The Path of Intentional Living
The distance between how you live and how you mean to live.
That distance is the whole subject.
You will not close it in a weekend, or alone. You close it over nine months, with forty people beside you: six months of reading, reflecting, discussing, and practising, four days together away from everything, and ninety days at home to make it hold.
Why this exists
Most of us are good at our lives and quietly estranged from them.
You optimised. You achieved. You kept moving, and somewhere in the moving you stopped asking whether the life you were building was the one you meant to live. Nothing is wrong. That is the strange part. It works on paper, and still there is a gap you can feel on a Sunday evening.
You could read all of this alone. Many people already have. What you cannot do alone is stay with it: the rhythm, the mirrors, the small terrifying experiments, and a room of people who will notice, kindly, when you go quiet.
Let us be clear about what this is
What it is not
- ·A course, a seminar, or a weekend of talks
- ·A fixed syllabus of books to get through
- ·A room where people perform how much they have read
- ·Productivity, networking, or business dressed up as depth
- ·Anywhere you will be handed an answer
What it is
- ·Nine months of honest, unhurried work on your own life
- ·Six streams of reading, composed around six themes
- ·One behavioural experiment, every single month
- ·Rituals repeated until they quietly become memory
- ·An intentional society of forty, built on purpose
Texts are catalysts. Conversations are mirrors. Behaviour is philosophy made visible.
The method
The Living Philosophy Cycle
Every month turns through the same five movements: Read, Notice, Speak, Practise, Carry. It is the spine of the work, and it is what stays with you long after you have forgotten which passage said what.
- 01ReadThe month's readings, as catalysts, not curriculum.
- 02NoticeWhat they stir in you, written down honestly.
- 03SpeakIt aloud, in the circle and to your thinking partner.
- 04PractiseOne experiment that turns thought into action.
- 05CarryWhat changed, into the archive you bring to the retreat.
The reading
Six streams of reading, not six prescribed books
Psychology, philosophy, spiritual and contemplative writing, fiction and poetry, memoir, and behavioural science. Each month draws on one or two of them. We send you a short core reading the whole room shares, along with optional pieces for going deeper, and there is always an open lane for the book already working on you. Everything you need to read, we provide.
The room
You hold space for others.
Who holds it for you?
Coaches, therapists, healers, and facilitators sit here alongside founders, creators, educators, and people who have simply been doing their own quiet work for years. The practitioners come for a particular reason: they spend their lives carrying other people's inner weather, and are rarely carried themselves. In this room nobody is the expert. Everybody is a participant.
Forty seats, composed rather than filled, across industries, ages, and seasons of life. We are not choosing the forty best applications. We are composing one room that will hold together for nine months.
Who holds this
I built the thing I could not find.
I have spent the last decade and a half in rooms where people are trying to change. As an ICF Master Certified Coach, and as an NLP trainer certified by Richard Bandler, John Grinder, Robert Dilts, Judith DeLozier, and Michael Hall, which is a sentence that means something in this field and nothing at all at two in the morning when you cannot sleep. Before any of that I spent fourteen years inside Ernst and Young and IBM, leading teams and quietly wondering why the people who had everything so often seemed the furthest from themselves.
I have trained more than eight thousand coaches and trainers, from over sixty-five countries. Which means I have watched more than eight thousand people leave a powerful room lit up, and I have watched a great many of them return, inside a month, to exactly the life they came from. Not because the work was weak. Because a weekend cannot carry a life. What changes a person is not the insight. It is what they do next, who is standing beside them when it gets hard, and whether anyone notices in month three when they go quiet.
So this is nine months, not a weekend. I am in the room for all of it: every circle call, all four days of the retreat, and the ninety days that follow. I am not there to teach you anything. I am there to hold the container, ask the question nobody wants to be asked, and then get out of the way while forty people meet themselves.
Vikram Dhar
The essentials
One fee. Two cohorts a year. Forty seats.
Everything is held within a single fee: the readings, the circle calls, your thinking partner, the four-day residential retreat, and the ninety days after it. The full dates, the payment schedule, and what the fee covers are on the application page.
