About Us
October 20, 2020 2024-05-02 8:43About Us
About Us
Founder
ARCHANA BAHUGUNA
I was a science lover in school and college and have studied Electronics and Computer Engineering. After many years of studying and working in tech in both US and India, I started volunteering for non profits in mental health, wellness and education. I wanted to do something that had deep social impact. This change happened because I started sitting Vipassana meditation courses (Buddha's teachings- the original mindfulness) in 2001. First out of curiosity and later due to immense gratitude- these courses had the capacity to open my heart to do something more rewarding with my life. I also happened to deal with sudden life events in my personal life that propelled me to dig about mental wellbeing in a deeper way. Having gone to therapists to benefit from talk therapy and practice various cognitive psychology techniques myself, I was able to see a deep connection between mindfulness principles and cognitive psychology- all cognitive psychology also is derived from mindfulness principles only and is more of an "analytical" variant of it. That made me feel very confident that the path of mindfulness has all the answers. I wish to spread this wisdom to all.
About Pahoti and contributors
“पहोति” (“Pahoti”) meaning “Able” or “sufficient” in Pali offers stories, blogs and video/audio lessons based in mindfulness and psychology to help teens and adults become more aware of their thoughts, feelings and beliefs and develop in self awareness and self reliance.
Pahoti began in my heart and mind after I started serving in Vipassana courses seeing people in millions come and go- seeking happiness, resilience, calm and what not. Slowly those feelings and thoughts turned into a deep intention and developed into a possible/tangible idea for a startup while I was living in the US (Bay area has some startup community). Slowly with time, testing and ideating, it was eventually registered as a company in early 2021. Since then it has gone through a journey and is now an online mindfulness education platform to help better how we live learn and work.
Thanks to the psychologists Sumedha Tulani, Nimisha Shrivastava, Roshni Jain, Soumya Tyagi, Asmita Nagpal, Ishhita Gupta and Saachi Arora for contributing to the content at Pahoti. Also grateful to Jyotica’s voice overs, animations by Faka and art by Aishwarya. Thanks to UX designs by Piyush Passi, Naman Sharma and Himanshu Padia. Thanks to Raghunath Gurjar and Ankit Dave for the website development. Special thanks to psychologists Sonal Chadha and Tarun Verma for the meaningful discussions, guidance and support especially in the early days. These are all great people and wonderful professionals btw and would love to recommend them in a heartbeat.
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