Years ago, in my art therapy training, my therapist would look at my work and say the same thing again and again. It needs to land. It’s too airy.

I did not understand what she meant.

The strange part was that even the air in my paintings would not move. It had no lightness to it, no drift. It just sat there, stuck. So I was not able to connect at both ends at once. The work would not land, and the air would not move either. Land and hold your ground. The words felt alien to me, like instructions in a language I had never learned. I did not know how to make earth appear on the page. And I did not know how to let the air breathe. Both took tremendous effort. 

So I learned to stay where I was. Stuck and somewhere up in the air.

It has taken me a long time, and a move to Goa, to understand what was really happening.

Here, I have been watching the clouds. They change their shape and form so often that if you look away for a moment and look back, they are already something else. Nothing about them is permanent. And one day, watching them, it struck me. The thing my therapist saw in my paintings was the thing I was living everywhere.

In the old teachings, we are made of five elements. Earth is form, the ground, the things that have a solid form and shape. Fire is passion, the energy that brings action. Water is emotion, the feeling that flows through everything. Air is thought, the mind and its endless movement. And ether is the space that holds all of it.

When the air is stuck, the mind cannot move freely. When the mind cannot move, fire cannot do its work, because passion needs somewhere to go. And when the air is stuck, and the fire cannot move, water takes over. Emotion floods in and overpowers everything. And in all of that, earth cannot form. Nothing can take shape. Nothing can land.

That was me. For years. Permanence scared me. To commit fully to one thing was frightening. So I kept everything moving. I moved the furniture around the house. I changed my programmes, my teachings, the way I offered my work. The moment something began to take shape, I rearranged it.

And it was not because the work was not good. People came. They understood what I taught. They were helped by it. But I was not at peace with it. Because anything that took a real form and shape meant I would have to own it completely. And that felt like a responsibility I was not sure I could carry. The newness would wear off. And then, I told myself, it probably would not serve its purpose anymore. I would not be able to do it justice.

So I kept myself small. I worked with only a handful of people. And every time I began to breathe, every time the air finally started to move, and the ground started to emerge under me, I made sure it stayed exactly as it was. Status quo. Safe and moving forms.

What I am learning now, slowly, is that holding the ground is not glamorous. It means repetitive work. Daily chores. The same things, done again and again, long past the point where they feel new or exciting. In the beginning, there is no freedom in it. It feels like the opposite of freedom.

There was something else hiding in my airiness too, something I am only now willing to admit. Staying up in the air felt spiritual. It felt like I was connected to All That Is, floating somewhere above the heaviness of ordinary life. But that was not the truth. It was a beautiful way to avoid it.

Because if it is truly “All That Is”, then it is in all of it.
Not only in the light and the lofty and the transcendent. It is in the mundane work. In the challenging times. In the repetitive, boring things I kept running from. The whole point of taking a human form is to experience it here, in the body, in the dishes and the routines and the days that feel like nothing is moving. Not to hover above human life, but to live inside it.

But freedom was never in the escape. Freedom is in embracing all of it. The earth and the fire and the water and the air and the ether…

And this is what the Wellness café I am building in South Goa is teaching me.

Maloka is asking me, finally, to hold the ground. To commit to one form. To stop rearranging and simply serve. There is no escaping into newness here. A café is built brick by brick, day by day, the same work repeated until it stands.

It is bringing me to a kind of ego death. The old ways of thinking are falling away. Old memories are loosening their grip yet again. I feel myself being emptied, and there is a strange peace in it. No more questioning, no more endless moving. Just space.

But I will be honest. That emptiness is a little frightening too. When you have spent your whole life keeping things in motion, stillness can feel like falling. I am releasing so much, and I do not yet know what will come to fill the space.

I do not have the answer. I am standing in the not-knowing.

But for the first time, I am not moving the furniture. I am letting the ground hold me, and I am waiting to see what wants to take shape.