Kahlil Gibran
I’m Shankar Dhanasekaran (@shankardevy)
a mindfulness practitioner, builder, writer, father,
Aurovillian and, in short, a Lover.
Guiding philosophy
I keep my guiding philosophy intentionally simple so it is easy to remember and practice every day.
I have spent enough of my life in a mental stack overflow, where fear, self-doubt, envy, scarcity and their many companions kept recursively calling one another, trapping my mind in endless loops.
Living a life of Gratitude Overflow is my way of breaking that recursion and learning to recognize the grace that has always been present in my life, even in the smallest of things.
For years I believed that doing good would make me feel good, until chasing that short-lived satisfaction by doing more and more quietly carried me into burnout. My mentor flipped it for me saying "Feel Good. Do Good. You have no permission to act until you restore your inner state".
Feeling good is Shantam, an inner peace resting on nourishment, kindness and compassion. Grounded there, my actions no longer arise from the need to prove or complete myself. They come naturally from gratitude and generosity, and their very quality changes.
Now
Inspired by Derek Sivers' "Now" movement, these are what I'm actively focusing now.
Dharana brings work, personal life, and inner well-being together as one integrated life, nurturing awareness, clarity, and conscious action instead of merely demanding more productivity.
Through Surplus AI, I explore how the surplus AI creates can be distributed rather than hoarded, and through The Missing Formation.md, the human capacities we must cultivate to use these new powers wisely.
StoneZupa (under development) is platform for conscious communities to come together as a sangha, cultivating the four pillars of human flourishing through shared practice and collective growth.
Sri Aurobindo
Those words beautifully express how I see the world. I don't see life as separate compartments of work, family, community or spirituality. They are interconnected expressions of one life.
Each influences the others, and together they shape how I live, love, build and serve.
From a young age, I was drawn to philosophy, spirituality, and the deeper questions of human life. I spent much of my youth exploring ideas from different cultures, religions, philosophies, psychology, mythology, and literature across both Eastern and Western traditions.
Osho, Kahlil Gibran, J. Krishnamurti, alongside the Mahabharata and Ramayana, profoundly shaped my worldview. Gurucharan Das's The Difficulty of Being Good, a contemporary reflection on the Mahabharata, deepened my understanding of human suffering and inspired my study of the Yama and Niyama
Today, long walks in nature, living in gratitude, Anapana, Vipassana, contemplative practices from the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, and my journey with Astanga Yoga are all part of my daily life.
Love is my deepest lifelong exploration. My love for my wife, Devy, has slowly opened my heart to love others more fully. I see that my love is still very much conditional. Unconditional love remains a distant ideal, but the small, bounded space of my family offers a safe place to grow my heart and face the fears and challenges that stand in its way.
Among everything I do, nurturing my relationship with my wife and children remains my highest priority.
Something shifted in me for life when I read Kahlil Gibran's On Love and On Children, listened to several of Osho's talks on love, and reflected on George Bernard Shaw's quote on parenting. Those influences led us to office-school our son and crowd-school our daughter. As a family, we spend our time discussing stories from the Mahabharata, reviewing films, analyzing characters, telling stories, and, most importantly, listening to one another.
My exploration of Karma Yoga gradually led me to Auroville, which is now home to me, my wife and our children. Auroville's Dream inspired me at a time when I was already exploring a life guided by the principles of Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein.
I co-founded Talam, an IT services, education and research unit, together with Manoj Pavitran. Through Talam, my exploration of Gift Economy, community building, and work as Karma Yoga continues.
Dharana AI and StoneZupa are two expressions of my life philosophy taking shape as conscious technology.
Dharana AI enables people to respond to whole life. Rather than separating work, personal life and inner well-being into different silos, it brings them together as one integrated life. It is my attempt to build technology that nurtures awareness, clarity and conscious action, instead of merely demanding more productivity while ignoring our inner state.
StoneZupa is a platform for conscious communities that help people cultivate the four pillars of human flourishing. While Dharana AI supports this journey at an individual level, StoneZupa brings these individuals together as a sangha, strengthening both individual practice and collective growth.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing under the promise of bringing greater productivity and leisure to humanity. From the steam engine to the modern computer, increased leisure has always been the promise, but rarely the reality. Through Surplus AI, I explore how the surplus created by AI can be distributed rather than hoarded, as has happened with every major technological revolution.
Teaching AI new capabilities has become as easy as dropping a skills.md file into a project. Yet we rarely stop to ask whether we, as individuals and as a society, have the capacity to handle these unearned powers. Through the lens of AshtaLakshmi, The Missing Formation.md is my exploration of the human capacities and practices that individuals, communities and societies need to cultivate to use these new capabilities wisely.
Software has been my craft for about two decades. Along the way I've written books on Elixir, Phoenix, Ash and Ecto, delivered a keynote, conducted workshops and training programs at ElixirConf EU and ElixirConf US, consulted with teams, and contributed to open source.
If one of my books or courses would genuinely help you but cost is a barrier, just write to me. I'd be happy to offer a discount or even make it available free. It's simply my way of paying forward the generosity I'm receiving in my life.
Notes on awareness, technology, AI, community, learning, and ordinary life.
Browse notes →Workshops, talks, and office hours that I host and gatherings I simply show up as a fellow participant or community member.
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