JAY SHETTY: Mind-Warrior

There is solace ahead. In celebration of May being Mental Health Awareness Month, we speak to the esteemed and universally adored life coach and author Jay Shetty, about the ways in which men can nourish and safeguard their mental health in these trying and hyper-accelerated times.

- MYRA ALI

One of the most perennial and formidable trials of adulthood is navigating the daily reality of being tugged in multiple directions. Confronting the teeming signals that abound real life and online is enough to give any man grief. It’s by no accident that the volume and scale of the discourse on mental health has been exponentially amplified, the more we progress into a modernity that is increasingly technologised in noise and confusion. So how do you navigate the mind over matter?

To ascribe the ‘icon’ tag to Shetty is to acknowledge his impact and appeal. As a starting point, it must be underlined that Shetty is a practitioner of his own lived truth. As a former Vedic monk, he stripped himself of worldly concerns in an ashram in Mumbai where he was domiciled. But his proximity to spirituality isn’t confined to the idyllic, but rather rooted in a realism that anyone can adopt into their daily lives. His videos have amassed more than four billion views and gained him over 20 million followers, making him one of the most-watched and credible people on the Internet and in the room.