Soul In The Game

We have a special guest to talk about her becoming mother journey. This is very different from normal motherhood journey that I have heard about in my life. We will hear from Shilpa Dhawan from Jersey City, USA. She is a single mother by choice. We will learn more on that soon. She is working in a high flying corporate job in the financial industry. She considers herself very fortunate to be blessed with an adorable baby girl who is currently 3 years old. Currently, Shilpa is a very busy mom answering her daughters "WHYs" :)

A single mom by choice is a woman who decides to become a mother without being in a committed relationship or without the support of a partner. This may involve using assisted reproductive technologies such as sperm donation, or adoption.

Choosing to become a single mom is a deeply personal decision and can be influenced by a variety of factors, such as a desire for motherhood, the lack of a suitable partner, or a need to take control of one's life and future.

While it may present some unique challenges, being a single mom by choice can also be rewarding. It requires a lot of hard work, dedication, and sacrifice, but it can also provide a strong sense of fulfillment and joy. It's important to have a support system of family and friends, as well as access to resources such as childcare and financial assistance, to help navigate the challenges that come with raising a child alone.

Rajitha Bharatan is a Bharatanatyam dancer and Physical Therapist by Profession.

She was introduced into the art form of Bharatanatyam under the guidance of her teacher, Smt Suganda Iyer and later with Manjula Ramamoorthy from hyderabad, India. During her learning years in India, she performed in various dance festivals and also for national television.

Her love to learn and excel the art form, led her to complete various dance exams, take up variety of workshops and volunteer in community events to propagate the dance form.

While she pursued her career in Physical therapy in India, Canada, UK and US, she also continued to perform as a solo artist to represent her art and culture.

Rajitha lives in Phoenix, AZ with her 3 boys and husband, where she continues to actively learn, perform ,teach. Rajita also collaborates with local artists while  pursuing her career as a Physical Therapist.

Rajita also talks about taking care of our body bringing her Physical Therapy expertise in this panel discussion: https://youtu.be/7QRPKBzAH4M

Happy earth month my dear listeners. In this season, I will take you all through a journey of the space where the policies that our dear leaders create or change in order to support our planet, discuss climate change topics, especially research area, including COP27 event that happened in 2022 with my dear friend and a climate change researcher Snighda Nautiyal.

We continue talking to Snigdha about her research today and learn about her process of applying the research on capacity building within sustainability.

Final episode, it was a great pleasure to discuss about research with Snigdha. If you have not listened to previous episodes, go back and check it out. they are less than 10 mins long. In this episode we talk about improving COP, leveraging COP as a voice for climate change leadership and the possibility of bringing changes.

Happy earth month my dear listeners. In this season, I will take you all through a journey of the space where the policies that our dear leaders create or change in order to support our planet, discuss climate change topics, especially research area, including COP27 event that happened in 2022 with my dear friend and a climate change researcher Snighda Nautiyal.

We continue talking to Snigdha about her research today and learn about her process of applying the research on capacity building within sustainability.

Happy earth month my dear listeners. In this season, I will take you all through a journey of the space where the policies that our dear leaders create or change in order to support our planet, discuss climate change topics, especially research area, including COP27 event that happened in 2022 with my dear friend and a climate change researcher Snighda Nautiyal.

In this episode, we discuss the many angles to looking at climate change. Who has the voice to bring climate change conversations? The social part of it, psychological part of it. Bringing art based form to help bring people together through, performances, story telling, visual arts.

Happy earth month my dear listeners.

In this season, we will go through the journey together to explore the policies that our dear leaders create or change in order to support our planet. Go deeper into climate change topics, especially research area, including COP27 event that happened in 2022 with my dear friend and a climate change researcher Snighda Nautiyal persuing her PhD at Arizona State University.

In this episode, we continue our conversation with Snigdha about politics of climate change. Discuss the influences in this space, and capacity building.

