Author: gkjohn

… by holding differently

 

Badri watched me squat.

“Again,” he said.

I went through the motion, focusing on form.

He nodded slowly. “Still too much quad. Your glutes and hamstrings haven’t woken up.”

I was lighter than I’d been in a decade. Stronger, fitter, more focused. But underneath it all, I was still compensating by asking the wrong parts of my body to carry what they weren’t built to hold.

“Strong doesn’t mean functional,” he said.

And didn’t I know it. I could feel it landing in places far from the gym.

Repatterning hasn’t been a single moment but more a languid undoing. Over the past few years, I’ve been retraining my body to move differently, engage differently, and stop pushing from all the wrong places.

My Pilates practice has been central to this in how it taught me to stop muscling through and start paying attention and to stop chasing intensity and start trusting structure. It’s humbling. Sometimes humiliating. Always illuminating.

Bit by bit, I’ve had to retrain old habits. I learned to stop overusing the front of my neck and access the deep flexors instead. I shifted from shoulder bracing to engaging my shoulder blades. I reawakened dormant muscles and re-sequenced my core so that tension doesn’t stand in for actual stability. I worked to quiet overactive hip flexors and fire glutes and hamstrings that had gone offline. I stopped asking my adductors to do more than they’re meant to. Even my feet had to learn new patterns to learn to grip and ground better.

Each adjustment took time, precision, and trust. And a slower understanding that change doesn’t have to be dramatic to be real because slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Then the physical re-patterning brought up emotional patterns I hadn’t quite named.

I’ve always been good at resilience. Capable under pressure, quick with clarity, reliable in a storm. What I hadn’t seen was how much of that capability was built on a bypass of solving as a way of not feeling and pushing through as a way of staying safe.

Through therapy and coaching, I began to see how much I relied on doing instead of being, especially when things felt emotionally charged. I used to assume that if a sensation felt intense, it meant something specific to that moment, that person, that context.

It took me a while to realize that what I was feeling was often real, but not always specific. A sensation is human. It doesn’t have to mean what I first attach to it. The heat of desire, the ache of recognition, the feeling of awe aren’t always about someone or something in particular. They’re just part of being alive and I don’t have to act on them, but sometimes I can stay a while and notice.

This shift from reflex to reflection was its own kind of re-patterning.

I began to see how often I reached for control in the name of clarity. How frequently I tried to resolve what was meant to be lived with. How predictably I rushed to name what was still unfurling.

What I thought was strength was often just overuse. Not unlike the quads.

(more…)

Every system protects itself

 

Every system protects itself. That’s how it survives, not just through rules or incentives, but by rewarding those who play along and punishing those who don’t. Belonging becomes the currency. You learn the signals. You speak the language. And somewhere along the way, you stop noticing the cost of fitting in.

When someone steps out of that current, even slightly, it creates friction. Sometimes it’s visible. Often it isn’t. It might look like a question that lingers too long, a hesitation in a room that prefers certainty, or a refusal to let something slide just because it always has.

A friend once called this kind being a “class traitor.” Isn’t there something in the discomfort that feels … useful? Not disloyalty for its own sake but in choosing to be accountable to something deeper than the incentives around you. Choosing conscience over coherence.

It doesn’t have to be dramatic. Often it’s not. It shows up in small moments: refusing to rubber-stamp a lazy decision, questioning a cherished norm, standing alongside someone your peers find inconvenient. You don’t change sides. You stay where you are, but you stop pretending.

Gramsci might have called these people organic intellectuals. Those who emerge from within a group and start challenging its defaults. But it’s not only thinkers who do this. It’s founders who pull capital out of extraction, civil servants who risk being sidelined, community leaders who push against the grain of their own movements. What they have in common isn’t ideology. It’s friction with the roles they were expected to inhabit.

The trouble is, these people are usually alone. They aren’t part of a cohort. They’re not coordinated. They’re just trying to hold their line without losing their footing. Sometimes they stay quiet, other times they speak out. Either way, they begin to notice what it costs to keep integrity intact inside a system built for accommodation.

The costs show up quickly. Social distance. Professional coldness. A polite exclusion from decisions you were once part of. You’re still in the room, but something shifts. You’re now the one who slows things down. The one who overthinks. The one who makes others uncomfortable because you’ve stopped playing along.

Most institutions don’t know what to do with that. They are designed to contain critique, not respond to it. They prefer feedback that comes through the proper channels, raised at the right time, in the right tone. When people begin asking harder questions outside those boundaries, they get framed as disloyal or unproductive, even when what they’re offering is clarity.

Over time, that kind of resistance gets worn down more through fatigue than confrontation. The cumulative weight of having to explain, defend, justify. The sense that your insight is now read as threat, that your care is mistaken for disruption. Many walk away, not angry, but tired of being the only one in the room who remembers what the work was meant to be.

What makes a difference is connection. Just finding others who’ve stepped into the same ambiguity. People who carry similar doubts, who’ve stopped pretending, who understand the weight of staying in a system without capitulating to it.

These connections usually don’t happen in formal spaces. They grow in the margins, in private conversations, shared silences, the unguarded parts of a walk or a meal. They’re held together not by outcomes, but by recognition. You know it when you feel it: I’m not the only one asking these questions.

