Why More Healing Work Can Keep You Stuck with Panache Desai

What's the difference between healing and becoming?

Healing is an egoic structure. Becoming is a time-bound structure. Neither one of those things are actually rooted in reality because who we are is beyond them both.

Time-bound, meaning time is the illusion.

The illusion is that we're becoming more of something when the truth is we're just living in the infinite potential of it right now, and we always have been.

My new dear friend Panesh, welcome to Rooted in Wellness.

It's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me on.

When I launched this podcast, you were one of the names that I had on the top of my list, um, because the feeling that I get whenever I read about your work is just so grounding, and it reminds me so much about my experience at the ashram, at the Sivananda Ashram. So I'm so happy you're here today. Um, I was sharing a little bit with you about the background of the intention of the podcast, and ultimately it's to help listeners feel more rooted. That's rooted in themselves and their happiness and their bodies and what I believe is our inner capacity that we all know that we have to be able to heal ourselves. So we all want to know, what are 2 or 3 practices that you have every day that help you feel rooted in who you are?

Well, I can actually share from firsthand experience actually that now we've been doing these Cult of Calm meditations for 1,700 days, and we have people from all over the world, about 2,000 people from all over the world. Every country in the world is represented, and, uh, we get together and our whole focus is on peace And, uh, for me, the biggest thing that's made the difference is accepting and embracing who we are as human beings. And then secondarily, realizing that this person, this individual self, is just an amalgamation of, of information that we've picked up from outside of us and that we've internalized. And that really, we're now at a point where, through the accepting and the embracing of who we are, we've forgone the need for change, the illusion of change. And we've come into this place now where everything is different because of that. And so in the context of healing, when we talk about healing, more often than not, people are really trying to change a part of themselves that isn't authentic to them in the first place, right? So for example, emotions were modeled to you. The only reason why you have this kind of identity-level association with them is because you keep repeating them over and over again as if they're yours, right? You have an attachment to them. But once you realize that this whole being human thing is just a collective thing and that it's a collective expression, then we can free ourselves of our individual identification to these things. And this is when healing or the restoration of harmony really occurs. And so every morning we're accepting, we're embracing, we're resting in the awareness of our breath. The reason why that's made such a huge difference for people, Mona Sharma Sharma, is because that takes us out of survival. It takes us out of the need to fix, heal, change, and improve. It takes us out of working on ourselves, and it introduces us to this infinite potential and possibility of who we really are, which you and I are both familiar with because it's a part of our cultural heritage. Different people have experienced it in different ways, which is this potential. And that actually, from that place of potential, beyond the confines of what's familiar, we begin to access these possibilities and these greater ways of living and being in the world. And so that's where we're at right now, and that's what's been helpful and useful.

As a practitioner, obviously, you know, we have this awareness. I'm sure a lot of our listeners, the languaging that you're using is so familiar. It's comforting. There's a knowing that's there. Oh yeah. Why am I stopping? Why am I not resting in the awareness of the present moment more often throughout the day? You've anchored this through meditation. I can imagine that you're prescribing doing this throughout the day, but I think on the flip side, do you notice when you get uprooted, are you coming back to this awareness constantly yourself? And I ask this question because I think listeners expect the guests that I have on the show, myself included, to think that we've got it figured out and that we've arrived at this place of health and enlightenment and it's who we are. Do you notice when you get uprooted in your life?

Well, there's no destination to arrive at actually, and there's no outcome or goal either. So The whole point of doing all of these things is not to be free of some aspect of your humanity, but it's to finally be able to meet your humanity with some compassion and empathy. And so, yeah, I think that the illusion is that we stop being human. Um, I very much love being human. I think it's the best thing ever. It's like the sole reason why I came down here, actually, is to be a human being. So, so far it's as advertised. And of course, that includes emotions and feelings, and life happens, and, you know, I'm in relationship, I have 4 children, you know, there's a global community. On any given day, there's something going on, and it's okay that there is. We don't have to invalidate our potential at the deepest level because of a moment of being human or a moment of experiencing something. And so actually, when you really follow this through to its finality and its conclusion, nothing at the level of our humanity needs to be different. Actually, it just gives us permission to be fully human. And to welcome everything that's happening, because now that's not inherently a limitation that we have to overcome. It's just holistically a part of our experience and life. So I still experience everything. I'm so grateful for the fact that I do. I'm happy that I'm not walking around like a disassociated zombie drooling down one side of my face, because I actually really love being a human being.

You got it. A big part of the work that I do with my clients is almost this unlearning— unlearning of trying to fix oneself, unlearning of constantly wanting things to be different, unlearning of constantly chasing something outside of yourself and instead coming back to remembering, and what you said so beautifully, choosing to have this human experience. All of us chose to be here to have this incredible human experience, and yet we're still not resting back into the fact that there is so much joy every day, and where's the gift even in the discomfort, in the disillusion? That was so beautifully said. All right, let's hop into some rapid-fire questions. We are gonna go deeper into all of them, so whatever comes to mind. One thing that you can do right now to feel more at peace that takes less than a minute: step outside of your house and just take a breath. Look up.

It's immediate harmony. Just literally walk outside of your office or your home and just take a breath and just look around a little bit and just immediately it returns you to harmony.

Just thinking about doing that brings a feeling of, ah, And exhale. All right, finish the sentence: you'll know that you've stopped fighting yourself when you give up the need to change. The most underrated spiritual practice that actually works?

Being aware of your breathing.

What's the difference between healing and becoming?

Healing is an egoic structure. Uh, becoming is a time-bound structure. Neither one of those things are actually rooted in reality because who we are is beyond them both.

Hmm. Time-bound, meaning time is the illusion.

The illusion is that we're becoming more of something when the truth is we're just living in the infinite potential of it right now, and we always have been.

All right, last one. The emotion that most people are carrying in their body without realizing it.

Rage.

Hmm. Interesting.

Because it's the one that people have the most resistance to.

And rage—

It's the one thing, yeah.

Would you call this an accumulation of things that have built up, unprocessed emotion?

I just think it's societal conditioning, honestly. It's like, you know, we've been programmed to produce, and so emotions are just inconvenient as it relates to being units of production. And so now emotions like anger are frowned upon or deemed to be low vibrational. Uh, there's so much judgment around it, and so there's a repression, a suppression of it. And then naturally what emerges is this manifestation of rage. And then all of a sudden, in the moment that it comes up, everyone's like, oh my God, I'm failing. I've just thrown the universe into a state of imbalance. And you haven't. You just had a moment of finally being honest about how you feel.

