Mahwish Syed: How Cancer Inspired an Authentic Life and Healing Spaces

I do really believe 100% from every part of me that everyone has the capacity to be able to do the things that they want and not to be held back by the mental baggage that's in our head that we want to push through.

Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. In each episode, we get down and personal with people who go after the things they want to make all their wildest dreams come true. Join us as we unveil and dissect a formula for what it takes to do the thing. Here is your host, Stacy Lauren.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. This is your host, Stacy Lauren. I am so excited to welcome Moish to the show. Hey, Moish.

Hey, Stacy. Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, thanks so much for being here. I'm so excited to talk to you more and to hear your story.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

So I'd love to have you share with the listeners all about you.

Well, I'm known as an interior designer by trade, and that's God having a very wonderful sense of humor because I'm an interior designer in more ways than one. So how does one design from the inside out? Well, I think the reason why I'm here with you speaking, because what I love about your mission is you don't wait for the opportunity. You create the opportunity. Right. I was in fashion before interiors, and I would say you make the occasion, you don't wait for the occasion to dress up. So in that we celebrate life, we. We celebrate each moment, we don't wait for that special occasion. And that couldn't have been more kind of prophetic because I came here talking with you because I published a book called Purgatory to Paradise, where I connected my cancer journey with my design wisdom. And especially when facing death, you realize there's no time to wait. All these things that were on my quote, unquote bucket list. Oh, my God, I didn't know if tomorrow would come. And so I decided to take the plunge during cancer on so many things in my life and during. Even when I was going through chemotherapy, I ended up being on the COVID One of my rooms that I designed ended up being on the COVID of a magazine. I mean, and that was while I did the thing. So I love your spirit, and I'm here for that in every which way, shape, and form. Stacy.

So are you saying so while you were in the cancer treatments is when you're still pushing forward? It wasn't that you waited till after. It was.

I didn't stop working. I'm A single mom. I'm an entrepreneur. And I continued. It was actually my golden thread. It was what, you know, when I was 12 hours in the hospital at a time, I was sitting there talking about my projects with the nurses and like, what about this fabric? What about that fabric? So it was my way of kind of keep chewing on something delicious to keep going forward, because it gave me purpose. Right. Instead of just focusing on, oh my gosh, this is happening to me. It was happening for me, and what was I going to learn? And I really employed my curiosity and an open heartedness during the cancer journey, which I also. That is one of the major life lessons. I would say that whatever calamity. There's a chapter in my book called Calamity is catharsis. And whatever calamity comes to us, look at it as a guest in Rumi's guest house. Right. So basically, you welcome each occasion, each guest into your guest house, and you allow that guest to impart their wisdom to you with open arms. You don't resist them. That's kind of the way I approached my cancer journey. Wow.

So it's all about surrendering to what is and being open to seeing what the message is in that.

Yeah. So surrender, according to my interpretation, is not giving up. It's trust. It's about trust. And there's a famous Sufi quote that I use in my book called, when in deep water, become a diver. So become a mermaid. I became a mermaid. So I went in towards the deep end, and instead of flailing at the top on the surface of things, I dove in, and I didn't know what was going to be on the other side. My son was 9 at the time, and we were watching Moana a lot, and he's like, mama, she reminds me of you. I'm like, yeah, I'm way past the reef now. I don't know what's happening. I don't know where I'm going. And sometimes storms are like. Like that. She was looking for a particular island and a particular demigod, and it was a storm that cast her on the very shores of the place where she needed to be. And I think sometimes we have to look at that storm as a blessing, not a curse. Yeah.

And what's coming to my mind when you use the word resist, Right? So you've done this enough, and you've seen the gifts from it that you are able to fall into whatever is that's happening. And instead of resisting, and it sounds like you have this really abundant skill for figuring things out. And I'm just kind of curious how that's going. How are you able to translate that for the listeners?

Interestingly enough, I started leading workshops for cancer survivors and hospital administrators on how to basically design their healing. And I employed my designer background as a fashion, jewelry, and interior designer to create a healing environment. And by using the senses to arrive at at least a level of grounding that will help you assist in whatever it is that you're dealing with. Wow.

So let's talk about your book first. I would love to hear more about your book and what that's about. And. Oh, do you have it? You could show it, too. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. Please share with the listeners what that is and how you ended up writing it, too.

