Feminist Founders Subscriber-Only Podcast

Becky Mollenkamp: Hey, hey! Today's guest is Deepshikha Sairam, who is a spiritual mentor and the author of Journey Home to Self on Substack, which I will link to in the show notes. I'm hoping that more people discover it because she's amazing. She has a wonderful podcast as well, and that's actually how we met and I'm just so thrilled that she's part of this. I love that she's talking about that journey home to self. That's what this whole episode is about. She went deep, gave me so much to think about. I think it'll be the same for you. So if you want to continue to learn from her, make sure you subscribe to her newsletter on Substack. She is a spiritual mentor to high achieving women, which is probably you or you were at least a high-achieving person who cares about social justice, equity, having a world that's decolonized, and that is what we're going to talk about because it all starts from within. So I hope you enjoy this episode. Thank you for listening.
Becky Mollenakmp: Hello Deepshikha, thank you for agreeing to this conversation with me. I'm really excited to talk about spirituality without all the patriarchal BS because as we know, the spiritual and wellness spaces are riddled with all sorts of white supremacist patriarchal capitalist stuff, um, and I'm excited to see that you're doing that work to try and challenge those things. And so I want to start by talking about decolonizing the space that you're in and maybe just getting started by asking you as I'm asking quite a few people who are trying to do that kind of decolonizing work. How you think about decolonization? How would you define that or what does it mean to you?
Deephshika Sairam: Thank you so much, Becky, for asking that question. I don't think that we give this question a lot of thought and it's so important. First of all, I want to start by acknowledging that this word can be very loaded and it can be very triggering, especially for marginalized communities. I was born and brought up there and we were colonized by the British for over 200 years. And so this word is not an easy word for anyone who has been in a situation where they've felt that they've been colonized, by the way, we've all been colonized by patriarchy, but specifically with the history has shown that there's been years and years of colonization. This word can be triggering, it can be, it can come with a lot of emotions, so I want to acknowledge that for everyone. Now, I love this question because we can talk so much about this. I'm going to talk about it in the context of our inner journeys, you can call it your spiritual journey. I call it a self-discovery journey home to self. That's what I call it. Now if you look at the term decolonization, in the simplest terms, the meaning is freedom. It's when the country that colonized that part of the world, leave it. If you talk about in terms of colonization, how it was used back when the British Empire were colonizing the entire world and of course other countries as well. Decolonization in its simplest tone means freedom. So for me, I want to go a step further and I want to use the term sovereignty. Not only do I love this word, but also I think it describes decolonization in depth versus just freedom. When we talk about sovereignty and the meaning of the term sovereignty Google is supreme authority. A power and when we talk about our inner journeys we want to be able to have a supreme authority or power towards what our inner journey looks like. So when I think of my spiritual journey, I want to be able to decide what that means for me, what my spirituality means for me rather than conforming to what authority figures have told me what patriarchy has told me, or what the world is telling me. And without the the spiritual bypassing and conforming to, let's say, a religion, conforming to any standards. The biggest question that we can ask ourselves is, who am I? Who am I? And all of us ask that question at some point in time of our, you know, in our life. Some people ask it at 7 years old. Some people ask you that 95 when they're on their deathbed, and most of us ask it during our middle years, the midlife crisis, which is, by the way, is coming sooner and sooner. I feel like for me it started at age 36. And when I started asking myself that question, who am I? It took me on this inner journey of self-discovery, where I was discovering who am I, without the narratives that I've learned from the world around me without the authority figures telling me what I should do with my life or how should I be in my life? So for me, decolonization means having supreme authority, having the sovereignty over my life in deciding how my inner landscape should look like, and answering that question, who am I without conforming to patriarchy, which in the world that I work in is the colonizer. I'm gonna go a step further though. Now when the British left India, they just didn't leave India. They left after 200 years of plundering and divide and conquer and basically, the country was in a mess, as it happens when a colonizer leaves. So for me, I want to go a step further when we talk about decolonization. So one is, of course, freedom. Second is going a step further, sovereignty. And the third is restoration. Restoration to what it was originally, which is what a lot of indigenous cultures are trying to do. They have fought to do to maintain that originality in the culture to maintain that integrity of what their place was, what their culture was, what their rituals were. And that is the hardest. Because after you've been plundered and robbed, it's a really hard journey to go back to that originality, to go back to that restoration. And in the spiritual sense, I think of that restoration as the journey home to self, the self that is pure, the self that is not conforming to patriarchy, the self that is not people pleasing, is not doubting, beliefs in the unlimited capacity of a human. And that comes with a lot of healing that comes with healing, that comes with regulating our nervous systems. That comes with recognition and acceptance that yes, we have been plundered. So it's a long answer, but to me, decolonization just does not mean my supreme authority, my inner energy, restoration, healing, regulation. So that's for decolonization means to me and I really hope that this is something that is available to all of us. Because it's a harder part, specifically the healing is the hardest part, but it is difficult to all of us.
