Viram is a four-day executive retreat in India for senior professionals who have been carrying a question they haven’t had space to ask.
I want to tell you about someone I’ll call Vikram.
He found out about the Executive Retreat, Viram, through a LinkedIn post. Read about it. Went to the website. Spent two weeks deciding. Booked a Clarity Call, then rescheduled it twice. Finally had the call. Booked a spot. Then, ten days before the retreat, he sent me a message saying he needed to cancel. Something had come up at work.
We spoke. I asked what had come up. He described a situation that was real but not urgent in the way he was presenting it. After a few minutes, I asked him directly, “Is something coming up at work, or are you talking yourself out of coming?”
Long pause.
“Probably the second one,” he said.
He came. What happened over those four days is what this essay is about, but it is also about the resistance that preceded it, because the resistance is almost always the more interesting story.
The voice that says this isn’t for me is worth examining carefully.
It is usually not laziness. It is not cynicism, though it sometimes sounds like it. In my experience, the people who fight hardest to talk themselves out of pausing are the ones who, on some level, already know that the pause will be significant. The resistance is proportional to what is at stake.
Vikram had been in his current role for six years. Senior enough that the role had stopped asking anything of him that he hadn’t already mastered. Successful enough that the external signals were entirely positive—promotions, recognition, and a team that respected him. There was no reason anyone looking at his career from outside would see a problem.
From inside, he told me later, it had felt like wearing a suit that fit perfectly and being unable to remember why you were dressed up.
He had been carrying that feeling for about two years. Not acting on it. Not naming it. Managing it with busyness, with the next goal, and with the reasonable argument that this was just what career plateaus felt like and that the solution was a bigger challenge, not a pause.
The resistance to pausing is rational.
This is worth saying clearly, because most people who work with me eventually wonder why they resisted as long as they did. The answer is not that they were foolish or avoidant. The answer is that the resistance made complete sense given what they knew at the time.
To pause is to create space. Space means the question is given oxygen. When the question gets oxygen, the likelihood of the answer arriving is high. And the answer, the real one, not the career-planning version, might be inconvenient. Might require something. Might change something that has taken years to build.
From this angle, staying busy is not avoidance. It is risk management.
The mind is protecting you from a disruption you haven’t yet decided you want.
Vikram arrived on Day 1 with the particular alertness of someone who has decided to make the best of a decision they’re still not sure about.
He was engaged at dinner. Asked appropriate questions. Was visibly assessing whether the other participants were his kind of people. Doing what senior professionals do when they are in an unfamiliar environment—managing the impression and deferring the actual arrival.
Day 2, the painting exercise.
He told me afterwards that his first instinct when I introduced the exercise was to consider it slightly absurd. He was an analytical person. He built business cases. He did not draw things.
Within twenty minutes of starting, he had stopped thinking about whether it was absurd.
The left side of his canvas had a large clock. Many small boxes are filling the space—each one labeled with a meeting name or a project name. And he himself is in the middle, very small.
He stared at it.
“I’ve drawn myself small,” he said. Not to me. To himself.
This is the thing the painting exercise does that conversation cannot.
You can describe your life in language that is professional, measured, and defensible. You cannot draw a professionally managed version of your life. When the brush is in your hand and the canvas is blank, you draw what is true.
Vikram had not known, before he drew it, that he experienced himself as small inside his life. He had known he was overextended, overcommitted, and always on. But small? That was new. That was the word the drawing gave him that two years of private reflection had not.
Day 3 was the river ritual.
He told me on Day 4 that he had arrived at the river with his three stones and had been unable to identify what the first stone, for releasing, was supposed to represent.
He stood there for a long time. The other participants were already in the water.
Eventually he put his feet in the stream, held the stone, and stood in the cold.
What arrived was not a thought. It was a physical loosening in the chest that he had not anticipated and could not explain. He described it as the sensation of something he had been carrying without noticing he was carrying it.
He put the stone in the river.
He didn’t know exactly what he was releasing. He knew something had been released.
Day 4, he built the right side of the canvas.
