I was seventeen, doing my internship in Chennai, going through one of the darkest periods of my life. I had been carrying a heaviness for a long time by then, a deep sense of not belonging, of not being able to see a way forward. I won’t go into all the details here. I’ve written about some of it in The Ache to Belong.
I remember one particular Saturday night, I found myself walking into the sea, alone, pretty sure I didn’t want to come back out. I had enough and was done with life, and there was no hope left in me. I had tried so hard for a long time, and had finally come to a place where everything had shifted apart inside me.
I don’t fully understand what happened next. I was almost neck deep in water, and not knowing how to swim, it was pretty clear what was coming. All of a sudden, a gigantic figure appeared and held me, and spoke to me in such kind, gentle words that I hadn’t heard in a long time, reassuring me that life didn’t have to end that way. Whether it was a vision, or my usual daydreaming, I am not sure. But it was something beyond anything I can explain rationally. And something shifted in me in that moment. I think it was Osho who once wrote that you have to travel into the darkest places within yourself, because only by going into the darkness can you return to the light with true understanding. Looking back, I think that’s exactly what that night was.
The next thing I remember clearly is sitting at the bus stop, drenched, staring into the vast emptiness in front of me, trying to make sense of where I was and what had just happened.
I was still in that daze when I noticed a banner at the side of the road: “Bhagavad Gita classes. Chinmaya Mission.” Something inside me stirred, like a pull. That pull changed everything.
What happened in the days that followed still feels a little surreal when I look back at it. I went into work the next day carrying something different, a strange kind of quietness that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Like something had been wrung out of me, and there was just a little more space to breathe, finally.
I just knew I had to sign up for those classes. They ran for two weeks, every evening from 7pm to 9pm. I was on afternoon shift at my internship, and the work only ended at 11pm. Changing shifts meant asking my manager, a man who was legendary in our office for saying no to everything before you even finished your sentence. My colleagues laughed at me when I told them what I was planning to do. Everyone knew this manager pretty well, and they just knew the answer was going to be a big no.
I went to his office anyway. I started explaining, and before I could even finish, he looked up and said: “Yes, of course. Take the morning shift for the next two weeks.”
I stood there for a moment, not quite sure what had just happened. But that was how it began. Things started aligning in a way I couldn’t explain, the same way I couldn’t explain what had happened in the sea that night.
The first day of the classes, I slipped into the back of the room in a corner, hoping nobody would notice me, as I always did in those days. I never wanted to be noticed by anyone. I would hide myself, let my presence fade into the background. I was surrounded almost entirely by people old enough to be my grandparents. The Guruji giving the discourse scanned the room, and his eyes landed on me. Like, why!! He called me up to the stage.
I wanted to dig a hole and disappear into the floor right away. My anxiety had hit the roof and beyond.
He asked me why I was there. I told him honestly, in my trembling voice: I have no idea.
He turned to the audience and said something I could never forget. He said that usually, people seek spirituality when they know they are going to die. And here was a young boy. The room laughed warmly, while my whole being was praying for the ground to swallow me whole. I probably turned several shades of red. But something in those words landed in me like a stone dropping into still water. I am sure he probably had no idea how close to the truth he was. Or maybe he did. I would never know.
Those two weeks changed the way I understood life, and how I perceived everything around me. Something had been reawakened in me. A sense that the body I was living in wasn’t just a place where all the pain happened. But it was also a place where something sacred could be experienced. Where life was waiting.
That was the beginning of my coming back. Or maybe, that was the day I was actually born again.
The Body I Had Left
Looking back now, I can see that long before that night in Chennai, I had already started dissociating from my body. It mostly appeared as an inability to stay present, because staying present felt too painful. I had learned to float a little above myself. To get through the day without actually being in it, so that I could exist without feeling much, and to hide from the world, so that I wouldn’t be noticed.
I didn’t have language for this at the time. I just knew that I felt more comfortable in my head than anywhere else. That touch felt strange, sometimes simply incomprehensible, even though deep down, I craved it. That I had learned, somewhere along the way, to associate my body with pain, with shame, with everything I was trying to escape.