Happy earth month my dear listeners. In this season, I will take you all through a journey of the space where the policies that our dear leaders create or change in order to support our planet, discuss climate change topics, especially research area, including COP27 event that happened in 2022 with my dear friend and a climate change researcher Snighda Nautiyal

We will talk about what is COP 27 in detail. COP27 was the 27th conference happened in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt COP 27 covers number of agenda items such as mitigation, adaptation, capacity building, finance ,loss and damage, technology transfer. There will be negotiations that can happen in this events. Some are closed spaces and others are open where attendees are open to observe.

There are also panels, pavilions, activities going on and these are done by civil societies, NGO’s, businesses which are not part of formal negotiations or decision making area. Here they share best practices, networking.

Path to happiness series final episode is on relationships. In this episode, we will go over relationships and the main cause how it can impact our happiness levels. For sustained happiness we need to slowly develop awareness, self-awareness and understanding of our own self. To attain that, the best feedback loop is our relationships. Our relationships gives us metrics, the variables that trigger us and how we respond with emotion.

Every interaction triggers an emotion in us. The emotion is dependent on our memory, our bias, our physical exertion levels. The interaction for me has always made me feel happier about it or not happy about it. And that emotion, becomes the driver for the judgement we make. Every-time the thoughts do NOT match our though that is seen as a threat in our mind and we feel challenged.

While the above drives judgement which directly impact our happiness, the second main driver in relationships is the expectations. Interview of Ratan Tata https://youtube.com/shorts/40xpZ8Z4b40?feature=share where he mentions he does not have to react to other peoples concerns. His entire mind is free to focus on "work" and not worry about these dependencies for happiness.

The question is, why should I expect someone else to make me feel happier? who put those thoughts in my mind to expect them from others? does it provide a sustained levels of happiness?

You know when you are right about something?

You know the feeling of proud which can potentially slide towards arrogance?

In this episode I will share my realization about arrogance to humbleness in a very practical way and the path to happiness. 

When does confidence turns to arrogance? 

Listen to this episode to know more.

Continuing the discussion about parenting based on our experience and learning, Kasturi and I talk about overprotective parenting. The episode explores about things that appear as overprotective parenting, any impacts we may have experienced and how we become aware of this. 

Resources to learn more about this: https://letgrow.org/

Kasturi Karthik is a very passionate advocate of Baby Led Weaning. After becoming mom for the first time 6 years ago, she has dedicated her time  to become the voice of the baby by adopting mindful and present parenting frameworks. I talk to her about all these principles and how  easy/hard it is to adopt these principles living with extended family who can bring in a lot of traditional models into parenting. In this episode we discuss about equal parenting concepts.
YouTube on Casual Sexism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXn2JNRrFNc

Kasturi Karthik is a very passionate advocate of Baby Led Weaning. After becoming mom for the first time 6 years ago, she has dedicated her time to become the voice of the baby by adopting mindful and present parenting frameworks. I talk to her about all these principles and how easy/hard it is to adopt these principles living with extended family who can bring in a lot of traditional models into parenting. We had fun discussing, hope you have fun listening.

Forest helps AZIPL providing technical support for virtual operations. Forest travels between Kenya and Arizona working in construction, project management, and  social entrepreneurship. When not working, you will find Forest hiking at the bottom of the Grand Canyon or high up a mountain cliff rock climbing. Being so productive, Soumya wanted to understand how Forest can manage so many diverse projects without getting overwhelmed. Forest also gives a starter demo of his use of "Notion" tool which he calls it as his second brain. Check out YouTube for video version of this: https://youtu.be/iMX-xmQPPeI

Denisa who loves to learn about Eastern philosophy including Bhagavad-Gita, lives in Romania and runs a bakery. Her and I discuss fundamentals of Yoga philosophy in this episode connecting them to real life examples and small decisions we make in our daily lives. 

