My journey
How I got here (and why I sit with people now)
- Pre-2018
The engineer who looked fine
I had the resume, the job, the routine. From the outside the picture was sharp. From the inside — too many open tabs and not much clarity. I wasn't burnt out, just something quieter than that: productive, and quietly stuck. That low-grade ache is what set everything else in motion.
On stage at HPE — looked fine on the outside - December 2018
Meditation — the door
I sat my first Vipassana retreat. Ten days of silence. The technique didn't fix me. It taught me to notice — to watch a thought without becoming it, to watch a sensation without running. I've been sitting daily since. Imperfect. Honest. The most useful thing I've ever picked up.
Early in the daily practice - 2017 – 2020
Solo trips. Surfing. Mountains. Learning to be alone.
Around the same time I started travelling alone — Karnataka coast for surf, Andhra for the Gandikota canyon. A year of being a beginner on purpose: surfing badly, sleeping in a stranger's couchsurfing home, standing in unfamiliar towns with no plan. Being alone stopped feeling lonely. It became the most useful tutorial in my own company I'd ever taken. Mountains stayed in the rotation too — Kedarkantha and others, in different shapes of company.
Mahabalipuram — first surf trip, 2017 
Gandikota — solo couchsurfing trip, 2017 
Kedarkantha trek - 2017 – 2021
Testing my edges — kung fu, obstacles, whitewater
I went looking for the edges of what I thought my body could do. Kung fu — earned my yellow belt. Devil's Circuit — crawled through mud and over walls. Two days of training to earn the eligibility to whitewater-kayak a real river. None of this was content. It was me learning that stress is just unfamiliarity, and unfamiliarity is the one thing you can actually practise.
Yellow-belt grading — kung fu 
Devil's Circuit, 2019 
Kodencherry — first river kayak - 2020 – 2022
Two years on the open mic
I picked up stand-up. Two years of writing my own jokes, getting on small stages, bombing more than I'd like to admit, getting better. Met a few of my heroes — Abhishek Upamanyu, Anubhav Singh Bassi — at their shows. Comedy taught me what nothing else could: how to put my own honest words in front of strangers and stay standing.
After Abhishek Upamanyu's show, Bangalore — 2020 
With Anubhav Singh Bassi — 2019 - All along
The mentors who stayed
Through all of this, I was being coached myself. Still am. They never fixed me. They asked the questions I was avoiding and waited while I found my own answers. I learned the most useful thing one human can give another: unhurried, non-judgmental attention.
· - After the breakup · still going
Day 100. Day 160. Still running.
When my last relationship ended, I didn't dramatize it. I just started running. Day 100 came and went — that's the milestone in the reel below. I'm still on the streak: 160+ days now, ~70% consistency. Some mornings honest, some mornings just stubborn. Nothing about it is Instagram-tidy. But it's taught me — viscerally, with breath in my throat — that small, daily, ordinary discipline is the kindest form of self-repair.
From the day-100 milestone — the streak's still on. · view on instagram - This past year
Open mics, on purpose — making rooms for others
For the last year I've been hosting open mics — making a small, regular room where people can stand up, be honest, and be heard. It started as fun. It's become a quiet practice in expression: doing the slightly scary thing in public, before you feel ready, just to remind yourself you can.
Open Mic & Meetup — Servira cafe, Koramangala - Now
Practising in public, holding space in private
I work from the Co-Active Coaching framework — studied closely, applied with twelve people so far, and reflected on with my own coach. But the real training has been seven years on the cushion, the runs, the surf, the open mics, the solo road. I post raw 2-hour Vipassana sits on @sitwithsavan to keep myself honest about the practice. And in private, I sit with people one-on-one — not as a guru, but as someone who's walked through the noise and learned how to listen at the speed of your actual thoughts.
Now — practising in public, holding space in private