The Gita classes cracked something open, but they were only the beginning. What they gave me was a framework to understand that the self is not just the mind, not just the thoughts and the stories and the fears. That there is something larger, something that held me even while I was neck deep in the sea.
But knowing that and feeling it are two very different things. And the journey from knowing it in my head to actually feeling it in my body took many more years and many different pathways.
The Way Back
Yoga was one of the first. Not the bending into awkward positions kind, but the slow, deliberate practice of moving and breathing consciously, reminding myself that I still breathed, and learning to witness the way breath moved in and out of me. Every time I held a pose and felt resistance, I was meeting something new. Every time I breathed through it instead of running from it, something loosened just a little.
My understanding of meditation was always very different from what was popularly known, thanks to everything I read from Osho. Meditation happened for me in my walks, sitting up on the mango tree in our house with my books the whole day, or lying on the rooftop watching the sky. Sometimes sitting still, sometimes moving consciously, sometimes just staring into the emptiness, sometimes with tears falling silently, and sometimes watching clouds form shapes that my mind turned into stories.
I was having this conversation with a friend in Manila recently about how much the mind loves stories, in fact, how it craves them. We make up entire narratives in our heads from tiny, insignificant moments. I was so good at that. My mind created stories that often ended badly. But there were also moments, stories with happier endings, where I felt seen and supported. I was slowly learning that a thought can be far from real. And that the body, when you stop fighting it constantly, has a wisdom of its own.
Another thing that deeply helped me was dance. I came to it almost by accident, and when I was least prepared for it. Seeing an ad in the newspaper about an Indian classical dance performance in Singapore way back in 2001 lit something up in me instantly. I had always wanted to dance, but it wasn’t common for boys to dance where I grew up, and I was far too shy and inferior to even let myself want it as a child. But this time, I was in Singapore, living on my own, making my own money, with no one to answer to. I saved up a little every month and joined a class. Dancing brought me back into my body in many ways. And when it comes to Indian classical dance, it isn’t just about the body. It is about the mind and the soul too. It is a union of all three.
What helped equally were the communities I found along the way. Queer spaces, kink communities, underground gatherings, conscious communities where people showed up as their full, unedited selves. In those spaces, I didn’t have to hide the parts of me that had always made me feel like too much for most others. Being genderfluid, pansexual, ethically non-monogamous, someone who moved through the world slightly differently, none of that needed too much explaining or justifying. For someone who had spent years trying to disappear, being in these spaces was creating a silent revolution in me. I was slowly transforming, embracing myself better, and showing up more authentically. All of it allowed me to finally give myself permission to just be.
Learning to Come Home to Myself
Sometime around 2007, an online friend from New York recommended an e-zine. The person wrote about love, self-care, and self-worth in quite a radical way. I bought one of their digital books, and it had a huge impact on the way I experienced my body and my pleasures.
It spoke about making love with ourselves as a practice of presence and self-love. Of being with your own body with the same care and curiosity you would bring to someone you deeply loved. I had always disliked the terms like “jerking off”, they felt cold and disconnected from what my experience actually was. This was something else entirely. This was about self-love and self-acceptance. About showing up for yourself.
So I started spending my Sunday mornings intentionally. Just me, in my own space, with nowhere to be and nothing to perform. I would gently move in my room. Lie still and just breathe. Move slowly and notice what I felt. Be playful and be present. Make love with myself, touch and caress myself gently and without any specific outcome or expectation, even for hours sometimes. Not rushing toward anything. Just being with the body I had spent so long trying to escape.
And slowly, the body I had spent years disliking started to feel like mine. I began to notice its beauty, the kind of beauty you feel when you finally stop fighting it. This body that carried my soul also carried an enormous capacity for pleasure, for joy, for tenderness. I just hadn’t known how to provide it for myself, or to receive it.
Falling in love with my own body was the foundation for everything that came after. And whenever someone tells me I am a good kisser, I would jokingly say, thanks to my biceps. I learned to kiss by kissing parts of me, and with my vivid imagination, my world became a lot more colourful and pleasurable. Because you cannot truly receive love and pleasure from another person if you are still at constant war with yourself.
What Conscious Touch Actually Means
Conscious touch is not a technique. It is something that happens in the space between two or more people when all of them are genuinely present, when there is real trust, real care, and real intention behind the contact.
