I went through depression in 2016.

I lost all my faith in God, became totally hopeless, and in fact an angry atheist. That’s the thing about dark times… they polarise your faith. You either develop a stronger faith or lose all of it.

Over time, my views changed, and my values became clearer. Elizabeth Gilbert’s one TED Talk gave me my transformational moment, and I became curious about spirituality.

I went on to read authentic books from Buddhist monks, among other contemporary spiritual literature.

After reading so many books about Philosophy, Buddhism, Hinduism, and spirituality in general, I can confidently…

All the sects of Buddhism focus on studying books as an important activity to practice Buddhism. I know this because I attended a few Nichiren Buddhists' meetings, met a Tibetan Buddhist, and have explored this topic for a few years now.

My problem with religious texts is that everyone reads texts from centuries ago without updating the teachings with a modern context. This doesn’t mean those old texts are fundamentally wrong; rather, we might understand it better if they are taught within the context of our social media world.

On my journey to explore Buddhism in a modern context, I…

Like any other bookworm, in 2016, I started tracking my reading progress on Goodreads.

In 2017, I pushed myself to read and finish many books because I wanted my Goodreads stat to display a boastful number. I read 15,000 pages and finished 61 books in 2017. This is how it looked in Goodreads:

Whenever I mention online that I’m a habit coach and I help people improve their habits, most of the time, I get the same response: “How can I wake up early?”

This issue has even more intensified due to the corona lockdown times. A national survey published on NCBI concludes—

“Due to complete lockdown during COVID-19 pandemic leads to a state of social jetlag with delayed sleep-wake, meal timings, and excessive digital media exposure…”

I used to be a night owl, which isn’t an issue. …

Last week, I graduated as a certified habit coach from coach.me.

My coaching statement is simple — I help people improve their emotional health with simple daily habits.

Let’s explore the four easy habits I recommend my clients follow to improve their emotional health.

Here are a few questions I will answer in this post

• Does science back up these habits for better emotional health?
• How soon will you see the results?
• What has been my experience with this habit?
• What would be the challenges to follow the habit?
• How can you get started?

This one habit helps you to slow down: Pause.

Sitting on a chair or wherever, closing your eyes, and simply breathing. …

I met Shikha via common friends, a few days before the incident. She’s an amazing singer and guitarist.

I was scrolling through Instagram and I saw her videos singing and playing guitar. She’s so good… really good.

I immediately shared those in DMs with a few close friends saying “how cool is she, right?”

At that moment it hit me — “Is there anyone who might be sharing my writings with this kind of excitement?” I doubted that.

I felt nauseated.

I went to the office washroom and vomited. And I cried. Maybe I had an anxiety attack. …

I have been writing online for the past six years. Sharing my posts across platforms comes naturally to me now.

I joined the coach.me monthly promotion challenge in October this year. It renews every month, and here’s one basic rule of it: you share one post every working day for the whole month, and you show support to three other posts shared by other members.

This helps you exercise your marketing muscle, check out what others are publishing in your community, and get some additional engagement on your posts.

That’s what I did in October. That’s what I have been…

This is inspired by Coach Tony’s post about his Codex Vitae. The purpose of this post is to collect and write down the bits of wisdom I have gained over the years and the new beliefs I have been developing with them.

I am planning to update this once a year at least.

Before you read further, a few points to note —

• This is meant to be Dipanshu Rawal’s “Codex Vitae/Book of life”. If you’re not Dipanshu Rawal, don’t follow this word by word. Feel free to pick what you like or what you would want to try and ignore the rest. …