It's called Purgatory to Paradise. How Cancer helped me Design an Authentic life. And it was basically in the making in another way, shape and form, even long before cancer came into my life. But cancer was definitely the catalyst for me to share. And I want to start by saying I come from a very private culture. I was born in Pakistan, and we came here to the States when I was a little girl. But I grew up in a very traditional upbringing, and we don't share those things. And while I was going through my cancer journey, I didn't tell anybody. And so for me to write this book was doing that thing. Stacy. I just for me to share my process. I felt driven to write this book because I was able to see my blindfold had come off, and cancer awakened so many latent, dormant seeds inside of me that I basically used the metaphor of and the mythology of Persephone. And that is really the backbone of my book, the mythology of Persephone and Hades. For those of you who slept through classics in high school, Persephone is the goddess who gives us the seasons because she's abducted by Hades and taken into the underworld. And her mother is Demeter. So while she is missing, the world goes icy cold because Demeter stops all the flowers from blooming, and it's cold and dreary. And basically, Persephone, while she's down in the underworld, she eats these pomegranate seeds. And I liken that to my seeds of wisdom during cancer and Hades, as the cancer which was abducting me and taking me from the world as I knew it and basically allowing me to see and become wiser. Right. And so the pomegranate seeds are my cancer lessons that I'm sharing with the world. And that's what the book is about. Wow.

I'd love to Hear also, now that this has happened and you're on the other side of it, what is that doing for you now? What are you focusing on?

I'm honestly, it's kind of amazing when you talk about one's life purpose or mission. And I think instead of searching for found me, and it found me through all these interactions that I had while I was writing the book. And I realized that my passion to connect design with healing was going to be a massive next chapter for me. And how I can do that has been a delicious adventure. Stacy?

Yeah. Talk to us more about that. And I love the word delicious. I'm falling into that right now.

Well, I believe that the word beauty has been hijacked and commercialized, and I'm really grounding it back into my spirituality. It's about grace and alignment. And if you take that one step further, when we are in harmony with our environment, we are actually in harmony on a biological level as well. And most of cancer these days is statistically proven to be environmental and not genetic. And so what is it about our lifestyle, about our environment, that is causing this resurgence, especially in 2023? I think there's a study by the American Cancer Society that has people predicted to be diagnosed with cancer, like up to almost 2 million in this country alone. So I think if we can figure out a way to create a beautiful environment that's also a healthy environment, that, to me, is the definition of beautiful.

And how can people do that?

How can people do that? In this podcast, here's my 10 tips or 5 tips. It's something I'm actually working on putting together. But I would say right off the bat, I would encourage people to do an audit of their environment, to just go around from one room to the next, think about what you love about that room and what you don't like about that room and see the pattern in which you understand your space. Because I think a lot of people. And this is where the purgatory part comes in, Stacy. Whether you rent or own, a lot of people are afraid to commit to beauty in their present environment. For whatever reason. I don't have the budget, or it's a rental or it's temporary. And people don't realize that this. I have a friend who came to me to help me decorate his apartment. It was a rental and he thought he was going to leave. And he was there for 25 years, and it was still unfinished. So this idea of being in the waiting room of life, being in the purgatory of life. So stop living as if your living room is your waiting room, put that art on the wall. Invest in your space, invest in your beauty, because that is actually life well lived. And cancer definitely helped me to buy some great art.

Yeah, that's so powerful because I think it's so easy to do that. I'm gonna wait until blank and then why not just do it now, right?

And sometimes, and I don't know if this has happened to you, you realize, oh, my God, I had that opportunity at that time and I didn't jump. And now that opportunity's gone or that moment to just strike is gone. And I literally, in the past couple of years have said yes to everything. Just said yes. Just said yes. Try it. Let's try it. Let's try it. Let's try it. Why not? If it fails, so what I've learned. But it is so important to say yes. Messy action, hell yes. Bad hair day. Let's keep going. It doesn't matter. I have a client who spent focusing on the type of mohair. For the last six months, she has not pulled the trigger on a bench. Literally, I've been six months. Go ahead. She could have been enjoying that beautiful bench after a month, for the last five months, she could have had it. But why wait? Because we're so much living in fear that if we make the wrong decision, then what? Lightning's going to strike? So you pick the wrong shade, you can change it, you can reupholster it. This is how we have to approach our lives. It's not permanent. And while we have the opportunity to just jump. But we're really socialized to not do that. And I think that starts early in school. It starts in test taking and having the right answer. And people lie to themselves their whole lives, giving themselves what's quote unquote, right answer. But it is so wrong for them.

