The Trap Door

Chanda Chaudhary

16 Apr 2026 — 1 min read

The ego is exhausting. It never leaves. It comments on everything. It keeps score, builds cases, rehearses conversations that will never happen. It is the noisiest room you will ever live in.

And yet.

That room exists only because something in you can hear it.

The noise is not the problem. The one who notices the noise — that is the discovery.

Most of us spend our lives trying to quieten the audience. Meditation apps. Journaling. Therapy. The ten thousand ways we have invented to make the inner room less loud. And some of it works, for a while. Then the commentary returns, as it always does, because that is what it is made to do.

That is the nature of mind.

It took the ego's noise and filled the room with furniture. So much furniture that most of us mistake it for the room itself. We spend our lives rearranging it.

But here is what the mind cannot do.

It cannot watch itself. Not really. Every time the mind tries to observe the mind, it produces another thought about the thought. Another layer of furniture.

If you stay with what is noticing, without falling back into commentary — you are no longer inside the noise. You are watching it.

The witnessing doesn't begin. It is recognised.

Nirakaar. Nirup. Shiva.

The Roadside Tree and Me

There is a tree I pass sometimes. Standing at a junction — noise, pollution, dust, the daily assault of a city that doesn't notice it's there. No canopy above it. No forest around it. Just concrete breaking its roots and exhaust filling the space where air should

The Primed Year

I got off a call with a friend yesterday. He'd been told this year would be hard. And it is, he said. It really is. I put the phone down and opened YouTube. The first video waiting for me: a numerologist explaining why 2026 is a year of

Shell

Pick one up. Really hold it. Hard enough to have survived the sea, the sand, the long journey to your hand. Fragile enough that you instinctively tighten your grip, then loosen it. Both things are true. And they come from the same source. A shell is not built. It is

Surprise

We spend so much of our lives preparing. Bracing, really. We call it planning, but underneath it is the quiet, exhausting work of making sure nothing catches us off guard. And then something does. Not the dramatic kind. Not the kind that undoes you. The kind that arrives, like a

Read more

The Roadside Tree and Me

The Primed Year

Shell

Surprise