(more…)

This was the third funeral like this in the past few months. Same rituals. Same electric crematorium.

Perhaps it was the recency. Perhaps the repetition.

But this time, something lodged in my mind and stayed there.

He would have turned ninety next week.

His father had been fading for a while. Not dramatically, just that quiet softening age brings. The kind where memory loosens and time begins to blur. A bout of pneumonia a few months ago had rattled everyone, but he had pulled through. So when he got the call last evening saying his father looked like he was struggling, no one expected that it would end here.

But it did. Quietly. At home.

I went to see them that morning. The apartment was one of those from the late 1970s, possibly early 1980s, with a name ending in “- Kiran”. The layout was familiar — odd corners, low ceilings, octagonal rooms, tiny grilled balconies that looked out onto nothing in particular. The whole place had that smell old apartments carry, a mix of varnish and dust, with the lingering trace of turmeric in the walls.

Upstairs, the furniture had been cleared to the shared landing. Where the sofas once sat, a body now lay. His father was wrapped in white, his skin rubbed down with sandalwood paste, turmeric, neem oil, and ghee. Grains were scattered across his chest and shoulders. A little ragi, some wheat, a few rice kernels like some forgotten harvest ritual. He looked small. Still. Tended to with care, but not with ceremony. Just the quiet hum of presence. Family, a few neighbours, some cousins, a priest. No urgency. No performance. Just the slow, steady movements of people who have done this many times before.

He had led a good life. People said it gently, as if reminding themselves it was true.

Then came the crematorium.

The pattern repeated. Rosewater, tulsi, camphor, and banana leaves. His body was lifted onto a metal tray placed over a thin wooden briar. It felt symbolic, not practical. More water was splashed. The leaves wrapped again. A final arrangement before the slide inward.

And it was in that moment, watching him disappear into the chamber, that something turned.

This was cooking.

The oils. The herbs. The wrapping. The heat. It didn’t feel like a farewell. It felt like preparation.

Papillote-style, like the French do with fish. Wrapped in parchment, lightly seasoned, and steamed in their own aroma. As the banana leaves touched the hot metal, they hissed. And that was it — I couldn’t unthink it.

We call it an offering. But to whom? For what?

Across cultures, we dress the dead, perfume them, anoint them with oils, wrap them in leaves, surround them with spices, salt, coins, grain. We call it respect. A final kindness.

But maybe that’s not the only reason.

Maybe it’s fear.

Maybe our gods are not what we imagine them to be. Not merciful or watchful. Maybe they are something older, something hungrier. And what we call ritual is just a recipe passed down across generations, designed to keep them sated. What if sandalwood is a marinade? What if turmeric is not just antiseptic, but flavour?

(more…)

Leadership through the lens of relationship

 

I had a slightly sideways thought this week. We often imagine divinity as a source of power. That it is something we beseech when we’re in need, hoping it’ll act on our behalf. But what if it’s the other way around? What if the gods gain their power from us? What if it’s the act of asking, remembering, tending, that gives gods their strength and not the other way around?

This line of thought won’t leave me alone. What if attention isn’t neutral? What if it’s generative? What if what we relate to is what becomes real?

pointed me to the Circumpolar Inuit Protocols for Equitable and Ethical Engagement which holds a quiet but consistent thread: relationship isn’t a step in the process. It is the process. Knowledge, identity, land, language, decision-making don’t exist in isolation. They exist through connection.

A hunter’s first seal isn’t just food. It’s a communal moment of reciprocity. The seal gives itself. The hunter shares it with elders and those in need. That act of sharing doesn’t just reflect community values; it constitutes the community. Without it, the relationship frays. And when the relationship frays, the meaning thins out. Things become less real.

So how does this land in our work? In the messy realities of philanthropy, leadership, and institutional life?

Let’s start with philanthropy. So much of the field still sees itself as a source of capital. We fund. We support. We enable. But if you shift the lens. If you accept that attention and relation create power. Then philanthropy more than resourcing. It’s about consecrating. What we fund is what we acknowledge as worthy of belonging. What we name, show up for, listen to, and keep returning to are the things we breathe life into.

Not to everything into a spiritual exercise. But to be honest that money follows meaning. And we shape meaning through where we place our gaze. When we treat certain knowledge systems as “input,” certain leaders as “investable,” or certain stories as “impactful,” we’re deciding what gets to be real in the system.

“We share our knowledge in the same way that we share our food.”

Doesn’t this line just hold everything? Knowledge isn’t abstract but is a living thing that’s kept alive through use, through ritual, through recognition. Like food, it’s meant to be shared with care, with context, with memory. If we forget to do that, if we extract, tokenise, summarise, the knowledge dies. And so does the relationship.

This applies just as much to leadership. If relation creates reality, then leadership isn’t about vision or control but stewardship of attention. What we notice. What we name. What we dignify with our time and trust. Leadership, in this frame, becomes a practice of presence. Less commanding, more convening. Less solutioning, more sensing.

It also demands a kind of humility that philanthropy and leadership often resist. Because if the system isn’t waiting to be fixed, but waiting to be related to, then we can’t start with answers. We have to start by becoming trustworthy partners in a relationship that might ask more from us than we’re used to giving including discomfort, slowness, and the willingness to let go of control.

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