So it sounds like you're really invested in not just doing the thing and creating this beautiful space, but it's making it come from inside of you and not because some magazine shows it. It's pretty much the deepest desires that you have for it.

Oh, yeah. And by the way, I live in dustin construction for 95% of those gorgeous magazine photos that you see on my website. Those are some of them. That was a townhouse I worked on for seven years. And during COVID things took like so long to come into fruition. So I'm in a state of becoming. Right. My background is an office space. It's not that I could give you a beautiful other background, but I'm like, no, you know what? This is life. This is how I work. And I think it's important to embrace the mess. And I'm coming from someone who art directs photo shoots and make sure everything looks quote, unquote, perfect. But I'm here to tell you that it does start within. It starts with your alignment to your own beauty. And not find it in the COVID or inside the pages of a magazine, but find it in what makes you feel good in your pleasures. If you go back to childhood when there weren't rules and you just liked it because you liked it, a lot of times. It's funny, I was at a panel last week, and there were two designers who were talking, and they both went in totally different career directions and then arrived back at what they loved when they were seven. And now they're successful because they actually embraced what they truly, truly loved, whether there was a vocabulary for it in their lives. And I think that's such an important message, because what we love as children, if we really thought it was viable, it has the ability to feed us so much more than what we think we should do.

Do you have advice for people on getting into their alignment to their own beauty?

I would start simply, very, very simply with grounding in your body. A lot of times we are so in our heads and we're overthinking things, right? And we often, when we overthink things, talk ourselves out of everything. So in terms of feeling, in terms of touch, in terms of scent, in terms of sight, what gives you pleasure, what makes you feel good, what feels good against your skin? So if you were to go to your closet and open the doors and touch something that really makes you feel delicious, what feels so good? Wear that. Put that against your skin and think about why you love it. And in that, why, why you like that scent, why you like that beautiful shade of emerald, Surround yourself by it. I find that people play it safe so often because they're afraid to commit to what they truly want. I see it as a designer, as an interior designer, as a fashion designer. They're afraid. It's crazy. But that thing, that guilty pleasure even, that's the key that will open the door to being in more alignment with your own beauty.

I'd love to hear your advice for people that maybe are going through cancer or something like that, and it's just really hard right now, and they can't see outside of it.

I would say I don't believe in battling with anything. Battling with cancer, it wasn't a fight for me. And when you set a framework of a battle inside yourself, you're at odds with yourself. So in that cancer was a dance or it was a messenger, and it had a message for me. So to listen, to be receptive to the message of what cancer was telling me and what cancer is saying for you, instead of just battle mode, okay, these are the pills we need to take. This is the treatment we need to do. This is the team, blah, blah, blah, as if you're setting a battle plan. Literally. It wasn't like that for me at all. And what is the message? What am I going to learn? Basically? It's so humbling, right? It's so humbling when you think you're doing everything right. And a lot of times there's a stigma attached to it. Like, something's wrong with me, something is bad inside me, something is growing. And that rhetoric sets up a conflict within yourself. So I would first say the framework is to pivot a little bit and to not reject it outright, not fight it outright, but to listen and allow the message to come through. Because there is an epigenetic reason why so many of us are getting cancer. And epigenetic means basically that there are certain environmental factors that turn certain genes on and off. So it's not your genetic makeup that is making you more susceptible, but actually your lifestyle. So again, if you're listening and looking and paying attention to your life, what is it in your life that's toxic? Is it a relationship? Is it a situation? Is it your food? I mean, just. I started again, auditing everything around me. Everything. And it actually. Again, when you start asking that question, you find your answers. But sometimes people are afraid to ask themselves because they fear what they'll find. And then if they actually took a look at it, they actually have to make those changes. And change is sometimes far scarier than cancer. Oh. Oh, my gosh.

For someone that hasn't been doing that, where they haven't been listening to themselves, and maybe they are scared, but they were like, okay, I'm gonna listen. What would be their first step?

I would say that journaling is very important. It's important to write and to not be afraid and not self judge all the feelings that you're having. Every feeling matters. And I'm not saying you have to be happy. That's not at all the message here. I'm not talking about toxic positivity. It's about acceptance. So I don't know if you know anything about the Japanese art of kintsugi. So Japanese have a beautiful tradition of ceramics. And when something breaks, they don't throw it away. What they do is they glue it back together and they gild the cracks with gold. And so your scars are that gold. And what I'm saying is we're not broken. We are just made more beautiful by what I call the patina of life. Right? Doesn't have to be cancer. It could be any other illness. It could be heartbreak. That scar on my heart can be gold. And the gilding, Stacy, is self acceptance. That gilding is you able to meet yourself and say, okay, I'm here for you, and I'm going to create space for you.

