Co-existing as Our Most Authentic Selves, with Uma Girish
How can we stay true to who we are and what we're meant to do while also allowing others to do the same? It's not always easy, but it's essential for growing into Village. In this conversation with spiritual mentor, Human Design guide, and writer Uma Girish, we explore how our soul paths can converge, separate, and weave something important together.
About Uma Girish:
Uma Girish is a Spiritual Mentor, Author, and Human Design Guide. Her sacred work is focused in the areas of grief, loss, soul purpose and evolution. She is passionate about empowering women to show up as their authentic selves so they can live, love, and create a legacy. Her latest book is Sacred Fire: Memoir of A Marriage, and it comes out May 19th, 2025.
You can learn more about Uma and her offerings at https://umagirish.com/
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Megan Leatherman:
Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to divest from capitalism and the norms of modern work and step into the soulful calling of these times we live in, which includes the call to rekindle our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother to two small kids, writer, amateur ecologist, and vocational guide. I live in the Pacific Northwest and I'm your host today.
Well, hello friends and welcome to the show. I'm really glad that you're here and honored to spend this time with you. I'm recording this in the middle spring period, but soon we're going to transition into the late spring period when the sun moves into the sign of Gemini on May 20th. So we're kind of getting closer and closer to that transitional point where we'll start to feel like
Maybe more and more days are giving us little hints and glimmers of the summer season that is to come, but there's still plenty of spring and chaotic weather and back and forth fits and starts to come. And we just can roll with that as best we can. I know I'm trying to stay as grounded and adaptable and flexible as I can right now. And it's not always pretty, but I do believe that growth is happening and I trust in these cycles. There are so many plants and animals and birds growing right now. Our green spaces here in Portland are really lush and the fruition process is even underway for some of our strawberry plants and raspberry, salmonberry, these plants that are flowering and then, you know, will become fruit soon.
So it's like we can see what is to come, I hope. All of this can feel, you know, exciting, destabilizing. It's beautiful. It's precarious. It's all happening. And I encourage you to stay as close to where you are and what spring is looking like, where you actually live. And again, use that as a teacher and see if you can put your hand on your heart and look out to what the natural world is doing right around you and see what you can mimic about it and trust that the land can teach you something about how to show up today. In this season of the show, we are exploring the theme of growing into village.
And my guest today, Uma Girish, is a lovely person who has thought a lot about and written a book that's about to come out on the topic of soul paths and not just the path that your soul needs to take through this life, but her latest book is a memoir about her marriage and it explores what it means to be in intimate relationship with others with your soul path and then in relationship with people who have their own soul paths and those don't always, you know, converge or run parallel and there's a lot to navigate there. And you know, in the village of my dreams, all of us are walking our own authentic soulful paths and are able to do that while coexisting with others who have their own soulful paths and that our paths can coexist and enrich one another's.
And it's no small thing to stay true to who we are and how we're meant to grow and to also be in close relationship with people who need to do the same. But it's something we have to learn how to do. And I think something that we deeply know how to do and are capable of doing, but it's often a place of relearning and remembering.
I’ll just to introduce Uma to you more formally, Uma is a spiritual mentor, author, and human design guide. Her sacred work is focused in the areas of grief, loss, soul purpose, and evolution. She's passionate about empowering women to show up as their authentic selves so they can live, love, and create a legacy. Her latest book is Sacred Fire, Memoir of a Marriage, and it actually comes out on May 19th, so you can look for that wherever you purchase books. And I've been really curious about human design, but you know, have not made any sense of it looking it up online. It just seems so complex and I couldn't, I couldn't make sense of it, but I was really excited to get a reading with Uma so I could just hear like the parts I needed to know and she could help me make sense of it.
And it was a lovely reading. I really appreciated how she broke down the most important parts. And I can see how when you understand better the way that you're designed and how your energy needs to flow, that it can just open up so much more energy for the day to day and just a sense of rightness and that kind of clicking into your own great lane, you know, where you're meant to be. So I hope you'll keep Uma's work in mind if you're curious about human design.
And I'm still making sense of it, but if you're wondering, I'm a generator and my profile is a two four hermit and opportunist. So I'm still learning about what those mean and integrating what Uma told me about them, but that's there if you're curious. I hope you love this conversation as much as I did. Just a couple of announcements before we dive in.
