the Wellbeing Aacharya retreat. To the keynote conversation. To the quiet of your own morning.
The conversation continues. It has always been continuing. You were already part of it before you opened this book.
Come further in.
