I used to think I was Ishita. Then I was sure I was nothing. Now I know I am everything.
As Ishita I have spent my life asking big questions and dissecting the edges of knowledge, unconsciously engaged in what I now recognize as a search for core Truth.
Growing up close to rivers and mountains in a Himalayan valley, I could be found admiring forests full of Koel songs or tracing lines of ants for hours at end, moving through the day with eyes closed, trying to see without seeing…
Driven by hungry existential curiosity, I looked for Truth in my homeland and awaylands, in forests and mountains, deserts and oceans. An explorer and creator, a wonderer and a wanderer I did, made, felt and thought about much…
Searching for answers through my work, I evolved into a multidisciplinary designer and thinker. Trained as an architect and a writer, I grappled with steel and concrete on one end, and our very humanity on another. Refusing to limit my explorations to a single label, I have worked as an architect, designer, painter, photographer, potter, editor, journalist and yogi…
I kept searching for Truth in the hearts and minds of others, in up-down-out-and-arounds, until my incessant questioning began pointing me towards my self and I got quiet, clear, still and full.
I separated knowing and understanding. I dropped the lie.
I admitted that the answers to my own questions lay inside me and had always been there. I realized time was a modification of my mind.
I accepted and surrendered to that which I knew but didn’t understand.
I began to align my outer self with my inner knowing.
Then, walking past a bookstore window I read the words “I Am That” popping out at me. To my own surprise, I heard myself say, “Why, yes, I am!” I walked into the bookstore, picked up the book, opened it up to be brought home by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj’s teachings. It became the only book I read for 4 years!
Over the next couple months, re-cognizing my own inner truth I had never had the words to articulate, I wept with joy and laughed with gratitude. Here at last, home at last! And then, the depths of my I-ness dissolved. All boundaries between me and not me melted so completely that there was no I left…no time, no space…nothing but the non conceptual one-ness, that which had no second. That which cannot be put into words, for it is the thing that makes words. And all else.
Eyes opened, the dream was over.
If you’re curious, yeah, I kept going to work, apparently losing your I doesn’t prevent architecture to be made through “you!” A glorious time of learning and assimilation followed. I discovered that the biggest questions have small and simple answers, that there is no core Truth. And that is magnificent!
I don’t believe there is The Truth, but I have found a Truth, in which I am finally home. And I want to help you find yours.
In 2015, I left work & home to make space and figure out how to engage consciously with the world and integrate my inside and outside. In that space emerged pointers that have brought me to exactly where I need to be now.
Now, whether I am leading a meditation, designing a product or a process, a painting or a poem or a photoshoot, I do it just for the pleasure of doing it. I don’t expect or need it to fill a hunger or a void in me. And the work is both better, and more pleasurable than ever.
Life is light, joyful, wholesome.
Fully at home in the foreground of spaciousness, I play in the world centered in peace within. And this fuels a joyous curiosity and a wondrous exploration, rather than limiting them.
I am ever more intrigued by the manifest world and want to know its very fundamentals as I explore life in its fullness! I am finally, free.
come to center 