One is just that there are lots of ways to engage with this work. If you find yourself listening to the podcast and wanting to go deeper, I teach a monthly seasonal class. My summer journal will come out soon. And if you are feeling like you're on the precipice of some larger change in your working life for your vocational identity, then I'll just let you know that I'm running a small group that offers vocational guidance called Meant for More, and we start June 3rd, and we're gonna gather over five weeks to do a kind of intensive, and we're gonna look at different areas of reconnection and support that people can access so that they can find and walk their own right path and do the work that they're meant to do right now. So you can learn all about what I'm up to at awildnewwork.com.
Thank you so much to those of you supporting the show as sustainers and those of you who have chipped in once or periodically as you can. I really appreciate your financial contributions and your belief in this work and your willingness to help make it sustainable for me. And if you're listening and you have the means and you want to pitch in, I welcome your support and you can do that at buymeacoffee.com slash Megan Leatherman and I'll put the link to that in the show notes as well.
I also want to say a big thank you to those of you who wrote such sweet, kind reviews on Apple podcasts at my request a few weeks ago, or those of you who left a rating on Spotify. I really appreciated those. They helped the show and just help people know that the episodes are still resonating with people and yeah, that they're helpful and they might be a good fit for potential listeners or guests. So thank you for taking the time to do that.
All right, well with that, I'm gonna open us with our invocation. So wherever you are, you might wanna just notice what your body is like right now. What does it feel like to be in your body?
How are you breathing? Does the breath want to change at all?
And could you just remember for a moment that you are an animal? It's so simple, but sometimes we just forget like what and who we even are. And could you remember just for a second today that your shape and form is animal, mammal, a being of the earth that you belong here, just like the bear, the whale, and all of our animal kin.
May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet. May our work honor our ancestors known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with. I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the Multnomah, Cowlitz, Bands of Chinook, and Clackamas tribes, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on.
All right, well, Uma, thank you so much for being here today.
Uma Girish:
Thank you so much for creating this space and inviting me into it to have what I know will be a delicious conversation.
Megan Leatherman:
I think so too. I would love to start by hearing a little bit about your path and how you arrived here today. I know that your mom's passing was a big threshold for you, but what could you share about kind of the path you've been on and how you're where you are today and how you came to this place?
Uma Girish:
I think that's a really nice place to start. So I was born and raised in India and moved to the United States in my mid-40s. So I was married and had a teenage daughter and we moved the very year the US was experiencing its recession in 2008. And eight months after that, my mother died from cancer. We didn't even know when we left India that she was sick.
She was diagnosed weeks later and passed away eight months after that. So that was sort of my initiation into chapter two of my life, as I like to call it, the apprenticeship of my soul, which pulled me away from living from my ego, my personality, my material self.
And while I honor all those aspects of me, because we are on a human journey and it's not about being one or the other, but being and living an integrated life, it really opened me up to a whole new realm of the existential questions. Who am I? Why am I here? How am I meant to live this life? How do I serve? Why was I called into this physical incarnation?
And that's where my journey began. And because grief had broken me wide open, I was in a new country and culture. It was my first winter in 44 years of my human existence, because we lived in southern India where it's just hot most of the year. So it was sort of the perfect storm. I looked out my window and I would see snow piled up and I felt frozen within. Didn't have any friends to really share my grief experience with. Nobody knew my mother. So she was anonymous in this country that I lived in. She had no frame of reference. I had no frame of reference because I was a brand new immigrant.
I struggled to find work because, like I said, the U.S. was in recession at the time. The only opportunity that opened up for me was a part-time position at a retirement community. And it was only much later when I looked back on that season and why the universe had placed me there that I realized that all the seniors in the retirement community
Their lives were completely alien to me. I didn't know anything about their world, their food, their music, what made them laugh, what made them sad. I had no reference. And yet we spoke the universal language of grief because they were grieving through the experience of having to give up a home they had lived in for some of them 40 years. And
They were making their way into a new community, had to make friends. They had all the same anxieties that I had as a brand new immigrant. Many of them had known losses, losses of people they had loved. In some cases, it was the death of their spouse that prompted them to move into a retirement community. so moving through the season of loss in a way that I never imagined I would,
With my chosen family, I felt guided through a series of serendipitous events to train as a hospice volunteer. So I spent the next five years of my life sitting with people who were dying. And that was like going back to the university of life. I don't think you gain that kind of education by going to university or reading books or getting a degree.
