Emotions Untapped

#023 Mindfulness Transformation: Revitalizing Career and Personal Growth with Dr. Nimisha Kantharia

• Livia Lowder

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This episode features Dr. Nimisha Kantharia, a surgeon and mindfulness teacher from India, who shares her transformative journey from burnout to balance through the practice of mindfulness. Initially skeptical, Dr. Kantharia discovered the profound impact of mindfulness on her emotional well-being and personal growth, inspired by Dan Harris' book 10% Happier.

In this episode, we explore:

  • Dr. Kantharia's journey from severe burnout in her surgical career to finding balance through mindfulness
  • How mindfulness meditation revitalized her professional and personal life
  • The evolution of mindfulness practices beyond breath-focused meditation
  • Practical, body-based, and trauma-aware mindfulness techniques for emotional regulation
  • How emotions like anger can serve as gateways to vulnerability and personal growth
  • The challenges and triumphs of integrating mindfulness into a busy professional life
  • The concept of reparenting, addressing past shadows, and meeting unmet emotional needs
  • Mindfulness as a customizable tool for busy professionals, parents, and those navigating neurodivergence
  • And so much more!

You will love this episode if:

  • You feel burned out or overwhelmed in your personal or professional life.
  • You’re skeptical about mindfulness and curious about its real-world benefits.
  • You struggle with understanding and regulating your emotions.
  • You want to explore mindfulness practices tailored to trauma, neurodivergence, or emotional complexity.
  • You’re seeking tools to improve self-awareness and enhance relationships.

This episode offers accessible insights and practical tools for integrating mindfulness into your life, helping you embrace each moment with greater clarity and compassion.

Books mentioned in this episode:
10% Happier by Dan Harris
The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read - Philippa Perry

Connect with Nimisha through her WEBSITE 
https://notjustmindfulness.com/

We love to hear from you! Please send us your feedback and questions via the text link at the top of the show notes, or DM us on Instagram

You can connect with our community, connect with us on social media and find valuable (FREE) resources on our website www.eqnation.org

Speaker 1:

I've always found anger an easier emotion to reach for than the more vulnerable ones, like sadness or disappointment. So if I find that I'm getting upset in a situation where I don't want to be vulnerable to the opposite party, I will get angry. But the first thing starts with acknowledging that we're human and angry. Being angry is not bad and that it has something like you said so rightly it has something to say to us. We need to give it the space to speak to us and process it, express it in a healthy way and then use that energy that comes from it. Any kind of overreaction is not really an overreaction. It's an appropriate reaction, because your body is not just reacting to that present moment, it's also reacting to, like, this whole historical past, and we carry it. We carry it in ourselves. Even if we can't consciously remember it, our body still remembers. That is something that I I thought that we needed to kind of just say about how powerful it is to have to know, to have this knowledge that our emotions are expressed in the body, and to find ways to become aware of how our body speaks so that we can start paying attention to our emotions. Society wants us to transcend our physical needs, but then it also wants us to be these rational, calm, balanced people. All the time it's like the human body was not designed for that. It was not designed for that. It was not designed for that. So, yeah, what I love about mindfulness is surgery. You know, you learn so much anatomy. I feel like mindfulness really taught me how we function as human beings in society and it kind of just feels like coming up full circle for me.

Speaker 1:

And then subsequently I discovered that I'm neurodivergent and I have ADHD and I realized that mindfulness is brilliant for folks with ADHD, but a lot of them run away from it precisely because of these things. You know, I'm not the meditation type. I'm not. You know, I can't do this, I can't sit still, I can't empty my mind of thoughts. So I realized that there were so many kind of misconceptions around this, built around the stereotype of what mindfulness and meditation is. There is a way that that mindfulness can work for you. It can work for you in your life, in your life situation. You know whether you need to do it for just two minutes a day, whether you need to do it 10 minutes every alternate day, you can make it work for you. And even if you can't meditate, even if you can't do all these regular prescriptive looking things, Welcome to the Emotions Untapped podcast.

Speaker 2:

I'm your host, livia Lauder. This is the show where we explore the power of our thoughts, feelings and emotions and how they create our personal and professional realities realities In this community. We dive into better understanding, using and managing these elements of ourselves so we can live healthier, better balanced and less overwhelming lives. You'll hear conversations with experts and thought leaders from a variety of fields here to help you gain insights, strategies and tools for building and upgrading your emotional awareness and regulation techniques, and there will be a couple solo episodes with yours truly. It brings me so much joy to share this information with you, to connect with you and guide you on your journey. If you're ready to start doing the work, you can download our free seven-step guide to improving your emotional health right now. Just go to wwweqnationorg. Now, let's dive in wwweqnationorg. Now. Let's dive in.

Speaker 2:

Dr Namesha Kantharia is a surgeon and mindfulness teacher from India. Mindfulness saved her surgical career in 2016 and then changed her life in 2019 when she became a mother. She runs a membership called the Middle Path Mindfulness your Way and teaches her brand of practical, body-based and trauma-aware mindfulness. Namesha, it's great to have you here. It's great to be here. Thank you. I'm so excited for this conversation. I feel mindfulness is so important to create a regular practice out of, and your personal journey is one that includes mindfulness and that it actually it changed your life. So, as a surgeon, I can imagine you know things are hectic. Your work is very full on, it's very intense, it's very professional, it requires you to be on, I'm sure, crazy hours and crazy days, but mindfulness has really helped and saved your career, as you mentioned. So I'd love to start there by how it did actually save your career and changed your life.