And the system's really perpetuating this right now that we have experience and access to visual information of things that are happening globally. If we're choosing to feel that rage within us, we're perpetuating what they want us to feel, as opposed to Yeah, I understand what you're saying. And that's a really great call-out because it ties in line with this concept of becoming. We're now talking about frequency a little bit more. We're understanding that the frequency— we're using language around happiness, joy, and peace being these high-level vibrational frequencies that we want to achieve. And we're really putting shame or disgust on anger and shame and rage instead of understanding the power. And no, that's part of the human experience. And you have to recognize when you're in those states so that that you can elevate once again, right? It's like, um, it's like the nervous system. If we're constantly just assuming that the point of life is to be in this parasympathetic state all the time, living like a yogi with your legs crossed in meditation, you're missing out on the quality of life in and of itself, when the fact is it's the full range of emotions.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So no, no part of— no part of anyone is a problem or an issue. Every part of everybody is love. Totally.

We're living at a time when the global wellness industry is valued at $5 trillion. And you and I both know that the rates of anxiety, burnout, depression continue to rise. And it's now being backed clinically by science and data for the people who need that. And this is amongst adults and children. And we have this awareness on one side of the power in investing in yourselves and tuning into things like therapy, or perhaps going on a retreat, or some sort of a healing journey where you're able to tune in. And yet despite this, people are still showing up feeling exhausted or disconnected, or what I call the laundry list of symptoms that we're waking up every day feeling tired emotionally, the signaling from our body trying to speak with us. So it begs the question then, what if the way that we're healing is actually part of what's keeping us stuck. So can you maybe shed some more light on, in today's world, why this concept of doing more work is actually making people feel worse?

Well, working yourself isn't working because the self that you're working on is, is an illusion anyway. It's a, it's an amalgamation or fabrication of aspects of human characteristics or qualities that you've picked up from other people or that you've modeled from others and then internalized. And now, because you repeated it enough, you're confusing it as the truth of who you are. So actually, the first thing we have to do is start accepting and embracing who we are. The way we are, and beginning to come to a place of peace around our humanity and the uniqueness of it. Once we do that, then it's— let's do something. Close your eyes real quick. So just imagine for a moment that you're in a cave, and this cave represents everything that's familiar, Mona Sharma Sharma Sharma, every emotion, every feeling. It's the totality of your identity. And yet at the end of the cave, there's a light. Now, the light is unknown, it's unfamiliar. However, where the light is, is infinite possibility and potential. When you're ready, just have the courage to walk out of the cave, walk toward the light and into it, and then just notice how you feel. The reason why people keep working on themselves over and over again and meditating for 70 years and not advancing in any meaningful way in their relationship with themselves is because they're stuck inside the cave. In ancient civilizations and cultures, they didn't heal people. They help people break free of the shackles of identification and identity and introduce them to the universal self. You see, the illusion is that there's some individual manifestation of soul or some personal energy. There isn't. There's the soul, our soul, which we're all a part of, and there's a collective energy, right? And so The, the quickest way to return to harmony is to free yourself of the illusion of this identification and everything that you've personalized. Once you do that, harmony and balance is restored in your life immediately and instantaneously. It's almost like a miracle.

I think part of the trap also is people are looking for, well, how do I do it? How do I get there? And just now, in less than 30 seconds, I was able to visualize a scenario, visualize the essence of the culture that's keeping me stuck, walk towards the light that I could imagine, and instantly I had a smile on my face. And the visual that I had walking towards infinite possibility was, in my mind, my hands were up in the air. I felt joy, freedom, happiness. Oh my gosh. And it's the feeling of, I just, I forgot. And maybe that resonates for some of our listeners. Like, it's not about the arriving. It's okay to go out into the world and forget and get stuck in that, and then remember and come back to this infinite possibility concept.

And yeah, yeah, well, also, it's, it's not in the spiritual industrial complex best interest for you to realize that you're lovable the way you are.

It's like healing, right? If we had optimal health, is that in the best interest of this industrial world?

It would be my best interest. I can just retire sooner and faster, but it wouldn't be in the best interest of anyone else.

You got it. So I didn't mention this, but, um, Shortly after I became a nutritionist and started working with people, I very quickly realized that I could put anybody on a protocol—food, diet, supplements, workout—they would achieve a goal and then most likely end up back in front of me within 6 months to a year. They fall off this elusive wagon. And that's when I ended up becoming an NLP practitioner, Neuro Linguistic Programming. But what I realize about a lot of these modern ways or sciences around the mind is that they're actually all rooted in ancient wisdom. So when we think about Vedanta or Ayurveda or these healing modalities that come from our heritage, they recognize more than one part of the body: the physical body, spiritual body, emotional body, intellect, and beyond, or these koshas, right? And I think it's really interesting that we live in a world where we're so stuck on the science to validate, yeah, that. And yet speaking about it, or when you embark on any type of a healing journey or guided meditation like you just put us through, we can feel it intuitively. And yet we're still trying to fix.

The need to prove it renders it useless. So the more they have to validate it and back it with scientific data, the more defunct it is.

And so doesn't that go against the concept that we are addicted to in today's work, which is do the work? The do the work mindset is actually what's breaking us down.

Well, it can be if we're bringing the same survival and pain to our spiritual unfolding, then absolutely. And sadly, most people are, you know, when they're when they're working on themselves or trying to, you know, 10x their lives, whatever they're doing these days. I don't even know, I can't keep up with it all. Whatever today's TikTok trend is, you know, uh, they're doing it from a place of incompletion. And so when you operate from that place of incompletion, naturally you just get more incompletion. So you can spend your whole life working on yourself and countless thousands and thousands of dollars and hours of your life bouncing around from one place to the next, and you're not going to get anywhere. Eventually you'll get to a place of freedom when you finally realize that being yourself is actually a really cool thing, and you, and you start to meet yourself with some grace and empathy, which is really the whole point of the spiritual awakening or journey anyways, basically to turn and face yourself with love and compassion in the midst of your humanity.

For someone who is just completely new to this world, what is your entry point with them to help them understand that? For people to even engage in understanding the concept of, oh yeah, I am a spiritual being, that came into this world to have a, a human experience.

How do you help them? It's actually easier for people who are new because they don't come with all these concepts and ideas and these books that they've read and all this baggage that, you know, they're bringing along with them. And so actually everyone who shows up who never been to Cult of Calm or never meditated before just immediately gets it. It's just so obvious to them.

It's funny how healing in today's world, for a lot of people, it's become an identity. For them. And in that is all the education and knowledge and awareness, and it's adding more, um, illusion to the things that you need to unlearn. Is that true? Totally. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. So what's the cost then in the end? So underneath all of this efforting and fixing and protocols and modality could perhaps be this core belief or understanding that you're broken to begin with. So What happens to someone in this mindset? They don't— they're not putting the two together. So trying to fix the protocol, fix all the symptoms are showing up. How do you help them recognize that underneath that is an actual belief system that they have that might be preventing them from healing?