When you're sitting with someone who has weeks to live, sometimes days to live, and you hear their confessions, you hear about them, about their broken dreams and what they regret and what they didn't achieve, their misplaced goals, it opens you up to a whole new understanding of why we came here and what we're to focus on. So that is how I started working with people who are grieving because as part of the bereavement team, I was already working with families who are about to lose loved ones. And so very naturally that led into me starting my business by working with the grieving. And as I started to work with the grieving, I realized that grief and loss isn't just about the death of someone we love. There are all kinds of losses. So that's what opened me up to serve in that space. And that brought me the greatest expansion and the deepest healing from my own loss. So I say this to underscore the fact that we don't know how our healing journeys go, but I think the universe does. And it places us in the right spaces with the right people. All it asks of us is to come with an open heart. And when we do that, then it can pour into us in ways that we can't even imagine.
Megan Leatherman:
Oh, beautiful. Thank you. I want to ask you a question that someone asked me yesterday that has stuck with me and I would love to hear your perspective. This person asked me, how do we know when we're in the right place? You know, if the universe guides us to places and, on a path, what would you say? How do we know that we're in the right spot? Are we always in the right spot? Are there things you look for? What would you say to that?
Uma Girish:
I would answer that question in the way that I would know I'm in the right spot. I would know I'm in the right space if my body felt right being there versus me forcing myself into a situation because my mind believes I should be there. So every time I trust my body, I feel that that's my soul's way of saying, this is where you're meant to be. It doesn't mean that that space is going to be easy, but there's something for my soul to learn by being in that space, which is why the wisdom of my soul even placed me there in the first place. But if I trust my mind, then it's always an ego agenda, which really goes well.
Megan Leatherman:
Yes, I know that firsthand. One of the things I really liked that you shared on your website is that you wrote, quote, that you're here to take off all the masks I wore for self-protection and live as the real me. Can you tell us more about that calling and what that has meant for you?
Uma Girish:
I think we learn to wear these masks very early in life for acceptance and approval. We begin to seek external validation. And for me, that was about being good at what I did, striving, being the best at everything I did.
But today, the way I live my life, I don't want to be the best at anything. I just want to bring all of me to the experience and know that I could fall and fail and make mistakes and have to relearn some things and make amends and hurt people and all of that. I don't think we ever get to a place of complete and total wisdom. And I think one of the misconceptions that many people have on the human journey is this desire to get to some place where they'll be whole. And I think it is about recognizing every single day where we are masking ourselves. Because even taking off the masks isn't a one and done. Every single human encounter, you know, where we attempted to blame somebody for something. We have to take off our mask off and ask ourselves, what am I afraid of losing here?
Why am I blaming somebody else and being afraid to face my inner demon? So taking off the mask, think, is a constant endeavor. It's a daily thing, I feel like. Even in the way I write my emails now, using sentences like, I'm so sorry, feels reflexive. But I actually pause and say, am I sorry? Am I sorry I'm responding to this person two days later?
And if I'm not, then I just delete that part. It's about knowing myself so well that I no longer depend on somebody else being okay with me, okay with how I express, okay with who I am, okay with my brand of truth telling. And so peeling off the masks, I think is like a constant thing we're going to be doing until the end of time here.
Megan Leatherman:
How do you feel like that has maybe opened up more energy or clarity for you to show up in a sort of fuller, soulful way? Like, what do you notice when the masks come off? What has happened for you, I guess?
Uma Girish:
I think for me, betraying myself is no longer a choice. think self betrayal is what we engage in when we wear masks. And I can't even go to bed at night anymore if I know I've done something to betray myself. So being true to who I am and expressing the truth of what I believe is correct for me.
Even at the expense of disappointing other people, having friends leave my world, all of that. I mean, it doesn't matter as long as I'm, I came here to be true to myself. And if I can't do that, then everything else feels pointless. In human design, we have an aspect called the role model journey, the journey of the role model.
And for who I am in this incarnation, that's where I am in this stage of life, the role model. And so do I want to be a role model for how to wear a mask well, or do I want to be a role model for exposing myself fully, being afraid while doing so, but knowing that expressing the truth of who I am is the only way to live. And when that happens, something magical happens, Megan.
It's that people who are right for me, who are aligned with me, just magically show up. Just magically show up. And the people that aren't right for me anymore fall away. The universe does the pruning. I don't even have to worry about it because the universe will create circumstances where somebody will either say something to me, which will force a truth out of me, which is hard for them to hear. And so they just leave.
