I want to tell you about a weekend in Rishikesh. And what the two days I spent in silence for clarity revealed to me, that twenty-two years in boardrooms never could.
Not the Rishikesh of Instagram, which includes the suspension bridge, the rafting, and the cafes full of backpackers. The other one. The one that exists if you go in January, stay somewhere simple, and make a decision before you arrive to stop talking.
I had not planned a silent retreat. I had planned a quiet weekend. But somewhere on the second evening, sitting on the ghats watching the Ganga move in the particular way it moves there—fast and cold and indifferent to everything happening on its banks—I stopped talking and didn’t start again for the better part of two days.
What happened in those two days was not dramatic. It was not mystical. It was, in retrospect, the most productive forty-eight hours I had spent in years.
The first thing that happens in silence is that the professional mind fights back.
Not aggressively. Just persistently. In the absence of external demands, the mind creates internal ones. A presentation that needs refining. An email that should have been sent differently. A decision that is still sitting somewhere in the pending tray. A conversation that didn’t go the way it should have.
For the first few hours, I was doing what I always did. Managing a to-do list, except the to-do list was inside my head rather than on a screen.
Then, slowly, that layer began to quiet.
Not because I suppressed it. Because I stopped feeding it. When you don’t speak, you don’t construct. When you don’t construct, the mind stops performing and starts noticing. It’s a different mode entirely, and most of us spend almost no time in it.
The second thing that happens is that different thoughts arrive.
Not insights exactly. More like observations that had been waiting for a gap. Things I had known but not acknowledged. Things I had been feeling but not named.
I noticed, sitting by the river on the second morning, that I had been in a role for three years that I no longer found interesting. Not difficult. Not wrong. Just not interesting. And I had been so busy performing it well that I had never paused long enough to notice the boredom underneath the competence.
That observation would not have arrived in a boardroom. It would not have arrived on a normal weekend. It required the absence of noise for long enough that the quieter signals could surface.
The boardroom trains you to solve the problems that are loudest. Silence gives you access to the problems that matter most.
There is a concept in neuroscience called the default mode network. It is the part of the brain that becomes active when you are not focused on external tasks—when you are daydreaming, reflecting, or imagining. For decades it was considered unproductive brain activity, the thing that happened when the mind wandered.
More recent research suggests the opposite. The default mode network is associated with self-referential thinking, long-term planning, and the integration of disparate pieces of information into coherent understanding. It is, in other words, the network that produces wisdom rather than just competence.
The default mode network requires one thing to function: the absence of directed task attention.
Most high performers have structured their lives to minimize silence. The podcast in the car. The notifications on the phone. The calendar that fills every gap. The result is a life of high competence and low integration — a great deal of knowledge and not enough time to know what it means.
I came back from Rishikesh with three things.
The first was the observation about the role—which I acted on within six months. I didn’t leave immediately. But I started the process of leaving, internally, because the silence had made the boredom undeniable.
The second was a question I had been avoiding for two years: what would I build if I were starting from scratch today? Not incrementally improving what I had. From scratch. That question had been too destabilizing to ask while I was busy. In the silence, it felt not destabilizing but clarifying.
The third was something harder to name. A sense of my own pace—the pace at which I actually think, which is slower than corporate life had required me to think for twenty-two years. The silence reminded me that I had a rhythm of my own, underneath the rhythm that the organization had imposed. And that my rhythm, when I could access it, was where my best thinking came from.
I am not arguing that everyone should take a silent retreat. I am not arguing that silence is a spiritual practice, though it can be. I am making a much more practical point.
The thinking that matters most — the integration, the self-awareness, the recognition of what is actually true about your life — requires conditions that most professional lives systematically prevent.
You cannot hear the deeper signal while the loud one is running.
The great leaders I have studied—across traditions, across centuries—understood this. Not as mysticism. As practice. As the deliberate creation of conditions in which the important thinking could happen.
Vivekananda meditated in the silence of the Himalayas before building a movement that changed Indian philosophical discourse.
Jobs sat in silence at Kainchi Dham before returning to build the most valuable company in the world.
Gandhi walked. For miles. In silence. Every day. Not as exercise. As thinking.
The pattern is not coincidental.
The Viram retreat is built around this understanding.
Not because silence is spiritual. Because it is strategic.
The four days in Dehradun are designed to create the conditions in which the important thinking can happen—the thinking that doesn’t fit in a one-on-one, doesn’t surface in a performance review, and doesn’t arrive while the phone is in your pocket.
What I found in forty-eight hours by the Ganga most participants find in the first two days at Viram.
Not because the retreat is magical. Because the conditions are right.
The boredom underneath the competence. The question that had been too destabilizing to ask. The rhythm of your own thinking, underneath the rhythm the organization imposed.
These things don’t require Rishikesh. They require stopping long enough to hear them.
If the only quiet you get is the drive home and the first ten minutes before sleep, you are not getting enough quiet.
Not for wellness. For the quality of your decisions. For access to the thinking that will actually change something.
The silence is not empty. It is where the important things have been waiting.
In 1974, Steve Jobs was 19 years old, had recently dropped out of Reed College, and was looking for something he couldn’t name.
