Programmes built on metacognition

Learn to witness your own mind.

Drishta runs gatherings and retreats that teach one skill: noticing how you think and feel while it is happening. From there you can steady yourself, understand more, and come back to yourself, to other people and to nature.

Join the first gathering How it works
Drishta emblem: a face in profile, eyes closed, with sky, hills, a seedling and roots layered through the mind along a gold axis
The name
draṣṭā
Sanskrit · the seer, the one who witnesses

The part of you that watches.

In Patañjali's Yoga Sūtra, the draṣṭā is the seer: the one who watches thought and feeling without being carried off by them. Drishta takes its name from that word.

Most of us are never given the time, or the language, to observe our own inner world. We react first and understand later, if at all. Our work is to make that observing a skill you can practise.

The approach

Four movements, practised in order.

Metacognition means thinking about your own thinking. Every Drishta programme walks through the same four movements, using conversation, making, time outdoors and quiet.

  1. Witness

    Notice what is happening in your mind and body as it happens, without rushing to fix it.

  2. Reflect

    Step back and ask where a thought or reaction came from, and what it wants from you.

  3. Understand

    See the patterns in yourself, in the people around you, and in the systems you live inside.

  4. Grow

    Choose your response, and carry it into your work, your relationships and your community.

Programmes

Interactive, creative, and held in small groups.

Flagship

The Human Curriculum

Five modules on being fully human again. Nothing to memorise and no lectures. You work through each module with your own experience as the material.

  • To SeeAttention, and what it lands on.
  • To FeelEmotion as information.
  • To RealisePatterns, beliefs and where they began.
  • To ConnectEmpathy, respect and other people.
  • To LiveBringing it home.

Two formats. In the city: two sessions of three hours. In residence: four days and three nights.

Drishta in Residence

Retreats hosted with partner spaces, close to nature. The first is being planned with a property in the Himalayas or South India.

Drishta Labs

The research behind the practice: our framework for empathic detachment and emotional regulation, and the tools we use to measure change.

Voices at Drishta

Conversations and lived experience, shared by people in the community.

Coming up
The first gathering

Come and practise with us.

Our first gathering is at the end of October 2026. It is the first of a few planned events, and a retreat follows. Write to us and we will send the date, the place and how to take part.

adutta03@unfoldedfuture.com
WhenLate October 2026
Details to be announced
What we run on

Currency is community.

Social capital first

Drishta grows through the people who take part and stay in touch. What we build is measured in relationships, trust and shared practice.

Think Studio

Think Studio is Drishta's design practice. It takes on design projects for organisations, and what it earns keeps Drishta running.

People

Founded by two designers and researchers.

Akanshya Dutta

Founder

Independent researcher and consultant, and visiting faculty in the Department of Design at Delhi Technological University. Previously worked in policy monitoring and evaluation at the Chief Minister's Secretariat, Assam.

Dr. Partha Pratim Das

Co-founder

Assistant Professor in the Department of Design at Delhi Technological University. M.Des in Product Design and a PhD in systems design for sustainable rural sanitation, both from IIT Delhi.