Becky Mollenkamp: Thank you so much for that really detailed and thoughtful answer. It's very helpful for me certainly as someone who is white and has a different experience, right, background and understanding of decolonization. Not just in the literal sense, I suppose, but also what does it mean to bring it into your personal development work. And so, that's sort of where I want to go next, which is how do you begin to bring that to your personal development work? What looks different when you are trying to find that journey home to self when you're doing it in a decolonized way, in a way that is not so much of what we see out there, which is sort of just like, just love yourself. That feels unhelpful, I think for most people that's sort of toxic positivity sort of thing of, think happy thoughts and love yourself. For most of us, I think that doesn't ring true, probably because of this colonization piece. But then if we aren't able to just sort of do that ‘think happy thoughts’ stuff, sometimes personal development work feels overwhelming or impossible. It feels like you can't get your hands around it, like if we aren't just happy all the time, what does it mean to learn to love yourself? I think for so many people who will listen to this, they're going to say, ‘I don't even know who my true self is. I don't even know how to begin to find that person.’ So what's different? I know you can't give us everything, but what's a starting place? What looks different when you start to think of this journey home to yourself through that decolonized lens?
Deepshikha Sairam: Right, I'm going to say something really radical here, Becky. I think self-love is bullshit. I mean, it's great when you can love yourself, but self-love is also like a mirage. It's there one day, it's not there another day. And I do think I have a theory about this that striving for self-love is a psy-op by patriarchy because if you are going to always strive for self-love you will always buy more and more things you are always going to strive for more and more things in your life. But self-love is an utopia. So I think that should not be the goal. How about the first step is we change the goal post? That in order to journey home to self or look for meaning in life or living a fulfilled and meaningful like or decolonization, we don't strive for self love anymore. I think, according to me, and that's been my journey, self-compassion and self-acceptance is a way better goal or something to strive for. I mean, think about it, if I can accept myself on days when I feel ugly and on days I feel beautiful, I have taken my power away from patriarchy. I have taken my power away from those who are not willing to give me my power, who are not willing to give me my voice, my agency over my serenity. If I say that I am, yeah, I am ugly and I'm beautiful. And I am fat and I am thin. And I am totally shameless, and I am completely ashamed of myself. And these are the two spectrums, I think we see life in such polarity. But in fact, if we can accept the duality of our life that maybe one day I will wake up and I will have dark circles under my eyes and I will be extra bloated that day. I would not fit into my shorts, and I would not love myself that day. And it's OK. I can still have compassion for myself and I can still accept myself. And the next day I might feel amazing. My hair might feel beautiful, my skin will glow, and I feel amazing, and I'm just giving an example in terms of beauty because that's what people usually relate to but it could be anything right? It could be your finances. It could be related to your business. It could be how you feel about mothering. It could be anything. But if you accept yourself rather than striving for always loving yourself, it's a very difficult path, and we will be striving for more and more things in our life. So I will give you the first step, and the first step is everything. The first step is, let's change the goalpost. Let's not go for self love, and I think it's a very radical move. It's a very bold move by women when they say fuck it like I'm not gonna love myself every day, but you know what I am gonna accept myself. There is a poem that I wrote and it's essentially on the duality and it says that, you know, I'm not going to say the whole poem, but