Well, I don't think that it's a belief system just inherently in and of itself. I think it's, uh, an imperfection economy that we've been kind of conditioned and hypnotized and brainwashed and bamboozled into participating in. And, uh, branches of spirituality and healing and transformation have just become the new kind of fringes of that. And, uh, this is why we just have a recycling and regurgitation of content in the space, and there's nothing really substantive that's available to anybody. You know, authentic transformation is not being actualized by people. And when I realized this, I actually stopped participating in everything. Uh, I had no desire to write another book. I stopped participating in teleseminars, stopped going to retreat centers, everything. And I just really kind of came back to myself, came back to my own lane, and just shared every day. And in doing that, people have been coming and they've been experiencing these amazing shifts. Why? Because there was never a spiritual impediment. There was never a spiritual obstacle. People were invalidating themselves, using their humanity to do so. So I realized, well, hang on a minute, nobody needs anything spiritually. This is a complete ridiculous thing, right, that anyone needs anything spiritually. Where people are disqualifying themselves is at the level of their humanity. So in actually supporting people and embracing their humanity, naturally now they're experiencing these spiritual phenomenon because now they're becoming accessible and available to them, whereas before they were totally inaccessible and unavailable because they would still have moments of feeling anxious, to still have moments of feeling whatever they were feeling, or experiencing whatever they're experiencing, or going through whatever going through in their body. And what I love the most about what's happening is that, you know, I have people from all walks of life, uh, people who are going on a medical journey, people who are going through every kind of life circumstance or situation, grieving, whatever, you know, unprecedented fame, success, and fortune. And regardless of where they are and what they're going through, it 100% works 100% of the time. Why? Because the— because we've been conditioned into this illusion that our humanity is the impediment. And the truth is, it is not. It's actually the whole point of why we're here.

Such an interesting timing for you to say those words, especially to me. Um, you know, in Ayurveda, we say that we digest with all of our senses— what we eat, what we smell, what we watch, what we feel, what we listen to. A lot of that comes with the dogma that comes from many different spiritual practices. And I think a lot of people, when they become curious, you're right, they go out and they want to learn about different gurus or religions or spiritual practices or types of yoga or nutrition, whatever it is. For me, what that looked like is, as much of a deep relationship as I have and love that I have for the Sivananda Ashram, I recognized recently that I was giving them my power because I always felt like in order to get in touch with my source energy, I had to go to the ashram to plug in. That was source. And then I realized in a lot of the teaching, this concept of Atman or whatever religion you practice, where source is, it was always this feeling of outside of me or above me. And if source is outside of me, then of course I'm always going to be chasing or looking outside of me for solutions instead of looking within. And so I empathize. And do you recognize— you're smiling— so do you recognize in a lot of that?

The irony of this, the irony of this is, right, that in India, right, God, Guru, and Self are one. How did that get lost in translation? If God, Guru, and Self are one, that means that every potential is present in the individual. Then there is no guru, there is no— there's not— it's all the same thing. We're all the same. It's our energy, it's our light, it's our presence. Belongs to all of us.

I think we have to just pause on that, because when that really lands, it's almost like taking everything that you've ever learned— or that you were told to believe about spirituality in connection with yourself, or the concept of God, whoever you believe in— it completely dissolves in the moment. And doesn't that change the reflection then? The mirror comes back to yourself and understanding, well, how differently would you treat yourself, eat for yourself, think to yourself, be in the world if you were God, if you believed that you were God?

If you keep living in the illusion of the imperfect, flawed human, then you will— then the best that you can do is externalize your light, love, power, and authority. Because it could never be you. So really, again, it comes back to, well, no, actually no, I'm just an individual. I'm unique, and how I'm experiencing life is unique to me. So how about I just embrace that? And then at that point, then all of a sudden, all of these things become available and accessible to me, because now I'm a place where all of these things reside and always have resided, by the way.

Yeah, I'm noticing that there is common languaging around when people decide to embark in knowledge like this or understanding like this, that you have to go through it. And when you go through it, it gets messy, it gets ugly, and there's the cost of lingering in an area where you believe that you're broken. You feel separate still. You don't feel like you're God because you're still unlearning so much of what was taught to you. So, If you're constantly trying to fix reinforces that you're broken. What is your message for people who are identifying with parts of themselves that just don't feel God-like or conscious-like or in tune?

They don't feel that way because you've been taught to compartmentalize yourself, and you've been taught to do that by your family, by society, by your religion, by your spirituality. And, uh, it's this compartmentalization of humanity that is the root cause of all of this distress that people are experiencing. Because fundamentally, you really don't have an issue with any part of yourself. You only have an issue with it because other people have an issue with it. So, Mona Sharma, the truth is we keep looking for love and acceptance from people who don't love and accept themselves. Well, how's that going to work? It's not, is it? At some point, we have to finally start loving and embracing and accepting ourselves and realizing that, that, well, that's actually why we're here, and that's the best use of our time as a human being. Is to turn that love and that compassion and empathy on ourselves, because then we begin to really, you know, progress and evolve. Not that there's a destination, not that there's an outcome, but we begin to be freed of the need to search and seek outside of us, right? And it's the end of that hamster wheel of working on yourself and, you know, all of these other things that people are doing, which is really just kindergarten and rudimentary in the grand scheme of things. We can then finally realize, well, hang on a minute, there is no fixed sense of self. There's just a collective expression called being human. And it's okay. I can take a breath and I can realize this emotion was actually just the soup that I was swimming in in my house. It's not authentic to me, so I don't have to personalize it. I can just give it back. In fact, I did a meditation the other day where I said, just imagine that there's like some kind of a retail outlet you pick your favorite, and there's a returns counter. Can we please just return to the desk and to the counter every part of our humanity that we've personalized and we've identified with? They'll lovingly take it back from you. And people literally did this meditation. They were like, Panache, I've been trying to deal with this my whole life and now it's just gone. I'm like, yes, because it was never yours. That it's the illusion, right? That there's some individual self in all of this. When there isn't.

