Episode 167: What Grief Taught Me About Business and Life
In this powerful episode, I join grief coach AmarAtma to explore how grief transforms our approach to business and life. We'll share raw, unexpected lessons about resilience, connection, and finding meaning through healing. Our conversation goes beyond survival to reveal how grief can be a profound teacher. If you've ever wondered how entrepreneurs navigate loss, this is for you.
Effective Strategies for Managing Grief and Building Resilience in Business Success
• See grief as a reminder of what you love and how you grow.
Let your emotions breathe instead of trying to run away from them.
Use tools like journaling, venting, or mindful movement to process feelings.
Learn to pause, reflect, and adapt instead of always pushing forward.
Regular body-and-mind care can boost your creativity and clarity.
Celebrate your wins, no matter how small, and let them fuel your future.
Planning ahead doesn’t have to be overwhelming—just keep it simple and focused. Whether you’re aiming for more revenue, better leads, or streamlined products, clear goals and sticking to what works can drive big growth. Simplicity scales, so focus on what truly matters and treat your business like a system that thrives with the right care and tools!
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Resources Mentioned:
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Stay Close to the Money guide: https://join.frenchieferenczi.com/money/
Follow AmarAtma Singh on: Website :https://amaratmacoaching.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amaratmacoaching
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Transcript
00:00:00 Gloria: Hey everyone, welcome back to Small Business PR where we make PR marketing super accessible for the everyday small business underdog. Now you might be surprised by this title. It's not really your typical PR and marketing episode. But the reason why I wanted to have this amazing human being on our podcast is because I have actually shared a lot on this podcast about my own journey with healing my relationship with my mother. And maybe surprising to some people, it was grief and really feeling my mother's grief that allowed me to feel deep compassion for her so that I might heal.
00:00:31 Gloria: And so in speaking about grief, I thought it was really important to have a grief specialist, someone who has helped so many people navigate what it means to let go on the show. He's also a member of our PR community and just an amazing human. So welcome to the show, AmarAtma Singh.
00:00:47 AmarAtma: Yeah, thanks, Gloria. I'm honored to be here. Yeah, grief is a very powerful topic and while it's not common for us to sort of talk about it, it can be sometimes a taboo topic, feels have a lot of heaviness to it. I think it's actually really important so grateful to be invited to your podcast to be able to talk about this remarkably important conversation.
00:01:05 Gloria: So it's funny because grief is something we try to avoid at all costs, but it was actually my greatest teacher by exploring grief. So can you tell me a little bit about how do you define grief and why is it so important for even people listening to this podcast who maybe never thought about it? Why is it important to understand grief?
00:01:23 AmarAtma: Grief is a universal experience, but it lacks universal support. So we often feel very overwhelmed and powerless to the experience of grief because we've never been taught what to do with it, how to manage it, how to manage the big emotions or the thoughts that come in with grief, when it comes to regret or guilt or powerful emotions like anger or sadness. These are very natural, normal human experiences that we have. We often say that death and taxes are the guarantees that we have in our life. But I would also say grief and loss are also guarantees that we're going to have.
00:01:57 AmarAtma: And so the definition I would say that for grief is actually really a reflection of love. We sometimes will say grief is a love story or grief is love that has nowhere to go. And so when we reframe grief in a formation of love, all of a sudden it changes our relationship to what these powerful or sometimes we call negative emotions actually mean for us.
00:02:20 AmarAtma: When we reframe grief in a loving experience, all of a sudden grief becomes a great teacher, like one of the greatest teachers of our life. Because then grief process or grief work or doing grief work or grief oriented processes, we have a way in which we can turn grief into a self-actualizing process. Grief will then teach us about what we love and how we love and what's most important for us. And that really leads us towards a more intentional and loving and present oriented life.
00:02:55 Gloria: That's so true if you think about it, because there's really no love without grief and vice versa. I wanna make sure that we contextualize what we're talking about. And the reason why I wanna have you on is because grief is, as you know, like more than anyone, it's not just about death of a loved one. There's so much more to it. And I think during the time of this recording, we're experiencing an incredible cataclysmic shift, not only in our society with multiple wars happening, but also with the economy. And so for a lot of people, there's a lot of grief in maybe mourning what they thought their business would look like and having adapting to that. So can you in that, like put it into perspective for us, like what exactly is grief and like, why does it relate to even how we build our business and our shifting identities as business owners?
