By Jyothi Devarakonda
Aks and Maya returned after their long-awaited vacation rejuvenated, refreshed, but more so ignited with a new purpose: bringing day-to-day happiness back and stopping the endless chase for perfection.
This was different from the usual kind of return where you come back thinking about unpacking, laundry, and starting to build the next week’s routines and meal plans. Maya and Aks returned with something they hadn’t packed: awareness. And unlike sunscreen or good intentions, this one didn’t get left behind at the hotel.
The beach had given them rest. The conversations on that balcony had given them something rarer: the ability to identify their burnout and pause long enough to appreciate each other instead of slipping into the “why do I have to do it all?” zone. They realized the equation of give and take, and through maturity understood that sometimes giving up a little actually gives you more.
Now that they had named it, they couldn’t un-see it. Which felt both terrifying and oddly like relief.
The first week home was intentional in ways they hadn’t been in years, Conscious choices for food, taking intentional walks, exercising even if it is shorter than planned but feeling happy about it and not beating up oneself for not completing the full hour.
Aks made breakfast on Tuesday, not because it was his turn on some invisible rota, but because he wanted to. And for the first time in longer than she could remember, Maya actually sat down with her coffee.
Not scrolling. Not mentally auditing whether the lunches were packed well enough or worrying about what might happen if she didn’t respond to emails within the next seven minutes. Just sitting.
She had found her version of stillness, and it looked exactly like this: a warm mug, a few unhurried minutes, and the little journal she’d started keeping beside the kettle. She let her thoughts drift onto the page, not in any organised way, just little doodles, reminder notes, fragments of feeling. Seeing them flow out and land somewhere made everything feel oddly manageable.
Her morning ritual became a quiet conversation with herself:
It’s okay. Be thankful for this day. Give it your best. The rest will get done.
It always did.
Aks, meanwhile, was learning something of his own. He had always shown up, but showing up, he realized, isn’t the same as being present.
People can give you all the love they want, but if you’re not still enough inside to actually receive it, you end up feeling lonely even in a room full of people who love you. He had been that person. Technically there, emotionally elsewhere.
Now he was practising the small, deliberate act of noticing: the way Maya laughed at her own jokes before she finished them, the particular chaos of a Tuesday morning, the fact that his kids were growing up in the margins of his distraction.
Even the kids started feeling the pause and calm around them. Dinner was no longer a negotiation. They planned and cooked as a family. The kids, buzzing with the stored energy of a full school day, needed gentle nudging away from their screens and into their chairs. Before, that nudging had come with an edge: deadlines, consequences, the quiet stress of two parents trying to compress family time into a thirty-minute slot before bed.
Now the reminder was different.
“Hey, it’s our time together.”
That was it. No ultimatums. No countdown.
Something shifted.
The kids started showing up on time, almost of their own accord. They were chattier, less resistant, more themselves. Maya and Aks looked at each other one evening across a table full of food, interrupted sentences, and the dog hopefully positioned beneath the youngest’s chair, and quietly understood something:
They didn’t need to carry it all.
They had been so busy managing the family that they’d forgotten to simply trust it. The calm they brought into the room had given their kids permission to rise and meet it.
They were learning to trust the process.
Maya went back to work the following Monday with the energy of someone who had finally figured something out. By Wednesday, she found things were moving well but when she took a moment to reflect, felt there was something not aligning with the way things were happening around her. On paper, everything was fine. Numbers solid. Emails answered. She smiled in meetings and mentored where she could. But somewhere between the KPIs, the quarterly deliverables, and the third hiring decision she privately disagreed with, she noticed it: a hollow feeling.
Not burnout exactly. Something quieter. Like a note slightly off-key that nobody else seemed to hear.
One evening she told Aks about a moment that had unsettled her, being nudged toward a shortcut she didn’t believe in. Small enough to dismiss. Significant enough to stick.
Aks listened. Then, with the clarity of someone who truly knows you, he said simply:
“Babe, you’re not the kind of person who can think of short-changing anyone. You always end up giving more of yourself, not less. That’s just who you are.”
It wasn’t a solution. But it was a mirror.
Her purpose had always been helping people grow. But lately, that purpose was getting harder to find, buried under targets, diluted by under-resourced teams set up to quietly fail, pressed thin by a culture that measured output and called it impact.
She was sleeping better. Present with her kids. Softer with Aks. And yet there it was again, that low, persistent dissonance.
Because here’s what she was beginning to understand: repeated misalignment doesn’t just create restlessness. Left unaddressed, it quietly rebuilds the very burnout you just climbed out of.
Maya stared at the ceiling that night, the question arriving slowly and then all at once:
What do you do when the life you’re building is healthy, but the work inside it isn’t yours anymore?
She knew she was on the right thought process, but now needed time to understand her purpose at work and what truly felt like the real Maya.
Jyothi Devarakonda
Certified Advisor · Leader · Life & Transition Coach · Founder, Guiding Eagle Inc
ICF Accreditation Candidate · 2026
Jyothi didn’t start her journey as a coach — she started by navigating change herself. From leading interior design projects to building a 20+ year career in banking and financial advisory, and then starting over as an immigrant in Canada, she knows firsthand what it means to rebuild from the inside out.
As a certified advisor and leader, she brings both professional rigour and lived experience to her work. Currently completing her ICF accreditation — the gold standard in coaching credentials — she works at the intersection of personal transformation and practical strategy, helping individuals move from self-doubt and survival mode into clarity, confidence, and a life they have consciously chosen.
Along the way, she noticed something that kept showing up: no matter how successful someone looked on the outside, misalignment in even one area of life quietly dimmed everything else. That insight led her to create Guiding Eagle — where she now helps individuals, especially women in transition, step into the fullest, most aligned version of themselves.
Her work is built on aligning four core pillars — space, finance, career, and relationships — because she believes lasting transformation happens when both inner confidence and outer circumstances shift together. Through coaching, workshops, and digital programs, she helps people build lives and help people identify their decision making and acceptance patterns which impacts all areas of our happiness.
Connect with Jyothi –
https://www.guidingeagle.com ; Tel # 587-741-3737
Book a call to start your journey – https://calendar.app.google/UREtBNj6gvFDSGeU8
“When (Jnana) True knowledge guides us, (Dharma) True purpose grounds us , and (Karma) our conscious action follows- life begins to align.
Published: 05-29-2026