It's funny, I did a meditation with somebody years ago, and they were guiding me not into what the process was, but, um, to imagine that I was given a gift. And for me, when I opened up this box that was the gift to myself from myself, there was a heart inside. It was a new heart for my broken heart, the one that felt pain, the one felt that felt suffering. And in that moment, it was like, ah, okay. I have a new heart and the belief that goes with that. But it almost sounds like it's comical to say that healing can be that easy, but I think it's part of the disillusion. So I would love to hear, you know, we talk about health so much on this podcast. Um, the spiritual teachings that you have though, I think are deeply embedded. Um, so much so that like my entire philosophy is that you are the healer. I never want to be considered anyone's healer. You are the healer. I don't know what your perfect healing protocol is because you have to uncover it. And it's a beautiful kind of guidance. That I, that I go through with people. So in that, let's just recognize the abundance of symptoms that are happening in the physical body today. That— what are the most commons? Irritability, anxiety, worry, tension, fear, fatigue, hair falling out, obesity, water retention, poor sleep. You know, I asked these questions at a conference, and when I ask who's suffering from them, every hand is going up. How do you put the spiritual lens versus, uh, over the symptoms occurring within the body?

Well, all of these symptoms are manifestations of survival. So basically, that individual is just living in a state of perpetual survival regardless of their circumstance. You can be the most financially successful person in the world and still be surviving, or you can literally have nothing and be in survival. So it doesn't have anything to do with your bank balance or your bank account right now. What are we surviving? What we're surviving is what we cannot be with within ourselves. So, so basically we've got people now in the world surviving being human. Beloveds, being human is something that you will never survive. You're going to die. There's no surviving being human. So the question is now, how do we address being a human being while we live here? Do we want to cultivate a loving and inclusive relationship with it? Do we want to be nurturing and loving and kind to ourselves? Or do we want to continue to be judgmental, micro-judgmental around aspects of ourselves and invalidate ourselves from the joy, the peace, and the love and everything? You know, in fact, it's funny, like this weekend I'm culminating a 3-part series on, uh, burnout and stress and overwhelm. And burnout and stress and overwhelm is so chronic because everyone's operating under the auspices of their individuality. They're living in the illusion that they have to do it, it's their energy, they have to elevate their vibration, that they have to put forth their effort. What they're missing out on is the fact that there's a collective energy, there's a collective presence, there's a collective unfolding. And in fact, this is why In ancient civilizations and cultures, there was no personal development. There was no such thing as spirituality, actually. Yeah, this is all, this is all the modern languaging and the modern fabrication of something that really has no language at all. People would just simply go into this state where they would be freed of this sense of being an individual, and then almost instantaneously, harmony and balance would be restored to them. Why? Because in that state, they can receive everything. You see, they're fine. They're, they're finally in a place where they can accept the miracle, the blessing, the grace that was always present. The body heals itself, right? It's, it's got the intelligence to totally heal itself. There is no healer. There is no external form that's healing you. You're healing yourself. You may be in the presence of another person, but the other person that you're in the presence of is just another manifestation of you anyway. So after a while, we have to move beyond the duality, the separation of it all, the illusion of hierarchy that somebody has something that you don't have. And we just have to realize that we're all in this together. We're all the same energy. We're all, we're all, all swimming in the same soup called being human. And my hope is that we can just be a little bit more peaceful with ourselves every day, a little bit kinder, a little bit gentler with ourselves every day. And that's about it. Forget about everything else. If you can just get to a place where you can just be moderately calmer, moderately, um, more compassionate with yourself, then that's great.

Beautiful. I often put the question back, you know, when you have a baby, in that first year of that baby's life, you're looking at every ingredient label that goes into that baby's body. You're managing the space around them. You're taking the most care, love, attention, focus, compassion, you name it. And all of a sudden they get old enough and we kind of drift from that. And then we take that, you know, into becoming an adult. Could you love yourself in the same way that you would love a newborn in front of you? Could you, you know, have rituals in your life that were in alignment with such a high value of love and dopamine that just made you just care for yourself so deeply? And yet often when we trace things back, I think what you said was really profound. It comes back to that word survival. So what are we surviving? If we look at the root cause behind that, Let's break it down into a couple of actions that people might have if it's overstimulation.

So for example, if you had like an angry parent, uh, then maybe you're surviving your own rage because you've made it wrong, because it was totally wrong that that emotion was projected onto you and acted out on you. And so now you've disconnected yourself from an entire part of yourself, and you'll go out of your way on an egoic level to try and prove that you're not an angry person. You'll meditate, you'll do your yoga, you'll do everything, but yet underneath the surface you're simmering every day. Right? And after a while, we just have to get to a place where we just get to the truth. And, and we, and we get to a place where we realize that the familiar is not serving us. The familiar is actually stifling us. And so in that moment, we can then just realize, okay, well, hang on a minute, no, I'm actually really angry. And it's okay that I'm really angry. And just welcome it. In the moment that we welcome it, it's experienced and it dissipates or it integrates. So what we're surviving is everything that we can't embrace or integrate or be holistic, uh, around within ourselves. And after all, we realized, well, hang on a minute, well, we don't have to survive our mind and our thoughts and our beliefs and our emotions and feelings, and we don't have to survive our current physical experience. We don't. We can just— it's okay. Like, being human is okay. We can normalize being a human being. And the more we normalize it the less we need to be anything else. Mm-hmm.

And what about things like safety? Safety is another word that's used a lot. A lot of talk around healing today has to do with nervous system regulation and returning to a feeling of safety and understanding that things happened to all of us when we were young, but it was part of us believing a story. It's kind of like tuning into a radio station where we got stuck in that track instead of recognizing that we are safe, we are whole to begin with. We constantly believe. So where does safety do you fit into this? Where does nervous system regulation fit into your teaching?

I think there are, I think there are two very different manifestations of being human available to us. I think that there's the manifestation of being human, that's the identity, personality, which is the majority of people on the planet right now. And then there's the manifestation of human being, which is the soul. And those are two very different, uh, experiences. Same life, same timeline, same journey, same person, same everything., but you just have a completely different experience. And what's happening right now is that people almost feel like they're living in another world, some, some other place, right, than everyone else. Why? Because they're peaceful, they're calm, they're not reacting to everything, their psyche is not being hijacked by the news headlines, they're not running around trying to keep up with the next trend, they're not constantly trying to fix or change and improve themselves. They found a place of peace within themselves, and that peace is wonderful. And from that peace then begins to arise this sense of joy and all these wonderful hormones and biochemistry begins to arise. And then they realize, well, hang on a minute, no, I've been depriving myself this, this state. And this state is my natural state. It's not somebody that— some— it's not something that somebody else is going to give me. So when we use words like safety, we have to recognize that there is no safety to be found outside of ourselves, that that safety has to be cultivated from within, that we have to make it safe to be where we are and be who we are and to be the way we are and live our lives. And we're the only people that can, right? But that again comes back to acceptance. For me, the reason why I focused on this was because it was the only thing that actually authentically worked. Not a technique, not a modality, not a teaching, no hierarchy, no ashram, no retreat center, no level 1, 2, 3— just a way for people to come into something that actually works. And the only thing that actually works is the acceptance of yourself, your humanity, the way you are. It's the only thing that works because that acceptance is the precursor to love. If you can accept yourself, then you finally become a place that you can love. And so that's why I've been focusing on this. It just saves everybody time and hours and flying all over the world and every other wild and wonderful thing that people are doing in the name of trying to evolve.