He traveled to India. Not as a tourist. But as a seeker. He spent seven months traveling through Uttar Pradesh and the hills of Uttarakhand, sleeping in ashrams, walking barefoot, and eating almost nothing. By the time he returned to California, something in him had shifted so fundamentally that the people who knew him before said he was different.
One of the places he visited was Kainchi Dham. It is a small temple complex in the Kumaon hills, about an hour from Nainital. The temple is dedicated to Neem Karoli Baba, a saint who died the year before Jobs arrived.
Jobs was devastated to have missed him. But he stayed. He spent time on the temple premises—sitting in the courtyard when the ashram was far less crowded than it is today, eating the prasad, sitting with the people who gathered there in devotion to a saint they had never met but clearly felt.
What did he find?
I have been to Kainchi Dham three times.
The first time, I went as a tourist. I knew the Jobs connection. I wanted to see the place. I took photographs, received the prasad at the entrance, felt the atmosphere, and left.
The second time, I went more slowly. The temple no longer allows visitors to sit in the premises as the crowds grew too large, and they stopped it to protect the space. So I stood for a while near the main entrance, watched the pilgrims arriving and leaving, and felt something I hadn’t felt the first time. I started to understand why Jobs kept coming back in his mind to this place for the rest of his life.
The third time, I went as part of Bhakti Yatra with Amit—my series of journeys to temples and sacred sites across India. And I went with a specific question: what is it about places like these that has drawn the world’s most effective people to them across centuries?
The standard answer is that Jobs was on a spiritual search. That he found Eastern philosophy. That it influenced his minimalism, his focus, his product aesthetics.
This is true, but it is too neat.
What I think Jobs actually found at Kainchi Dham and at the other places he visited in India was something more specific and more useful than a philosophy.
He found a different relationship with the mind.
Here is what I mean.
Most high-performing professionals operate from a mind that is always on. Always analyzing, planning, optimizing, and solving. This is the mind that builds companies and closes deals and manages teams. It is extraordinarily useful.
It is also extraordinarily loud.
And in that noise, amidst the constant processing, the endless to-do list, and the background hum of ambition and anxiety, something becomes crowded out. The deeper signal. The instinct. The thing you know but can’t quite hear because everything else is too loud.
The great contemplative traditions have understood this instinct for thousands of years. What they offer, at their core, is not a belief system but a practice. A practice of quieting the loud mind long enough to hear the deeper one.
Jobs found it at Kainchi Dham. Not a philosophy. A practice. A way of being in a relationship with his own thinking that he then brought back to Cupertino and applied to everything: the products, the presentations, the decisions.
The minimalism of Apple products is not just aesthetic. It is the direct result of a mind that learned to distinguish signal from noise.
Mark Zuckerberg visited the same temple in 2015, at a moment when Facebook was facing an existential crisis. He went on the advice of Jobs, who had told him to go before he died.
Zuckerberg said the visit helped him reconnect with his original mission (to connect people) at a moment when he had become distracted by the pressure to monetize and scale.
This is not mysticism. This is what happens when a very busy mind gets very quiet for long enough to hear what it actually knows.
I am not saying that visiting Kainchi Dham will transform your leadership.
I am saying that the pattern is real and consistent enough to be worth taking seriously.
The most effective leaders across history, not just Jobs and Zuckerberg but also Swami Vivekananda and Krishnamurti, drew their clarity from a practice of going inward. Not as a spiritual hobby. As a strategic practice. As a way of ensuring that the decisions they made were coming from the deepest and clearest part of themselves, not from the noise.
Kasar Devi, a village near Almora in Uttarakhand, sits within the Van Allen radiation belt, which is a zone of electromagnetic activity that runs between the Himalayas and the Andes. Swami Vivekananda meditated there. Alexandra David-Néel lived there. Timothy Leary, Cat Stevens, and Bob Dylan all visited. Scientists have theorized that the electromagnetic conditions in that zone affect consciousness in measurable ways. I visited Kasar Devi as part of Life is an Endless Vacation; you can watch that here.
Whether or not the science holds up, the pattern does. People go to places like Kasar Devi and Kainchi Dham and Rishikesh and come back different. Not because of magic. Because sustained, deliberate silence does something to a busy mind that nothing else does.
This is the thread I follow in Bhakti Yatra with Amit.
Not religious tourism. Not spiritual tourism. Something more specific: an inquiry into what these places have offered to the people who visited them seeking clarity, and whether that offering is accessible to people who don’t share the specific religious tradition.
My answer, after three years of this inquiry, is yes.
The offering is available to anyone who comes with genuine openness and stays long enough to remain quiet. The temple doesn’t care what you believe. It cares whether you are present.
I have been contemplating building something around this inquiry—a retreat called Antaryatra, the inner journey.
Four days at these sacred sites in Uttarakhand. Not a pilgrimage in the religious sense. A structured inquiry into the relationship between inner stillness and outer effectiveness designed for senior professionals and founders who have done the external work and are beginning to sense that the next level requires going somewhere they haven’t been yet.
I haven’t launched it yet. Before I proceed, I want to know if it will find the right people.
If this essay landed for you, comment below and let me know. One word is enough: interested. That’s all I need to know about whether Antaryatra should exist.