it starts with that what I have come to know of life, holy of the holiest truths that I'm both ugly and beautiful, flawed and perfect, deeply loved and unlovable, and I dance between the two spectrums, and I’m sometimes here, I'm sometimes there, often neither here nor there. And the thing is that when you accept both parts of yourself, then you're taking your agency, you're taking your power, and other people can judge me for having bags under my eyes and for not shampooing my hair and no having makeup on my face when I show up for a Zoom call or having gray hair or having a flabby tummy or you know, giving my kids maybe a peanut butter and jelly for lunch and dinner both, whatever it is. You can shame me for maybe not making enough money in my business, or making a lot of money in my business, but it's not gonna affect me because I accept both parts of myself. I accept the fact the part of myself that is savvy enough, that has the marketing skills, that is a good mother, and I also accept that part of me that is stern to my kids, screams at my kids, and wakes up with a bloated tummy. So I think when they do that, and it is hard, but it is also a very, very radical move, and I think that's the first step that we have to take. I also want to say on the part where you talked about, you know, most women who are listening to this, don't even know who they are. 100%, I agree to it. I don't know who I am. And I don't think anyone does, and I don't think that's the point. There's a great book that I read earlier this year. It's called The Covenant of Water. It's not a personal development book, it is a fiction book, beautifully written. And there is a quote in that book. There is a character that says this, and I think this applies to this whole concept of who am I? What is my purpose? What is the meaning of life? Is this all it or who is my true self? And the quote is ‘sometimes we have to live the question, not push the answer.’ And I think that is the whole point of asking this question, this question that has been alive for generations and has been asked by sages and the enlightened ones and the, you know, tired mothers and everyone in between. Who am I? What am I here for? What is my purpose? And I don't think that we need to push for the answer. I think the point is that we have to live this question, and somewhere in between let the answers come to us. And sometimes it doesn’t and sometimes it does. And it’s again a mirage. It’s a utopia. Some days you feel like you’ve got it, you’ve got the answer, you know who you are. And the next day you feel like I don’t fucking know who I am. So I think, you know, if we can think about it differently. I don't think that our personal development journeys have to be so complicated, we don't need a three-step process. We don't need to go on year-long pilgrimages, we don't need to meditate for hours and hours. I think these are very tiny one-degree shifts that we need to take. These tiny paradigm shifts that hm, you know what? Fuck self-love. I don't want to strike for self-love. I recently saw on a Zoom call that, you know, my hair is completely grayed out like my roots are showing, and to me it was like holy shit, like, you know, I look unkempt to me. And then the next day I was looking at another angle in the mirror. I'm like, it doesn't really look so bad. And I’m not against coloring my hair. I will do it and, you know, anyone can do whatever they want. But I'm also not right now in a rush to do it, so just this morning I was like, OK, you know what, let me just make an appointment and I got it for a month out. And I was just thinking about this, the old me would have panicked, would have been like, holy shit, I have to go to a party on Sunday, and my gray hair will be showing and what are people going to think? And this time, I was like, I don't even care. I don't care. I accept myself as who I am. It doesn't mean that I'm not gonna to color my hair. It doesn't mean that I'm not gonna groom myself, but in this moment, I'm not striving for self-love based on a particular thing that I can get. I am striving for self-acceptance and self-compassion. And it can be very hard to get there. But I think the first step for us is to understand that self-love is not the goal. The goal is to accept our duality.