00:03:39 AmarAtma: Well, I think that's very important. A lot of the work that I do is not just death-related grief, but non-death-related grief as well. We sometimes call these intangible losses or ambiguous losses. So grief as a definition is not just about love, but it's also about a change or end of something familiar in our life. Major life transitions are huge and bring up grief response. So grief is not an emotion. It's a response that comes with many emotions at the same time. And so when it comes to businesses or the economy or hopes and dreams that we had from whether it might be a marriage or it might be a relationship or it might be a business, that will lead to grief if it doesn't necessarily evolve the way that we had hoped or dreamed or envisioned it to be that way.
00:04:22 AmarAtma: That's a big deal for a lot of us because when we don't name that as a grief, then there's this part of ourselves that is unconsciously seeking to reclaim that loss. And if instead we own the grief of the transition or pivot into something that is shifting and moving in these non-death related griefs, then we're not spending this energy trying to fulfill a dream that's evolved to something else or reclaim something that's something else. And that's so important because we can then use that energy and that vitality towards another area or focus of our business, of our work, of how we need to pivot or shift and change.
00:05:00 Gloria: Oh, that is absolutely so profound. So would you say that so a lot of people are finding like disappointment, right? Like I worked so hard, it's not turning out to be, maybe I need to pivot. So can you talk to me about like, do we just accept the grief so that we can do the work to let go? Or like, what is the right way to think about it in a healthy way so that, like you said, we cannot get stuck in the spiral of disappointment, self-loathing, and actually use that energy to create something maybe better and more aligned for us?
00:05:29 AmarAtma: I think this is exactly the area where we get stuck in, to be honest. We will all experience grief uniquely and individually because grief is that way. It's a very personal experience. But we get stuck in similar ways. And one of the areas we get stuck is trying to force acceptance and push to let go. That is a misnomer. We often use the five stages of grief to be the conversation of end all, be all around grief, everything. And that last word of the five stages of grief is acceptance. That we think that we're gonna get that sense of peace and resolution, some closure, some completion. It's bogus, okay?
00:06:06 AmarAtma: We have to recognize that grief is an emotional response, which means it's a heart-centered response, not an intellectual one. And we can't be linear or think our way out of it. So instead of acceptance, I like to use the word embrace. Okay? Acceptance is gonna create a false sense of peace. It's gonna create a false sense of conclusion in the journey. And inherently what it's gonna do for you is gonna compartmentalize and fragment your spirit, your psyche and your consciousness.
00:06:34 AmarAtma: And when that happens, then we are in the unconscious reclaiming process. We are utilizing internal vital energy that could be utilized for creative solutions, for new business ventures, for relationships, for energy of networking, that's going into an emotional place that's fragmented within ourselves. And instead, we wanna honor and own the disappointment. We wanna take away the stigma or the judgment or the shame or the minimization or the invalidation that might come across with negative feelings or with difficult feelings and say, it is a disappointment. It did suck. I'm really upset about this. I'm annoyed that this is, I'm frustrated with this.
00:07:16 AmarAtma: And when we can give space and let the grief and the emotions breathe, something very powerful is going to happen. And something that you think is going to happen is not going to happen. Okay? You're not going to drown in the feelings. You're going to give space for empathy, self-empathy, and when you allow that self-empathy and ability to express and to feel, not just think about your feelings, but literally feel that disappointment and be present to it, it's like a flower that blossoms. And when a flower blossoms and blooms, what happens? It wilts away and dies. Emotions are like that as well.
00:07:53 AmarAtma: So instead of forcing acceptance and trying to create the push through, the get over it through letting go, actually causing more difficulty and more harm for you. You're actually putting grief inside of invisible backpack that's making life harder and more difficult for you. Instead, let's create a spaciousness for those emotions. Don't stigmatize, judge or shame what you're feeling. And instead, create a way in which they can breathe. Do some journaling practice, do some somatic work, do some work that gives your body an opportunity to express and feel that disappointment, vent to a friend. And then through that phase, embrace, release, the release comes from the emotional experience. That's how we do this.
00:08:39 Gloria: So you're saying that letting go is still important, but it's not just like you go from one to a hundred of letting go. You have to go through the other phases first before you let go.
00:08:48 AmarAtma: It's part of nature. Let's look at it naturally. Sometimes our human mind and our consciousness, our mind over matters everything. We intellectualize everything, but nature doesn't work like this. All right? Nature works in rhythms. It works in cycles. We have seasons. Without seasons, we don't have life. We don't have oxygen. We don't have photosynthesis. We don't have this breathability capacity.
