The Juice of Life

When someone speaks from a place of direct experience, you can feel it. Not just in the words, but in the rhythm underneath them.

That’s what struck me in this conversation with Sahasrajit Ramesh — not just what he said, but the way it stayed with me. He wasn’t selling insight. He was living it.

We didn’t start with productivity, leadership hacks, or frameworks. We started somewhere more basic — and more vital.

We started with aliveness.

What Happens When We Get Off Track

Like the rest of us, Sahasrajit didn’t begin in a monastery or a mountain ashram. He began with talent, drive, and expectations — which led him to Oxford, to MIT, to the energy sector. From the outside, a clean arc. But something inside went quiet.

He talked about what it felt like to follow a path that made sense on paper but drained the colour from his days. The further he specialised, the narrower he felt. Creativity dried up. The routines were efficient but lifeless.

I’ve seen this story unfold in countless boardrooms. The people around the table are smart, driven, and well-compensated — but slowly, imperceptibly, something shifts. The energy flattens. The day becomes just another task list.

Sahasrajit’s turning point wasn’t dramatic. It was a slow realisation: “For me personally, this isn’t it.”

That felt honest. And familiar.

Reconnecting With the Fire

Before Oxford, before engineering, before corporate life — there was something else: drawing, storytelling, acting. The freedom of creating just because it felt good. That’s where the juice was.

After quitting his job — against the advice of almost everyone close to him — Sahasrajit gave himself space to feel again. First in London. Then, eventually, in India.

He described it as “trusting the unknown.” I know that edge. I’ve stood on it. The temptation to line everything up before leaping is strong. But sometimes the leap has to come first.

What helped him trust it was reading: The Untethered Soul, The Surrender Experiment, The Power of Now. Books I’d also read — but hearing how they landed for him gave them a different weight. They weren’t ideas anymore. They were instructions. Or maybe invitations.

Organic Movement and the Intelligence of Life

One of the phrases he used — and it stayed with me — was:

“Be where life is. Be as life is. Move as life moves.”

It sounds simple. It isn’t.

For many of us, work has become a mechanical process — mapped, measured, sliced into OKRs and KPIs. And while those tools serve a purpose, they rarely serve the soul. Sahasrajit offered a different lens: life as an organic system, not a machine.

We explored this together. He spoke about how nature has rhythms. The seasons repeat — but never quite the same way. There’s a living intelligence underneath the cycles.

The human version of that isn’t found in a perfectly structured calendar. It’s felt in the flow of attention, the aliveness of a conversation, the rhythm of a day that leaves you more whole at the end than it found you.

I found myself nodding. Not just at the ideas, but at the experience of them. In my own work — especially in the shift from traditional leadership models to what I now think of as “whole leadership” — I’ve seen how tightly we hold the reins. And how much more effective we become when we loosen them.

Surrender and Co-Creation

One of the stories that stayed with me came from Michael Singer, author of The Surrender Experiment. Sahasrajit shared how Singer let go of control, followed life’s lead, and somehow found himself running a company that sold for hundreds of millions.

It wasn’t the outcome that mattered. It was how he got there: not by force, but by flow.

This isn’t about passivity. It’s about presence. It’s not letting things happen to you — it’s moving with life, instead of against it.

In leadership, this translates in surprisingly practical ways. Listening more. Responding instead of reacting. Staying flexible. Letting a plan emerge through collaboration, rather than fixing it in isolation and defending it at all costs.

Some of the best work I’ve seen — my own included — has come not from perfect strategy, but from attentiveness to what’s real in the moment.

What Gets In The Way

But it’s not always easy to access that state.

Before we can move with presence, we often have to clear what’s in the way. That might be stress, tension, or old patterns of fear. Sahasrajit talked about catharsis — not just as an emotional release, but as a form of preparation.

You can’t think your way back into aliveness. You have to feel it.

It made me reflect on how often we try to leap into presence without first making space for it. The practices that help — movement, stillness, conversation, even music — aren’t luxuries. They’re clearing mechanisms.

And in leadership, that matters. Because the state we’re in is what we transmit. Before any strategy or plan, it’s how we show up that sets the tone.

The Juice of Life

Which brings me back to the title.

Sahasrajit described the work of Satya Speaks as helping people rediscover “the juice of life.” It’s a phrase that could easily drift into cliché — unless you’ve actually felt that dryness before. And then felt something return.

That juice, for me, is presence. It’s the hum beneath a good day. It’s what makes work worth doing and people worth following. And it rarely comes from striving harder.

It comes from alignment. From remembering what we knew before we were trained out of it.

Creativity. Curiosity. Care.

These aren’t luxuries. They’re leadership muscles. And they need practice.

One Question

If you’re reading this and sensing that something’s missing, here’s a simple question:

Where is the juice in your life right now — and what would it take to follow it a little more?

You don’t have to quit your job or move to India.

But you might need to pause. To feel. To notice.

Because life is always moving — and when we move with it, something begins to shift.

And that, I think, is where the real leadership begins.