Becky Mollenkamp: I love that so much and it feels like it speaks to everything that I have been learning as I go down this journey and have more and more conversations with folks who are doing decolonization work or doing liberatory work that the answer is almost always in the end. But liberation is really about is freeing yourself from the binary in all the ways that either I love myself or I hate myself, or that I have to perfectly love myself or I am a failure at this whole journey home to self, right? And I think the very piece of like, it can be both. It can be one day. I love my gray hair and one day I hate it and that's OK because I still accept myself. And I think that's absolutely beautiful. So thank you for sharing that. And I wanted to ask you about sacred feminist nd wisdom because you're your substack is a gathering place for women who are walking the path to their true self, which we've been talking about true self, and then that you explore sacred feminine wisdom, myth, and embodied spirituality without the patriarchal BS and toxic positivity, which we've also been talking about, but I haven't really asked you what what do you see as sacred feminine wisdom and how does that play a role in the things we're talking about around self-acceptance.
Deepshikha Sairam: So before I answer that for you, I want to give a little bit of a backstory for me so that people have context and people can relate to it. A few years ago, 2 or 3 years ago, I had a business mentorship practice. It was a full practice. I had a lot of clients. I was doing really well. And there was this, after I started my business, after everything, after I got to the certain stage in my business where it was successful in quotations on paper, making multiple six figures, lots of clients, lots of media features, there was this feeling of what is all this for? Because nothing was ever enough. The multiple six figures was not enough. The roster of clients was not good enough. The social media following was not good enough. And I'm not saying I had a huge following or anything like that, but still, whatever it was, it was not enough because I was always striving for more. So there was this period in my time where I started questioning what is all this for? Like what am I doing all this for? And there was always need for more and more. It was never enough.I started feeling, and I felt it, and I'm gonna give you a few metaphors that your audience can probably relate to it, I felt it as a glass of sparkling water that has been left on the counter overnight. It was still a glass of sparkling water, but it was flat. That's how I felt. And I started questioning, what am I doing all this for? Why am I working so hard if this dream home was not enough for perfect family was not enough? Nothing was ever enough to overcome that feeling of not enoughness, you know what I mean? A lot of women, clients and friends have also described this feeling as a day-old slice of pizza or some women say that everything is fine, like everything is great, but I don't know why I feel so miserable. Call it an existential crisis, call it a midlife crisis, but that was a point where I started questioning, what are we doing in life? Why am I working so hard? Why am I working all the time and always thinking about what more can I have rather than staying in the present and enjoying this? And you know how they say that when the student is ready, the master appears? I call it the sacred feminine call. That's when I started really diving deep into the work of sacred feminine or divine feminine. And I started understanding how I was completely in my masculine, hustling on that hamster wheel on a patriarchal train of success that was going nowhere, waiting for someone to say, ‘you're approved, you're good enough, and this is it, here's your reward for working so hard, here's a reward for being, the best mom, the best class mom, the best business mentor,’ the best…you can fill in whatever comes up for you there. And that's when I started realizing that I was in an imbalance. Now, going back to sacred feminine, in the metaphysical world, sacred feminine is believed to have been here since before the beginning of time. It's the primordial energy. It's the shakti. It is said that this feminine creative energy is going to be here, it was here before time and is going to be here after time. And if you think about before 2000-plus years ago, before patriarchy came in, before the Church came in and made Mary Magdalene a whore, before they wiped out the names of women from history, we were in a balanced world. We were in a world where sacred feminine or divine feminine, I use the two words interchangeably, was a part of life. It was the normal. Women were healers. Women were midwives. Women knew how to work with herbs, women relied on their intuition. People used to go to old women, they were called sages. They used to go to old women for predicting the future. What they named as witches. Women were basically tapping into their intuitive power and they were well-respected in the society for doing that. There was a practice called the red tent, and women used to gather in circles when they were on their periods because it’s said that at that time our intuition is really strong, so they used to gather together, they used to read the stories, they used to tell the stories of the past, and then these red tents were broken when the circles of women were broken and basically we were shamed for having periods, for having a body, and you know, there's a really great book, and I wish we had more time. I could go into it here. There's a really great book called “Witch” by Lisa Lister, and she gives the history of our horror story of patriarchy of how it came to be. And she talks about how when the men started going into the medical field, women were a threat to them because women were healers. Women were midwives, and people would not go to