SAAMAKSHI MEDIUM

On February 18th, the world narrowed down to the four walls of a sickroom and the violent rebellion of my own body. My eardrums throbbed with a dull ache, my breath was shallow through a heavy cold, and my body was caught in a humiliating tug-of-war between medicine and dysentery. At the very moment life had handed me a golden opportunity, the kind of professional "platter" you dream of, I was reduced to puking and peeing in my pants. I cursed the Divine. I screamed into the silence:  “Why is it so much hard work? Why can’t it just be easy?” But looking back through the fog of medicines, I realise that my physical collapse was actually a spiritual intervention. When your senses are forcibly shut down : vision blurred, ears blocked, taste and smell gone, you are pushed into a "theta" state. You are no longer reacting; you are observing. In that drug-induced, slowed-down calm, I saw the truth of my life with terrifying clarity. The Masks We Wear I realized that everyt...

There is a teacher I once heard say something I have never forgotten. "The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long." He wasn't talking about ambition. He was talking about joy. About what happens when we take something sacred and make it loud. Gratitude is one of those things. I have watched people, myself included, discover gratitude and immediately turn it into a performance. The lists, the declarations, the daily posts, the morning rituals announced to everyone within reach. And I understand it completely, because when something finally fills a space that was empty for a long time, your first instinct is to hold it up to the light and say —  look, look, look. But here is what I have come to understand after sitting with this for a long time. When gratitude gets loud, it is rarely because we are overflowing. It is because we are afraid. Afraid that if we stop counting it, naming it, declaring it : it will quietly leave. So we grip it tighter. We say it loud...

Look, we've all been there. Lying awake at 2 AM thinking, "God, I wish my parents were different." More affectionate. Less critical. Present instead of absent. The kind who actually  got  you instead of projecting their own stuff onto you. I get it. I've had that conversation with myself more times than I can count. And I've sat with hundreds of people who've said the same thing, tears streaming down their faces, asking: "Why couldn't I have just had normal, loving parents?" But here's the thing I've learned on this path, and it's going to sound weird at first:  You don't actually need nice parents. You need effective ones. And here's the kicker, every parent is effective. Even the terrible ones. Especially the terrible ones, sometimes. What "Effective" Really Means Before you throw your phone across the room, hear me out. I'm not saying abuse is okay. I'm not asking you to slap a gratitude sticker on trauma ...

You can be good at many things and still feel wrong doing them. At a certain point in your hashtag # career , your designation starts defining you more than your intent. You're known for a role, a capability, a way of thinking - and that reputation enters the room before you do. What complicates things is that competence often gets mistaken for conviction. But many of the things we're "good at" are simply the result of years of repetition. Practice. Exposure. Pattern recognition. Not always enjoyment. Not always choice. In marketing and hashtag # branding especially, it's easy to build a career around interpretation - reading the room, translating feedback, making things work. Those skills are valuable. They're also easy to confuse with purpose. Over time, the disconnect shows up quietly. You're effective. Trusted. In demand. And increasingly detached from the work itself! I've learned that some of our strongest hashtag # skills are survival skil...

For a long time, I didn’t even realise how afraid I was. Not the dramatic kind of fear, but the quiet, everyday kind. The kind that whispers,  be careful ,  don’t trust too much ,  something will go wrong. It slowly becomes the background music of life. I would walk into new conversations already guarded. Begin new projects already imagining how they might fail. Meet people while secretly preparing to be disappointed. And I thought this was being “smart”.  But all it really did was make the world feel heavy. One day, without a big breakdown or turning point, I simply felt tired of living like this.  Tired of bracing for impact all the time. So I started with a softer thought. Instead of telling myself, everyone is against me , I said, maybe I am protected. Instead of thinking, something will surely go wrong , I whispered, maybe everything is unfolding exactly as it should. It felt awkward. Almost naive. But slowly, something inside me began to open. I noticed I ...