Yeah, tell us what that acceptance felt like for you in order to trust that this was the path for you to follow? What does it feel like in your body?

Many of you, many of you know this story, um, but I'll share it anyway. So my daughter, and this is a commonality with you, my daughter Celeste was born with a congenital heart defect. So she spent 18 months of her life, the first 18 months of her life, in the hospital. She had 5 open heart transplants, 5 open heart surgeries, then she had a heart transplant at 18 months old., and she even flatlined for 8 minutes during one of those operations. And for me, uh, it didn't matter that I was Mona Sharma's father. It didn't matter that I was successful. It didn't matter that I knew who I knew. The powerlessness that I felt as a parent was so overwhelming that I fell to my knees, literally in the chapel of the hospital, and I had no choice but to finally accept the fact that she was going to die. I literally had to come to a place of accepting her mortality.. And I realized that holding on to any outcome as it related to her life was causing me so much suffering. And at that time, Mona Sharma Sharma Sharma, there's nobody I could turn to. My mother was going through it, my wife was going through it, everyone was going through it. And so all my usual support systems and mechanisms were all drowning in all of this. And so for me, powerlessness became an entry point into a, a broader awareness of a power that's infinitely greater than we could ever imagine, that's beyond all of us.. So for me, feels adorable. I feel happy every day. I, when I see a squirrel, I jump out of my body with excitement. We have chipmunks here, we have woodchucks. I love nature. Uh, I, I appreciate my life. I don't take any of it for granted. Uh, I make the most of all of it. I'm a human being. I have emotions, I have feelings, I have a body. We're Indians, so we don't have the best genetics, except you're half Danish, so you're saved by the Danish side. But the Indian side, That's a treacherous part. It's a doozy. It's a doozy. It's a treacherous part. And Indian parents do not do health disclosure well. Yeah, not at all. I was like, so, so do we have a history of heart stuff in our lineage? No, no, everything's fine, Bada.

Don't worry, we're okay. Everything's great.

Diabetes? No, nothing. No, nothing. No diabetes, no. But there was that one time when so-and-so had a heart attack and died immediately. I'm like, wait a minute. Like, at what point do we sit down and have this health disclosure as Indians? Come on, man. So, so anyway, so it's treacherous being Indian, being, being Indian and, and, uh, being human in the area of health, like a Pandora's box. You don't want to open that box. But anyway, so, you know, we're all of it, right? And it's okay, it's okay. You know, for me, it just feels joyful. I love, I love being here. I love having interactions with people like you. You know, it just makes my heart happy. You know, that we're even discussing this, you know, and, and that we're even open to these possibilities and potentials in life, you know, while navigating the treacheries of being Indian.

Yeah, gosh, my cheeks are hurting from smiling and I have tears in my eyes, right? It is absolutely true. Yeah, my dad's answer to everything was pranayama. Yeah, yeah, practicing pranayama.

Yeah, yeah, don't worry. Yeah, no, there's no history of diabetes or heart attack or stroke. Nothing, don't worry, it's okay, brother, don't worry, we're okay.

Next thing you know. Here you go. What a story. And that hopelessness that you describe, um, I think it probably feels like the word surrender to a lot of people, which is thrown around everywhere. Just surrender, just surrender. Well, how do you surrender when you look at a world when we see war and death and famine and poverty and politics and everything in front of us? But what I'm from hearing from you and like so many incredible teachers, I would say, that I have in my life. And teachers in the sense that when I see it being lived, it's, um, it's like it's an anchor to truth. Like, oh yeah, I just have to remember it every day. I've got to tune into the right station every single day. Break down the, the challenges with the word surrender. And I'm saying this because there's people out there, and God forbid, I never want anyone to get to a point where Nothing matters when you don't have your health. Life stops. When your daughter got sick, nothing else in the world matters. Not your bills, not your waistline, not the protocol. And unfortunately now our suffering is in these really small symptoms that we've normalized in our day-to-day society. Everyone's got them, so it must be normal. How do we surrender to this path? How do we remember this every day? How do we remember to look outside and be like, oh my God, look at the, the trees and the sky and the fact that I woke up today and I'm alive. How do we stay aligned with that truth when it's so easy to get distracted?

You have to approach yourself with a sincerity. You have to approach yourself with a sincerity and a sense of awe and wonder. And people who really want to know themselves with sincerity often discover themselves. Where you— we've got every single thing that we talk about in the spiritual space becomes a buzzword. Buzzword, and then everyone starts trending it, right, to gain traction. But very few people know what it really means. Surrendering is actually just being freed of the illusion of individuality, right? It's, it's recognizing that there's something far greater than all of us that's doing all of this, you know. Uh, something's breathing us, something's digesting our food, you know, something's keeping us alive and maintaining our bodily functions while we're sleeping, you know. We're not doing any of that.. And so we've gotta get to a place where we recognize that there's something far greater than all of us at work here, and we don't need to understand what that is.

We just need to accept the fact that it is, that there's intelligence.

Yeah. And, and crisis, crisis is a wonderful entry point into surrender because the truth is it, it doesn't matter who you are at the level of your identity. It does not matter. It's an equal opportunities entry point into all of a sudden realizing how powerless you are. And, and coming to terms with that powerlessness, right? And, um, and it's wonderful. There's two ways it happens. Either you have some crisis in your life and some loss of identity, which is the best thing that could ever happen to you, or you wake up in the middle of the night at 3 o'clock in the morning and there's just energy flowing through your body and you can't explain what's going on, right? But one of two ways, we're all getting it now, and it's all happening, and it's exciting. Because now we don't need to be anything other than just a regular human being living our lives in the world, you know, real people living real lives, and we're having experiences. So be mindful of the illusion.

I think everyone listening knows that there— if there's something that you're doing that's sabotaging your health, what part of you is agreeing to pursue that?

And understand where that comes from, or even make peace with the fact that you are, and that you probably always will. Mm-hmm. Because the thing is that if you try and change that sabotage and you fail at it, then that becomes yet one more point of disqualification. But if you can actually just accept that sabotage as a part of your identity, your habitual self, then that got you the grace all of a sudden to have compassion for yourself when you find yourself in those patterns.