these white men for healing if the women were there, and therefore the witch hunt started. And of course that was one reason, there were many, many reasons. But sacred feminine is going back into balance. Sacred feminine is the decolonization. Because sacred feminine is the yin and the yang, and everything in this universe has the masculine energy, has the feminine energy, and as women, we have been made to forget that. We’ve been made to forget that we have our intuitive power, that rest is our biggest ammunition that we can get. That our periods are something that we don't have to be ashamed of, our body is something that we don't have to be ashamed of, that we are really, really powerful. It's interesting because, and this is the work, right? So I really got interested in the myth of sacred feminine because we learn through stories and the mythology of different female archetypes, different goddesses that have been there and their stories, some that have been recorded and lost, some that have been told through from grandmother to mother to daughter to sister, and these stories are really proof that we, as women, are really powerful. And essentially what patriarchy did to us was it took our power away. It took our agency away. It took our sovereignty away. So I, I love the work of Sacred Feminine, and, you know, if you go on Instagram, there's so much like this goddess channeling and there’s mystery schools and there's wound healing and all of that, and I'm all for it. I have nothing against it, but I'm a pragmatic person, I like to look at things in a practical way. In its essence, sacred feminine is what we were before the colonization started. Sacred feminine is how we were before patriarchy told us what we should do with our life. So the journey of sacred feminine is the journey home to self, is the journey back to healing. It is going back to our center. It is going back to how it was before. I was going to give you an example before, but I thought I'd say something else. Just recently, someone in my close family member, I shared with them, when I went through that journey of what am I doing? I decided to take a sabbatical and I burned down my business. I closed it. That’s not for everyone, but that's how I do things, and I really took time to center myself and go back and learn where did it go wrong? Like where did it go wrong and where did I go wrong? And how can I come back home to myself? So I spent a lot of time, a couple of years, on my inner journey to really understand what is it that I want to create in this world, what is my biggest contribution to this world? So I was talking to this person in my family and he told me that, oh, but you're too old now to start a business and I turned 40 this year. And immediately it just triggered me. Immediately, what if he's right?, I'm 40, maybe I cannot start a new business. Maybe I cannot write a new book. And of course I know that I'm not too old. Of course I know that there are women who have started businesses and written books, older than where I am. Of course, I have many, many examples of these wonderful women who have done it before me. But the patriarchy is so insidious, and I really want people to understand. And so this is not the evil empire. It's not Darth Vader that we know where it is and we can go with our ammunition, and we can go with light sabers and defeat the evil empire. It's not that. Patriarchy is insidious and it's in everything. It's in the air, it's in the water, it's in the food we eat, it's in our blood, it's running everywhere and it's also inside us. And I watch myself sometimes when I would see someone and I'm like, oh my God, like what is she wearing? I have to check myself. This is patriarchy speaking. Like if I was really to honor another woman's sovereignty, her authority, her choice, her agency, that I wouldn't do that. So the self-awareness is a big piece, so I had to check myself that, no, I am actually not old. And I really want to honor this is really hard work because now I had to do all my practices, all my nervous system regulation and, you know, self check and all my decolonization practices to really understand that no, whatever this person said is patriarchy speaking from him or this is what his belief is, this is not what my reality is. I am not going to believe it. And it sucks. It fucking sucks because I can use the same energy in my creative endeavors. I can use the same energy in something else, but I have to now put all this energy in disbelieving this belief system, and upturning it or overturning it. Do you know what I mean? But this is the work, and the more people talk about this, more people do it, it won't get easy, hopefully at some point in time for our future generations it will get easier. It won't get easy for us, but the more people talk about this, the more we can be aware that he said that or she said that, but that's not right, and I choose not to believe that. Again, we come back to the acceptance that I accept that I'm feeling this way right now. But I'm going to do all my practices and I choose not to believe that. The sacred feminine in essentiality along with all the crystals and the womb healing and the yoni steaming and all of that is separate. It is recognizing that we completely bought into the program of being in our masculine energy. We thought that we have to behave as men. We have to be in the masculine energy in order to be successful. And it's not true. We can have both. Of course masculine energy is important. Of course it's important to take action and strategize and be out there and all of that. But it's equally important for women to derive from their intuition, it's equally so important for us to think of rest as a practice and not as a reward or something that we feel guilty of. At the basic level, sacred feminine is going back to who we were before patriarchy came in, before they told us that this is who we have to be.