Speaker 1:

So you're absolutely right, of course. You know this is pretty much how it is as a surgeon, and you know we get into training when we are about ready for so I must have been in training for about a decade yeah, this happened when I was around 33, so just under a decade and all my 20s. I was this type a person who was rushing about trying to do everything that I could possibly do, trying to prove myself as a woman in a still male dominated field, and you know I just wanted to do it all. You know I was just like greedy to get all the experiences and everything. And people were always telling me, like you know, you're a really hyper person, don't? You think you need to kind of get into yoga or meditation and kind of calm down a bit. And I used to be very offended by that. You know, I used to think that being this hyper person is like just so much a part of my personality and that it gives me an edge as a surgeon and that, you know, I felt like meditation or yoga would kind of numb me out or it would like make me less, and it was really annoying to think that I had to change parts of myself. So I used to push away those suggestions, like for most of my 20s. I was just like, yeah, I'm not the meditation sort, like please don't even suggest these things to me.

Speaker 1:

And then, uh, you know, when I was in a much less hectic position, I was in a much more supportive work environment. I guess that's when it happens right you can fall apart when you are being supported by people. So I was in a really, really supportive department and it's just that we had a bit of a hectic period going on and we had some transitions in workflow and I just saw myself physically, mentally, emotionally sick and we reached this point where I would go into the operating room and feel like throwing up and I would rush out and I would need to like retch. I wouldn't actually throw up and I would come back in and the whole thing would repeat again and it was really disconcerting as a surgeon, right, you can't enter your OR and need feel like wanting to throw up, and I'm the least squeamish person ever. You know, it's not that I trained myself to be that way right from my younger days. I was never. I had no issues with blood or with, you know, gut smell, those kind of things. So it wasn't any of that.

Speaker 1:

So naturally, my work colleagues and mentors I was in a training institute at that time so they were really concerned they got this whole battery of investigations done for me and they checked out my heart and my gut and everything was normal and so we just started off on some. You know, we just called it like acidity and reflux and like started those meds and it didn't help. Then they said you know what, maybe you're just burnt out, maybe you need to take a vacation. So, even though we were in the middle of this really hectic period, they sent me off on a 10-day vacation and I came back and it was still the same. And then I started losing my mind because I was like, oh, what am I supposed to do? You know, nothing seems to be working. And then my husband, like very, very timidly, he was like you know why don't you consider mindfulness? Because we were not bitten everyone's head off by then about mindfulness and meditation. So people didn't really suggest it easily to me, not even my own husband. And I was like, yeah, like, like you know, I was desperate. I was like let me just try and see what happens.

Speaker 1:

So typically when I'm looking up like when I'm looking for something. So typically when I'm looking for something, I'll find a book first, and the book that I found was 10% Happier by Dan Harris, and it was such a great book to read. It was the perfect book at the perfect time for me, because he was also a very high-strung person who was not into spirituality or meditation or any of these things. He had this stressful career because he was a news I think he's an abc news news reporter or he was. He isn't anymore, but he was a news reporter and he was. He went to the taliban and covered that, that whole uh operation, and it was quite stressful for him. And then I was like, oh my god, you know, if mindfulness works for someone like him, it'll work for someone like me. So it kind of I started off on a very positive note and he gives you a lot of evidence in that book. It's not fluffy, it's not all beautiful words, there's quite a lot of cuss words, but there's also a lot of science in it and that kind of appealed to me.

Speaker 1:

And so then I found an app and I started meditating for like 20 minutes a day, and by meditating I specifically mean mindfulness meditation, because there are so many different types of meditation. So that's basically, you know, focusing on your breath. In and out, your mind wanders, uh, you just notice that you have thoughts. You try not to judge yourself. You come back to the breath, and so I started doing this for like 20 minutes a day and it worked instantly, like I went back to the OR. I had no more of these episodes. It was almost miraculous for me. So that's why I say that it saved my surgical career, because it sounds dramatic in retrospect, but I know it wasn't because I was desperate. I would have done anything to be able to go back to my surgical work and everything that I tried meds, vacation, investigations. Nothing seemed to be working. And then this is what worked.

Speaker 2:

That's such a fascinating story and it's so interesting how you had so much resistance in the beginning, right, like everyone was like try this, try that, and you're like, no, go away, like I don't want it to change who I am. But then you know, in kind of resisting, that you reach the burnout. But it was really nice for your co workers to be so supportive and in you having a break Because, like he said, it was a super busy time and like they probably actually needed you, but they needed you to be okay more, which is really fantastic.

Speaker 1:

Yes, yes yes, I completely agree. I think you always need support from people around you. You know, it's never.

Speaker 2:

It's never even though mindfulness and meditation can be such a solitary journey, but but I needed that support to get there, right, I mean absolutely, and you shared with me in our pre-interview as well how, in 2019, so a few years later continuing to practice mindfulness really did change your life, as you became a mother as well so, um, yeah, uh, you know my, my main resistance to mindfulness and actually meditation, and I wasn't even like, I wasn't even looking at these things because I was just like no, you know, you become this calm, blissed out person who's detached from everything and you won't care about anything anymore.

Speaker 1:

But then when I started using mindfulness so with mindfulness meditation, there are a lot of different anchors you can have.

Speaker 1:

So the most common one is the breath, where you place your attention on the breath.

