Welcome to The You Festival
The You Festival is a warm and enlivening gathering of TA (Transactional Analysis) practitioners, students, and enthusiasts. Less structured than a conference and more intentional than a casual meet-up, the festival is designed to invite thought leadership in TA by encouraging culturally rooted studies, experimentation and contextually relevant applications, so that the theory continues to grow from the lived realities of the communities that practise it.
Across the day, participants can choose from eleven original, brief sessions that offer fresh perspectives on TA ideas. The You Festival is a space where learners become teachers, theory meets imagination, and the TA community gathers to listen, cheer, question and think together.
What Makes This a Festival?
Between and around the sessions, the You Festival 2026 comes alive with tarot readings, book swaps, picture-book listening, games, shared meals, and the easy, unexpected conversations that help a community feel like a community.
Who Is It For?
The You Festival is open to anyone curious about Transactional Analysis — TA practitioners and students, psychology students, educators, mental health professionals, coaches, organisational leaders and consultants, and those who are simply wondering, “What on earth is TA?”
For psychology students, The You Festival offers a chance to see Transactional Analysis applied to real questions of identity, relationships, culture, mental health, and community.
Workshops
Opening Panel · 9:45 am – 11:00 am
I am Ok, You are AI
Panel Discussion on Mental Health and AI
With Gowri N Kishore and Shreya Ramann, Moderated by Subramanian Kalpathi
As people increasingly turn to AI for comfort, reflection and validation, therapists are encountering new questions in their work. This panel uses a Transactional Analysis lens to examine human-AI interactions, including the stroke exchanges, ego states, script patterns and psychological games that may be involved. It will also explore how AI occupies the space between sessions and influences the way clients understand themselves and engage in therapy.
The panel will help practitioners consider the implications of AI use in their client work, including how to speak responsibly with clients about it. We will also examine the emerging ethical and legal questions: what duty of care means when a client is also seeking support from AI, how therapists might respond when AI advice causes concern, and where responsibility or liability lies in a space that is still largely unregulated.
Workshop Series 1: From Survival to Freedom · 11:30 am – 12:45 pm
Participants choose one of the following three workshops:
Who Is Holding Your Okayness Hostage?
Meera Ravi and Poonam Gupta
This experiential workshop introduces a nuanced extension of existential life positions: “I’m OK only if You’re OK.” Participants explore how early relational environments may create a conditional sense of self-worth in which personal OK-ness depends on maintaining harmony, approval, or emotional stability in others. The session invites reflection on conditional beliefs, their origins, their impact on relationships, and new permissions for boundaries and self-acceptance.
Foreclosed: A TA-Existential Reading of Suicide
Preeti Balasaria
Drawing TA into conversation with existential philosophy and Eastern traditions, this workshop explores the suicidal moment as a collapse of freedom into childhood and cultural script. Participants examine injunctions, life positions, discounting, contamination, Cultural Parent, stroke deprivation, and redecision, asking how clinical work can reframe no-suicide agreements as acts of recovered freedom.
The Life Waiting to Emerge: From Adaptation to Aspiration
Vishnu Agnihotri
This largely experiential workshop explores how roles, scripts and adaptations that once helped us survive may later become too small for the life trying to emerge. Drawing on TA, James Hollis’ The Middle Passage, and Berne’s ideas of physis and aspiration, participants will reflect on an over-adaptation, sense what longing or capacity may be asking for more room, and sketch a small 30-day experiment in autonomy and aliveness.
Workshop Series 2: Difference, Dialogue, and Response · 1:45 pm – 2:45 pm
Participants choose one of the following three workshops:
Neurodivergence – A TA Take
Selena George
This interactive and reflective workshop introduces neurodivergence and invites participants to begin thinking about it through a Transactional Analysis lens. Through brief self-exploration and examples, the session considers how TA perspectives and techniques might inform and support lived experiences of neurodivergence.
The Living Room Circle – Intergenerational Conversations
Gauri Palekar
This intergenerational group-work session creates a living-room-style space where people of different ages can speak openly about feelings, beliefs, family patterns, and experiences that often remain hidden. Using prompts and shared conversation, the workshop explores transgenerational passage, family patterns, and how time structure can be reorganised to build deeper connections across generations.