Becky Mollenkamp: You are right, the more the people talk about this, the more that we can make these changes. I think it's so valuable and thank you so much for sharing so vulnerably and freely. This has really been a beautiful conversation and so inspiring, and I feel like I've taken a lot of your time, so I want to wrap up here for the listeners who are feeling that stale flat kind of feeling that you mentioned. It sounds like the first step in that journey back to self or getting back to the sacred feminine is to change the goalposts from self-love to self-acceptance. Can you share maybe a journaling prompt or a question or something that we can leave both folks with to help them marinate more on this as they work on this journey back to self?
Deepshikha Sairam: Thank you, Becky, for making me a part of this beautiful experience. I really hope that this has resonated with the listeners. And what I really hope is that this is caused somewhat of a paradigm shift. Paradigm shifts I know are hard. We're so used to looking at something one way, but I hope that I've kind of made a one-degree shift and urged the listeners to look at this whole thing in a different way. Okay, so there are two things, yes, shifting the goalpost is really, really important. There are two things that I want to talk about here. Whoever is interested in doing this decolonization work and doing this walking back to sacred feminine, journey home to self, there's so many different words for doing the same thing on our time on this planet Earth. The first thing that I would really urge women to do is question everything. Like I mentioned in my last, you know, segment that patriarchy is insidious, question everything and question it, and then compare it with how you feel in your body. Even what I'm saying here, question it and see how it feels. Maybe it sounds like bullshit to you. Maybe it sounds like a, you know, crap to right now, and that's fine, that's OK, but I think that's when we start making the changes and start listening to our body and our own intuition, our own guidance versus what the world has always told us. When we start questioning something, and then they say, oh, like this is making sense and this is not making sense. The math is not mathing there, and this makes complete sense, and this is why I feel this way. The second thing that is really, really important, and I think this is probably the first thing that we all need to be doing to do this work is rather than pushing our feelings under the rug and rather than pushing them down, which we've been all taught to do, and even men, men are not excluded from patriarchy. Men also suffer from patriarchy as much as women do, in some ways, women do, of course, more, but one thing that we really ought to be doing is really accepting our feelings. So when we talk about acceptance, the question is, what are you accepting? Are we accepting our circumstances? Are we accepting the people that traumatized us? We are of course accepting ourselves as we are. And to do that, we have to accept the feelings that we feel rather than pushing them under the rug. Now I can talk for hours and hours about this topic, but I'm going to make it really short. So one of the things that I suggest is taking some time every day if possible, if you can make it a daily practice it's going to become a habit and, you know, you will become more self-aware, taking some time to yourself, sitting in a room and giving yourself some time and maybe have a journal with you. This works best when you do longhand because writing is very somatic and when you write with long hand, we are basically processing feelings. And the prompt is very simple, I feel, or today I feel, or today I'm feeling. And then just let it go, just without thinking, without making an edit, without thinking about if somebody reads this, what is it going to be? You can actually take it and put it in a safe, you can tear it, you can burn it, you can do whatever to it, but just putting it down on paper gives our feeling a place to go. And one thing that I want to point out here is do this with self-compassion, acceptance and self-compassion goes hand in hand. You cannot do one without the other. If you are going to accept yourself the way you are, you have to do it with self compassion. So do this with self compassion. One of the things that has been so pivotal in my journey., and you know I have a therapist, I’ve gone to therapy, I've done so many modalities, breath work, you name it, and I have done it. I'm a regular meditator, I have meditated for 5 hours straight non-stop at one time. But one thing that has made such a big difference that nothing has is feeling safety in my body and the science speak for that is the science of safety or the polyvagal theory. Basically, regulating our nervous system. If we are going to be in flight, fight or freeze response all the time we are going to be operating from there, and