00:09:08 AmarAtma: And just so we have a digestive system. Okay. We eat food, we have saliva, we have enzymes, we have food that is digested through our digestive system, but know that in our digestive system, the elimination process is the last step. But what are the steps before elimination? What before it goes to the large bowel, the colon? We have absorption and assimilation.
00:09:32 AmarAtma: So inherently, if grief is a self-actualizing process, it's about being a teacher for us, especially in the non-death related grief. We gotta digest life, we gotta digest those decisions. Okay, so what happened? What worked? What didn't work? Okay, let's absorb and assimilate. Let's start to extract between things we can take with us as a business and things that we wanna leave and say, no, we're evolving. No, we're growing. No, this wasn't, I didn't know this a part of myself that I'm growing in this part of the business. Oh, I could anticipate this need of the business. I can anticipate the market trends and the movements of the economy or the business or an election cycle. So is this a way to pivot or is this a way to be patient? How do I absorb that? That's a discerning mind.
00:10:18 AmarAtma: That's also part of a digestive process. The small bowel is doing a lot of that for us. Absorption, assimilation, learning life lessons, extracting the resources and then the elimination comes. That elimination comes as a letting go process as the final piece to that. That's very natural, but it's not the first stage, it's the last stage.
00:10:39 Gloria: Ooh, you really, you know what, this is actually profound for me because I always say that so much of what I've learned in life is as we get older, it's not about holding on, it's about letting go. And so I think letting go just is like the pivotal work that we're all here to do, letting go of our childhood stuff, letting go of our identity, letting go of our scarcity. But how do you get to that letting go?
00:10:59 Gloria: What you're saying is a lot of people emphasize on just letting go, but then they kind of miss the middle steps, which I think is really important because when I think about this, I call it like end stage toxic capitalism that we're in, like in the US, right? You can see that people's livelihoods and their living standards, they're really not where they should be. And so this entrepreneur, and I've bought into it too, this whole thing of like more, more, and growth at all costs. Like you said, it's very not natural. Like what grows year after year without a season, viruses really and cancer.
00:11:31 Gloria: And so what do you have to say with like the current way that we're looking at entrepreneurship and business through the lens of exactly what you're talking about? How can we create a more aligned, a more wise way of looking at the seasons in our business? Because a lot of times when things don't go well, we just are like, okay, let's try next thing and we're constantly just like trying, trying, trying, but we never give ourselves, like you said, that space to just sit in it, be uncomfortable and digest it.
00:11:59 AmarAtma: That's right. I think that we have to learn to be comfortable in the uncomfortable. And inherently any business venture is about embracing uncertainty. We got to recognize that uncertainty is an important part of the equation. We don't know what we don't know, and we don't know how market trends are going to be evolving for us. And so we have to grow a comfortability with uncertainty in a very deep way. We have to grow comfortability in uncomfortable emotions.
00:12:22 AmarAtma: But if we don't do that and we become reactionary to uncomfortable emotions, that's going to drive a lot of our business. We're going to make impulsive decisions that way. But it's important to recognize that capitalism is really a foundation of mind-body dualism. It's an old philosophical thought. And mind-body dualism is saying you and your body is a machine. It's a robot. You're in it and it takes away your experience that emotions are an integral part of our reality. It's saying that we've got a mind over matter. We've got to intellectualize everything. It means keep pushing, keep moving as if you just need to be fueled up with Red Bull or meat or with food and just get going. Keep having sex. Just keep going and push and push and push. And the body doesn't operate that way.
00:13:13 AmarAtma: The body is like nature. It goes through cycles. We have circadian rhythms. We have neuroendocrine hormonal processes. We have ways and cycles that we move through us and emotions are a part of that process, but for a long time in mind-body dualism. And we think about the industrial revolution. We think about the labor class. We think about the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century and how things go.
00:13:37 AmarAtma: So much about what's coming across right now is in the election cycle, is around paid family leave and overtime pay and conversations that are around healthcare that are given to us or supported for us as a right, not as a privilege. A scenario where we have conversations around support for maternal leave and paternal leave so that we can have better relationships for our families at home.
00:14:07 AmarAtma: These conversations are saying, rest, nourish, allow for revitalization and recovery of the body. But capitalism has mind-body dualism. It thinks of us as a machine. So we gotta push and we gotta move forward. We gotta hustle in all ways. That's gonna lead us to burnout. And burnout is when the body is saying, no, I can't. It's an abuse to the body when we go to burnout and push through burnout. Gabor Maté has a great book called When the Body Says No. And grief is a part of that too.