Speaker 1:

An anchor is just a place for your attention to land on for the duration of the practice, and so the most common one is the breath that we know of. But there are a lot of other iron pers like you could, you know, say an affirmation in case of self-compassion meditation, or your internal body sensations when you're doing a body scan, or even body movements when you're doing a walking mindfulness meditation practice practice. So I kind of tried all the rest of them out and I was just like no, you know, these are, these are really boring, they they're not speaking to me. I'm just going to stick with this breath focused, uh, mindfulness practice. And that's all I did for the first three years, because the initial one month I was all like, let's try this, let's try that. And then I was just like, no, none of all of this is really boring stuff. And so what happened eventually is that I kind of was using my mindfulness practice as like this anti-anxiety and anti-anger pill I mean, it's not a pill, but it's just like it was just like a just to prevent myself from getting angry or to prevent myself from getting anxious. And you know, what happens is that you practice for a while and things go really well, and then you get cocky and then you kind of fall off the wagon and so I would start practicing and then I would find myself getting stressed out and then I'd be like, oh, let me get back to my practice again. So I would start practicing again and then I would fall off again the wagon and then my mom would say, you know, I don't see you meditating anymore and you seem to be really angry all the time and you're snapping at us all the time. And then I would be like, sign, then I shall go and meditate. And then I would go into my room and, you know, practice mindfulness and come back out with very bad grace but but like much calmer and easier to tolerate person. So this is, this is the first three years of practice. This is what I did.

Speaker 1:

And uh, then, when I became a mom, uh, I just found that all my emotions were really supersized. I was exceedingly happy and I was exceedingly angry and uh, suddenly this, this breath focused meditation, was not working to kind of tap my emotions down anymore. And uh, then I started thinking about all the other practices that I had kind of ignored right up till then, because I started doing a lot of reading into early childhood development, even though my child was only and she was like she was like a baby of three months. But anyway, I was reading about all these books, you know, these parenting books, and they all spoke about kind of helping your child through meltdowns and tantrums and teaching them the skills of emotional regulation. And a lot of them used to ask this, you know, used to say that ask your child, where in the body do they feel their emotion?

Speaker 1:

And when I read that it kind of clicked. I was like, oh, that was the point of the body scan practice, see, the body scan practice, which I had completely ignored. The point is to be able to locate your emotions in your body. And then, when I kind of did some soul searching, I realized that if you ever asked me how I felt, I would either say I felt happy, or I would say I'm feeling mad or bad or sad. Like that was my emotional vocabulary. That was all the vocabulary I had. So, yeah, that's when I started going into those practices deeper and deeper and that's when mindfulness changed my life Amazing.

Speaker 2:

So what is it that you practice mainly now? Is it the breath focus, meditation and body scans? Are there other things that you've introduced to your kind of roster, so to speak? When it comes to mindfulness practice, what is kind of your main focus, and or have you started to explore kind of other mindfulness activities as well?

Speaker 1:

So I do it all now. I just do them in rotation. I do a lot of like. I don't stick to just one anymore.

Speaker 1:

I still find that the breath focused one is the one, maybe because I have the most experience with it. It's the one that kind of gets me back to the present the most easily. But I must say this you know, when I'm studying in practice, my mind is all over the place. It's not like my mind is empty of thoughts or anything, because I've noticed that's a misconception people have that you know, when you're meditating you'll be blissed out and it'll be all like peaceful. Actually it's not. I'm constantly, I'm like, wrangling with my thoughts. I'm like, no, I'm not going to follow that thought. I'm coming back to my breath, like the whole practice is getting distracted by my thoughts and coming back to the breath. But after practice I find that I'm more grounded, I'm more centered, I'm more present, I'm less reactive. So that still stays my name, stay practice. But I do all of them. You know the five senses practice.

Speaker 1:

I don't do a lot of movement-based practice because I have this. I've been doing more of it recently because I started doing it with my members in my membership. So for a month we did walking meditations and it was a nice experience. But it's not something that comes to me easily, because for some reason I get all up in my head and I start thinking of the mechanics of walking and muscles and ligaments, and the surgeon in me comes out and I can't. But I have a movement-based practice that I developed, which is which is with watercolors and art, and and I do that sometimes, when I need to, when I can't be, when I need to, when I can't be, still I need to move, but I still need to be mindful.

Speaker 2:

Well, I love that. Yeah, getting into a creative space for me is, I've noticed that really just kind of like relaxes me and kind of allows me to slow down and, like you say, you're still doing something, but you're also just, you're kind of just very present in that moment and it just kind of allows you to focus on something that isn't these racing thoughts that are constantly in our minds. Right, you mentioned anger quite a few times and I love this. Your social media. You talk a lot about anger as well, especially geared towards, like as a mother, right, and not getting angry at your kids or, when we do get angry, how to kind of manage that. Know, emotions are, are there to teach us when we feel things. It's kind of like a lesson from you know your inner being being like okay, what, what is this here to show me? What do I have to learn from this? What do you think it is about anger that we should be paying attention to?

Speaker 1:

well, I think we should all just be paying attention to anger in the first place, because I think I don't. I can't say that the same for men, but I do know that some men struggle with expressing anger as well, or with, you know, even acknowledging that forget expressing. We start with just acknowledging that I'm angry about a situation, and a lot of us don't want to do that because we think that if we say we are angry, we're going to be hurting the person in front of us. So there's this, a lot of, I feel like a lot of negativity around anger, which is it's a very maligned emotion and it's actually such a powerful emotion. It's such such a powerful emotion there's so much energy and there's so much vitality in anger. And so, of course, anger can the expression of anger can be extremely destructive, right, like when you lose it or when you're, when people are violent or when they're abusive. But for a lot of us, we're not violent or abusive when we're angry, but we're still scared of it because we think that it's a spectrum and we're going to land up there unless we kind of control our anger or we tamp down our anger. And so a lot of my own personal work has been about finding ways to accept that I'm angry and to express it in a way that is healthy, that allows me to set boundaries. And you were saying what do you think is the message of anger?

