My name is Kishan. I drank heavily for five years and tried to quit for three. I read the books, changed routines, and sat through a 10-day silent retreat. Nothing held. I drank at a wedding the night the retreat ended.
Then my grandmother died. The 13-day mourning period became the longest sober stretch I'd had in years. A few weeks later, a friend asked me one question.
"How do you want to be remembered?"
It landed. I quit two weeks later, in 2023.
I told my parents after my one-year anniversary because I didn't trust myself not to break it early and give them false hope. Seeing the tears in their eyes is something I'll remember for the rest of my life.
Stopping changed a lot. It did not change the job I didn't care about, the body I'd ignored, or the question of what I was doing with my life. So I went to work on those too. What changed me wasn't quitting. It was keeping small promises to myself until I believed my own word again.
Before this, I worked in finance and short-selling. My job was finding the detail that did not match the story a company was telling. Eventually I started using the same lens on myself. What did I say mattered? What did my behavior show? What kept appearing in the gap?
I don't teach anything I haven't run on myself first. Fifteen years of training, a daily meditation practice, and rebuilding my own life taught me why discipline runs out, how one habit can quietly hold three goals in place, and how avoidance hides inside a perfect routine. Now I use that lens on other people. I know where they get stuck, and how to find the one change that gets the rest moving.
That's the work I do now. My clients don't come to me about drinking. They come about their health, their careers, their families, the things they've been pushing off for years. You don't need a story like mine to work with me. You need something you want badly enough to go after.
One question from a friend changed how I saw myself. Change how you see yourself, and the life you want follows.
Rudra is the remover of sorrow. Destruction before renewal.