Or it'll bring in people who will find my podcast, a podcast episode I recorded probably eight years ago, and they get in touch with me and they become a client. It happened just yesterday. That's why it's fresh in my mind. So when we trust ourselves and fully express from that place of truth and authentic being, I think the universe just takes care of the rest.
And it's a deeply fulfilling way to live, even if sometimes it can be scary because we think, you know, I'm going to hurt this person. I'm going to lose this friendship. My husband isn't going to like what I say. But the invitation again, constantly is to take off the mask.
And it seems like that would be an essential part of grieving. I mean, to grieve is, it's hard, I could imagine it's hard to grieve fully and deeply if you're trying to present in a certain way. It seems really connected to that.
You're so right because grief is one of the messiest of human experiences. Right. There's no timeline. There's no formula or framework. You just sit in it and some days are good. Some days aren't so good. Some days are terrible. You don't know how long this will last. All of that. And if you can just be with yourself and know that your only job in the season of grieving is to befriend yourself, that is your saving grace.
And so many people struggle with grief because they feel they have to present a face to the external world. And I'm not saying, I'm not saying this from a place of judgment, because I know many, many people have to go to work and you can't really carry your grieving face, your messy heart and walk into your corporate office. Right? It's hard. It's hard. The systems we live in do not give us permission to grieve, to be ourselves, to take the time we need. There's no spaciousness in a culture that worships speed. So I'm very aware of this as I'm saying it. Grief almost feels like a luxury. The time to grieve and the space to grieve in a way that feels natural to each one of us is a real luxury in the times that we live in.
Megan Leatherman:
I'd love to hear your perspective about one's soul path. What do you believe about, you know, do we have a choice to incarnate? Do we have something we bring into this lifetime with us? What's your perspective on multiple lifetimes? Like I've heard some, I've heard a little bit about it already and getting to know you, but could you just give us kind of...your overview, what you feel is true at this moment about our souls and the choice, if it's a choice to incarnate and what we learn and anything you want to say about that very big topic.
Uma Girish:
Yeah. So I was born and raised in India. So reincarnation was a word in my environment. My elders talked about it. mean, living room conversations, there would be conversations about reincarnation and soul birth. And I didn't understand any of it. I wasn't ready for any of those conversations, I guess. But it was after my mother's death that I really started reflecting on these things and went into that space of contemplation. So I say all this not as some kind of expert or someone who knows this to be absolutely certain. This is what feels right to me. This is what I think to be true for myself. And that is that I believe Earth is a school where souls come here to learn lessons. It's the most challenging plane of existence.
And so when we choose to come here, we ask for the incarnation. And I believe we choose our parents, where we are born, the kind of family we are born into. And that's so hard for so many to hear because, you know, they go, why would I choose a narcissistic mother? Why would I choose an abusive father? So I say that, you know, fully understanding and appreciating that people will respond like this.
And yet I know that when we look at the bigger picture, the big perspective, we understand that if we just came here for no reason, then why go through all this heartache and turmoil and stress of the existence? So I believe that we are souls traveling in human bodies. The soul chooses experiences to learn from and to expand and elevate its consciousness. And then we go back, we return to the light, which is where we came from. And we leave the love we created behind as our legacy. That's what I believe. And so when I consider that perspective, none of what we are focused on, which is ambition and achievement and success in the way the world defines it. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with any of those words. I am ambitious. I I define success on my terms. So it's not that those words are wrong, but I think the metrics are wrong, the way the world describes and defines those terms. So when we get caught up in the ego level materialism of chasing and accumulating and possessing, and our life becomes an endless struggle to strive and gather more instead of being more. That's authenticity. Being more of who you are is the authentic journey. But when we get caught up in the struggle of striving, I think we lose our way. We sort of get lost in the chase. The material world becomes the reality and the only reality that exists. But I think we need to move from the material to the mystical.
And when the mystical becomes our perspective, everything shifts. We slow down, we have more spaciousness, we ask questions of our soul, we engage in soul inquiry. I think we learn to draw boundaries. That's important too. So often people get so caught up in this, I'm spiritual so I shouldn't have any boundaries. I should love everybody and all is one and one is all and you know, and then it becomes very complicated when
The next day your sister slams the phone down on you or calls you names and you're like, am I supposed to be kind here? How am I supposed to be kind when I feel this fury raging inside of me? So boundaries to me are very sacred contracts and agreements. So I think that we come here to balance out the soul and human journey. We are both soul, divine and human.
