The first time I noticed the word

My first memory of the word holistic really registering with me came during a conversation with one of my ex-girlfriends, an incredibly accomplished artist, while I was trying to understand why the conservatory where I worked kept pressing me to take on more teaching hours.

I was far more interested in performing and touring at the time, and doing a lot more of both. I think a part of me was worried about being judged, or being labelled the “failed musician who teaches”. Ironic, given that we now live in an age in which more and more artists hustle to advocate exactly what I was in those coaching and instrumental lessons. Not just mastery of a vocation, but a deeper understanding of what it is to be practising an art as a human.

“I think it’s the holistic perspective you bring. We need a lot more of that.”

Why I distrusted it

I grew up with somewhat sceptical connotations attached to the word.

Twelve years as a kid without a passport in India (true story), observing a steady stream of one-way traffic with Eat Pray Love tourists throw it around at pseudo-spiritual retreats, blissfully oblivious to the ground realities they stood on. For the longest time, the word reminded me of essential-oil-soaked privilege at premium Ayurvedic resorts that most locals couldn’t afford, and from which they were often, quite literally, gated away.

Holistic seemed to belong to a rather specific brand of performative, expensive wellness masquerading as elevated wisdom with cultures reduced to treatments, and complicated social realities flattened into something soothing enough to be sold back to the world.

It took me until about five years ago not only to make peace with this part of my vocabulary, but to set out to reclaim what turned out to be the story of my own life staring me in the face the entire time.

The story behind the word

There were the six languages I grew up speaking and mixing, two of which I have since forgotten, convinced as a toddler that they were one. A constant shape-shifting involved in growing up across four countries while my parents travelled relentlessly, until each version of me began to form a self-sufficient little universe of its own as the witness of it all from within itself threatened to morph into one eternal chameleon.

Then there was the unconventional route in music.

I grew up on a wild combination of tapes, amidst the strains of whatever else happened to find its way into the air of a middle-eastern country declared a dictatorship by the west, shut off from much of the world, where access to music itself was uncommon. Then the bated breath waiting for Top of the Pops on tele living in London; followed by first lessons on an organ learning Christian music from a nun in a South Indian village shortly after. Moving on to training in South Asian classical music while in schools in India, ending up in cover bands playing rock music in an Indian metropolis; becoming a founding member of India’s first official Afro-Cuban ensemble; and moving back to Europe to complete a diploma in jazz piano performance and arrangement; and eventually songwriting and production, as a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who produces his own music.

That probably sounds like one massive flex. But the reality behind it was decades of waking up with identities that felt almost violently incompatible on some days.

To this day, depending on which phase of my life somebody met me in, their perspective on who I am can sound as though they are describing completely different people.

Different lifetimes.

From culture to nationality, language to gender, sexual orientation to my relationship with the body-mind, I can’t think of a single question I didn’t look under those rocks to examine.

For years, I read that multiplicity as evidence that I had somehow failed to settle on a single coherent identity. Beneath the languages, countries, disciplines, cultural codes and apparently contradictory versions of me, trying to pinpoint the notoriously elusive ‘authentic’ self was a work in progress I’ve only recently started feeling the kind of agency I could hope for over the years.

The proposition that the relationship between those parts might itself be the identity took much longer to occur to me.

A homecoming disguised as a discovery

This year I began studying parts work in earnest, most notably Internal Family Systems, the idea that the psyche is not a single unified voice but a system of parts, each carrying its own history, its own fear, its own protective job, held together by a core self that can stay steady without being hijacked by any one of them.

What struck me was not how new it felt but how old. The further I went, the more I traced it back, ironically, to the very ancestral traditions that had been handed to me in a dozen different ways without my ever noticing them as a system. The multiplicity of self already mapped in the yogic scriptures. The Tantric currents of Buddhism and Hinduism that never once pretended the mind was one clean thing. The Indic Vedas. The Tibetan texts. Lineages that had been describing the internal family for centuries before anyone in the West gave it an acronym and a training certificate.

The framework I thought I was learning turned out to be a homecoming of sorts. The chameleon I had spent years treating as a defect felt less like evidence of a missing self and more the very system my inheritance had already charted.

The co-relations between the parts was the closest thing to an identity I had felt, just like the traditions had been saying all along.

A word for what I was already doing

It has been about five years now that EveryNowHere (a moniker dedicated to the time-space paradigm), the Holistic Musician Academy, Tapasya Loading and Safe and Sound Studio have all, in different ways, been doing the same work.

