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The Mind Is Not You
Real-life stories, inquiry, and practical exercises that invite readers to examine the identities built around the body, achievement, relationships, and experience.
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My Story
Storyteller. Spiritual seeker. Mother.
I’ve spent my life telling stories, first through animation, then children’s books, and now through writing about the mind. Along the way, one question has stayed with me:
Who are we, beneath everything we’ve learned to be?
I hope my writing helps us understand ourselves more deeply, loosen the hold of old patterns, and find greater freedom, kindness, and joy in everyday life.
Based in San Jose, California.
Discover my storyWhere the stories began
Science, stories, andspiritual inquirylived side by side.
On hot nights in New Delhi, when the electricity went out, my family slept on the rooftop. After a full day of work, Papa would tell us stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Sometimes he fell asleep halfway through, and we would wake him, asking for more.
My father was a physicist who lived simply and believed his daughters should be as educated and self-reliant as his son. As a child, I didn’t always appreciate his simple way of living. I noticed what other families had and sometimes wished ours looked more like theirs. Only later did I understand what he had given us: an education, the expectation that we could stand on our own feet, and permission to think for ourselves.
I can trace my work back to those years. I learned to love an imagined world enough to stay awake for one more story, and I learned that I was allowed to question what I was told. Both have stayed with me as an artist, a mother, and a writer.
The Hey Girl! story
I wrote Hey Girl! for my daughter.She said, “Every girl needs this.”So I shared it.And girls around the world wrote back.
400,000+ copies · translated into 5 languages
“It gave me a confident boost and made me feel like I can do anything.”
“These books are helping me grow into a strong young woman.”
“Every little girl in the world should read this book.”
I wanted my daughter to have a place for her thoughts and feelings, to recognize her strengths, and to know that her voice deserved to be heard.
For young readers
Books to help herbe herself
Young readers have written to tell me about feeling more confident, speaking up for themselves, and learning to like who they are. Behind every number is someone sitting with a page, finding words for something she may not have known how to express.
Hey Girl! has been published in Spanish, Russian, Traditional Chinese, and French, with a Simplified Chinese edition currently in publication.
I also write picture books, journals, and chapter-book adventures. There is room in my work for self-discovery, but also for talking dogs, mischievous characters, and the simple pleasure of making a child laugh.
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The questions that stayed
Then something shifted.
Alongside the stories I was telling, I kept returning to questions in my own life: about the mind, the need for approval, and how much of who I thought I was had been shaped by other people.
I had been exploring those questions since I was a teenager in India, under the guidance of my teacher, Guru Nanua.
In a moment I can only describe as awakening, the thoughts, fears, identities, and stories I had carried for years were still there, but I could see that they were not the whole of me.
The questions were no longer only things I was trying to understand. They were now things I had to learn to live.
Who am I beneath everything I have learned to be?What is left when I stop defending the story of me?And what does it mean to live from that place?
Seeing clearly did not mean I knew how to live it. There were still meals to make, relationships to navigate, and old patterns that returned.
That gap between seeing and living is where most of my writing begins.
My teacher & the teachings
What I return to.
Guru Nanua lived in a village on the banks of the Ganges, about four hours from New Delhi. I first went there as a teenager, and much of who I am today goes back to those years.
People came to him with illness, grief, confusion, and lives that had stopped making sense. I watched him listen and help them recognize patterns they had been repeating for years. Some of what I witnessed there I still cannot fully explain.
It was there that I began to understand seva, selfless service, through the act of serving whoever needed help. Meditation and service have shaped my life ever since. Sitting quietly makes me aware of what is happening within me. Being with others reveals how readily I can forget that awareness—when I want to defend myself, be appreciated, or have things go my way.
I also return to Advaita Vedanta, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita, and to the teachings of Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj. A passage I have read many times can reveal something different when an experience in my own life makes its meaning clear.
Often, the teaching becomes personal in a small moment: listening without preparing a reply, noticing an old reaction, or recognizing when care has become a need to be needed. These are the moments that ask me to practice what I thought I understood.
Awakening happened for me in a moment.Learning to live awake is taking a lifetime.
What I’m writing now
I write while still learning.
A piece usually begins with something I’m struggling to understand in my own life. Writing lets me stay with it long enough to see it clearly, and perhaps offer a reader somewhere to begin.
That’s how The Mind Is Not You began, and it’s where my forthcoming book, A Life Awake, comes from: reflections on approval, control, love, and the selves we learn to carry.
Forthcoming
A Life Awake
Reflections from an examined life: moments of recognition about approval, control, love, responsibility, and the selves we learn to carry.
Discover what’s comingVisual design & storytelling
A life shapedone frame andone page at a time.
Alongside a full-time career in animation and visual storytelling, I pursued writing as a passion and went on to author 18 books.
I worked onsite at Disney Animation, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Nickelodeon, and AWS. I earned my MFA in Film, Video, and Computer Animation from USC and wrote an episode of Netflix’s animated series Ghee Happy.
Animation taught me how much a small detail can carry: a gesture, a pause, a shift in light, or a change in expression. Writing asks for that same attention.