00:14:40 AmarAtma: Because that grief that we're feeling is a vision that we have, a linear process of our mind and where our body is at. We can create an enemy out of our body that says, hey, I want you to be more on board with what we're creating. And the body is saying, I want you to be more on board with me and understand cycles and rhythms. So what we need to do is slow down. What we need to do is take pause. What we need in this scenario is a mindfulness practice. We need to allow for the adrenals and the cortisol and the adrenaline. We need to allow for the fight-flight response to settle down and to allow for the parasympathetic response to come on activation.
00:15:21 AmarAtma: Through that parasympathetic response of relaxation and rejuvenation, we have a lot of creativity. We have a lot of insight. And from that place of transitioning, then there could be a wholeness. And grief is asking for wholeness. It's asking for mind-body interconnectedness, not mind-body dualism. So capitalism really drives a lot of this. And so it's a revolutionary act to care for the body, care for your spirit while running your business. This is a part of a practice that I feel like I've learned to embody within my own entrepreneurship, within my own process. And so I may have to constantly practice because I feel that need to push and at all ways, at all costs.
00:16:02 Gloria: Yeah. Oh, what you said is so profound. It reminds me of my journey of burnout. I grew my business pretty quickly and I did not give my body to rest. And the body knows, right? Like you said, I developed a 13-centimeter fibroid tumor in my uterus. And when I got it taken out and I saw that mass, which is literally stuck energy, I started to realize like all the chakras and like how it was very symbolic of how I was running my business in my life. And it wasn't about flow. It was about pushing at all costs. The more I work, the more I make. So therefore, I always had to always keep feeding this machine.
00:16:36 Gloria: And from giving myself no time to rest after my open abdominal surgery, I went into a mental spiral and burnout. And so that's when I realized like this is really dangerous. It's amazing that as entrepreneurs, we have our own schedules, but I also think when it's unchecked, it can just be this narrative of like, I can always be doing more. Why am I not doing more? I need to be doing, and it's just this endless thing. So that freedom that we have also needs to have boundaries. And so this is a really good reminder.
00:17:05 Gloria: What about... I want to talk about seasons because I think that is very important in business and something that people talk about but they don't embody. So like, yeah, I'm going through this phase, but then they don't actually go through the phase. They're thinking about solutions and I'm very action oriented. So I know that too. How do we know if we're properly grieving and giving ourselves rest and honoring the seasons when maybe we're like action taking, low-patience entrepreneurs who'd like to spring into action? How do I know when is enough time that I've given myself rest before really going forward?
00:17:37 AmarAtma: That's a great question and in some of that question underneath that question is a little bit of a fragmentation in it as well. So this is a real radical-based thinking in terms of shifting our mindset about how we think about grief. It doesn't happen one or the other. The mind is always gonna wanna make things in black and white terms and labels and categorize things. We're gonna recognize that it's happening simultaneously. The heart can hold what the mind can't understand.
00:18:03 AmarAtma: We think that a lot of the power is in the brain, but actually what we know from neuroscience and a lot of the polyvagal theory is that the heart is communicating 80% to the brain where the brain is communicating to the heart 20%, okay? Efferent and afferent nerves, the way that the communication of that super highway between the heart and the head is in relationship to 80% of the heart is communicating to the brain and 20% of the brain to the head.
00:18:28 AmarAtma: The heart can hold what the mind can't understand. The heart can hold abstraction. There is an invitation for emotional intelligence at a greater level, because when you can learn to hold two things as true at the same time and not feel in conflict, not feel in duality of it, this is where the magic starts to happen. This is where you can then be able to grieve and take action at the same time. This is where you can have a discerning mind about when is it to really push and move and when is it to relax and rejuvenate, meditate deeply and be in a potentiality of energy as opposed to a kinesthetic form of energy. How is it that I can go to a receptive place, to an active place, active place to a receptive place?
00:19:15 AmarAtma: That movement is a beautiful infinity flow that exists within the power of the heart. The heart isn't just a place of emotions, it's also a place of wisdom, of inner insight, of like almost a wise advisor or a mentor that can be able to be in tune with past and future at the exact same time. The mind has a very difficult time managing all this. The mind is in categorization. The mind is trying to understand things and make sense of things and categorize. It's a very beautiful computer, but it's not the only part of this process.