The fee
₹1,27,000Inclusive of GST
To hold your seat
₹17,000Deposit, then instalments
Next cohort
Mar 2027Applications close mid December 2026
The room
40 seatsBy application, on fit
The retreat is where six months become visible.
A letter you wrote in month one, opened on the final afternoon by someone who is no longer the person who wrote it. A fire, and words spoken aloud for the first time. A small, bound book filled with anonymous reflections from your cohort. Then, ninety days to carry it all home.
The method
A philosophy of change, not a syllabus.
The texts are only ever the catalyst. The work happens in the spaces between them: in the journal late at night, in the circle when someone says the thing you were not going to say, with your thinking partner on a Friday, and in the one small experiment you promised to run this month and would very much like to postpone. Reading changes thoughts. Behaviour changes identity.
The Living Philosophy Cycle
Five movements, every month
Move through them slowly. The order is not decoration: an insight that is never spoken stays private, and a thought that is never practised stays a thought.
By month six you are carrying an archive: six months of noticing, six experiments run, six things kept. You bring all of it with you to the retreat, and it is heavier than you expect.
The arc
Six months move in three acts
Transformation is not linear, and we do not pretend otherwise. The middle is meant to feel unsettled. We will tell you that in advance, and we will still be there when it does.
Months 1 and 2
Awakening
Seeing the story you have been living inside, and noticing for the first time that it is a story. Identity first. Then the patterns you repeat in love, in friendship, in every room you enter.
Months 3 and 4
Disruption
Letting mortality and fear rearrange what matters. This is the part everyone would skip if the structure allowed it. The structure does not allow it.
Months 5 and 6
Integration
Making something honestly, and stepping toward whoever is trying to emerge. By now the reading has done its work, and the room has become something you look forward to.
The ground it stands on
Principles of intentional living
Not rules. Convictions the work keeps returning to. Beneath them sits a quiet lineage: Stoicism, existential and narrative psychology, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, adult development theory, the contemplative traditions, and moral philosophy. That is the spine, not the syllabus. You will feel the rigour. You will never be lectured with it.
- ·Live examined. An unexamined life simply runs on old instructions.
- ·Choose deliberately. Most of a life is built from defaults nobody actually chose.
- ·Practise before opinion. You learn what you believe by acting, not by arguing.
- ·Let behaviour lead. Identity follows what you repeatedly do.
- ·Be known rather than impressive. Relationships outlast performance.
- ·Think slowly. Fast lives are changed by slow thinking.
- ·Move with courage, not certainty. Waiting to feel ready is how most things never happen.
- ·Treat attention as a moral act. What you attend to is what you become.
- ·Keep becoming. There is no finished version of a person.
How the room is held
The facilitator's stance
Facilitators hold the container. They do not fill it. For the practitioners among you, this is usually the first relief: for nine months, nobody is asking you to hold anyone. You are allowed to arrive without your professional self and simply be a person in a chair.
- ×We do not rescue.
- ×We do not advise.
- ×We do not interpret your life for you.
- →We ask.
- →We witness.
- →We create the conditions in which you meet yourself.
Why it works
Reading
expands perspective.
Writing
slows thinking.
Conversation
reveals blind spots.
Behaviour
creates identity.
Ritual
builds memory.
Community
sustains change.
Insight fades. Practice, repeated in good company, becomes a way of living.
The library
Six streams of reading, composed around six themes.
There is no list of six books to get through, and there will not be one. The themes are fixed. The reading is composed, cohort by cohort, from the streams below, for a simple reason: the same passage does not open the same door in two people, and forty people arrive with forty different literacies and forty different wounds.
A seventh lane stays deliberately open. History, anthropology, ecology, science writing, theatre, film, sacred texts, and the work of your own tradition. If it serves the month's theme and it serves the room, it belongs here.
How a month's reading works
Three ways in. One conversation.
We send you everything you need to read each month. There is nothing to buy, nothing to track down. Everyone shares a core text so the circle has common ground, and beyond that you can go deeper along the path that speaks to you.
