Ashwin's Story
My journey began less as a spiritual search and more as a search for some peace within myself.
In 2013, I was diagnosed with clinical depression. Therapy and medication helped, but they also left me with a deeper question: Is there a more fundamental freedom from suffering?
That question changed the course of my life.
I began learning meditation from a Buddhist monk near London and later immersed myself in yoga. The search eventually took me to the Yoga Vedanta Forest Academy in Rishikesh, where I lived and studied alongside monks at the Sivananda Ashram.
There I met Swami Atmaswarupananda, a monk in his early nineties. There was nothing extraordinary he needed to say. His presence itself showed me the possibility of embodying peace. He passed away two months after we met, but the perfume of his silence stayed with me.
Over the years, I explored meditation, yoga, Vipassana, Vedanta and self-inquiry, spending time in ashrams, the Himalayas and Arunachala, often in long periods of silence.
At one point, I stepped away from family life and work to give myself completely to seeking, meditation and inquiry.
Those silent sabbaticals eventually revealed something remarkably simple and natural: what I was seeking had never been absent.
This ordinary human life, in all its colours, is it. Here and now.
Every experience appears within the stillness of what we are.
Life and Being are not two.
Sahaj Sat came into existence from this seeing, not as a place where someone has all the answers, but as a space for shared inquiry into what we are and how that understanding meets everyday life.
I am not a guru, teacher, master or enlightened being. I am not even a speaker or a writer.
I am a lover, in love with this mystery we call life.
Love to work with people who are looking to see this eternal presence beyond any labels or expectations.