00:19:51 AmarAtma: When we can understand that we can hold multiple things as true at the same time, it's not an either or, it's how we do that simultaneously. And to embrace the grief or to embrace the wintering or to embrace the process of slowing down and then knowing when to be active, slowing down, being clear where we want to take trajectory or action. That is a wisdom place of the heart that is very, very much needed in our entrepreneurial journey. And that will also make every part of the grief much easier, so much easier, so much so that you can receive the nuggets of the truth that grief as a teacher has to offer.
00:20:27 Gloria: So you have such amazing experience with this because you actually teach what it means to like embody grief and then let it go through somatic exercises. So I'd love to know from you, how do we know when we're on the edge of burnout or like not aligned, but our ego and our thirst is always telling us, no, you can do more, you can do more. How do we know that when we're not in alignment? Let's talk about that. And then I wanna talk about when we actually know what we can do to start to reframe, rebalance so that we can get back on track.
00:20:59 AmarAtma: Burnout is going to be the experience around, depending, there's very varying layers to this. But when you're sharp, you're agitated, you're irritable, you're projecting onto other people, especially those closest to you, when you're not taking time to eat or to drink water or to sleep, these are areas that you're pushing. You're pushing, right? So there's an emotional component, there's a physiological component. If we're feeling like there's an increase of insomnia, if we're feeling that there's low appetite or like a voracious appetite, but we're not eating well, we're not slowing down, we're constantly pushing, that is indications for us that we're leading towards a high pressured system existing for our body and our body is trying to catch up for that.
00:21:47 AmarAtma: Now, when we go into burnout to exhaustion, that's when you feel like, I gotta have that extra cup of coffee because I'm more tired than normal. I'm too tired to even sleep. I'm falling asleep in places that I shouldn't be falling asleep to. This is where your body is now, in a critical state that needs full on relaxation. So there's varying levels to the experience of burnout. When you feel like you're laying out to your coworkers, to the people's closest to you, I tell you that agitation, that irritability, it's form exhaustion, okay? So that's a core component to that.
00:22:23 AmarAtma: What is it that we can then do in that particular thing? I love the work of Nap Ministry on social media. Oh, it's beautiful because it's talking about relaxation as a revolutionary act. You see, when we are in survival mode, we are not thinking clearly. We are not thinking clearly. We are not in prefrontal cortex executive mind. We are in amygdala, we are in a fight or flight mode. We are in alarm system mode.
00:22:51 AmarAtma: So the work of radical relaxation, taking naps, going out to Central Park, looking at the trees, do some bird watching, taking a moment to be with friends in a non-business networking agenda oriented way, going for walks, activating a mindfulness practice of slowing down and relaxing, taking a couple of minutes throughout the day, doing body-based awareness practice, feeling your feet into the ground, slowing down your breath. These are all ways that we will naturally start to transform the experience physiologically that is existing in that realm of burnout.
00:23:34 AmarAtma: This will then increase, interestingly, neuroscience is sharing, when we start to practice mindfulness, not only do we start to feel relaxed, but brain centers start to open that incorporate compassion and empathy and creative solution. Mindfulness is actually one of the most effective ways to activate the executive mind and clear mind because it'll make the prefrontal cortex more engaged with us.
00:23:58 AmarAtma: So that's the heart-mind unity that we're looking for, not the mind-body dualism that we feel like we're fighting with all the time. We've got to embrace the body. We've got to nourish the body. The body is our best friend. And when we can take an opportunity to offer that, it will serve us with clear thinking, clear trajectory, discernment. There's a lot of ways we can, there's a lot of techniques and practices, somatically that we can do, meditations, guided visualization, affirmations. There's so many practices that we can do to help bring ourselves back to a much more aligned experience to serve our business, to serve our work.
00:24:38 AmarAtma: They don't have to be relaxation response means, I'm being lazy sitting on the couch and not doing anything. No, relaxation is an active, engaged process of body relaxation, of relaxation response. And you can actually be a wealthy, driven, ambitious, high achieving person without burning out. You can have effortless action. You can have energy while feeling relaxed. You can have the experience of being in a flow state without it burning out your adrenals and making you in a chronic stress experience.
00:25:13 Gloria: Yeah, and I will say what you said is absolutely true. A lot of times we're like, oh, well, you know, it's easier said than done. No, it actually 100% is fact based because what I did is after my burnout, I invested heavily in semantics. And by the way, if you're not following AmarAtma, please do, because he has free somatic exercises you can do to get into your body so that those moments of clarity can come out.