We talked before we were recording, and I was telling you that I had just done the expert panel for the bucket list challenge and how the interesting thing is, by each of these people were telling their story about how they did the thing in relation to their bucket list. And then I was saying how it's interesting how the thing is what opens you up to be able to meet all the people along the way. And I'd love to hear what your thoughts are about that.

That thing that deep down, everyone's got a few things. Actually, sometimes it's not just one that you constantly go, oh, God, wouldn't it be nice? Wouldn't it be nice? But how for me, sharing my story in my book and publishing, I had a goal. My goal was last year, my birthday, and I kid you not, every person I met along the way to help me gather the right data, the information, all of that is now part of my posse, my soul posse. And I think it's so amazing. Even my cancer team, I love the doctors and the nurses, and I mean, it's so crazy how every single person along the way has a message and a beautiful part to play in your life, but you won't find none until you say yes to yourself. Wow.

I'd love to hear your biggest piece of advice for people on doing the thing.

It's going to be scary, but just jump, dive into the deep end. Become a mermaid. You'll realize you can actually breathe underwater, but you won't know until you try.

I'd love to also share, because I think sometimes people can overthink when they're wanting to do something new or they're wanting to get to know themselves better or they're wanting to tune in. And I loved what you said earlier about just going into your closet and finding something delicious to try on, because that could be the gateway for them to be able to get themselves to open up to other things. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that as well.

Oh, yeah. I mean, think about what feels delicious, what smells delicious, what sounds delicious. Follow that bliss. I mean, in quoting Joseph Campbell, I totally think that we are in alignment when we are in that pleasure state. And I think we have to fight this kind of insidious rhetoric, societal rhetoric, that pleasure is sinful or there's something bad about pleasure. Right. And I'm talking about pleasure from a very simplistic perspective. Again, what made you feel good when you were seven? Right. That childlike pleasure, that childlike innocence, that wonder, that level of curiosity. Allow yourself to listen to a podcast that might have a nugget of wisdom, that will open a doorway, that will say, oh my gosh, I should email that person and ask them this question. I always tell my son, if you don't ask, 100% of the answer is no. But if you do ask, 50% of the answer could be yes. So why not ask?

Did you get that from somewhere or is that yours?

It's probably from somewhere somehow.

I was just curious.

Yeah, but that's something I've been saying to him since he was really little is try it, Try it even when it's, you know, try to get them to eat something. And I'm like, if you hate it, then we'll know. But if you won't, try it. Which is like one of those things.

Yeah.

Again, it's should I, should I, should I? Any single time anyone asks you, should I? It's because they themselves haven't given themselves permission. Right.

I would love to hear what's coming alive for you after our conversation today.

What's coming alive? Oh, my goodness. I am down the rabbit hole with creating an environment and really coming and designing from a quantum perspective. Basically, what is in alignment with our biology. What does that space look like, and what can we surround ourselves with without breaking the bank? I mean, I am a high end residential and commercial designer in New York City. So I have the taste and I have my background coming from a very humble background and a traditional background that still employs traditions that have been passed down from generation to generation. So combining that ancient wisdom with all these modern discoveries is my sweet spot lately.

Stacy, where can people find out about you and also to work with you as well?

Well, I'm on Instagram as Maurice Zayed Designs. That's M A H W I S H S Y E D Underscore Designs D E S I G N S. My website is msd-ny.com and yeah, I'm on TikTok too if yeah, I'm going to be on TikTok, but Instagram is really a place where you'll find a lot of what's inspiring me, what's getting me hot, and I share a lot of tips there and a lot of discoveries that are just keeping me excited.

Thank you so much for coming on and talking to me. This has been really great.

Thank you so much for having me. It's been lovely.

And for the listeners, do the Thing. Don't wait for opportunity. Create it.

Thanks for listening to the do the Thing podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. But even more, we hope you'll be inspired to do the Thing. Do you have a burning question on Doing the Thing that you'd like answered? How about an inspiring do the Thing story of your own that you'd like to share? We'd love to hear all about it. Just leave us a voice message at do the Thing callcast co or email us@helloothethingpodcast.com.