Speaker 1:

I think a lot of us would agree that anger comes up when we need to be protected, when we're feeling violated, when someone's taken advantage of us, when someone's breached our boundaries. So I think, especially for women, if you can acknowledge or reach the place where you are angry about those situations, well you don't need to scream or rant or rave, but then you can use that energy that you get from that anger to set up healthy boundaries, to have difficult conversations, to say no, this behavior is not acceptable or I need things to be done this way. And we lose out on that when we, you know, want to tamp it down and just be this whole pleasant, like good girl or you know this, this, this nice person who just never gets angry and is just so calm, because I think anger is such a human emotion. We all feel angry. I mean, some of us may be more angry and some of us may be less angry, but but when people say, oh, I never get angry, I always get really, really curious about what they're doing or what they've done with that experience of anger that even they aren't aware of it. So, yeah, and I know moms get angry a lot, like parents get angry a lot, especially moms, you know, shouldering the majority of like the physical, mental and emotional burden.

Speaker 1:

And I feel like there's a lot of talk, especially in gentle parenting and conscious parenting circles, around how destructive the effect of kind of yelling and punishing your kids can be, because it creates that disconnection and it creates that fear in them. But at the same time, not many people tell you that you also need to kind of model that healthy expression of anger right for your children. Otherwise you're either going to raise them to be these nice people pleasers or they're just going to tamp down things until they kind of burst out and have this big outburst. So yeah, that that's what I think about anger. And, uh, for me personally I have to say this I've always found anger an easier emotion to reach for than the more vulnerable ones, like sadness or disappointment.

Speaker 1:

So if I find that I'm getting upset in a situation where I don't want to be vulnerable to the opposite party, I will get angry. And it took me a long time to understand that I kind of default to anger because I don't want to be vulnerable to the other person. And then that's when I realized that, at least in intimate relationships, like in my family, I'm kind of putting up anger as a shield where, instead of allowing myself to be vulnerable to safe people and increasing intimacy, like, I'm blocking it by being angry. But so it's. It's a journey, I guess it it's a personal journey for each of us. But. But the first thing starts with acknowledging that we're human and angry. Being angry is not bad and that it has something, like you said so rightly, it has something to say to us. We need to give it the space to speak to us and process it, express it in a healthy way and then use that energy that comes from it.

Speaker 2:

Beautiful. There's so many great takeaways from that. Thank you for sharing that. It really the two things that stuck out to me the most was you know that it is essentially a protection mechanism that we are kind of using without realizing it. And your example of you know, because boundaries have been crossed or we've been mistreated or we feel we've been mistreated, so we get angry to kind of protect ourselves.

Speaker 2:

And I think that's a really beautiful example that you use to when it comes to children, that to necessarily never get angry is not really the best way to approach it, because it's inevitable that your children will at some point feel anger and if they don't really understand how to express that because they haven't had you being an example, then that can actually be really quite detrimental to them and their learning experience and their understanding of processing and managing their emotions.

Speaker 2:

So that was a really great share, thank you. Now we talked in our pre-interview as well about reparenting and how you know healing inner child wounds and really accepting support from your village and how you know mindfulness and emotional intelligence plays a really big role in know managing our, our kind of childhood experiences and reparenting ourselves in the now as an adult. Um, and I know that that's a big part of your story as well and I'm sure that it you know, once you have children yourself, a lot of stuff starts to come up that you kind of didn't recognize before, didn't have the opportunity to to kind of feel and work through before. I'd love to go in that direction now.

Speaker 1:

So, again, I was really lucky when I became a mom. In like the last few months of my pregnancy, I found this book by Philippa Perry, which is called. It's such a great title. I love the title, the book you wish your parents had read and your children would be glad you did. It is such a great book and I don't think it's necessarily only for parents. I mean, of course, a lot all of it is geared towards parents.

Speaker 1:

But basically the crux of that book and this was the first time I'd ever heard something like this is that when you are parenting your child, um, your past is going to come up. When you are in those situations that you find your child in, uh, shadows from your past are going to influence you and unless you are willing to kind of explore that, that those those shadows from your past, and process them, you're going to end up up reacting either in one direction or the other. So either you do exactly what your parents did and your child will have the same experience that you had, or you'll go too far in the opposite direction, and then that's not a great thing either. So she kind of really drove it in that you are going to have these experiences and then once I knew that I could see it coming up all the time from the time, from the time my child was an infant. And obviously you can't have like like, not many of us have memories of our infancy but we do have body memories of it, right, we have these sudden feelings of sadness or anger and it doesn't seem to be related to what's happening in the moment. And so I kind of took that very seriously and started kind of journaling when I, when things like that happened and, you know, trying to see what was happening for me so that I don't project it onto my child, so that I don't become like this overprotective mom but at the same time you know, meet her needs, whatever her needs are in that situation, kind of using it like a spotlight to see what needs she has.

Speaker 1:

And the really cool thing was to discover that when you do that, when you find that there's this particular situation and you have this child and you suddenly realize that there's this emotional need and it wasn't met for you, you have that opportunity to meet that need for yourself in that moment. Needing it for your child is very healing in itself. But you also can not always physically, but in imagination, with words, through the inner dialogue that runs through our mind, through doing little acts of love and care for yourself, you can begin to meet those needs for yourself. And I have personally found having a child to be I mean I never expected it, but to be a very healing experience for myself because of this, because there are many things I would never have realized I needed if I didn't realize that she needed them and then saw that I hadn't received. With that, though, I had extremely loving parents. I I had very caring, loving parents, but you know, parents are not perfect and we all live in a society that influences us and conditions us in particular ways you know, like valuing productivity and valuing not valuing differences, or, you know, being afraid of the things that make us different. So all of that plays a role, even if you have really warm and loving parents.