And it's all about learning to navigate this divine human existence with grace and with gentleness and authenticity.
Megan Leatherman:
Thank you, that's helpful. I'm curious, I know part of the work you do now is in human design, you mentioned that. Can you talk a little bit about how you came to that modality and what it shows you about one's soul path or true self? What does it illuminate, I guess, about someone's soulful self?
Uma Girish:
I came to human design back in 2018. It seemed everyone was talking about human design. Oh, so it seemed to me and I had no clue what that was. Everybody in my space back then, I think I was on Facebook and everybody was talking about human design. And then a coach friend of mine said she was training to be a human design reader. And I reached out to her and said, what, what is this human design?
And she said, would you like to have a basic reading with me? And I said, sure, I'm very curious because I'm hearing this all around me. And when the universe keeps dropping something constantly in my space, I know I'm meant to pay attention to it. So she lived in Bordeaux, France at the time. we had, think, like a 15 to 20 minute session where she told me things that I had no idea how she knew about me. And I was like, how do you know all of this about me? This is so true. And she said, well, we are friends, so I know some, but I don't know all of it. But I look at your chart, and it tells me everything about you. And that just fascinated me. I was totally pulled in, and I began to study with her. And since then, I've gone on to study with many other teachers.
I find that human design is one of the best systems I've encountered simply because it speaks about the energy we are imprinted with the moment we take our first breath. So it's about what was going on in the cosmos, where were the planets, where was the sun in relation to where you were born.
I feel that there's something sacred about this system, which is why I love it so much. in doing readings with people, I have discovered that it lands for them as well. Oftentimes they will say to me, I feel like you're looking at my soul. And that's really what it is. I call the human design chart a person's soul's blueprint because it not only shows you the parts of you that are your strengths, the energy that people feel from you, for instance, when they encounter you, when they step into your energy field. But it also shows you the areas where you are deeply conditioned and so vulnerable to other people's energy, the pressures from the environment. It shows you what your gifts are, what your purpose is coming into this incarnation. So all of that is littered through your human design chart. And I find it to be a system that honors the human and divine journey, which is why I love it so much, because that's the focus of my work as well. I help people with their grief, which is a messy human experience, but I also help them with their purpose, which is all about their soul journey on this human path. So I find it to be a beautiful blend of both and that's why I just embrace the system wholeheartedly.
Megan Leatherman:
Wonderful. Well, I'm determined to get a reading with you soon. I'm really excited about that. I still don't really understand human design, but you're right. It feels like everyone is talking about it. So I want to see what it's like. You're also a writer. I know you've written a couple of books and you have one coming out very soon. Can you tell us what this next book is about?
Uma Girish:
Yeah, this is my fourth book coming out. It's called Sacred Fire. It's the memoir of our marriage. My husband and I will be celebrating our 34th wedding anniversary next month. The genesis of the book was about, actually happened when my mother died and this spiritual awakening blossomed within me.
And I started to shed this old identity of Uma, the identity my husband had known and loved and married, right? And here was this new person speaking a whole new language, embracing very different things. And he didn't understand who I was becoming. So this was back in 2009. That's when my mother died. And then my father died 18 months after her.
It became really clear to me. My soul was sort of screaming at me and saying, you have to serve, you have to serve. This incarnation is about service. It is about giving your wisdom, your gifts, sharing more of who you are. And that led me to wonder, well, who am I? Right? Many of us want to know our purpose, but I say to every client I meet, in order to know your purpose, you have to know who you are.
That's why I love human design so much because it tells you who you are, who you came here to be before the world told you who you should be. So when this happened, we were brand new immigrants. Our daughter was 15. She would be going to college soon. The unspoken pact my husband and I had made was that we would both go, you know, I would find a job. He already had a job.
And we would put money away for our daughter's college education. And for some wild, crazy, unfathomable reason, I said, my soul wants me to serve. I don't want to go find a job. And that just stopped him in his tracks. And he felt abandoned, lonely. now it's all on me to make this happen. I thought we had an understanding, which is why we packed our bags and moved one continent away. But something in me, and I couldn't even articulate it back then, I didn't know how to use words to speak about it. Something in me kept saying, it'll be okay. Just trust the voice within, everything will work out. So I held on to the truth of that voice, even as it was so difficult to navigate the marriage. Right?