Not a vision board. Not a bucket list. A specific picture of a working life in which he was not small. In which the boxes were fewer but larger, things that actually required him rather than things that merely needed a senior person in the room.
He gave his canvas a title.
He chose a mantra.
He identified three habits that would move him toward the picture—one of which was a conversation he had been postponing with his CEO for eight months.
He had that conversation within three weeks of leaving.
He called me two months later.
The conversation had gone better than he had expected. Not because the CEO had solved the problem — the structural issue was still there. But because Vikram had entered the conversation from a different place than he had entered conversations before. He knew what he was asking for. He knew why it mattered. He had drawn the right side of the canvas, and the drawing had given him language that two years of private frustration had not.
He is still in the role. But the suit fits differently now. Not perfectly. He would not describe it as ‘perfectly.’ But it is his suit. He chose to wear it, and he knows what he is wearing it for.
The participant who almost didn’t come.
If Vikram had cancelled—which he nearly did, twice—he would have gone back to the role with the same private feeling and no new language for it. The resistance would have won. The busyness would have continued. The question would have stayed at the same low oxygen level that made it manageable.
The resistance to pausing is not weakness. It is the mind doing its job, protecting you from disruption before you have decided you want it.
The job of the pause is to help you decide.
If you have been circling this for a while, if you have read about Viram, thought about it, told yourself you’ll come next cohort, and found a reason why this particular moment isn’t right—I am not going to tell you that you’re wrong.
I am going to tell you that Vikram said exactly the same things.
The Clarity Call is thirty minutes. It costs nothing. Most people leave it with more honesty about the resistance than they arrived with.
That is usually enough.
A leadership retreat in Dehradun is not what most people expect when they arrive.
I am going to tell you what actually happens at Viram.
Not the brochure version. The actual version, what people arrive carrying, what the first evening feels like, what breaks open on day two, and what most people say on the morning of day four.
I’m telling you all this because most people who come to Viram don’t know what they’re signing up for. They know the broad outline: 4 days in Dehradun with a structured pause. They don’t know what it actually feels like from the inside.
People arrive at noon.
Most of them have been on their phones the entire journey, finishing things, answering things, staying ahead of things. The first thing that happens when you step out of the car is the air. It is different in the Doon hills. Slower. Cooler. The kind of air that makes you realize you haven’t taken a full breath in weeks.
The second thing that happens is that your phone gets into a sealed pouch.
Not confiscated. Not banned. Pouched. You carry it with you the whole time. You just can’t use it reflexively, which is the point. There are two short windows each day for urgent needs. For everything else, you are here.
Most people don’t realize how much of their mental load is the phone until it’s gone. By evening, something in the shoulders has dropped.
The first evening is a dinner circle. A long table unites everyone, encouraging mindful eating and gentle introductions. No icebreakers, no name tags, and no structured networking. Just food and conversation and the mountains going dark outside.
What I notice at that dinner, across every cohort, is the same thing: people are still performing. Still in professional mode, interesting, engaged, presenting their best version. The conversation is good. But it is just the surface.
The day closes with yoga nidra. Early night. Soft lights.
That’s fine. Day 1 is just arrival.
Day 2 starts at sunrise with something nobody expects: laughter yoga.
Not performative. Not forced. Hasya yoga — the ancient practice of laughing as a physical act before the mind has any reason to. Light, inclusive, never serious. Within ten minutes, most people have laughed more sincerely than they have in months. Something loosens.
After breakfast, we do a forest ridge walk. Nature journaling. Ten quiet minutes alone with the view. No talking required. Just the oak trees and the deodar and whatever surfaces when you stop moving and start noticing.
Then Cuppa Convos—chai in hand, crafted prompts, honest conversations. This is where the performance begins to crack. The prompts are simple, but they are not safe. People say things they haven’t said in a professional setting before. The group starts to become real to each other.
In the afternoon, we do the first part of Paint Your Future.
This is the same exercise from my 2020 book—the one I did in 2013 that changed everything. But at Viram it runs in two parts across two days. Day 2 is Part I: guided visualization, sketches, and first passes at color. No pressure to make it complete. Just honest marks on a page.