Everyone reads this
The core reading
A curated set of forty to seventy pages we send you each month: chapters, essays, poems, and short original provocations written for your cohort. It is what the circle call is built on, and it is meant to be read slowly, and then read again.
If you want to go further
Going deeper
Alongside the core reading, we share a few optional pieces for each theme, spread across the streams: something psychological, something philosophical or contemplative, a piece of fiction or memoir. Read as much or as little as the month allows. It is offered, never assigned.
You bring your own
The open lane
If a text is already living in you for this theme, a scripture, a poet, a novel you have read four times and still cannot explain, bring that to the circle too. Tell your thinking partner. The only thing that matters is that it changes what you do, not simply what you think.
Why not a fixed list
The arc is the argument. The titles are not.
- ·Because you are not identical to the person beside you. A book that cracks one person open puts another to sleep. A shared core, plus room to go deeper where it speaks to you, gets far more of the room to the same depth.
- ·Because fiction outperforms advice. A novel changes people more deeply than almost any book with a method in it. Fiction slips past the defences that self-help sets off in a room of intelligent adults.
- ·Because each cohort teaches us something. The room tells us which texts actually moved behaviour, and which merely impressed. The library is revised after every cohort. The themes never move.
- ·Because reading is not the point. The experiment is the point. The reading exists to make the experiment feel inevitable.
We are not making better readers. We are making people who live differently on a Tuesday.
The journey
Six months. One story.
Each theme rests on the one before it. Identity before relationships. Mortality before courage. The sequence is the argument, and it is why this cannot be done as a weekend. Every month gives you readings drawn from the streams, one circle call, one experiment you would rather not run, and one thing you keep.
The rhythm between the readings
What a month actually asks of you
The circle call
Sixty to ninety minutes with your circle. Never summaries. Emotional questions only: which line disturbed you, which passage exposed you, what are you pretending not to know?
The journal
A journal you keep throughout the year, opened before month one with the core readings inside. Prompts, letters to yourself, the experiment, and room for the artefact. By the time the retreat arrives, it has become an archive of your year.
Your thinking partner
One person, deliberately mismatched to you across industry and life stage. Weekly voice notes. Partners rotate at month four, so the second half of the journey arrives with fresh eyes.
One voice note, weekly
Every Friday, a short spoken reflection to your partner. Voice, not text. It is harder to hide in a voice, which is precisely the point.
One shared question, weekly
Every Sunday, all forty of you sit with the same question. No answer is required. It is simply company in the asking.
One letter, monthly
A letter to your future self. The month one letter is sealed, and stays sealed, until the final afternoon of the retreat. Nobody reads it before then, including us.
The reflection mirror
Not a score. A mirror.
In month one, again at the retreat, and once more at day ninety, you answer the same six quiet questions in private. You keep every version. Nobody else ever sees them. The point is not to be measured. The point is to feel the distance you have travelled, in your own handwriting.
Compared to six months ago, how often do I avoid conflict, feel lonely, live intentionally, say no, feel grateful, and trust myself?
Four days, at the end of six months
The culmination, never the beginning.
The retreat does not create the change. It is where six months of it become visible, to you and to everyone who has been walking beside you. Somewhere quiet, in nature, residential. Forty people, one fire, no slides. Summer camp for thoughtful adults, and we mean that with complete seriousness.
The three moments people carry for years
Endings are remembered more than middles
The sealed letter
Written in month one, by someone who did not yet know what was coming. Opened on the final afternoon, in the room, in silence. It is usually the quietest hour of the four days.
The Fireside Night
People read aloud from their journals. Letters, regrets, turning points, poetry. Nobody is ever required to. Yet almost everybody does, and nobody forgets who spoke.
The Book of Observations
A small, bound book of anonymous words your cohort wrote about you. It is handed to you at the close. Most people wait until they are alone to read it.
The room is part of the teaching
How the space is designed
Nature, never a city hotel. Residential, because sleeping on site deepens everything that happens in daylight. One large circle room, small breakout spaces, quiet corners, journal lounges, tea, and an outdoor fire that gets used every night.
