The Last Place You Look

A look back at the inspiration behind World Yoga Festival

I used to smile when people said that whatever you are looking for always turns up in the last place you look. It sounded like a throwaway line — one of those phrases people repeat without thinking. But the truth is far simpler, and far more exacting. The moment you find what you are seeking, you stop looking. Seeking ends. So, of course, it is the last place.

What I didn’t know then was how long it would take me to stop.

For more than twenty years, Sonali and I lived as seekers without naming ourselves as such. On the surface, our life looked successful, comfortable, even enviable. Beneath it ran a persistent unease — a quiet sense that something essential was missing. Life felt like an endless choreography of striving, acquiring, and distracting ourselves until the inevitable end. Surely, we thought, there had to be more than this.

Our search first took us away from a settled, comfortable life in Cambridge, all the way across the Atlantic to San Francisco. We believed, as so many do, that meaning might be geographically misplaced — that a better version of life existed somewhere else. For a time, it seemed we had found it. Spacious, climate-controlled homes. Multiple cars. Redwoods in the garden. Sunshine that never seemed to fade.

But slowly, almost imperceptibly, the shine wore off. The American Dream, for all its promise, did not contain what we were looking for. After seven years, we returned to Britain — not defeated, but quietly puzzled. The question we had carried with us remained unanswered.

It began to dawn on us that perhaps what we were seeking was too subtle to be found in things.

We turned to books — anything that sat outside the accepted narrative. Self-help, self-improvement, self-knowledge. Yet no matter how contemporary the language, the conclusions always seemed to point backward. Modern ideas of consciousness felt provisional, incomplete. Gradually, we realised that every thread we followed led further into the past, and ultimately, unmistakably, to the Vedas.

We began studying Vedanta on our own and quickly found ourselves out of our depth. The texts were precise, uncompromising, and demanded a level of clarity we did not yet possess. We needed guidance. So we sought teachers, scholars, swamis — anyone who could help us stay afloat.

Throughout this time, one name kept resurfacing: Swami Dayananda of Rishikesh. He was spoken of not with awe, but with respect. He had written extensively in English, and the clarity of his words drew us in. The more we read, the more certain we became that we needed to hear him in person. Eventually, we found the courage to attend a two-week study retreat — what he simply called a “camp” — in Rishikesh.

From the moment we entered his ashram, something settled. There was no sense of arrival as achievement — only recognition. When Swamiji began to speak, there was no mysticism, no performance. Just clarity — gentle, exacting, and deeply humane.

Without effort or announcement, the seeking fell away.

That was the last place we looked.

What we found there did not promise a better future or a new identity. It revealed something quieter and more stable than either. Once seen, it could not be unseen — but it still needed to be lived.

Thus began our relationship with Advaita Vedanta — non-duality.

Years later, when Swami Dayananda spoke of his wish for an authentic yoga festival in the West, we recognised the same question we had once lived with: What’s next? Not as ambition, but as maturity. He saw that for many dedicated asana practitioners, physical mastery of the body eventually gives rise to a deeper inquiry — and that inquiry needs a place to land.

The problem, of course, was that we knew nothing about festivals. We had never attended one, let alone organised something of that scale. But Vedanta had already begun to rearrange our relationship with fear. Fear, we had learned, is not a warning — it is a story. And order, when trusted, has a way of carrying things forward.

Swamiji often said, “Give the world the best you have, and the best will come back to you.”

We didn’t yet know what “the best” looked like in practical terms. We only knew that giving mattered more than certainty.

So, full of ignorance and equally full of faith, Sonali and I said yes.

Not because we were ready — but because something had shifted. Seeking had ended, and responsibility had begun. What followed was not clarity, ease, or spiritual certainty, but a very human journey of logistics, doubt, mistakes, generosity, and exhaustion. A journey guided by grace.