Between Ache and Aliveness: A Journey Through Alternatives

What does it mean to choose wholeness in a world built on fragmentation? A personal journey through ache, community, Alivelihood, and becoming.

My co-travellers: Team Travellers' University

The Ache Beneath the Noise

There are days I wake up with a quiet grief I cannot name. It lives somewhere between the newsfeed and the forest edge, between the sound of plastic unwrapping and the memory of rivers that once flowed freely.

It is the ache of witnessing a world that celebrates speed over stillness, profit over people, and convenience over connection. A world where even healing is sold in packages, and meaning is chased like a trend.

And yet, somewhere beneath this ache lives a deeper knowing, a remembering. That this is not the only way. That buried beneath the ruins of extraction and despair are seeds of something older, wiser, and still alive.

Alternatives do not arrive fully formed. They grow slowly, like roots under dry soil. They ask us not just to do differently but to be differently.

Between Intention and Impossibility: The Fractured Path of Sustainable Living

I’ve seen what sustainable living can look like; earth-honoring, soul-nourishing, deeply aligned. I’ve tasted it in the fresh soil of a community farm, in the quiet discipline of zero-waste homes, in the rituals of conscious consumption.

And yet, I have struggled to embody it fully. Not because I don’t care but because the system makes it hard to care sustainably.

Urban infrastructure, economic pressure, cultural disconnection all collude to make the path of sustainability feel like swimming upstream. I often feel like I’m oscillating between two worlds; one I long to live in, and one I must survive in.

So I’ve stopped chasing perfection. I now choose intention over idealism. Every time I reduce plastic, buy local, or slow down, I am whispering: I still believe in another way. And that belief, even when fractured, is a seed worth holding.

Some place in upper Assam; witnessing the echos of nature.

Community: The Soil of My Becoming

If sustainable living has been a push-and-pull, community has been the ground where I’ve rooted.

When I joined Swaraj University in 2012, I wasn’t just seeking alternatives, I was seeking a way of being that felt more whole. I remember sitting with a grandmother under the open sky in a tribal village near Udaipur during my Cycle Yatra. Listening to her sharing about her understanding of land, seasons, and reciprocity. There was no PowerPoint, no whiteboard, just presence. And that was enough.

During my travels, I met and documented people across India who are living regenerative, dignified lives. I visited alternative schools, met unschooling families with no fixed curriculum, only rituals of listening. A cob house builder in Tamil Nadu who believed architecture could be prayer. A fisherman in Kerala who speaks of tides like poetry, not industry. They taught me more than any institution could.

But stories wasn’t just something I documented, it became something I healed in.

In healing-oriented spaces I’ve been part of, I began to notice how collective presence allows grief to move, shame to soften, and silence to speak. It wasn’t one event or retreat, it was many small circles, slow conversations, shared meals. I began to see that we heal in relationship, not just with people, but with values, memories, and the land.

The Long Work of Healing: More Than One Wound

My healing didn’t begin with a diagnosis. It began when I paused long enough to feel. To feel the layers of conditioning of being raised as a man in a patriarchal world, yes, but also the inherited belief in achievement over rest, logic over intuition, detachment over vulnerability.

There were moments of rupture: crying uncontrollably in a circle of strangers during a men's circle; being lovingly called out for interrupting someone in a facilitation session; realizing that I was replicating power dynamics even while “doing good work.”

There were also moments of quiet repair: being told “you don’t have to fix everything” by a friend; learning to say “I don’t know” in spaces where I was expected to lead.

Healing, I’ve come to understand, is not a one-time reckoning. It is a slow composting of identities, beliefs, and roles that no longer serve life. It is the courage to stand naked in the fire of your own contradictions and stay.

Kids from farm school in Tamilnadu immersing with soil and land

Regenerative Entrepreneurship: Alivelihood as a Spiritual Practice

The word “entrepreneurship” once felt distant to me, corporate, competitive, driven by growth. But then I found or perhaps remembered the word Alivelihood. Alivelihood is the quiet art of aligning what we do with what makes us feel alive. It is rooted in the understanding that work is not separate from life. It is an offering, a ritual, a co-creation with the world.