00:25:37 Gloria: I noticed that when I did slow down and I just did like tapping and shaking and let the energy move through my body instead of swirling in my head, I was so much more productive. And to give you like a case in study, raise your hand if you have ever gotten great ideas while you're in the shower or if you're running. And there's a reason for that. Your good ideas are not coming when you're in your daily to-do list.
00:26:02 Gloria: And so I think all of those real fact-based examples show us that we benefit tremendously when we unplug, when we relax, when we move. And so that's exactly what you're talking about because it actually is true. You get your best moments of clarity. Have you ever felt like, I know I was at a crossroads with my business, and whenever I feel like I need to make a decision, I just, I go somewhere quiet and the answers come to me. So it absolutely is true.
00:26:31 Gloria: Do you have any other, because you've shared so many different ways that we can get into our bodies so that we can open those neural networks and have clarity instead of being on survival. Do you have, like, what's your favorite exercise or routine for our listeners that they can take action on today?
00:26:46 AmarAtma: Great, I'll share with you a couple. What I'd like you to do is wherever it is that people are sitting and listening to this, you can practice this or you can pause it and come back to it at another time. This is gonna be, I'll teach you two or three exercises for you right now. What I'd like you to do, and Gloria, you and I can do this together, take a nice deep breath. Good, and just exhale, relax. Very good. One more time, take a nice deep breath and then just relax the breath. Beautiful.
00:27:16 AmarAtma: Now what I'd like you to do is inhale through the nose, very slowly, and pause for just a moment. Now purse the lips and exhale very slowly through your mouth and make that exhale very controlled and make it as long as you possibly can.
00:27:45: Good. When you're ready, now take a nice deep inhale. Fresh breath in, hold for a moment. Once again, purse the lips and slowly exhale. And feel a coolness on your lips, extending that breath out. Make it long, controlled.
00:28:17 AmarAtma: Very good. Take a nice deep breath and then just relax the breath very comfortably. Very good. Good. This is gonna automatically put you from a sympathetic fight flight response to a parasympathetic relaxation, rejuvenation response. Okay.
00:28:37 Gloria: I feel so relaxed already. And that was what, like 15 seconds?
00:28:40 AmarAtma: Very quick. It's the fastest way to do it. It's the fastest way. You can do it any time as well. Dinner table with the family, political conversations, at right before you start working for the day. There's so many avenues in which you're gonna be able to apply this.
00:28:53 AmarAtma: All right, here's a bit of a somatic practice, okay? What I'd like you to do is raise the arms up over the head, inhale the breath, and then drop it, exhale. Whoo. Good, inhale the arms up over the head, and then powerfully exhale. Whoo. Let the arms go. Good.
00:29:11 AmarAtma: Now just shake your hands and shake them from the, shake your hands, but when you shake, this gushy area of your thumbs, yeah? Shake from that part, and start at the lower part of your body. Good. Good. Now shake from the middle part of your body. Good, and raise your arms up, and then raise your arms above the head and shake above your head. Good.
00:29:32 AmarAtma: And what we're gonna do is we're gonna inhale here, and we're gonna exhale through a long sigh as we move the arms up and down. So inhale here. Ah! Good. Inhale the arms up, keep shaking. And lower. Ah!
00:29:52 AmarAtma: One more time. Go up! Ah! And now take a nice deep breath up. Smooth breath in and drop an exhale. Ha! Good one more time. Deep breath. And drop an exhale. Ha! Very good. just allow yourself to take a nice deep breath and then close your eyes on your exhale. Now that's a letting go practice. Okay? Good.
00:30:21 AmarAtma: And here's the last one for you. Okay? Put one hand on your heart and the other hand over. Good. And just allow yourself to take a nice deep breath. And close your eyes on your exhale.
00:30:37 AmarAtma: Now imagine breathing in and out through your heart as if your heart has a mouth. And you inhale through your heart and you exhale through your heart. Very comfortably, very slowly. And just for a moment here, we're just consciously inhaling and exhaling through the heart. Good.
00:31:13 AmarAtma: Now what you can do here is keeping the hands here and continuing to breathe slowly. I'd like to just have you remember a time or visualize a time of great appreciation, great love, great gratitude. And for those who want to work specifically on their business, part of their business they feel really proud of. You know, like you overcome something really difficult for yourself as an entrepreneur. And you're just so stoked for how things have evolved in that courageous movement through fear.