Speaker 1:

And so this was such a great opportunity to kind of look at what those emotional needs are, even physical needs, for that matter. So you know we were talking about me being a surgeon, and part of being a surgeon is I used to be so proud of this ability of mine, and it must have come across when I said I was not squeamish at all. Right, it must have come across. I was so proud of this ability of myself to endure things. I can go 40 hours without sleeping. I can go all day without eating.

Speaker 1:

It kind of became this matter of pride and I really looked at it and I realized that society rewards us. It rewards us for being able to transcend our physical needs when you go to school. If you're the kid who needs to go to the loo all the time, at some point of time your teacher is going to say you're a troublemaker or you're a distracted kid, you're distracting the whole class, all those kinds of things. You can't eat when you're hungry in school. You have to eat in the break time. It's not like it's not a lot of schools which will allow you to open up your tiffin and eat whenever you're hungry. You can't just take a nap because your body is tired. So we learn to kind of not listen to these signals of our body. And then society keeps rewarding it. Right, it keeps rewarding it.

Speaker 1:

You get into a job. People reward you for being so productive, for pushing yourself beyond the limits, for, like, staying late on a Friday night, for coming in on weekends to work. And so there are all these physical needs as well that we've learned to ignore. And not only learn to ignore, we get proud of ourselves for ignoring it. And then you have a child. You have to meet their physical needs immediately, especially when they're really little. They have more tolerance capacity. You just have to meet their physical needs immediately, especially when they're really little. They want more tolerance capacity. You just you have to feed them, you have to clean them, you have to put them to sleep when they need it, and it can be it can be so annoying if you're this person who's always quite proud about kind of pushing past your limits, and so for me it was really a lesson and like no, this is what the human animal needs. Like we're animals. We forget that we're animals and we can push past our limits, but there will always be a price to pay.

Speaker 2:

We'll be right back after a quick break. I hope you're loving the show so far. The personal development journey can feel lonely sometimes, but it doesn't have to. We are here to help each other succeed at figuring out this whole growth thing. So come be a part of the conversation at wwweqnationorg. There you'll find links to our free community, which is full of valuable resources to get you feeling unstuck, less stressed and more connected to yourself and the people around you. And if this podcast does bring you value which I'm sure it will chances are it will do the same for someone else in your life. We are all about bringing value to the collective. So share this episode directly with a friend or pop it on your socials with your biggest aha moment from today's show, and don't forget to tag us at Livia Lauder. That's L-I-V-I-A dot L-O-W-D-E-R. Right, let's get back to it.

Speaker 1:

You can push past our limits, but there will always be a price to pay, and I truly also think that these physical and emotional needs are really interlinked together. So we were talking about reparenting, and I'm going to bring it back to reparenting, which is just this ability as an adult to take responsibility for your physical and emotional needs and meet them as best you can in a given situation, and in the pre-interview we also spoke about how we're not meant to be doing this all alone. Right, it's not like this me solitarily sitting alone in my room surreting for food and cooking for myself. It's not about that. But if people around you can't really meet all your needs, then you have to try your best to meet as many of them as you can, and hopefully, in time, you will find communities and spaces and people who can help you meet some of those needs.

Speaker 1:

But as adults, we also have to be responsible for communicating those needs, like if you need to be held. You need to be have to be responsible for communicating those needs, like if you need to be held. You need to be able to be vulnerable enough with your partner to tell them that I need to be held, which is not always easy for a lot of us. So a lot of it is being able to communicate those physical needs or emotional needs to other people and say I need a hug right now, or I would feel so loved if you would go and get me a cup of tea. It's just, it's small things and it's a practice really to start doing this for yourself, and then, of course, it spills out and you do it for other people as well. So that's like a great positive cycle which develops.

Speaker 2:

But yeah, yeah, amazing. And one thing you said there in the beginning and I think it is just a really good example of having awareness around. You know, childhood traumas and triggers essentially was that when you said you know you might find yourself reacting to something that doesn't really make sense in the moment, like a situation happens and your reaction is a little bit kind of overboard. And I think that's a really great clue that, hey, there's stored emotion in my body and this situation that's just happened has actually brought that emotion up. Where that emotion originated from is something completely separate to the situation happening right now and again, you know, just kind of showing us that emotions can be our best teacher if we're willing to learn, be our best teacher if we're willing to learn.

Speaker 2:

And I love, like just the description that you had around, you know, having awareness around, taking care of ourselves the best we can. And you're right, like society kind of puts these pressures on us and rewards us for these things that are kind of the opposite of what we should be doing, like overworking, you know, not eating, not sleeping, like doing all these things really pushing ourselves. But it's like, oh, congratulations, you know, you're doing such a good job, but it's like. But are we like I'm not putting my needs first, I'm not prioritizing my needs? I'm doing all these other things that I'm getting rewarded for, but, like, what about me?

Speaker 2:

And that's what? I think that's such a good, just a reminder. You know that, like, you can't take care of other people if you're not taking care of yourself first, whether it be you're a parent or even, you know, through work, through your relationships within your family unit, through your relationships within your family unit, and so that's such a good reminder. Yeah, I really appreciate you sharing that as well. What you mentioned with your support network too, right, it's having people around you that you can learn and you might not be there yet, but that you can learn to express yourself in this safe space and be able to share what your needs are and really express that and have that be received. Right, there's so much importance to that.

