How Much of Your Happiness Belongs to You?
There is no amount of achievement that can promise you nothing will change.
This isn't only a personal question. For as long as people have been afraid of losing what they have, they've tried to build a life immune to it - enough money that losing some stops being frightening, enough success that other people's opinions lose their power, enough certainty to finally relax.
Aarti and I each arrived at that plan on our own, in different rooms, chasing it in our own ways, long before we built anything together.
We can see the problem with it now: there is no amount of achievement that can promise you nothing will change.
You can be doing well and still feel behind. You can be loved and still fear being left. You can get the life you wanted and immediately start worrying about how to keep it.
And somewhere in all that protecting, improving and proving, living becomes something you keep meaning to get around to.
How long can you keep preparing to be happy?
Why achieving more never settles the question
We're Aditya Sharma and Aarti Babhoota. We both started working at seventeen, both from the bottom, in industries with nothing to do with each other. Mine was about helping people go somewhere. Hers was about building the rooms where people met, in one country after another.
I spent my early career in luxury hospitality, with two of India's largest hotel groups, including on the opening of new properties. I later co-founded Tripver, a crowdsourced travel community platform built around bringing travellers together. Across those years I met and spoke with thousands of people, from different generations and walks of life.
Part of my job, early on, was handling guests who were angry - a wrong room, a missed upgrade, an evening that had gone sideways. I turned out to be good at it. Calming someone down was, it seemed, exactly my kind of personality. And the strange thing about calming down someone successful and well-known is that after a drink or two, they would usually keep talking - about a marriage that wasn't working, a child they didn't know how to reach, how alone they actually felt.
I met some of the most recognised names in the country that way. I had wanted to become people like them. Once I got close enough to actually know a few, I understood how much of that wanting had been aimed at something that wasn't really there.
I spent a decade engineering operations that could produce almost anything a guest asked for, on demand, at any hour. The one thing none of it could produce was stillness. That, increasingly, seemed to be the thing people were actually short of.
The travellers I worked with later were asking for something similar, in plainer language. Some were celebrating. Some needed distance from work. Some wanted adventure, company, silence, or a few days when nobody expected anything of them.
Underneath the different reasons, people wanted to feel happy. Free. A little more alive. I understood that. I was looking too.
What happens after the trip ends
There was happiness in travel: an unexpected friendship, a long conversation, sitting quietly in nature. Sometimes it came through partying or getting high; sometimes through finally having permission to do nothing.
But I kept wondering about what happened afterwards.
The trip ended. The inbox was still there. So were the difficult relationship, the comparison, the habits, the thoughts that had made a break feel so necessary. A beautiful experience could change your perspective. Whether that change travelled home with you was another question.
Tripver was doing well by then. I had left a salaried job to build it, on the assumption almost every first-time founder makes: that once the company is yours, you finally answer to nobody.
That turned out to be wrong, and wrong in a specific way. You are never quite your own boss. The boss is whoever holds the money - the people funding you, or the customers, or simply the market deciding what it is willing to pay for. The title on your card changes. The arithmetic underneath does not.
So the same plan I thought I had escaped quietly reassembled itself around me: make enough, prove enough, and only then relax. It had stopped being about the travelling.
I had spent years helping people take a break from their lives. I was becoming interested in what could help them when they returned.
Why silence alone doesn't quiet the mind
Vaatalya came out of that question. I co-created it as a nine-acre, off-grid mountaintop community retreat in Solan district, Himachal Pradesh, surrounded by reserve forest on three sides. The nearest shop is about thirty minutes away.
That last detail tells you something a photograph cannot. You have to make a little more effort to distract yourself there.
The idea dated back to 2007. Two rooms were standing by around 2014 and a few people came, but it only opened properly in 2023. That tells you something about building off-grid on a mountain, and something about how long it can take to be certain of what you are actually making.
Living there in relative isolation meant spending real time with ourselves, and it taught us quickly that beautiful surroundings do not produce a quiet mind. You can be looking at a mountain and mentally arguing with someone who isn't there. You can have nowhere urgent to go and still feel restless. You can finally have the silence you wanted and immediately reach for your phone.
Aarti's route to the same discovery ran through a different set of rooms.
She spent more than twenty years inside large corporations. Process and product roles in financial services first, where she became a senior manager young enough for it to surprise people. Later, exhibitions - building the events that brought education institutions and students together across Europe. The work carried her through close to fifty countries. Her passport is the thickest thing she owns.
