Between sessions
Heartbound
The Hero Within
A mythic inner-journey game in twenty-three short chapters, walked with a Mirror Lens and a journal. It is offered alongside the gathering — for the hours between sessions, and for the weeks after.
Why a game, here
An idea followed by an experience
One of Ekatva's design principles is that no idea is left sitting in the head: a talk on flow is followed by twenty minutes of making, not by a question-and-answer session. A single day can only give a taste of that. Heartbound is the part you can carry home.
It is not the gathering, and does not pretend to be. It asks the same question in a form you play rather than attend — what is left when the story you tell about yourself is quietly set down?
The instrument
A Mirror Lens
Short reflective prompts that return your own answers, reframed. Nothing is scored, ranked, or shared with anyone.
The practice
A journal, in sentences
Each chapter closes with one question written to be answered in a line — not an essay, and not for an audience.
The arc
Twenty-three chapters
The classical journey, compressed: departure, ordeal, return. It ends not in a trophy but in an ordinary room.
Play
Walk it now
The game runs on its own site and is embedded below. Choose a hero, give them a name, and begin — you can leave and return whenever you like. Progress is kept in this browser, on this device, and nowhere else.
Heartbound is hosted at heartbound.monkabode.com and runs in the frame above; it also carries a small “Made with Emergent” badge, which is the platform it was built on. If the frame will not load on your device, open it directly.
Then come and test the rest of it
The pilot edition is deliberately small — around twenty to twenty-five people, one day, in Goa in November 2026.
A game is worth an evening. Whether any of it is true is worth one day.