- 01No PowerPoint. The room is the curriculum.
- 02Music is designed. Morning music is not evening music. Silence, too, is a choice we make on purpose.
- 03Branding stays quiet. Premium and human. You will not be handed a lanyard.
- 04An anonymous question wall. Fears, confessions, questions. Others answer, anonymously, in their own hand.
- 05A care lead on site. A qualified care professional, present for all four days, for anyone who needs them.
Most retreats end at the door. This one has ninety days left to run.
After the retreat
Ninety days to make it hold.
Every retreat fails in the same place: the return. Two weeks of glow, a few beautiful photographs, and then the old life quietly closes over it. So this one does not end at the door. On the final morning, you write a ninety-day plan by hand, and the structure comes home with you to make sure you actually follow through.
The commitment card
Written by hand on the last morning, signed, witnessed by your pod, and photographed before you leave. Three rituals you will install. Two commitments you will test. One thing you will end. One person you will tell. That card is the spine of the next ninety days, and four people who know you now will be holding you to it.
The arc of the return
Four phases, ninety days
This is not goal setting. It is evidence gathering. On day ninety, the question is not how you feel about the work. It is what has changed in your calendar, your relationships, and the way you spend a Tuesday.
The cadence
What actually lands in your week
Day 90
The closing circle, and what you take with you
The mirror, a third time
The same six questions you answered in month one and at the retreat. Three versions, one year of a life, in your own handwriting. Nobody sees them but you.
The evidence page
One page, written by you: what you ended, what you began, what you finally said aloud, and what it cost you. It is the truest artefact of the whole nine months.
Your next ninety
You either write a second ninety-day plan with your pod, or you close cleanly and step into the alumni community. Both are honest endings. Drifting quietly away is the only thing we ask you not to do.
Insight is what happens at the retreat. Change is what happens in the ninety days after it.
And then
The community, for as long as you want it
- ·Your pod continues, if the four or five of you want it to. Most do, and some are still meeting years later.
- ·Quarterly reunions. The full cohort online, and one gathering a year in person.
- ·The alumni network. Two cohorts a year, so by year two this is a genuine community rather than a mailing list.
- ·Alumni as facilitators. From year two, alumni may apply to hold circles for new cohorts. It deepens their own work as much as it serves the next room.
The room
Good rooms repel before they attract.
Forty people, chosen for depth and for the mix. The common thread is not age, wealth, or profession. It is a willingness to look honestly at your own life, and to do the work between the readings rather than simply admire them.
Who tends to be here
Coaches and Facilitators
You have language for other people's transformation, and you use it beautifully. Here you are not the one holding the room, and that takes about a week to stop feeling strange. Some alumni later train to hold circles with us. That is a consequence, never the reason to come.
Therapists and Healers
You carry other people's inner weather for a living. This is reflective and communal, not clinical, and it is not supervision. It is somewhere you get to be a participant: witnessed, rather than useful.
Founders and Professionals
A life that works on paper, and a gap you can feel on a Sunday evening. You do not want to accomplish more. You want to live more deliberately, and you would like some company while you work out what that means.
Creators, Educators, and Seekers
You have been doing your own work for years, mostly alone. You want structure, company, and a room that will not let you stay abstract about any of it.
Please do not come if
- ·You are looking for a productivity system
- ·You are coming to network, to sell, or to be seen
- ·You want the answers handed to you
- ·You want the four days without the nine months
You will flourish here if
- ·You will actually run the experiment, in the month it is asked of you
- ·You can be uncomfortable without leaving the room
- ·You would rather be known than admired
- ·You can give this nine months of your attention, not nine weekends
Who holds the room
The same person, in the room, for all nine months.
Vikram Dhar is an ICF Master Certified Coach, NLP Master Trainer, Licensed Emotional Intelligence Master Trainer, one of a small number globally, and a mentor coach to other coaches. Before the work found him, he spent around five years at Ernst and Young and nine at IBM, leading teams across India, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, and coaching leaders inside IBM's worldwide coaching group.