It was a career that looked excellent from the outside and was very hard to keep holding up from the inside.
Her body had been keeping score for longer than that. She was an overweight teenager and then an adult who got told about it - ninety kilos at nineteen - and by her twenties she was living with PCOS, years of severe gut trouble, and a spine her doctors described as degenerating. Each of these was being managed as a separate problem by a different specialist. Eventually she was told she should have surgery on her back.
She decided against it. What she did instead was start practising - Iyengar first, then classical Hatha, patiently and badly and daily - and change the way she ate.
The surgery never happened. Everything she teaches now she tested on herself first, across years, which is why she is so unwilling to recommend anything she hasn't.
She went to Mysore to study properly, and then kept going: advanced certification in classical Hatha and Mysore style, over a thousand hours of registered training. Within a couple of years she wasn't only practising there but assisting a senior teacher on teacher-training courses - teaching the people who were themselves learning to teach.
She has not stopped studying since. Nutrition qualifications from Stanford, Emory and LMU Munich. Ayurveda dietetics at the University of Trans-Disciplinary Health Sciences and Technology in Bangalore. Foundational training in trauma-sensitive yoga with the Center for Trauma and Embodiment.
That last one matters more than it sounds. Working with someone carrying trauma is a different skill from running a class, and she is careful not to confuse the two - which, in a field full of people willing to confuse them, is most of the point.
The problem with a wellness industry built on repeat customers
For a period she headed the nutrition vertical at a health startup. Then she left.
Not because of anything unusual about that company. The opposite, if anything - it was behaving exactly as businesses are built to behave.
Almost every business needs you to come back. That isn't a scandal, it's the model: repeat custom is what makes revenue predictable and a company worth investing in. But look at what it quietly rewards. A customer who no longer needs you is a customer you have lost. Make someone genuinely self-reliant and you have, in business terms, done something foolish.
You can see the result in most aisles of most shops. Food engineered to be eaten again rather than to nourish, and marketed hardest to children. Products that relieve a problem slowly enough that you keep buying the relief. And a wellness industry that has worked out it is far more profitable to sell membership, belonging and the next programme than to make itself unnecessary.
So it comes down to what a person is willing to be part of. You still have bills. You will still be told that the honest version of your work doesn't scale. The question is whether you can pay those bills while staying on the side of the person in front of you - and then accept that you don't get to control how that turns out.
We are not above this. I still consult - mostly hospitality, not only hospitality - on the unglamorous work of joining the dots between what a business promises and what a person actually receives. But I am careful about who I take on, and the filter is simple: they have to already have something genuinely good to sell.
That turns out to be a small group, and the reason is worth saying out loud. Selling something cheap and hollow is easy. Selling something honest is hard, because the person you are talking to has been worked on so many times - by the ninety-nine rupee offer, the buy-one-get-one, the urgency invented last Tuesday - that your telling them the plain truth now sounds like one more technique. People with a real product are the ones who struggle most to be believed. Those are the ones worth helping.
That work is where a good part of our income comes from, and I find nothing compromising in it. The compromise would be letting the same logic decide how we teach.
A person's health cannot be made insignificant by placing it beside a bigger number. Nobody should become a number in anyone's report.
She left to build Parivartan, a personalised reset programme where the number of people is small enough that nobody becomes a case file.
She came to Vaatalya with Parivartan in its early form. The shape of it existed; a good deal of what it now contains did not. Until then I had never worked with anyone else in this field, and the reason was uncomplicated: this work puts you in front of people at their most open, which is very easy to exploit and very hard to undo.
What we recognised in each other was the refusal to do that. Vaatalya was about sustainable living; Parivartan was about a sustainable lifestyle. It turned out to be one idea approached from two directions.
Most of what Parivartan holds today arrived afterwards - the sound work among it - out of courses we took together and things we spent a long time testing on ourselves before offering them to anyone.
We have kept moving since. We spent six months living in the Andaman Islands, where a small island teaches you what a city has no way to: how few things you actually need, how visible you are to everyone around you, how fast a day reorganises itself around weather and light instead of a calendar.
The teaching has travelled with us - Mysore, the islands, Kurukshetra, Chandigarh, a corporate boardroom in Bangalore, and sessions with police personnel and schoolchildren on Neil Island and in Havelock.