While traveling across India for 52 Parindey, I met people who embodied this spirit. A young man in Udaipur left a corporate job to revive millet farming in his village not as a business model, but as an act of ancestral remembrance. In Belvai, Karnataka, Sammilan Shetty created a Butterfly Park not for tourism or acclaim, but as a sanctuary for biodiversity and reverence. He speaks of butterflies not just as insects, but as ecological storytellers, fragile, vital, and deeply interdependent. Watching schoolchildren walk those forest paths, learning to listen to wings, I realized: sometimes the most radical work is the quietest one.

And then, in Assam, I encountered Elrhino a family-run initiative that transforms elephant and rhino dung into beautifully handcrafted paper. It’s hard to explain what it felt like to hold those sheets in my hand. Paper that carried the memory of the wild, the labor of artisans, and the humility of circular design. Elrhino isn’t just about paper; it’s about reminding us that even waste, when respected, can become wonder. It’s about turning what the system discards into what the earth needs.

Pankaj Joshi: A scientist turned community forest conservationist from Kutch

But Alivelihood isn’t just out there in remote places. It has found its way into my own work. I’ve sat in circles with youth trying to break free from the expectations of degrees and salaries, asking instead: What is worth giving your life to? I've co-designed workshops where we map not just our skills, aspirations and dreams, but our wounds and longings.

Alivelihood is messy. It doesn’t promise scale or certainty. But it offers something deeper: a sense of coherence between your inner truth and outer action. In a world where so many are burned out by work, this feels quietly revolutionary.

Deep Democracy: Listening as Leadership

While I haven’t sat in local governance structures, I’ve tried to embody a different kind of democracy. A felt, lived democracy in my daily life and work.

In one facilitation session with young changemakers, I remember a soft-spoken participant hesitating to speak. When she finally did, she said, “I don’t think like the rest of you, and I’m not sure this space has room for that.” That moment changed the entire design of our gathering. We slowed down. Revisited assumptions. Made room.

In another collective I was part of, we used a practice called the “empty chair”, leaving one seat in every decision-making circle symbolizing the person who isn’t in the room: the forest, the waste-picker, the unborn child. It was a simple act, but it transformed our choices.

Deep democracy, to me, is not about voting. It’s about widening the field of who and what is allowed to matter. It is remembering that silence has content. That conflict can be sacred. That dissent is not a disruption, but a form of deeper intelligence.

What Holds It All: Principles That Feel Like Prayers

Real alternatives don’t begin with strategy they begin with relationship. And the ones that anchor me are these:

• Equity: A quiet but relentless insistence that justice is not sameness, but fairness. That healing must reach the most wounded first.

• Inclusion: Not as policy, but as practice. The courage to be changed by those who were once invisible to us.

• Justice: Not as revenge, but as restoration. A way of tending to the harm, the history, and the hope simultaneously.

  
  

These are not values I "implement." They are living questions I return to, over and over.

Why We Need Each Other: The Alchemy of Collective Becoming

If I’ve learned anything, it’s this: we break alone, but we heal together.

Collective action is not always loud. Sometimes it is the gentle act of making tea for someone who’s tired. Sometimes it is showing up to a protest. Sometimes it is pausing in a meeting to ask: Who is missing from this conversation?

And sometimes, it is simply staying; staying in discomfort, staying in dialogue, staying in the room when it's easier to walk away. Because staying is how trust is built. And trust is the soil in which new worlds begin.

A Living Invitation

This piece is not a manifesto. It’s a love letter to the questions that won’t let me sleep. It’s a trace of the path I’m walking, imperfectly, vulnerably, fiercely.

To anyone who feels overwhelmed by the world but still chooses to care, I want to say: you are not naive. You are necessary. You resist the temptation to become numb. You hold grief and grace together. You imagine futures that are wild, rooted, tender and fiercely just.

Let’s walk together—not toward a fixed destination, but toward a more beautiful way of being human. One compost pile, one difficult conversation, one act of refusal at a time. Because the world we long for is not a fantasy. It is a remembering. And remembering is a radical act of love.