Two big patterns that I've noticed: one was seeking safety Everything that I did was try to get to some point of me feeling like everything's okay, which I never got there because the bar always got higher and higher. And the second one was really understanding that I was always trying to fix something or get somewhere else. Never just be. Trying to fit in even. Even, you know, being half Indian, half Danish, I was never Indian enough. I was never Danish enough. And For our listeners, it's whoever— community or society or employer or colleagues that you always try to fit in with. You try to be somebody else. For what? Goes back to identity and loss of identity. Something that— this is a little bit off topic, but I'm curious your insight on this. My fear is that when something trends on social media, especially around health, it's like this veil of illusion that goes out. And partially with excitement, I'm going to put this through the lens of women's health and hormones right now. There's so much beauty that women go through when their hormones change because it's a process of losing identity and remembering and coming back to yourself and trying not to fit in anymore. And yet we live in a world where the knee-jerk reaction from a lot of doctors right now is, well, here's a hormone, take the hormone, right? Here's a prescription medication, take the prescription. Here's a supplement, take the supplement. Can you go a little bit deeper in that loss of it, of identity? And I'm sure you have a lot of people in this kind of perimenopause, menopause group.

I think that what's happened is that people haven't accepted the natural cycles of life, you know. And so I think getting older and moving into wisdom and a sage phase of living is just a normal part of life. It's a very natural part of life. But for some reason, everyone's trying to defy it and change it and try and cheat their mortality, right? Just trying to stay alive for as long as they can. And, uh, what they don't realize is that we're all going to die when we're supposed to. There's nothing that we can do about that. And that these natural changes that we go through, whether they be, um, a transition in, uh, our womanhood, a transition in our manhood, whatever that is, it's a natural phase of life. It's a natural evolutionary cycle, right? It doesn't have to be a source of suffering. We don't have to turn everything into a problem. You know, it can just be a natural part of what's happening. Now, we live in a world where we're also offered every kind of solution, so it doesn't have to be untenable and unmanageable and uncomfortable. You can also be supported. So this is where we're blessed enough to be a human being. We're blessed enough to live in an age where there are answers and solutions that we can access that resonate with our hearts, and that ultimately we're at a point now pretty much where biologically we've evolved into the totality of ourselves. And that now the key that's igniting the next phase of our evolution is this love, the remembrance of this love inside of us, this power, this intelligence inside of us. And so I can't directly speak to menopause because I'm never going to go through it. I can address manopause— not there yet, but when I will be there, I'll come back to Mona Sharma Sharma Sharma and talk about it. Yeah, but, but in the short term, can we please just get back to embracing the natural phases and cycles of life? And just flowing with them. Like, let's just accept and embrace the natural phases and cycle of life again.

And how do you talk about the death cycle then? You know, I think there's a sense of pride when people are going through an ego death, and people feel a sense of pride when they can go through it and have the hardship around it instead of the acceptance. And maybe you can tie this in. I know a big part of your story also is arriving in New York City after 9/11 and what that must have been like. How did it feel recognizing that as it was happening in the world, and how does that relate to how we deal with death cycles?

Well, I think that death is something that needs to be embraced by every human being. I think that it's been single-handedly the greatest catalyst for me in my life. Uh, if you've ever been around someone who's dying or who's had to confront their mortality, or you've had to do it, it shifts everything. Because in the context of death, all of a sudden nothing really matters. It's like all of the stuff that you thought was important just isn't important anymore, you know. And so it's, it's, it's wonderful to, to live with this awareness of death, this kind of memento mori, right? It's like we're all dying, right? And for me, it's very liberating because quite frankly, you just don't waste your time anymore, you know. You don't waste your time anymore. So many people are just going through the motions in life, But after a while, it's like, holy cow, I'm gonna die. Like, let's make the most of it down here, you know? And then you just finally get to a place where you start experiencing it all and living it all.

How old is your daughter now?

She's 11 now. Oh, because my son— and she's a cheerleader.

Wow.

Which is amazing. And no developmental delays, no, no issues, nothing. Like, it's, it's just been amazing to see her flourish and thrive as a heart transplant kid. You know, it's like incredible.

She's amazing. Amazing. I'm so happy. There's something, you know, if I were to seek the, the gift or just the, the pure wholehearted acceptance of having an imbalance or issue or symptom of the heart, it's just the constant awareness that you have a heart and how special it is, the fact that it beats for you every single day and that it keeps you alive. And now understanding the energetic component behind right? And if we're looking at science talking to us about heart rate variability or heart coherence, um, I think there's something powerful that we've become disconnected from, which is just that own inner vibration and the uniqueness that, that comes from that. So I think it'll be so beautiful as she gets older, her connection to her heart and what that will be, especially with you as a dad. But I can imagine thinking of your children as your greatest teachers, what that would have felt like for you.

Hmm. Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see who they grow up to be, Mona. Yeah.

All right. People are seeking success. You've had a lot of success. You've been on incredible platforms with Oprah. I see your books behind you. How did you not get trapped into that world? You said you got to a point where you started coming back to your truth and turning down the volume of that. But there must have been something intuitively that happened to not continue to chase. In this world, it's always, well, you got to get to the number one podcast. You got to get to the number one on the New York bestseller. It's always chasing that next home run instead of just, you know, I really pride myself in staying in my lane at my own pace. What happened in that moment or what was the insight?

I think my grandmother just did a really good job with me. I think she really did, you know, for the first 5 years. You know, she really did a good job. You know, she showed me what love was, you know, and, and she showed me what loving people actually meant. And, um, I never lost that, you know. And I'm actually a little sad that she didn't get to see all of this. I think she'd be very proud, you know. But I, I always think about her, you know, and I, and I always, I always think about whether she'd be proud or not, you know. And, um, and for me, that's always the saving grace, because when you realize that you're a part of an industry that just cultivates dependency and doesn't actually offer empowerment, then you can no longer participate in it. And for me, uh, it was very easy for me because everybody wanted me to be the next Deepak Chopra, uh, or whoever, because I'm Indian and people lack imagination. And there's only one slot for an Indian person in the genre. So, so they were like, okay, he's Indian, he can, he can take over that role, right? We'll just get him to write a bunch of books every year and, uh, travel the world and do PDF presentations and whatever. And, uh, we know how to monetize that. And of course, I didn't want any part of that. And then, of course, the very thing that got me to all of these platforms was now all of a sudden the very thing that they were trying to get me to be the opposite of. Like, sorry, it's not working. Yeah. Um, you know, when I signed a book deal, I walked into Penguin Random House as a business partner, not as an author. And I, I always understood my value. And again, I think that that's due to my mother and my grandmother.. And, um, and so, you know, uh, needless to say, an industry that thrives upon the illusion of imperfection or requires you to believe that you can't do things for yourself, uh, very quickly found out that Panache Desai could very much do everything for himself, and he didn't need anybody, uh, any one of these outlets at all, actually, to be who he is in the world. And to this day, I still don't, you know. So it was easy for me to step away from it because you very quickly realize that the success that's being flaunted is actually just fabricated. You know, it's not real, it's not substantive, you know, it's not worth it. Like, who you have to be in order to have it is terrible. I wouldn't sleep at night, Mona. I wouldn't be able to live with myself, honestly. And, um, and it always comes back to, would my grandmother be proud of me? Yeah. And I think had I carried on, you know, down the path that everybody wanted me to carry on down, I, I, I don't think I'd be able to answer that question as a yes. Yeah. So I'm very happy that today I can say, yes, my grandma would be very proud of me. And, uh, I get to wake up every day, love people, you know, thousands of people from all over the world, support them. Whatever they glean from that, they glean from that. But I'm really at a point in my life where I don't need anything from anybody. So it's just, it's just after a while you get to a place where there's nothing left to do but to love people and just to give stuff away, you know. Like, there's nothing left to do, you know, because you realize that all of this doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean anything. The accolades, the fame, the fortune, the connections— it's all so fleeting and so futile. It's not worth chasing or having. And even in having shared this with so many of you, you won't believe me. You're going to have to go out there and exhaust the potential of it in order to finally wake up from the illusion of it. You know, I just hope that you'll listen to me and save yourself some time. But, uh, but that's, that's it for me. You know, I'd rather have myself than have anything else in this world. I'd rather have myself. I'd rather have my heart, my peace, my life the way it is, than have something else. Thank you for sharing that.