We have also gone looking for people further along than we are. We studied in Munger, in Bihar, at a school run by sannyasis - people who have formally renounced ordinary life and live accordingly. Staying inside that discipline gives this pursuit a structure that reading alone cannot.
There have been other stretches like it: Leh and Ladakh, and Bir Billing, where we spent time learning Thangka painting. For three or four years now, a good part of the company we keep has been people who have given things up on purpose.
Yukah came out of all of it. The short description is a school of classical Yog and Ayurveda, which is accurate and tells you almost nothing, because it is roughly what several thousand other places also call themselves.
What is actually different about it is narrower, and worth stating plainly. We teach Yog and Ayurveda as one thing rather than two products, with practical nutrition attached to both. We work in numbers small enough to correct one person at a time, by name. We train for the possibility that someone in the room is carrying something an ordinary class is not equipped to meet, and we are careful about the line between teaching and treatment. And the stated aim is that you stop needing us - which is the part most schools cannot afford to mean.
What classical yoga teaches beyond the postures
If yoga means stretching to you, some context helps. What most people meet as yoga is asana - the postures - and asana is one part of a much broader system. In its classical form, Yog also covers breath (pranayama), attention, habits, self-inquiry and service: the ordinary and often uncomfortable business of seeing how you live.
What Ayurveda is, beyond the oil massage
Ayurveda gets much the same treatment as yoga - met as a spa menu, or a shelf of supplements with Sanskrit on the label.
What it actually is, at least the part we find useful, is an old system for paying attention to your own constitution: how your digestion behaves, what a particular food does to you specifically rather than to people in general, how your sleep and your appetite and the season move together. Less a catalogue of remedies than a habit of noticing. Both systems ask the same thing of you: pay closer attention, and stop outsourcing the answer.
We also keep meeting the gap between understanding something and being able to live it.
You can understand attachment and still keep checking whether someone replied. You can speak about acceptance and spend an evening defending yourself in your head. You can teach awareness and discover a reaction in yourself you would rather not examine.
Practice makes those things harder to ignore.
What to do when effort isn't enough
What we work on now, in ourselves as much as with anyone else, is one plain skill: do your part properly, then let the result be the result.
You prepare properly for the pitch. You are honest in the difficult conversation. You set the boundary. You change direction when it is clearly needed.
And then somebody else decides. The client goes elsewhere. The promotion goes to the person who has been there longer. The relationship ends anyway.
The skill is letting that be disappointing without letting it become a verdict on you. Not giving up, and not pretending you didn't care. Just refusing to read every outcome as a score for your whole life.
It is harder than it sounds, and it belongs in the middle of ambition and responsibility, not somewhere away from them.
People rarely ask what we actually do about this ourselves. The answer is a routine, and it is duller than anyone expects.
Every day we practise across five of the classical paths. Hatha, for the body. Raja, for attention and the mind. Kriya, for the breath and what sits underneath it. Karma - work done without needing to be seen doing it. And Bhakti, the hardest of the five to translate: devotion, roughly, and the only one that is not about improving yourself at all.
Not an hour on a good week. Every day, including the days we would rather not, which are the days it is actually for.
That is the method. We do not have a cleverer one, and we have arranged our lives around it - what we study, where we live, what we agree to - because we would rather go further into this than do most other things with the time.
None of this requires a school. People have done it alone for a very long time. What guidance adds is correction - someone who notices that your breath is shallow, or that you have quietly turned a practice into one more thing to be good at. That is most of what we do, with fairly ordinary tools: classical Hatha Yog, meditation, breathwork, sound, reflection and food.
Perhaps you are starting your career and already feel late. Perhaps you have achieved a great deal and are surprised by how little peace it has bought you. Perhaps you have saved fifty videos about changing your life and have yet to make room for one practice.
You do not need another reason to feel inadequate.
You need somewhere honest to begin.
Where to begin today, without a class or a retreat
If you want somewhere to start today, without waiting for a retreat or a class: notice, once, the next time you tell yourself you'll be fine as soon as something happens. Don't fix it. Just notice it. That's the whole practice. It's also most of what we teach.
That is what we mean by self-reliant wellness. We want what you learn to become usable - something you understand well enough to practise, question and adapt, including when we are no longer beside you.
You can begin a conversation with Aarti and me at Yukah. Tell us what you are finding difficult and what you want to understand.
But before you do, sit with one question.
If your happiness keeps waiting for something to happen, how much of it belongs to you?