Speaker 1:

I really love what you said. You know about emotions because of the overreaction piece which you spoke about, because I realized it when I became a parent. But once I saw it in my interactions with my child, I began to see it everywhere in my interactions with my parents, in my interactions with my, my sibling, with my spouse, with my child. I began to see it everywhere In my interactions with my parents, in my interactions with my sibling, with my spouse, with my friends. I would find these situations where maybe I behaved okay you know, sometimes you're in a social situation and I behaved fine but the thing is inside me there's this storm of emotions. And then I would be like, really, was this? This situation has produced this internal storm of anger and I'm thinking about it all the time. And she said this and I should have said that Is it really about this particular situation? And then I would go back and find that no, it wasn't really about this situation, it was about some other time that I felt unseen or I didn't feel valued, or I felt like I wasn't heard. I didn't feel valued or I felt like I wasn't heard, and so I mean I just don't want people to think that you have to have a child to be able to do this kind of work. What you said was so great, because any kind of overreaction is not really an overreaction, it's an appropriate reaction, because your body is not just reacting to that present moment, it's also reacting to, like, this whole historical past and we carry it. We carry it in ourselves. Even if we can't consciously remember it, our body still remembers. Which actually brings me to a great part of, I think, something which we're talking about, about emotional intelligence and how the our emotions express themselves through our body.

Speaker 1:

Uh, we kind of touched on this in the body scan, right, and I think it's so important because I think a lot of people don't realize I didn't know, I didn't know till I became a mom at 36 that you feel your. I mean, of course, everyone knows that if you get angry, your voice gets louder and your heart races, and if you're anxious, your heart is racing, like we all know that, but we don't know that there are these subtle ways in which you could be angry. If you're suppressing your anger, you could kind of be clenching your jaw, and it's not the same. It's not like a universal language, right. It's such a personal language to each one of us, which is why we kind of need to investigate it, which is why I now love body scans, because I feel like it teaches you that language of the internal body sensations.

Speaker 1:

And then when you become attuned to that because for me it was a clenched jaw it was like I had this incident where I was with my child in the park I was a beautiful day and there were birds chirping and she was playing and we had a lovely morning and I suddenly noticed I had this like I was clenching my jaw really hard and I was just like so what's that about? And then I realized I was mad at myself for something which apparently I had not done. I had done something in the wrong order of things. I didn't want it to be that way and I would have been the first person to tell you I'm not a perfectionist, but the thing is I was so mad at myself for that and then when I kind of followed it, followed it, investigated it, and we can, like I did this in a safe space.

Speaker 1:

I did this with my therapist, but a lot of it can be done by yourself as well, especially if it doesn't involve like a lot of very traumatic and this wasn't it actually but it took me to this place where I realized that I thought I needed to follow a certain set of rules to be to think of myself as being okay.

Speaker 1:

So it led me to this place, to this undiscovered sense of shame that I had about myself and how I was always trying to kind of follow a certain set of rules not really be perfect, but follow this set of rules and do things right, always do things morally right all the time, and it was a tremendous pressure I was putting on myself. I was incredible to come to that kind of understanding only because I had been practicing body scans which made me aware of that clenched jaw. Otherwise, I must have had that clenched jaw so often in my life, but I wasn't paying attention to it. It was just part of my normal existence. So, yeah, that is something that I thought that we needed to kind of just say about how powerful it is to have this knowledge that our emotions are expressed in the body and to find ways to become aware of how our body speaks so that we can start paying attention to our emotions.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and it really does take practice, like I'd love to. I'm just gonna throw something that you had said before. We're just gonna go back to that really quickly. But I'd love to talk about the body scans and the noticing the emotions. But you had said before, you know, with noticing your triggers and stuff like that and the emotional, you know, kind of eruptions inside, obviously it came very obvious to you when you had your child, but then you, like you said, you started noticing it in other relationships. And I'm curious because once I kind of started on this journey too once you have that awareness and understanding in yourself, how much easier is it to see when other people are being triggered and are, you know, overreacting seemingly to a situation and you can kind of tell it's like okay, take a breath. You know, you can kind of see it in them too.

Speaker 1:

I'm wondering if you had the same experience oh yes, oh yes, all the time, all the time. And actually this this is one of one of the things that I'm working on right now is because I can see it in my husband and I can be this very annoying person you would think. You would think, and it's a practice. I'm trying to be, you know, compassionate and understand that the trigger is not in the moment and it's something to do with the past, but because I've had such a great experience, kind of digging into the past and kind of reconciling myself and, you know, making sense of my life and my personality and everything, my go-to will be to tell him you should be doing this work too, which is not, which is not a kind of compassionate thing to do. But yeah, there are. You do notice it more easily in other people and, um, with someone who's not as close as to me, as my husband, because obviously you live with that person and it's it's a lot harder to be kind of compassionate all the time with them. So I am fully human. You know, even though I try, I fail more often than I don't, but at at least I'm trying. But with friends and all, I find that it's easier for me to then reach that place of oh my God, you're hurting because of something else which is going on, and reach into that compassion and empathy piece so that you're not taking it personally.

Speaker 1:

I don't take things personally so much anymore because I know there's something else happening. I mean, of course I need to see my behavior and see if I'm responsible, because in any relationship you know there's, there's always a little, even it's never 100, zero. I mean I'm not talking about abusive relationships and those kind of things, but like normal interactions, there's always it's really 100 and zero. It's going to be 10, 90, 20, 80. So I kind of look for my 10 or 20%, that piece where I need to do something about myself. But then after that I can like, not take it personally and I can be like, okay, there's something else happening for this person. So it's all right, you know, maybe they'll sort it out, maybe they won't, but at least I know that it's not all about me.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I think that's really important to remember and like to just shed some light on that too, is that when we do start to have these understandings and awarenesses in ourselves and then we begin to recognize them in other people, it does give us an opportunity to be more empathetic, more compassionate and, like you said, not take things personally because without having the understanding and awareness, here's this person, you know, getting angry or blowing up or yelling or screaming or reacting over something that just happened that likely involved you as well, and without that understanding and awareness, it's you're automatically going to take it personally because it's like this person is expressing all of this towards me. You kind of have no choice. But when you understand that, oh, you know, this is likely coming from another place which you know probably has nothing to do with me, and then you can kind of remove that and then, you know, stay calm and express that compassion and empathy in their direction, so it all kind of comes full circle, which I find so beautiful. So the body scans the emotions. What I wanted to say about that was you know, it is a practice and it does take practice, and I just want to say that because when I first started kind of doing these myself. I was working with a coach at the time and we were doing NLP and hypnotherapy. It was a little bit of a mix. She's got a lot of training in these modalities would go.