His lineage is unusually direct, and he will tell you it matters less than it sounds. He is certified by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the co-founders of NLP, and by Robert Dilts and Michael Hall, the people who built most of what came after them. He is a certified trainer with the American Board of NLP and a certified hypnosis trainer with the American Board of Hypnotherapy. He is also a Success MindsetMaps Coach and Coach Trainer, and has trained with other pioneers including Daniel Goleman and Connirae Andreas. He has trained more than eight thousand coaches and trainers, from over sixty-five countries, and was named among the world's top hundred coaches in 2017.
None of that is why he built this. He built it because eight thousand people is a great many people to watch leave a room lit up, and return within a month to the exact life they came from. The insight was never the problem. The going home was.
The team around you
Nobody holds a room of forty alone
Anyone who says otherwise has not tried. Every person here is chosen for the way they listen, not for what they know.
Geetanjali Papreja
Circle leader
An NLP Master Coach, Success MindsetMaps Coach, Human Skills and Emotional Intelligence Trainer, and former Assistant Professor with a Master's in English Literature, which is precisely why she leads circles here. Two decades of holding audiences, more than four hundred workshops, and over ten thousand individuals later, she has developed an unusual talent for recognising the moment a room goes quiet, and someone decides whether to say the true thing.
Venkatesh Balan
Experience designer
An ICF PCC coach and NLP trainer who spent seven years running one of India's leading performing arts companies, and who founded a social development foundation in 2013. He designs what you will feel and rarely notice: the music, the light, the timing of a meal, the object waiting in your room. Every sensory detail here is a decision, and they are his.
The care lead
On-site care presence
Named before your cohort begins, and introduced to you by name in month one. Present at the retreat and reachable across the nine months, they hold the boundary between the deep work here and support that belongs elsewhere, and help anyone who wants it find their way to it. They are not a therapist, not a minder, and not responsible for your wellbeing; that stays with you. Their presence is simply what lets the room go as deep as it does.
Four circle facilitators, and a documentation lead
One facilitator for every ten people, each held to the same stance without exception: no rescuing, no advising, no interpreting your life back at you. From year two, alumni of this work can train into these seats. The documentation lead captures the quotes, the photographs, and the memory artefacts you carry home. All five are named before your cohort begins.
These five seats are filled after the room is composed, not before. We match facilitators to the cohort we actually have, and every one of them is named and introduced to you before your cohort begins.
To be announced
Circle facilitator
To be announced
Circle facilitator
To be announced
Circle facilitator
To be announced
Circle facilitator
To be announced
Documentation lead
Duty of care
This work opens people. Holding that is part of the design.
Writing your own eulogy. Sitting with mortality. Reading a regret aloud by firelight. These are powerful things, and on some days, for some people, they are destabilising. Any programme that induces depth has a duty to hold it, and we would rather tell you how we do that before you apply than after.
This is not therapy
It is reflective and communal, and it asks real emotional stamina. It is not a substitute for care, and it works best when you are steady enough for demanding inner work. We say so plainly in the application and again on the first evening, and anyone who needs more support than the room can hold is warmly helped toward it.
A care lead, throughout
A qualified care professional reviews every application, stays reachable across the six months and the ninety days, and is present for the whole retreat.
Content notes, and real exits
Before the heaviest sessions, with an unpenalised option to step out or take part differently. A quiet room is always open, and nobody comments when you use it.
Screening is routing, not rejection
The confidential application exists to support you, and partly to make sure the timing is right for you. Sometimes the honest answer is a later cohort, or this alongside support you already have. We will tell you kindly, and we will mean it.
The archive belongs to you
Your journals, the sealed letter, the book of observations. Never shared, never published, never used in marketing without your explicit consent. Documentation happens only with permission.
Aftercare is built in
The drop on returning home is real, which is precisely why the ninety days exist. A check-in in the first fortnight, your pod every week, and the care lead reachable for a defined period.
Applications
When it is your season, the Path begins with an application.