How do you, my husband and I have always had a wonderful relationship and how do you suddenly navigate a relationship where he looks at you and wonders who you've become, why you're making the choices you're making. And you're struggling with not feeling seen, not feeling heard, not feeling understood. But something in me just kept prodding me. Keep going, keep going, things will be okay. And it all worked out beautifully. Our daughter’s 31 today. She went to college. She did really well. She got a free ride to go do her masters in creative writing. It all worked out beautifully, but there was so much grief at the time. The grief of not seeing eye to eye, even as we were walking hand in hand. So that's what the book is about. How do you walk hand in hand with someone? Even when you don't see eye to eye. How do you do a life, a marriage together when you're walking completely different soul parts? So he had to get to a space where he finally, I mean, from the very beginning, he always supported what I was doing. He just didn't understand it. And a part of me demanded that he understand. That was the mistake I was making. I had to do my own work and get to my own place of.
I can give him full permission to be who he is and he can give me full permission to be who I am and walk the path that I'm walking. So this book is the story of how that happened and how it's still happening.
Megan Leatherman:
That sounds really important. And yeah, I'm not so far along in my own marriage, but those themes have already come up as people change even over a decade of being married. And I think it has implications not just for marriage, but just how to build a life with anyone as your authentic self, whether it's friends or family or children, that, yeah, if we don't have that permission to change and evolve, things can get really sticky and not healthy. What would you say are some of the things that really supported you and your spouse in that difficult time? Are there any things you could point to that where you could say like that helped or that enabled repair or that resource supported us?
What do you see when you look back?
Uma Girish:
So the first thing I would say is that whether it's a marriage or a friendship or an intimate partnership of any kind, think, you know, traditionally we go to a place of this isn't working, so we have to break it. Well, breakage is not the only option. I think that's what my book is here to convey, that two people can have completely different soul parts, but
Maybe, and this feels true for us and for me, that our karma in this incarnation as man and wife is to honor each other's journey. Because we are both good people, just because he doesn't understand my work, my path, my journey, the things that I'm interested in, doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with him. Unless I make him wrong for being that person. So that's been the journey. So a couple of things that have supported us is I had to do a lot of asking, asking to have conversations with him where I could welcome questions from him and then also share why I'm doing what I'm doing. It's not important for him to get or understand all of it.
But I at least had to create the space and say, you I want to share this with you. It's OK if you don't understand all of it. You can ask me questions. To speak about the journey and my motivations for doing what I'm doing, right? That was very supportive. For me to find my own community and not let him be my entire village.
That was one of the most important things. So I had to find my tribe and that tribe has shifted and changed, you know, since 2009, we're talking post pandemic. My husband and I moved to California for a year for his work and then we spent three years in Germany. So things have shifted and morphed and changed a whole lot, but I still had to find my tribe, my people that I could have conversations with.
I had to find my teachers and mentors. I had to find work that would satisfy me on a deep soul level, that would bring me joy. That was my reason for being here, right? Now, if I had that vacuum and nothing to fill that vacuum, then I would turn to him and say, fill this for me. It's your job. I'm your wife. I had to stop doing that.
When my journey and who I was becoming didn't make all the sense in the world to him, I had to find ways of making sense of it for myself. And the pandemic, think, was the final sort of expansion or explosion in this multi-chapter saga, which is that when all my tribes were taken away, and again, it was just him and me locked in this marriage bubble, right?
I had to then bring all the parts of me that were still unhealed, the scared part of me, the part that sought validation from Him, the part that wanted to protect me and keep me safe. All these parts of me were my village. I had to tend to them. I had to get to know myself on a deeper level. I would say 2020 to 2025 has been such a deep level of understanding, healing, shifting, questioning, contemplating, reflecting for me. And I'm hearing a lot of other people as well, but learning to befriend all these different parts of me and create spaciousness in my heart so they can all live there and look at each one of them with compassion and understanding and kindness.
I think that's been the most profound and sacred work that I've done. And so when I'm unhappy today or when I'm having a bad day, I know how to tend to those parts of me. I'm not looking to him to save me or to listen to me or to reflect something back to me. I mean, we're human. We do need that in a marriage. I'm not saying I'm totally, you know, not in need of that, but I definitely know how to tend to those parts of me and to live with all those beings inside of me. I love solitude. I love my space. I love my work. I love my books. I love my meditation. I love my gentle walks outside. And this feels like a rich life for my soul. So I think that could be the biggest thing that has changed. And I think as I started cultivating this life, his sacred life for myself, I let him off the hook in many ways. He started to feel the spaciousness. Okay, I get to be me. And although I'm wedded to the material world and I live and work a corporate life, I'm not constantly feeling judged and pulled into her path because she wants me to be there. I think he felt freed when I was able to free myself.