Expansive Resilience: A TA Lens on Response Flexibility Under Pressure and Uncertainty
Suba Lakshminarasimhan
This workshop reframes resilience not only as endurance or recovery, but as the capacity to expand one’s range of response under pressure and uncertainty. Using TA concepts such as scripts, drivers, Parent messages, ego-state rigidity, and autonomy, participants examine automatic stress responses and practise shifting into more flexible and conscious choices.
Workshop Series 3: Challenging the Cultural Parent · 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Participants choose one of the following three workshops:
A Humble Inquiry into Two Possible New Drivers: Be Different and Be Careful
Lalana Zaveri
This workshop offers a study-informed exploration of two possible additional Drivers: Be Different and Be Careful, while honouring Taibi Kahler’s original five Drivers. Drawing on pilot testing of an expanded Drivers questionnaire, the session shares the inquiry, methodology, and emerging questions around the possible validity of these Drivers within Driver theory.
It’s the Thought That Counts… Or Is It? Why Recognition Lands Differently Across Cultures
Charusmitha Rao
This interactive workshop explores how cultural narratives shape the ways people give, seek, accept, and withhold strokes. Using proverbs, family messages, social norms, reflection, gallery walks, and group dialogue, participants examine how beliefs about humility, hierarchy, achievement, praise, visibility, and social harmony influence recognition practices.
Breaking the Good Girl Rules
Namita Kutty and Shreya Krishnan
This session uses Kahler’s driver theory to unpack the quiet “Good Girl Rules” many women inherit: always agree, be selfless, avoid conflict, don’t ask for much, and be good. Participants identify their dominant driver, connect it to cultural conditioning and early reinforcement, and rewrite one internal rule into a specific behavioural experiment.
Closing · 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
The Festival Played Back · 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm
A Playback Theatre Performance by First Drop Theatre · Conductor: Bejoy Balagopal
This closing Playback Theatre performance offers a reflective end to The You Festival. Audience members share real stories, which actors reflect on the spot through movement, poetry, metaphor, music, and more. The session invites TA ideas and festival experiences into a shared space for witnessing, resonance, and meaning-making.
Closure: A Songful Goodbye · 5:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Rahul Jagannathan & George Varghese
“When you sing with two or three other people and you get it right, everything lifts a couple of feet off the ground.” — Graham Nash
Singing is one thing, but singing together is something else. Powerful and uplifting, group singing is not just fun, it creates deep human connections and benefits our wellbeing. We will close the day with communal singing, a simple, joyful way to gather our voices, mark the end of the Festival, and leave in a spirit of connection.
Throughout the Day
The Festival Bookshelf
With Karthik Raghavan Ravi and Namrata Pai
Bring a book you have loved and are ready to pass on, and leave with one that finds its way to you. This small, joyful swap invites books to begin new lives with new readers, carrying stories, ideas and memories from one person to another. Last year, more than 80 books found new homes.
A Card. A Script. A Choice: When TA Meets Tarot
With Leena Nair
TA gives us the map of the inner world. Tarot gives us symbolic imagery and archetypes rich enough to hold what is hard to put into words. Together, they can help a person notice which part of themselves is active, what story they are repeating, and what freer choice may be waiting. During the Festival, names will be drawn from a jar, and a few participants will have the opportunity to work with Leena during the breaks.
Children’s Books, Adult Truths
Reflective Conversations Around Picture Books · With Deepti Marlapalle | The Reading Habit
These picture books may look like children’s stories, but each one speaks directly to the inner Child, inherited voices, and the stories we tell ourselves. Expect to recognise your own drivers and scripts in these characters, to laugh at how plainly they are drawn, to go quiet at the ones that land close, and to leave with a fresh, gentler vocabulary for the Child in all of us.
The Festival Schedule
Investment
Early Bird Fee
₹2,999
All inclusive.
Available for the first 50 registrations.
Regular Fee
₹3,999
All inclusive.
Applicable after the first 50 registrations.
Student Fee
₹1,999
All inclusive.
For full-time students currently enrolled in a university or college undergraduate or postgraduate programme. A valid student ID will be required. No refunds if a valid ID is not provided.
The student concession is not applicable to working professionals enrolled in part-time, distance-learning, executive, or doctoral programmes.
Cancellation and Transfer Policy
If you cancel your registration on or before 1 November 2026, 50% of the registration fee will be refunded.
Cancellations received after 1 November 2026 are non-refundable. However, you may transfer your registration to another person at no additional cost by informing us in writing by 22 November 2026. No refund or credit will be provided for non-attendance.