we're going to be anxious, we're going to be worried, and all those inner gremlins are going to come out even more telling us how we're not good enough. In a lot of my research in the work that I do, and also my story has been the core wound of every woman, I can say that, but almost, you know, with certainty is the not enoughness that we feel. And because of that not enoughness, we have a lot of these common symptoms, people pleasing, seeking approval from people, the rage that we feel that we can't express, the not belonging, the feeling of not belonging, and so many other things that we feel in our body, and they have no place to go, so they get stuck in her body. And once we name them, and once we give them a place to go, whether it's, you know, journal writing, that's amazing. You can even do it in a coaching session with a coach. You can do it with a mentor. You can even do it with a therapist. When you give these feelings almost like allowance to process within your body, emotion is just energy in motion. It's e-motion. And what it wants to do is it wants to move through the body. I think this practice of allowing our emotions, ‘the art of allowing,’ my mentor used to call it, is the single most powerful thing that we can give ourselves and then accepting the emotion that we are feeling. It could be rage, it could be anger, it could be sadness. And as a culture, we're so scared of tears, but when I'm writing in my journal, and when the tears start to drop, the heavy tears, I know, and I'm feeling vulnerable and I'm feeling I’m sad, but I know that this is my body's way of processing the emotion. So it's really important for us to understand that if we are, if our nervous system is deregulated, if we are always in fight, flight, freeze or fawn, which they've discovered a new stage now, we are always going to be in an imbalance, right? And we talked about the balance, the yin and the yang. But if we can regulate our no system we feel safety in our body, that's the place where we can start to really explore what our identity means to us, what our purpose means to us, and the question that I asked in the beginning, who you are, what is yourself? What is that self about? Uppercase S, not the ego self, but you know, the higher self that we talk about. So do that practice oOf writing in your journal every day. Make it secret if you have to. You don't have to share with anyone. And of course, if you choose to do it with a mentor, a coach, just make sure that you're doing it with the person who's safe, who's either trauma-informed or you feel safe with because as humans, our first thing is that we need humans to co-regulate our nervous system, so that's like the real practical stuff that I will give there. It's a life-changing practice that you can do. Once you start doing it and once you start seeing that wow this is feeling good now. Like I'm putting down all my emotions, you really start to feel the changes inside of you. You really start to get your power back. Thank you so much for having me on this and I'm happy to answer any questions if the listeners want to reach out and have any follow-up questions, I'm happy to answer them for any one of you. All right, thanks so much, Becky.
Becky Mollenkamp: Thank you, thank you, thank you for all of your thoughtful answers. This has been really lovely and I'm so excited to get to know you and meet you through this and to introduce you to others, and I hope that they'll check out your substack which I will link to you, but I just wanted to wrap things up by having you share anything else that you wanted about where people can learn more from you besides your substack or connect with you and if there's any specific things you wanted to mention about offs or how to work with you.
Deepshikha Sairam: I am on Sustack, Journey Home to Self is the Substack that I am on. I will be honest, I took a little bit of a break during the summer. I will be getting back on it and there's already a lot of stuff that people can read and interact with, which will be an extension to whatever we've talked about. So that's the best place to get in touch with me. I am in the process of creating my second business and that is something specifically for writers. So if you are a writer and you want to do creative writing without getting dysregulated, without being in this colonization mindset and the patriarchal bullshit in a way which is very divine feminine, which is anti-patriarchal but also in a way that gets you in touch with your muses, gets you in touch with your creative abilities, then just follow me on Substack. Join the conversation and very soon it will come out. Again, thank you so much, Becky. This has been such a pleasure. I can't wait for all the episodes to come out and see what others have to say.
Becky Mollenkamp: Thank you for your support. It means so much and I will be back in your ear holes with another conversation in the series tomorrow.