Speaker 2:

You know, we'd kind of lay down and we kind of speak to the, the subconscious mind, and she would ask um, we would, we would work on one emotion specifically in a session, right, so it might be sadness, anger, um, you know any, any of the emotions that we were working through. And she would ask you know, where in the body do you feel it? And for the first little while of doing that I was like, oh God, yes, like what do you mean? And you'd try to kind of you'd tune in and you'd kind of try to listen and scan the body and kind of feel. But it's hard at first.

Speaker 2:

So like I just want to say that if you've never done this practice, if this is potentially the first time you've heard of it, or you're just starting on this journey and starting to do these body scans, like have some grace and like have some patience with yourself, because it does take a little while to kind of get to the point where you can recognize where it is in the body right away and you're not doing it wrong, right, it's just that if you haven't done it before, it's just going to take a little while to get used to it and to get a little more in touch and in tune with the body and being able to really go into those places and recognize. You know what those feelings feel like. So I love that.

Speaker 1:

This is a strategy that you use, a tool that you use, but yeah, I do just want to say because, for my personal experience too, oh, absolutely, I'm the person who gave up on this right. I started doing body scans and and, in like in mindfulness, you either start like head to toe or like toe upwards, and then you go body part by body part and you'll be like toes, and what am I feeling there? Is it tingling? Is it numbness? Is there a throbbing? Is there nothing at all? And then you'll go on to feet and then you'll go on to ankles, and I used to do this and I was like this is insane, insane. Why am I doing this?

Speaker 1:

But I didn't know that emotions express themselves through the body. It just felt so irrelevant to do this. I was like what does it matter? What does it even matter? You know, like as a doctor, it was just like what does it even matter if my right finger is tingling? Like what is the significance of it? There's no significance, unless it's like a symptom which you need to take to your doctor, right? Because as a doctor, these things are symptoms for me. So, unless it's a symptom, why am I sitting in this moment and looking at this? It was so boring, I just gave up on it. I was just like no, I can't do it. This is why I didn't do it for three years, which is why, actually, I try to bring it up whenever I can. But I think what you said is so when I started reading all those child development books and they were like ask a child where in the body they feel their emotion, and I was just like, wait, what I don't feel my emotions in my body, like I don't know what they're even talking about. And then when I started doing it and, you know, started doing the body scan, and I think people can start really brief, like they can shower two minutes because it can be quite boring. I used to use it to put myself to sleep at some point of time because it was so boring, so boring me to sleep, but anyway, uh, I'm just saying you could just do one part of your body, right, you could just do a really quick scan and just something to start getting yourself attuned to these, these sensations.

Speaker 1:

That can that, can that can tell you that there's something physical that you need to attend to, can also tell you that there's something physical that you need to attend to. It can also tell you that there's something emotional and most of the times it's nothing. Right, it's nothing. It's just that it's like learning a language, the language that your body is speaking. Yeah, it's like learning a language, and actually that language is called interoception. It's like our eighth sense besides your touch, taste, smell and and all so there's so much occupational therapy research around interoception.

Speaker 1:

I find that very fascinating, because it's the same way that your body tells you your physical needs and it's the same way that the body tells you your emotional needs, and that that is why so often we get the two mixed up, right like.

Speaker 1:

That's why, when you're hungry and you don't realize you're hungry, you may find yourself snapping at people all the time, right, getting really hangry, because it's the same system that your body is using to communicate. So obviously there's going to be crossed wires and all of that, and which also means that meeting our physical needs in the moment can help us to be more emotionally regulated people, and and I find that fascinating because society wants us to transcend our physical needs, but then it also wants us to be these rational, calm, balanced people all the time. It's like the human body was not designed for that. It was not designed for that. So, yeah, what I love about mindfulness is surgery. You know, you learn so much anatomy. I feel like mindfulness really taught me how we function as human beings in society and it kind of just feels like coming off a circle for me.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I absolutely love how your personal experience and your lived experience of you learning all of these things has now transitioned into you helping others learn. So you have your membership space, the middle path, mindfulness your way and you help others in that space. You know, learn the practices of mindfulness. I'd love for you to tell us a little bit more about that.

Speaker 1:

Yes, the reason I called it mindfulness your way is because a couple of reasons. One is that you know, I stayed away from mindfulness for so long because I thought it had to look a particular way, because I thought it was all about like closing your eyes and sitting cross-legged and, you know, kind of being blissed out and serene, and so, like the PR I like to call it the PR around mindfulness. You know, we, when we say the word zen, we generally mean calm and relaxed and so and the and the thing is, as a society, as a people, as a person, we really want to be those things right, we really want, we long for the calmness and so so it's kind of our desire that we're projecting onto it. But actually mindfulness is very gritty. It's very whatever is present. You kind of accept whatever is present, even if it's anger which is present, even if it is unpleasantness which is present. You kind of accept whatever is present, even if it's anger which is present, even if it is unpleasantness which is present. You're kind of training yourself to accept the present moment and then to meet that present moment with compassion. So I feel like those are the two pillars of mindfulness awareness and compassion. And it doesn't have to look the way. You know it's not prescriptive. You can modify practices to meet you where you are. You don't need to close your eyes. You don't need to look at it as meditation Like some people.