It is a bit of an illusion. Yeah, in this industry especially, I think, um, I get the— a lot of the same reflection of, you know, going on tour or the books or the numbers or growing more or pushing more. And then I just asked, like, for who? Who are you doing that for? And I ask that question for listeners to take that to heart also. For people who chase success, I work with a lot of really successful people who are constantly chasing more success, and for what? And your story about your grandmother makes me think about mine. And what I really miss— I hate the fact that we live in a world where we're becoming so disconnected from our seniors. Like, the cool thing about a South Asian community, even a Danish community, is that there's such a strong focus on living together, right? And like, being around our elders and the wisdom wisdom that they gave us. And one of the last things that my grandma said to me before she passed, you know, we're just talking about the future. My mom, I think, was alluding for her to say, like, be a good student or work really hard, get what you want. You know what she said to me? She said, go to the discotheque, go dance as much as you can. That's grandma wisdom right there. But I'll never forget it. It's the remembrance to have fun, to be in this world because It does feel like it, it goes so fast. Yeah. So for listeners who are exhausted from trying everything, you've alluded to this a little bit, when they come into your world, what would you say the first step is in acknowledging that acceptance? So they become familiar with it. Life might happen. They go out into the world and they get really busy and disillusioned again, and they fall into their belief systems and habits that are anchoring them. Their fear and lack of security, but they have these nudges of remembering. What could be a daily practice for people to come back to every day?

Well, I think the only thing that actually is of value out of the personal development world is commitment, consistency, and repetition. Nothing else. You can forget about everything else. It's all just useless. But, but that which you do with commitment, consistency, and repetition bears fruit. And so this is why I've been showing up for 1,700 days, Mona. Because if I show up every day and share it every day and offer people an opportunity to come into peace and connection every day, right, that's it. It's, it's literally that. And then what happens is all of a sudden now they have more peace in their past than they did before, and it becomes their present. So, so then, unbeknownst to them, this freedom from identity, this freedom from identification, from judgment, becomes a habit. And it becomes a habit just through their showing up every day and just clicking on the Zoom link. And next thing you know, all of a sudden, like, Panache, like, I'm just coming to Cool to Calm and everything's changed. Like, my whole relationship with myself is different. I'm like, yeah, that's the commitment, the consistency, the repetition. Like, it's the only thing that you need from personal development. All of the rest of it doesn't work. But that, that's, that's actually useful.

Would you say then, like, speaking to this intelligence which you've experienced, you live, you showed up for 1,700 days, I'm putting this through, you know, people in my community that I can think of who, they have a job that they hate, but they need to make money. We live in a world that really puts a lot of focus on wealth and success and monetization. The fear that must exist, well, if I find something that I love and figure out how to get paid on a way that I love, but what I think you're going to say is the meaning that they're giving to the job or the meaning that they're giving to have their monetize as part of the suffering in itself. In and of itself.

But also, I think you can't success your way out of your suffering. Yeah. If you're miserable now, how do you think you're going to be happy later? Don't you have to start now from where you are? Don't you have to start laying a foundation of peace now? Forget about the job, forget about the external circumstance. Why don't we just cultivate a sense of peace within ourselves because we're human and we're alive? Or cultivate a sense of joy the way we are? Well, then the job thing will take care of itself, the financial thing will take care of itself, everything will take care itself. But the first thing we have to do is address your relationship with yourself.

And so the result of tuning into peace and trusting the unfolding, when you begin to love yourself and see yourself, that you will be provided for.

Because I had to use the word peace, right? Because— and, and I had to use the word peace because it's really, it's neutrality. But neutrality doesn't have a feeling associated with it, so there's no way for a person who's just beginning to begin to connect with it So peace is a wonderful entry point because peace is another way of articulating that neutrality or that equanimity or harmony, which is also freedom from this identity and this personalization. That's really the real reason why everyone's suffering.

When my health was at its worst, I was hardcore dieting on the Atkins diet. I was working out hardcore. I was in calorie restriction. I was waking up with the 5 AM Club. I was doing all of these things and someone gave me a hug once. She's like, "Why do you feel like a ticking time bomb inside?" And I felt like I was seen.

Is this the Indian side or the Danish side?

Which side is this? Hey, I didn't become a doctor, a lawyer, or a judge like my big brother. I had to hustle to get to the top of my corporate ladder at the youngest age possible. My heart was like, I can't take it anymore. Literally a loud symptom. My brother's a judge, God bless him.

Oh, so, so I think, I think after a while you realize that it's just what you're doing is just working, right? Like, I think eventually you have the realization that it's not working and you can finally get to a place of embracing that, and that's when you have like an entry point into something else, right? It's like, okay, this, we can take a pause from this.

It's crazy how hard it is for people to truly put themselves into the number one list of priorities that they have every single day. Like if they could truly wake up, go outside, be present, like you said, when we started recording, just go outside, be part of nature, look up, experience awe, experience wonder. Why is it so hard? It's not. It's not. It's a choice. None of it's hard.

It's all very easy. That's the problem. The problem is it's so easy. We just have to do it every day. We just have to be— we just have to commit to it, and we have to be consistent, and we have to repeat it every day. That's it. And we have to be sincere in our wanting to know ourselves enough to commit to it and be consistent with it and repeat it every day.