Two cohorts a year. Forty seats in each. Offers are made on fit, never on who arrives first, and the application asks real effort of you on purpose. The friction is the filter, and it is the first thing we ask you to practise.
Cohort A
- ·Applications Close mid December 2026
- ·The six months March 2027 to August 2027
- ·The retreat September 2027, four days, at a resort on the outskirts of Bangalore
- ·The ninety days September 2027 to November 2027
Cohort B
- ·Applications Close mid July 2027
- ·The six months October 2027 to March 2028
- ·The retreat March 2028, four days
- ·The ninety days April 2028 to June 2028
The questions people actually ask
Answered plainly, before you apply
Is this therapy?
No. It is reflective and communal, and it asks real emotional stamina. It is not a substitute for care. A qualified care lead reviews every application, stays reachable across all nine months, and is present for the whole retreat.
Why forty people?
Small enough that you are known by name and noticed when you go quiet. Large enough that the room holds genuinely different lives. Four circle facilitators means one for every ten people.
Can I just come to the retreat?
No, and this is the one thing we are inflexible about. The retreat is where six months of work becomes visible. Without the six months there is nothing to make visible, and you would be the only person in the room who had not travelled.
What if I miss a month?
Life happens, and we plan for it. The circle call is recorded for your circle only, your thinking partner keeps the rhythm going, and the experiment waits for you. What we ask is that you tell someone rather than quietly disappear.
I am not much of a reader.
The core reading we send is forty to seventy pages a month, and if it is not landing there is always an open lane to read something of your own instead. Reading is never the point. The experiment is the point, and the reading exists to make it feel inevitable.
I have done deep work before. Why this?
Because you already know the shape of the problem: the room was powerful and the going home was not. This is built around the going home. Nine months, ninety days after, and four people who will notice.
The investment
One fee. Nine months of your life.
It covers everything: your journal, all the reading we send you each month, all six circle calls, your thinking partner, the four-day residential retreat with your stay and all meals included, every material and memory artefact made for you, the full ninety-day programme with your pod, and the alumni community afterwards. The only thing outside the fee is your travel to the venue.
The fee
₹1,27,000 inclusive of GST
One price, for the whole nine months. Nothing is unbundled later, and there is no upsell waiting at the end.
The deposit
₹17,000 secures your seat
Paid once your offer is made. It holds one of the forty seats for you, and it is the moment the work quietly begins.
The balance
In instalments
Spread across the six months, so the cost moves at the pace of the journey rather than landing all at once. GST is already included in the fee.
The four-day residential retreat, including your stay and meals, is held within the fee. The only thing outside it is your travel to the venue.
The application
Five questions you cannot answer quickly
We are not choosing the forty best applications. We are composing one room that has to hold together for nine months. Write plainly, and write honestly. Polish is not what we are reading for, and we can tell the difference.
- Expressions of interestWhere it begins
- Written applicationsIn your own words
- ConversationsA real one, both ways
- Seats40
- 01Where is the gap right now between how you live and how you mean to live?
- 02Describe a belief about yourself you have recently begun to question.
- 03Tell us about a conversation you have been avoiding.
- 04What are you hoping the answer here is not?
- 05Nine months is a long time. What would make you go quiet around month three, and how would you want us to handle it?
- 06Optional and confidential: is there anything about your health or your circumstances we should know in order to look after you well?
Start here
Ask for the application
Tell us who you are, and the one thing that made you read this far. We will send you the full application, the dates, and the payment schedule. Nothing is committed at this stage, and there is no sequence of emails waiting for you.
Received
Thank you. The full application, the dates, and the payment schedule are on their way to you. Take your time with the questions. The ones written in a hurry are the ones we can always tell.
Reaching us
Where to write, and what happens to what you write.
If you would rather ask a question before applying, or if something on this page needs a person rather than a form, write to contactnlpca@gmail.com or info@nlpcoach.in. A person reads it, and a person replies.
What you share with us, including anything you choose to tell us about your health or your circumstances, is read only by the people who hold this work. It is used to consider your application and to look after you well, and for nothing else. It is never sold, never published, and never shared outside the team without your explicit consent.