On paper, they look like completely different things: an artist profile, a coaching and education platform, a podcast, and now a space opening that work up to people beyond music. In practice, they have all grown out of the same preoccupation with what happens when parts of a life that have been told they don’t belong together are finally allowed into the same room.

We are trained to separate them early. Technique from expression. Creativity from livelihood. Ambition from mental health. The body from the mind. The artist from the teacher, and both from the person trying to pay rent, maintain relationships, navigate an industry and somehow retain a reason for making the work in the first place.

Specialisation has its place, of course. I’m very glad my dentist concentrates on teeth rather than seeing them as an energetic metaphor for my relationship with abundance. But somewhere along the way, the ability to isolate a problem for the purpose of examining it, became confused with the idea that the problem actually exists in isolation.

A musician’s nervous system does not disappear when they enter a rehearsal room. Their relationship with money does not politely wait outside while they negotiate a fee. Childhood adaptations do not cease operating because the subject of a conversation happens to be marketing, and structural realities involving race, class, gender, nationality, disability or access cannot always be coached away by improving somebody’s mindset.

Nor does every difficulty lead back to trauma, the nervous system or a limiting belief. Sometimes a creative just needs a better skill-set, a more realistic plan, stronger technique, clearer communication, a proper contract, a competent doctor, an evening off or the courage to admit that the thing they have spent months pursuing just no longer fits.

Taking the whole person seriously also means resisting the temptation to force every problem through whichever lens happens to be fashionable, marketable or personally familiar.

What I do and don’t mean by ‘holistic’

This is where much of what calls itself holistic still loses me.

Combining several vaguely adjacent practices does not automatically make the result holistic, particularly when the cultural histories of those practices have been stripped away and repackaged for people with resources to consume them. Neither does spraying spiritual language over a business model that remains indifferent to the material conditions of the people it claims to serve.

When I use the word now, I mean taking enough of reality into account for the work to have a chance at being honest.

That does not require dragging every aspect of somebody’s life into every conversation. It means acknowledging that the aspect we are working with belongs to a larger living system, and that changing one part of that system may affect several others.

That somewhere, they are all connected. Sometimes it’s clear to see, other times, it’s a bit more complicated. Messy even.

It also means acknowledging the limits of my own role. A holistic perspective does not make me a therapist, a doctor, a financial adviser, a physiotherapist, manager or spiritual authority. If anything, it makes it more important to recognise when somebody needs one of those people rather than pretending to have a magic toolbox with an answer for everything.

This has changed the way I understand teaching as well.

For years, I had unconsciously accepted the hierarchy behind the phrase “failed musician who teaches”, as though performing represented the vocation in its purest form and teaching was Plan B.

The reality of my own life has been almost exactly the opposite.

Teaching made me listen differently.
Coaching changed the questions I brought.
Podcasting forced me to articulate connections that had previously existed as instinct.
Writing helped me recognise patterns that performing could not always name.

None of these were activities orbiting the “real” work. They were altering it.

Why the industry taught me to distrust the whole

There is a reason the music I grew up inside has been sliced so thinly into sellable parts, and it took a conversation with a mentor of mine for me to see it properly.

He is someone who has managed rockstars nine out of ten people reading this would recognise, and he was trying to pitch a demo of mine to major labels that kept refusing me, in no small part because I was a brown German guy with a South Asian name, who did not fit whatever box they happened to be buying that quarter. Some of the themes he brought to my attention were an eye-opener of a different sort. Things like how entire economies of nations have historically relied on their music industry in ways the public eye doesn’t necessarily realize. Music has been an instrument of soft power, of export, of national identity, for as long as there have been nations to project it and consumers to create demand for the same.

Once you see that, the gatekeeping looks less like a matter of taste and more like a control of a valuable commodity. An industry with that much at stake has every incentive to narrow what an artist is allowed to be into a genre, a marketable face, a unit of output that can be signed, shaped and replaced.

A product that hits prescribed numbers.

That is the context the Holistic Musician Academy was founded to counterbalance in its humble way.

If an industry had spent decades trimming the artist down to the parts that sold well, then the work worth doing was the reverse. To hand creators the whole of their practice back. Or better still, remind them that it was never taken away from them.

The body, the mind, the history, the craft, the inner life, the lineage, we have more agency over it than we realize. Not art as output, but the artist as a whole human being who happens to create, which is what every tradition understood thousands of years before the existence of an industry.

Why this matters more now

We are living through the age of AI slop. Endless generated content, frictionless and hollow, arriving faster than anyone can listen. And in the middle of it, board members of trusted institutions like the Grammys, and respected musicians people look up to, keep repeating inaccurate accounts about the process being a sign of just more technological progress.