Part of that ease comes with the embodiment. I think in today's world, it's so easy to become decapitated. We're thinking about what to do, thinking about where to go, thinking about how to fix. We've got this technique. Our head is literally hanging forward, dragging us forward. But then when we come back into our body and we truly feel, like you said before, how do you feel the anger or the shame? Can you talk to people about the power of coming into the body, learning how to come back into the body.

Yeah, let's do it. Close your eyes, Mona Sharma. Breathe and relax. So, um, we'll just begin by first of all just accepting and embracing every emotion that you have throughout the course of your day. It's not low vibration, it's not wrong, it's just an emotion. It's okay, we can accept it. We can also just accept the mind It's not wrong, it's not bad, it's not getting in the way of anything. There will be thoughts. It's okay. We can also just accept whatever your current state of your body is. It's okay. In this moment, it's okay to just accept the fact that you are exactly the way that you're supposed to be to live your life. All of these emotions, all of these feelings, all of these thoughts, what's happening in your body, it was all supposed to happen. It's all a part of your journey. And in fact, none of these things are the problem. It's all an invitation. Just continuing to take some breaths and just settling into who you are beyond all of this. You'll start to feel yourself expanding beyond the confines of your body. You may even begin to feel yourself filling the entire room. The apartment that you're in, the house that you're in, the office building that you're in. Eventually you'll become so vast and so huge, you'll begin to fill your entire city and town. Eventually you'll venture out even beyond that, until you can no longer be contained or restricted even to a planet as vast as the solar system, as vast as the galaxy. As vast as infinity. There is no place in creation where your light, your love, and presence is not. Now, you have a body, you have a mind, you have emotions, but these things are not who you really are. Who you really are is the infinite, eternal, and immortal self.

Take some breaths, Mona Sharma.

How are you doing?

It just feels like freedom.

Yeah, and this is— see, and people say that they want healing, and see, but what they don't want— they want freedom, beloved. Like, that's really what everybody wants. Everybody wants this freedom. They just think they have to do something in order to get there. They don't realize that they're the only person withholding it from themselves in the first place. See?

Yeah. Yeah. It was a beautiful practice. Yeah. Part of when I'm working with someone, a lot of it is so cerebral. Um, and then to guide them to come into their body to just witness how much they've been holding and the fact that they don't have to hold anymore is so powerful. I hope everyone keeps a meditation like that on replay. Again, it's so simple. Um, Maybe it's an invitation also. Do you invite people to really guard themselves to what they're ingesting— news, media, paradigms?

I feel like we have an innate intelligence within us as to what resonates with us and what doesn't. I feel like we fall into treacherous or precarious territory when we start to prescribe things generally to people, because I think people have to follow their own individual guidance around things. And cultivate their own kind of sense of what works for them and what doesn't. I think that one of the major reasons why spirituality, the transformational space, has become kind of defunct or redundant is because we have tried to apply a generalized approach to an individual. And I think what we have to do is actually meet the individual where they're at and really support them in what they're going through in their experience and empower them in that. And so that for me has just been better. Um, so I, I can't holistically say that there's one thing that works for everyone, but I think, you know, the opportunity here is to get to know yourself and to really open your heart to yourself. And, and again, that requires your sincere yearning, and it requires your commitment, your consistency, and your repetition.

In that freedom, looking at your book behind you and discovering your soul signature Even saying that, it's like the ownership that can come that we all have this soul signature that we came into this world to be a light, an essence, so much more than just this physical vessel that we have. Obviously, we should get the book. How do you describe your essence?

Don't get the book. You don't need another book. Don't get the book. Don't get the book. Don't get the book.

What is your soul signature?

Get yourself, right? Like, this is the thing. So that's it.

Yeah, yeah. You're—

so your soul signature is just your uniqueness. Yeah. You know, it's just, it's just who you authentically are. It's, it's the way you are, the way you experience, you know. And, and this is what we have to make peace with, our individuality, who we are, the way we are, the way we're experiencing, the way we feel, what triggers us, what moves us, everything. There's no end to the depth of intimacy that we can cultivate with ourselves. Yeah, right. It's like we're so desperate to be in relationship with others, but we're hardly ever in relationship with ourselves. Yeah. So, so that's really it. It's just get to a place where you discover your soul signature or your uniqueness or who you are as a human being.

Give yourself some, some grace to do that. A lot of women I work with, men as well, Often when we do a meditation, we try to just imagine what would be like to be a kid again. What colors would you wear? What would you play with? How would you wear your hair? What would your laughter be like? Would you sing out loud? And often I see clients have tears come down their face because it's so hard to get in touch with that free, you know, signature that they have. But I think in that, I hope that listeners, they just, they never feel any judgment. There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing to fix. It's simply an act of remembering. Would you agree? Yes.

And remembering who we really are. You got it. Yeah. Beyond all of this nonsense.

I adore you. Thank you. It's, um, yeah, I'm just so happy that you could be with me today. Can you tell me, let's just share with the audience, we're going to link out everything below, but How do you enjoy most communicating with, with people who find you and your work?

I just, I just love, uh, the fact that people come to Call to Calm. It started during the pandemic. It's just a way to be of service and help people, and it's 6 years now, every day, Monday through Friday. And everything really just organically kind of arises from that. Like, if we find ourselves stuck in something, then I'll offer something on the weekend where we can go into greater detail with that. Um, people ask for mentoring where they can be supported over a 3-month window, so we did that. But really, everything's just kind of organically, uh, come from people who show up, you know, and people have just sincerely asked for support in whatever way they have. And so it's just a joy to be there every day. So come to Cool to Calm, it's totally free. Click on the link and show up. We have a good time, we laugh a lot.

Yeah, come to Cool to Calm. I'm gonna come to Cool to Calm. Yeah. To take, uh, to wrap things up, you know, people still want to know if you could just guide them in 3 things to support them in stopping fighting themselves and feeling peace every day.

You're adorable, you're infinite, and there's golden light shining out of you, all of you. And there couldn't be anything missing in any of you. Ever, because the same infinite intelligence that made everything made you. So after a while, if you are religious and are spiritual, then you really have to believe what you believe. Either God is omniscient and omnipresent, or God's asleep at the wheel. You can't have it both ways, beloved. After a while, you have to realize that you're who you are. Your humanity is a part of the grand design, and you have to be inclusive of that. And You're not broken. You don't need to be healed. You don't need to be fixed. If I was with you, I would give you a hug, but in lieu of me being with you, why don't you give yourself a hug? Because you deserve it.

Beautiful. Thank you so much for being here today. I can't wait to meet you in person. To be continued, we'll say. Thank you, it's been a pleasure.