Speaker 1:

They have religious hangups with the word meditation. Some people like me would just love the meditation sort. You could just look at it as a brain exercise. If you have to, like you can reframe things. So a lot of.

Speaker 1:

And then subsequently I discovered that I'm neurodivergent and I have adhd and I've realized that mindfulness is brilliant for folks with adhd, but a lot of them run away from it precisely because of these things. You know I'm not the meditation type. I'm not. I. You know I can't do this, I can't sit still, I can't empty my mind of thoughts. So I realized that there were so many kind of misconceptions around this, built around the stereotype of what mindfulness and meditation is. I really just want to give people ways to use these tools in ways that work for them. And you know, whether you have time or not, whether you can meditate or not, there is a way that that mindfulness can work for you. It, that mindfulness can work for you. It can work for you in your life, in your life situation, you know whether you need to do it for just two minutes a day, whether you need to do it 10 minutes every alternate day, you can make it work for you and even if you can't meditate, even if you can't do all these regular prescriptive looking things, so, yeah, that's why mindfulness your way is my tagline.

Speaker 1:

I know I've gone on about it a bit, but I kind of feel really passionately about it and and and like not, you know, not kind of feeding into that stereotype of being like zen and blissed out all the time. It's going to come when you work through mindfulness. But but it's a journey. It's a journey and it's a tool which can help you. So, yeah and so oh. The other thing is that, because I'm from India and I live in India and I feel very passionately about this, I it's a very low cost membership. So it's seven dollars a month. So that was something that was really important to me as a value to keep it as accessible and affordable as I possibly could. And yeah, that's that's. That's what it is. The membership, that's what it's about. We try and do a different practice every week and I kind of try and organize the practices around a theme. So, like I said, one month we were doing movement-based practices and lately we've been doing a lot around anxiety, different practices that can help you with anxiety. So yeah, that's how it's organized.

Speaker 2:

Fantastic, so it's a very active community. Then you're in there every month, every week, like chatting with teaching. I'm in there all the time. Yeah, yeah, fantastic. I love that. Well, you are such a bright, energetic woman. It's been such a pleasure having you on the show. There's been so many amazing takeaways from this. I really appreciate your vulnerability and just sharing your story and you know the pitfalls and the triumphs and all the things in between. It's been a really fantastic experience to just sit here and have this conversation with you. So I really thank you from the bottom of my heart for being on the show. I'd love for you to just share any final thoughts that you might have and then just where people can find you if they'd like to reach out, take a closer look at your membership, follow you on social media, et cetera.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, just this. I think I said it when I said that, you know, mindfulness is for everyone. It is absolutely for everyone. Every single person, every single person, every single human being I know can benefit from it, and the benefits are going to look different depending on what's happening in your life and you can find a way to make it work for you. And, uh, to that effect, I have, I have, a couple of kind of free resources which I've created which I would love for you to share, as you can, because they can be a taster for people to see, you know, different ways in which mindfulness and compassion can kind of be incorporated into our lives.

Speaker 1:

And so one is this set of five prompts which you can do for mindfulness, anytime, anywhere. You don't need to be meditating or anything, you kind of just read the prompt and kind of go through it and do it. And the other one is this really short 12-minute kind of session which I took for my members, which I made available for everyone, on self-compassion, because initially, when I was starting with mindfulness practice, I focused a lot on the awareness piece, you know, awareness of my breath, awareness of the present moment, you know, not being angry, not being anxious, and what can I do to calm myself down when I'm angry or anxious? And I out on this compassion piece, because mindfulness is like it's the non-judgmental awareness of the present moment, and so non-judgmental can it can seem like a very, uh, neutral word. It can seem like a very neutral word but actually, uh, if we, if we, if we, you know, kind of take it one step further and look at it as compassion, which is a strong pillar of mindfulness, mindfulness becomes very active, it becomes very, very. You act from a place of compassion, you show yourself compassion. It becomes a more active, more kind of practical way to exist in this world.

Speaker 1:

So, yeah, like an intentional way of being, yes, an intentional way of being, and, and you know, compassion always intentional way of being, yes, an intentional way of being. And you know, compassion always includes self-compassion, it always always includes self-compassion, otherwise it's not really compassion. So I kind of have these two resources that I would love to share with people, and I'm active on Instagram. I'm very active on Instagram, so I'm there as Mindfulness with Namesha, at Mindfulness with Namesha, and so, yeah, people are welcome to find me there and I'm happy to chat with them.

Speaker 2:

And yeah, beautiful. Well, thank you for sharing those resources as well. I'll make sure those are all linked through the show notes, and it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2:

I've loved our conversation.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I've loved our conversation.

Speaker 2:

That's a wrap on today's episode. I am beyond grateful for your participation in today's conversation. My intention is that the information shared here today has inspired you to deepen your understanding of your emotional health and that of the people around you. When you're ready to start sharpening your tools, head to wwweqnationorg and download our free seven-step guide to upgrading your emotional health. Our website is the best place to connect with our community and get access to free resources. You can also send us your questions through our social media channels linked on the website wwweqnationorg. All the resources from today's show will be in the show notes linked on the website wwweqnationorg. All the resources from today's show will be in the show notes and before you go, make sure you hit follow so you don't miss an episode. I'm Livia Lauder. See you next time. On Emotions Untapped.