Most people arrive with resistance to this. They are analytical, strategic, and data-driven. They are not accustomed to drawing things.
Within twenty minutes, something shifts.
The act of drawing—badly, imperfectly, with a brush on a blank page—forgets the part of the brain that edits, qualifies, and hedges. You can’t draw a nuanced position. You draw what’s true.
I watch people look at what they’ve put on the left side of their canvas and go quiet.
One participant who is a managing director at a large financial services firm stared at his left side for a long time. He had drawn a man in a box. The box had dollar signs on it. Outside the box: his family, a beach, and a book he had been trying to write for six years.
“I didn’t know I thought of it that way,” he said.
He did know. He had just never drawn it.
The day ends with gratitude by candlelight. Journal. Rest.
Day 3 starts with a trail breakfast. We eat walking through oak and deodar forest, a short trek, not a hike, just enough to move the body and get the mind quiet.
Then the river ritual.
Everyone finds three stones. One for something you are releasing. One for something you are grateful for. One for something you are inviting in. Feet in the stream, a minute of silence. The river is cold, present, and completely indifferent to your title.
Something about putting your feet in moving water and holding a stone that represents what you want to let go of — it does something that no workshop exercise does. People cry occasionally. Not dramatically. Just quietly. The way you cry when something has been held for too long and finally gets set down.
After rest and self-care time, we come back to the canvas for Part II.
This is where it gets finished. Full acrylic. By the end of Day 3, each person’s canvas has a title, the name they’ve given their next chapter. A mantra. Three micro-habits that would make that chapter real.
Not a vision board. Not a bucket list. A specific picture with a name on it.
In the evening, a story circle. The prompt is simple: “A time nature healed me.” People go around. By Day 3 the professional persona has mostly softened; the conversations are real. When someone says “I don’t know if I want to keep doing this” in the story circle, they mean it. They aren’t catastrophizing. They are being honest, probably for the first time in a while.
The evening ends under the sky. Stargazing, or sky-gazing if the clouds come in. No agenda. The group, by the evening of Day 3, is no longer a collection of strangers. They came as professionals. They leave as something more: people who have sat together in the dark and said things they haven’t said out loud before.
47% of the first cohort returned for the second retreat. I think it is because of Day 3 evening.
Day 4 — Three habits, one boundary, one joy
The last morning starts with a soft stretch and breath.
Then integration journaling. Not a business plan. Not a goal-setting worksheet. Three habits, one boundary, one joy. The most specific and honest things you can commit to given your real life, not the ideal life, but the actual one.
Then the closing circle. Each person shares one commitment aloud. There is a blessing for the road. Phones come out of the pouches.
Most people look at their phones and feel very little urgency about what’s on them. That feeling lasts about three days for some people. For others it lasts longer. What I’ve noticed is that the canvas lasts much longer than the feeling.
People leave with the canvas under their arm. A titled painting of their next chapter, with a mantra and three habits they chose themselves.
Some of them make a significant change within six months. Others make smaller ones: a conversation they had been avoiding, a decision they had been deferring, a boundary they finally set. Nobody leaves with the specific feeling they arrived with.
The feeling of running without knowing where you are running to.
Viram doesn’t end on Day 4.
The four days are the beginning. For the 90 days after, there are weekly group execution calls, monthly one-on-one sessions, and daily WhatsApp support. The insight from Day 3’s river ritual needs somewhere to go when Monday arrives and the inbox is full. That’s what the 90 days are for.
Most retreats give you a peak experience and send you home. You are responsible for the integration. But we stay.
Viram is not for everyone.
It is not a spa retreat. Not a yoga retreat. Not a business strategy offsite. It is a structured pause for people who are ready to do the actual work of figuring out what their life is for and who want the support to live it when they get home.
If that’s you, the next cohort is April 22–25, 2026. Fifteen people maximum. The Clarity Call is where we figure out together if Viram makes sense for you right now. Thirty minutes, free, no pitch.
If you’ve read this far, you probably know something about yourself that you haven’t acted on yet.
That’s what Viram is for.