Vikram had built a company from nothing. Two hundred employees. A board. A reputation. By the time he came to us, he had also built a quieter thing - a hollow that had been growing inside him for years.
He did not call it depression. He called it the heaviness. His blood pressure was 158 over 102. He had not laughed, properly, in over a year.
Permission, first
The hardest thing for Vikram was not changing his diet, or starting to walk in the morning, or even meditating. The hardest thing was giving himself permission to be unwell.
We spent the first month simply naming what was happening. Not fixing it. Just naming.
The slow climb back
By month four his blood pressure had dropped twelve points. By month seven, he was sleeping seven hours instead of four. By month nine, he had instituted a four-day work week at his company.
His team noticed. They began to soften too.
"They did not try to fix me. They taught me how to come home to myself. That is a different kind of medicine."
Vikram Krishnan continues to work with us, in lighter and lighter rhythms. Their story, like all stories worth telling, is still unfolding.