The third position under the Regional Category at the Wingword Poetry Competition 2025, along with a cash prize of INR 10,000, was awarded to Tushar Mehta for his poem, પ્રેમ શું કર્યો એણે. He talked with us about how his poetry has been shaped by his experiences as a life coach.
Tushar Mehta is a Life and Relationship Coach, published author, and poet from Anand, Gujarat. He is the founder of ‘Happinez Within’, a unique self-healing platform that integrates six transformative sciences: Aura Scanning, Chakra Healing, Face Reading, Palmistry, Astrology, and NLP. Through this approach, he helps individuals heal emotional blocks, resolve relationship conflicts, and discover lasting inner peace.
Tushar is a trilingual writer and poet penning in Gujarati, Hindi, and English. His works capture themes of love, understanding, silence, and emotional connection. His Hindi poem माँ was featured by Delhi Poetry Slam. Through poetry, storytelling, and soul-centered coaching, Tushar continues to bridge hearts—with words that heal.
He is the author of Echoes of Being Understood, an English collection of deeply reflective stories on empathy and connection, now available on Amazon. Its Gujarati counterpart, titled કોઈ તો સમજો મને, is also set to release soon.
Your work moves between poetry and life coaching, between language and healing sciences. Do you see your poems as an extension of your coaching, another way of helping people? Or does writing occupy an entirely different space in your life?
For me, poetry and coaching are not two separate roads — they are streams of the same river. Coaching gives me the tools of science — chakras, palmistry, NLP — to help people identify and release their blockages. Poetry gives me the language of the heart to reach where science alone cannot.At the same time, writing also gives me a sacred personal space — a place where I can pour my own struggles and transformations. It is both: an offering to others and a sanctuary for myself.
Through ‘Happinez Within’, you use tools like chakra healing, palmistry, and NLP to help people work through conflicts. When you encounter a client’s unresolved pain, does it ever echo your own inner struggles, and if so, how do you transform that resonance into poetry?
Yes, often the pain I see in others awakens a familiar vibration within me. Healing work is not one-sided — when I help someone align their chakras or shift through NLP, sometimes I feel the old scars of my own journey whispering back. But instead of resisting, I allow that resonance to flow into words. Poetry becomes my way of alchemy: I turn echoes of suffering into verses of empathy. Through that, both the client and I heal together — they find release, and I find expression.Your book Echoes of Being Understood reflects on empathy and human connection. Do you think storytelling itself can be a form of healing? And if so, what wound do you believe your writing most urgently addresses?
Yes, I deeply believe storytelling is a form of healing. Every story carries an energy — sometimes of pain, and sometimes of hope — but when it is spoken, it allows both the storyteller and the listener to breathe a little lighter. In my writing, I often try to give voice to the emotions that people keep hidden: the longing to be understood, the silent ache of relationships, the wounds of being unheard.If I were to name the wound my work most urgently addresses, it is the loneliness that comes from not being truly seen or understood. We live in a world full of noise, but very few moments of genuine listening. Through stories, I try to offer that listening — to remind people that their emotions are valid, their experiences matter, and they are not alone.
So for me, storytelling is not just art; it is a gentle medicine for the heart.
How did you hear about the Wingword Poetry Competition? What was the process behind sending your poems to us—was it a more intuitive approach or one with considerable analysis and thought?I first came across the Wingword Poetry Competition through my search for platforms that truly celebrate the voice of poets beyond boundaries. What struck me about the Wingword was the openness — the sense that any sincere voice, whether polished or raw, could find a place here.
As for my process of sending poems, it was a blend of both intuition and reflection. Poetry, for me, always begins intuitively — a sudden flow of words born out of emotions I cannot contain. But once that flow is on paper, I step back and reflect carefully, polishing it so the essence is not lost in expression. So when it came to Wingword, I listened to my inner calling to share, and then gave the poems the attention they deserved before sending them. In that sense, the submission was both an act of faith and an act of craft — faith in my voice, and craft in ensuring it could reach others with clarity.