Yeah, those were some of the things that really helped and are continuing to help us.
Megan Leatherman:
So I'm curious, like, It sounds what you're saying about how to sort of care for yourself and give yourself first so much of what you need as kind of the that's like the starting point. What is it like when if someone that we're in an intimate relationship with is not doing that for themselves and so and still I mean it sounds like your spouse, you know, benefited from that and is I'm sure stable enough that he can also take care of himself. But I know of people who are in partnerships where they're doing a lot of work for themselves and really trying to heal and be integrated. And that's wonderful. But they're in a partnership with someone who is maybe not willing to do that work. And so does ask a lot of them or is not processing their own stuff. Like, when does it become?
What I guess, what's the difference between just doing my own work and letting someone else be themselves and kind of off that hook? How is that different from being in myself, but maybe being in a relationship with someone who's not willing to do their own work? Like, I know this isn't making total sense maybe, but do get what I'm wondering about? Like.
If you were doing all of that yourself, but then you were in a marriage, maybe with someone who, you know, wasn't willing to look at any of their stuff, what then, like, did that come up? What is that like? Or how would you have navigated that? What are the, yeah, what's the distinction?
Uma Girish:
I get what you're saying. That's a really important question. And I think each person has to decide what's correct for them. So I'm not able to offer you a prescriptive answer to this. But I think you'll know from within whether the right thing to do is to stay or to leave or to tend to the relationship, give yourself a particular timeline, each, marriage is different and you know what you need in your marriage and what you're not getting, what you're getting, is what you're getting enough. Because when it comes to things like, I mean, I'm in a three decade partnership, so there have been so many decisions, right? Like when we relocate, when our daughter needs something of us, now we're looking at a brand new chapter that will be upon us next year perhaps, which is retirement. Where are we going to retire? Are we going back to India or continuing in the States or dividing our time? So you need someone who can be with you in those decisions, A marriage is a partnership. So if your spouse isn't doing their work, isn't, and I will say, I will qualify that by saying,
My husband doesn't go to therapy. He does not meditate. He grew up in a stable family, just as I did. He grew up in more of a stable family. At least my family, we had to deal with my dad's alcoholism. But so he will light the lamp every morning before he goes to work. He's 100 % committed to being the provider.
He's a very responsible human. So he checks all the foundational boxes for me. I don't ever, ever, ever have to worry about not being cared for or being abandoned or anything like that because he's just a deeply caring human for whom family is a priority. But if someone is not feeling safe in a relationship and their partner is not willing to do the work, then maybe it's time to ask the question, do I really want to, do I see us being in a partnership that will serve us long-term? So I think it's up to each one of us to ask the question, to reflect, to see what we need, what we're getting, what we're not getting, and then make decisions accordingly. I think some marriages are meant to last the long term and I think some relationships you move into because there's something for you to learn. you learn boundary setting, maybe your job is to learn how to love yourself, maybe your job is to...is to consciously uncouple. There so many lessons our soul can learn from being in partnership. I don't think anything is right or wrong. It's just what's correct for you as a human walking a soul path that is committed to your own expansion in this incarnation.
Megan Leatherman:
Yeah, thank you. That's helpful. How has your commitment to not betraying yourself and your commitment to authenticity shaped your parenting as your daughter has grown? What has that been like as you've changed and she changes and yeah, how has that been?
Uma Girish:
That's such an interesting question. My daughter and I have always been very close, even through her teenage years. So as someone who values emotional wellness, I've always created a space for her to be herself, to cry when she needed to, to throw a tantrum when she needed to.
And so as she's grown older and as we've moved through seasons, know, just yesterday I was saying to her, and we were exchanging some texts and she said, I feel really affirmed by what you just said. Thank you for understanding. And I, I would not have said what I said even six months ago. And so I said to her, I too am learning new lessons in our relationship.