00:31:55 AmarAtma: It could be the smallest thing. It could be a big thing. It's not about money. It's not about network. It's really about something that you personally overcame and you're stoked about that. Experience that moment. See yourself and that pride and that confidence, that deep appreciation for the hard work that you went through in it.
00:32:25 AmarAtma: As you visualize it, step into that visual. Feel that celebration inside your body right now, inside your heart. Continue to breathe in and out through your heart. As you experience this joy, this overcoming triumphant achievement based process.
00:32:57 AmarAtma: And let go of the visual, let go of the memory, but continue to feel in your body. Experience that triumph. A personal story that maybe nobody else knows but you. Feel it through your body and breathe in and out through your heart. Very good. And a nice deep breath. And then release. Ha!
00:33:34 Gloria: I'm ready for a nap now. You've put me in a state of total calmness.
00:33:40 AmarAtma: A relaxation response.
00:33:43 Gloria: Yeah, that's definitely something. So what do you say that, so obviously this is on a daily micro scale, right? How do we achieve more of this in our business? Not just only in semantics, but the way we think, because we do spend a lot of our time thinking and not doing enough of these.
00:33:59 AmarAtma: Well, I think that comes back to that embracing, taking out of that mind-body dualism, that intellectualization, and saying how taking care of my body, taking care of my emotions, honoring how it is that I feel, being honest about that experience, journaling it out, talking it out, releasing it and not keeping it inside actually serves you and serves your business. And while it might be something that seems indirect, we're coming to know more and more through modern science that it's actually a direct relationship to creativity, to finding solutions and to finding more joy. Why is it that we are doing our business in the first place? What are we seeking to achieve?
00:34:43 AmarAtma: For most people, it's not just money. There's something about a service or a product of something they wanna alleviate in a person's life or they wanna have more of in their life. Underneath the why is an emotion, underneath that why is something that is inspirational and motivational from an emotional heart-oriented place. Tap into that energy there and know that that is gonna serve every aspect of your business. It's not the how, it's not the what, it's not even the why. It's underneath that is at an emotional, body-based level. That is gonna serve and at the same time, it's gonna help to alleviate your grief.
00:35:23 Gloria: Yeah, and I think, you know, just another example of this is, I actually hired a CMO for my business for content because content was something that was like such a drudgery zone for me, like, ugh! So much I need to create. And once I worked on getting over whatever that fear was of being seen, of being too authentic, letting that go, I actually let go of my CMO because she wasn't able to actually grow my audience at all because she doesn't know me like I do. I started to feel that content was no longer a burden. And I'm back to writing my emails and the content is flowing.
00:35:59 AmarAtma: Good. Good for you.
00:36:00 Gloria: And so that's, yeah. And I wish all entrepreneurs could go through this because I think content is a lot of times where we get stuck. It just feels so heavy. It feels like it's something we have to do. It's almost like, ugh, it's not innate within us. When actually we have so much content and stories, but we're just blocked from accessing that. So I think what you have taught us has honestly help me as well. And that's something that everyone can do to dig into that. If you do feel like your content's heavy, if you do feel like bogged down, like do these exercises, it will absolutely make you let go of whatever it is that's preventing you from creating more content. So thank you for that.
00:36:34 AmarAtma: More than just letting go, it's actually gonna bring you closer to yourself. And when it becomes, when you become closer to yourself, grief has a self-actualizing, when you come closer to yourself, the words, the content comes out of you. It's the flow state of creativity. Most of us were running away from ourselves. Let's say run towards yourself. That's what we're talking about with grief work. No. Embrace it, not just accept it, to push it away and let it go and avoid it. No, let's embrace it. Let's honor it as a part of our natural, normal human experience.
00:37:05 AmarAtma: So many of us are running away from ourselves like we're running away from grief or running away from uncomfortable emotions. We got to learn to be with that and that authenticity, that genuineness is very important for every part of our business. I knew this, I live it. I live it within my own work as well. Very powerful.
00:37:21 Gloria: And you also grew your content organically from zero to over a hundred thousand followers by being yourself. And you could, you know, if you had felt like that, we were on, you were blocked or that was, cause there's a lot of content. I don't think you would have grown the way that you do. But when we do see your content, it doesn't seem like it's a chore for you. It seems like it's coming within a deeper part of you, your mission and your values.
