“I moved to Auroville in 2020 along with my family as full time volunteers. Having worked in the healthcare space for 14 years, we had moved to Auroville to get away from the rigmaroles of city life and the corporate race with the intention to discover more about
ourselves so that we could love fuller and better.

Before the move, part of what I was doing was setting up a mental health offering for a large startup. While that had given me a good understanding of the space, I was also deeply passionate about doing something in it – having struggled for years with my own mental
health. And my move to Auroville proved to be seminal to everything that has happened in the last 1.5 years of thinking about and starting what would eventually be called SoulUp.
When I moved to Auroville, its social fabric of Auroville and amazing sense of community, for the first time it exposed me to casual conversations with a not-so-casual impact. There was ample opportunity to discuss and brainstorm on life situations and personal challenges. I got to know people whose life journeys and struggles were similar to mine and realized how much hope, strength and sense of connectedness and belonging such conversations were bringing to me.

And while this was personally very uplifting, I also became more and more convinced about a human centric approach to mental health. While always a proponent of the power of
conversation, I realized that talking about common challenges and struggles (something we all intuitively do) if enabled systematically for a lot of people and situations, can be a much needed enabler for mental health as a space.

This was also the time I met Mahak – and both of us hit it off instantly – united in our
commitment to do something meaningful and again through our common interest in health.
We discussed the concept at length for a few months – evaluating benefits, use cases and potential risks – but our conviction only grew with time. And that is how SoulUp was born – a
platform for sharing and learning from each other’s lived experience. And it all happened due to the amazing energy of a small township and through honest conversations about life and purpose.”