That’s not what it is, and the first courts to look at it closely have started acknowledging this.*

This is precisely why a holistic perspective on our artistic practice is no longer a luxury. If our entire worth as an artist is just output, then a machine built to generate output will always look like a replacement. If our practice is whole, rooted in history, in the body, in a lineage, purpose, in a reason for making the thing that has nothing to do with feeding a feed, then the machine is not competing with us at all.

The artists who understand this will be fine. The ones who reduced themselves to content long before the machines arrived are the ones most exposed.

Where to start

1. Get your art together. Not your brand, not your marketing, not your PR — your art. Know what you are actually doing and, more importantly, at a depth no prompt can reach.
2. Read history. The industrialised, monetised version of music is a very recent and very narrow slice of what music has ever been. The oldest instruments we have ever found, bird-bone and mammoth-ivory flutes from the caves of the Swabian Jura, are around forty thousand years old, made by people who had barely secured food and shelter and still chose to carve something to make music with. Art was not a luxury that arrived once survival was handled. It was part of how our species survived at all. That is the older and truer job description, and it is still available to you.
3. Build the ecosystem. The future is not the lone genius against the algorithm. It is community and collaboration, mentorship offered and received, a culture of elders meeting newer practitioners at eye level, with respect, in a cycle that keeps renewing itself. The teacher and the student are the same person at different points on the same road, which is the thing that conservatory conversation was pointing at all along.

One enquiry, several containers

EveryNowHere explores these questions through records, performance and the strange intimacy of making something private public.

The Holistic Musician Academy applies them to the lives and careers of artists trying to build something sustainable without amputating the parts of themselves that make the work worth hearing.

Tapasya Loading lets me examine them through conversation, research and the perspectives of people whose lives refuse easy categorisation.

Safe and Sound Studio extends the same enquiry beyond musicians, because it became increasingly obvious that much of what I had learned through working with artists was never exclusive to artists in the first place.

The contexts might look like they change, but the essence underneath is the same.

Even the name Safe and Sound carries some of this. Safety, to me, does not mean constructing a permanently comfortable environment in which nothing difficult can be said, attempted or risked. Anyone who has made serious work knows that creativity can be messy, confronting and occasionally brutal.

But there is a difference between the adversities and challenges involved in growth and the destabilisation caused by a complete absence of trust as a result.

Safety is not a destination. It is the foundation we need to internalize on our own terms so we do what we came to the planet for. 

Celebrate life.

The bigger picture

I used to think the fragmentation was my private problem to solve. I no longer believe that. It is not personal, and it is not a defect. It is the condition of the species right now.

We have never been more connected and more divided at the same time. We have sliced ourselves into nations, disciplines, timelines, identities and algorithmically sorted tribes, and then handed the seams to machines that profit from keeping them torn. The same logic that reduced the musician to a unit of output is now reducing the human being to a unit of attention. We are being specialised, monetised and separated from our own wholeness at industrial scale, and most of us have been trained to experience that separation as ambition rather than loss.

This is exactly the ground art was always meant to hold. Not as decoration, not as content, not as a wellness accessory, but as one of the oldest technologies we have for making a fractured thing whole again.

This is not a romantic claim. It is turning out to be a measurable one. In 2019 the World Health Organization reviewed more than three thousand studies and concluded that engagement with the arts plays a significant role in preventing illness, promoting health, and managing and treating conditions across the entire span of a human life.

What every surviving tradition already knew, that art was medicine, ritual, memory, cohesion, the place where the body and the grief and the history and the sacred were allowed back into the same room, the evidence is now catching up to.

That function has not expired. It has become urgent. In an age that can generate infinite hollow imitations of art, the real thing, made by a whole human being for reasons a machine will never have, becomes not less valuable but irreplaceable.

So the winding, bewildering road was never a failure to become one clean thing. It was training for a moment that needs people who can hold multiplicity without breaking. The word available for that, however compromised, is holistic. 

I intend to keep using it until it means what it was always supposed to mean.

* On 31 July 2026 the Munich Regional Court ruled that Suno had infringed copyright by training its AI models on works represented by GEMA, and ordered the company to stop, to disclose its revenues and to pay damages. It was the second such ruling in under a year, following GEMA’s win against OpenAI the previous November. In the United States the major labels remain in court against Suno and Udio, with statutory exposure reported at up to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars per infringed work, a fair-use reckoning still working its way toward judgment. These products were built on one of the largest uncompensated appropriations of creative labour in recent memory, and the first judges to examine it squarely have not called it fair.