00:37:43 Gloria: And so for anyone that's listening, if you do feel stuck in your content, if you do feel like your experience a shift, come back to this episode, right? Please follow AmarAtma. Do you... So now, I mean, I could talk to you for hours about this. I mean, this is so complex and there's so many layers to this. But what is the one thing you want to leave our audience with? A thought, anything?
00:38:04 AmarAtma: There is nothing wrong with you. Who you are as a person, all of your life experiences grows us to being something unique and original. Own it. You're special. Feel it. Don't run away from it, run towards it and see what your unique special gifts are that could bring the world to making it a better place to whatever product or service that you are providing. It is special.
00:38:31 Gloria: And it's an honor to have you as like someone who is doing that and living that. And what a privilege that we get to do that through our business. So how can people find out more about you and get more into this work?
00:38:42 AmarAtma: Yeah, I'm very active on social media. Instagram is the fastest and easiest way for us to connect. @amaratmacoaching is the simplest way. I'm very active on there. If you want to DM me, feel free. amaratmacoaching.com is my website. I have a coaching business around grief work as well as bringing more aliveness into life and bringing more joy, which are the two most challenging emotions is joy and aliveness. And so through grief work, we can create a little bit more love and joy and aliveness into our life. And I got a lot of services and ways that I could support you in that journey.
00:39:14 AmarAtma: But you got this, like, Gloria, like it's amazing. Good conversation, good podcast, good job about bringing in this emotional component, human oriented pieces to the business. I'm grateful for you to integrate the human components of our entrepreneurship and not just, you know, business versus personal, professional versus personal. Like, way to integrate it, well done.
00:39:34 Gloria: Yeah, and I think we're getting to a time where like people's intuitions are heightened and you can tell right away when someone is using their business just purely as like a cash machine and someone who's doing it almost like art.
00:39:45 Gloria: One thing I want to leave our audience is that you said something that was so profound and maybe you should talk about it, but you said something about the way you looked and the work that you do and why it's important for access and equity because so much of what we do here is to bring different voices to the table and maybe challenge the status quo. Can you talk? Do you remember what you said about that?
00:40:05 AmarAtma: When I decided to be more on social media and to want to do my work, I felt very nervous because I'm an Indian man who's a Sikh with a beard and I don't want to come across as a guru nor did I want to come across as something other than myself. And so when I decided to do social media, I kind of did a pact with myself that I wanted to put my face on my content. And I wanted to, when I said I didn't want to run away from me, I wanted to run towards me. So who am I? And I wanted to put myself there on my social media.
00:40:37 AmarAtma: That's been very powerful and that work towards visibility, that work towards smallness, that work towards some the shame components of there's something wrong with you, there's something not right about you or something fundamentally that needs to be changed about you. I had to confront those things within my content within my work, but I wanted to embody that to be able to live the transformation I'm wanting to help people with in my work.
00:41:01 AmarAtma: And so I made that as a pact with myself that I wanted to put myself all over my social media and make sure that people can see me as myself. And I would go further than that. Not only see me as a brand, but see me as a person. I don't want to be put on any pedestal. I don't want to feel like any sort of perfection around any of this. I wanted to be a human being. I want to show the awkward, messy, imperfect parts of myself because I wanted to live that with others and bring that.
00:41:27 AmarAtma: I think shame and grief, you know, grief is very powerful, but shame is there too. It's very toxic. And it can make us distort the way we think about ourselves, the way we think about our work, to distort the way we think about our businesses. And I was in direct confrontation of all of that within my content and my creation. So I wanted to come across as genuine as I possibly could on social media, within 30 seconds of a reel or a one minute reel, sometimes it's very difficult, yeah.
00:41:50 Gloria: Yeah, and you said something, you know, I have a long beard, I have a turban, like people either think like guru or terrorist. And the fact that you are, because you know, when I think about coach, I don't think about someone that looks like you. And so I think it's so powerful that you're like, I'm not going to hide who I am. People will make the judgments whatsoever, and I'm still going to embody this fully and be a grief coach for people who don't see me as the typical coach when you close your eyes and think of a coach.
00:42:16 Gloria: And I think that's so powerful. And that's the work that we're all here to do and why my business exists as well. And so I'm honored that you're doing this work and all judgments aside, you're going forward and like putting your face on everything and being like, yes, like someone that looks like me can absolutely hold space and be a grief coach too. So that's beautiful. So thank you for doing this work.
00:42:35 AmarAtma: Thank you, Gloria.
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