I have experienced touch that left me feeling more alone and empty than before it happened. And I have experienced touch, sometimes the simplest things, a hand on my shoulder, someone I care about sitting close without needing anything from me, that felt like being seen all the way down.
The difference is not physical. It is energetic, it is intentional. It is the difference between being touched for the sake of it, and being truly seen.
My relationships, all of them, the romantic ones, the fluid friendships, platonic friendships and the chosen family I have built over the years, have all been part of this healing. Not because they were perfect. None of us arrive into relationships without our wounds and baggages. But because in each of them, at their best, I was seen, supported and held. Held in the way that the gigantic figure in the sea held me that night, with warmth, without ill intentions, without asking me to be anything other than what I truly was.
That is what conscious intimacy actually is. It is people fully being present with each other, with nothing to perform and nothing to hide, coming together to celebrate life, even in their lowest moments and in their pain. Finally recognising that they matter.
What Relationships Taught Me That Nothing Else Could
My relationships have not always been easy. I have loved people who weren’t ready to be loved the way I loved them, and I have been told far too many times that I am “too much” and “too intense.” I have had connections that asked more of me than I had to give at the time. I have navigated the complexity of being poly, queer, and brown in spaces that weren’t always built for someone like me. I have been asked, more times than I can count, how someone who is deeply spiritual and a classical dancer can also be very sexual. And eventually, I started to even describe myself as a living contradictions. But if you think about it, none of these things are contradictions, they never were. They are all part of the same life, the same person, the same body and the parts of the many shades of being human.
But I have always met incredible people, especially since I started showing up more authentically and making space for genuine connections. And through all of it, I felt seen, held and supported in more ways than I can put into words. By partners who sat with me in the dark without trying to fix me. By friends who showed up when I was really in need. By people who loved the parts of me that I was still learning to love myself.
Each of those relationships taught my body something that no practice could quite reach on its own. That it was safe to be touched. That vulnerability doesn’t always have to be swallowed by my fear of abandonment. That intimacy isn’t something that happens to you, but something you co-create with another person who is equally present, equally willing to be seen, and who makes space for you just as you make space for them.
I think about the gigantic figure in the sea sometimes. That quality of being held without condition, without agenda, without needing me to be anything other than exactly what I was in that moment. I have found that quality in so many people over the years. Enough times to know that there are good people out there, plenty of them, and that the universe brings them into our lives when we make space for abundance.
And every time I have experienced it, something in my body remembered, and relaxed into it like coming home.
The Body Still Remembers
I am not claiming that I have healed fully. Healing is not a destination we arrive at all at once. Some days the old patterns show up, the floating above myself, the instinct to take up less space, the reflex to hide. I notice them more quickly now than I used to. And I know how to come back. I have the means, the tools, and the people to help me find my way back to myself.
Sometimes it is a conversation that sparks something in my heart. Sometimes it is simply spending time with someone I care for. Sometimes it is that same Sunday morning ritual, the reminder that there is nothing to perform, only to be, and to be fully alive.
And recognising that this body, the one I once tried to walk into the sea with hoping never to come out, is still here, and is still breathing. Still capable of extraordinary pleasure, connection, and love.
The body remembers everything. The pain it has carried, yes. But also every moment of genuine connection. Every touch that met it with care. Every time it was held without condition. Every time it was simply allowed to be.
I used to think the goal was to transcend the body. To rise above it, the way I had learned to float above myself as a teenager. But I don’t believe that anymore. The goal, for me, has been to come back to it fully, tenderly, and without flinching, and to make it my home.
A Note to Anyone Reading This
If any of this resonates with you, and if you have felt lost in your journey, this is what I would tell you: The way back is not linear. It doesn’t happen all at once, and it doesn’t look the same for everyone. But it is possible, and I know this not because I read it somewhere, but because I lived it.
And if you are in the middle of your own darkness right now, please reach out to someone. Anyone. You don’t have to be in crisis to ask for help. You just have to be carrying something too heavy to know that you don’t have to carry it alone.
The body remembers the darkness. But it also remembers the light. And there is so much more light ahead than you can see from where you are standing right now.