Nate Kadlac is all about design. He has a Newsletter and Podcast called "Plan Your Next" where he shares his design thinking ideas every week. Nate being a minimalist entrepreneur, shares his thought process and how he started his journey. You can subscribe to his Newsletter here: https://planyournext.com/ or learn more about him here: https://www.kadlac.com/ 

Shahana and Yaseen had their first child 3 months ago. Being first time parents, they went all in for home-birthing. In this podcast, we talk about their beautiful journey towards home-birthing, decision making, researching and having her lovely daughter Iniyaa. They also run a non-profit called PC for Refugees in Tempe, AZ: https://pcsforrefugees.com/

Maanasi Balakrishnan is one of the purest animal lovers I know of. I have known her for more than 6 years now and she has gone from exploring Veganism to all in to Vegan diet in the past 5 years. They live in China from past 3 years and Maanasi shares her journey going deeper into Veganism along with the challenges, support and discovery their family go through. Her soulful and reflective stories makes it more interesting to listen to her. You can connect with her here: https://www.facebook.com/maanasi.balakrishnan

Brendan Mc Adams loves B2B sales. We can hear his energy, knowledge and soul in this art that he has nurtured from a long time in his career. Brendan just launched his own independent consulting for B2B SaaS sales on April 19th. We talk about his journey, passion and his latest launch. Go here to find him: https://b2bsalescommunity.com/ or on Twitter: https://twitter.com/brendanmcadams

Raghava Sharma's marriage is in May 2021. His fiancée is in India going through this crisis. While she has recently tested positive for Covid-19, Raghava is anxious, worried and feels helpless for his family back in India. He agreed to talk and share about this, because talking helps and sharing will let others know we are may be feeling the same as others. We support our country, pray for this to be over soon and staying positive!

A single-mom of 3 boys, Judy Barreto used to run "Spondeo Montessori" in Giblert AZ. She is deeply devoted to children's learning and worked very closely in structuring the school in an environmentally friendly way. Now, Judy has just started her journey in Eco-Therapy and I wanted to learn all about that. We talk to her about her journey from being the owner of a Montessori, to Mom and transitioning to Eco-Therapy. 

Snigdha Nautiyal is a Climate Change researcher at Arizona State University - School of Sustainability. In this episode we discuss about Climate Change, mental health and cats! This episode covers my good friend's academia perspective and research side about all the news we hear about Climate Crisis. It is not all bad news, there are some actionable items and good news too :)

In this episode, we will meet a Design Thinker, product developer who is living in Zürich, Switzerland. Soleil not only enjoys building products applying design thinking methodologies, she is a plant lady with close to 150 plans inside her home and much more. I had lot of fun chatting with her, hope you have fun listening!

Barb has transitioned from being an air-hostess to IT Project Manager to sound-healing yoga teacher. We talk about her journey from Slovenia to Canada in our podcast. You can find more about Barb and her work here: https://www.instagram.com/yogawithbarb/
This podcast is dedicated to Women's history month 2021.

Hey listeners, in this episode we go deep into Yoga philosophy with Steven Urban. He shares his honest life experiences and how Yoga helped him to manage those difficult emotions in the process. Listen and enjoy!

When I was focused on aasana part more before, I decided to perfectly learn headstand or sheershasaana. It is one of the intermediate to advanced aasanas. In this episode I talk about the technique I used to learn this headstand. If you have a personal story, please share with me and I will mention that in my next episode. Enjoy listening!

In this episode we go over what it is to go through teacher training program during pandemic and online. I have conversation with ASL and English Intrepreter Tiana Boskovich. Enjoy!

Did you know, we need to do warmups even for gentle Yoga stretches. Over the years I have practiced Yoga, I have also injured my body when I have not done warm ups. I have realized it when I changed my practice or went to a different teacher. This episode, I share my perspective on that.

As I started my yoga teacher training program starting this year, I am excited to go deeper into yoga practice and share what I am learning with others. This is the first episode in this series of yoga. Enjoy!