Because everybody changes, right? She's changing too and certain things are more important to her today. Certain things are not. And so my daughter is queer. And so I had to learn to give her permission. Right? I had to let go of the dream I had about who she was going to be with or what that was going to look like. And ask myself,
If your authentic expression is so important to you, then shouldn't you honor that in everybody else around you? And so that is my guidepost for our relationship. And I'm trying to make that my guidepost for my marital relationship as well. Every time I feel tempted to control my husband or control the way he thinks about something, I just remind myself if your authentic expression
is the most important thing to you. Shouldn't you honor that in him as well? So reminding myself of that helps me to stop wanting them to be something that I want them to be and instead honoring their journey. So I just keep coming back to this idea of giving someone permission to be who they are and where they are. Now you get to engage or disengage as you need to. So there's a
Let them be who they want to be and then let me be who I need to be. You know, so if a friend, for instance, calls me and wants to rant about Trump and what's happening in the administration for one hour, I get to say no. She gets to rage. She gets to have her rage. That's a perfectly valid place to be. But do I want to take all that on? I get to say no.
I get to have what I want to. So can we all just coexist and find ways to communicate and be detached from the outcomes? So often what gets us in trouble in relationships, especially intimate relationships, is we are attached to certain outcomes. We want the other person to be okay with the way we are being. And not everyone is going to be.
So that's been the biggest lesson with my daughter as well, to just see her for where she is, give her full permission to be who she needs to be, who she wants to be. One of the things I value a lot is connection. And for me, connection means being in touch many times a week. I like touch points throughout the week. And so whether it's phone calls or texts.
She does not need that. So one of my biggest lessons in our relationship has been overcoming this idea that connection can only look this way. That if we are texting and talking, that means we're connected. Otherwise, we are not. I've had to honor her definition of connection. Because when we get to be with each other and she's coming home tomorrow, so we have the best conversations. We can talk for two hours sometimes on the phone.
But she doesn't feel the need to connect as often as I do. When we connect, it's beautiful. So I've had to honor that. Again, coming back to this idea of giving people permission to be who they want to be and who they need to be. Yeah.
Megan Leatherman:
Hmm. Yeah, which is such a radical thing. Like I can't even, I'm, yeah, I can see so many edges and opportunities to do that more in my own life. It's really, that's so different than being together in the ways we all think we should be. And yeah, I can just, it just feels so much more freeing even hearing you talk about it. Well, you know, the season of the show, recovering this topic of growing into Village. And to me, it feels like everything you're saying about authentic connection and expression is essential if we're going to grow into more connective or healthy or longer term, you know, community with ourselves and other people and other beings. But what is the term Village evoke for you and how do you see your work as related or not related to a village?
Uma Girish:
Yeah. You know, human design says that as we move into the year 2027, we are moving into a whole new era where the individual is going to become very important, which is why we're seeing structures and institutions crumbling because we're going to be rebuilding everything. So when I mentioned this to one of my clients, she said, but what about community? Isn't community important?
And I said to her, yes, but look at the communities that we have today. They are more cults than communities, so many of them. So a healthy community can only come together when every individual in that village or community is healthy. And that's what we're going to see. So it begins with each one of us. And when we get to that space where we are individually healthy enough that we don't look to an external authority to tell us what to do and how to do it and where to go. That our inner compass becomes our own authority. This is when we build beautiful villages and communities of strength where everyone is honored, but there are no hierarchies where each individual's wisdom is seen and appreciated and revered. So those are the communities that I dream of. I know it's,
We have some ways to go before we get there, and I don't even know if I'll be alive for that. But that is my endeavor. In the work I do, I empower the individual so that this person carries their individuality, their uniqueness, their blueprint into a room that they walk into, a community they walk into, a family they walk into. There's nothing more important than self-empowerment, in my view.
Especially if you're a woman. I mean, we've been beaten down for, gosh, thousands of years now. Beaten and burned and vilified. It is our time to rise. I really, really, really am excited about the rise of the Divine Feminine because I believe that we have, women have access to so much intuition and wisdom and the sacredness of life, we birth life. And so I believe that there's something really important and sacred for us to do in moving the world in a different direction. But that begins with self-empowerment. If a woman is attached to external validation and approval and a formula where she believes there's a right way to do things and the wrong way to do things, there's only your way to do it. There's no such thing as the right way or the wrong way.
So this is why I'm excited about empowering humans because when we have empowered humans, we will have empowered villages, empowered communities, and eventually an empowered world.
Megan Leatherman:
I believe you. Thank you. Yeah, that's such an important point. I remember someone a few years ago said something like, in a true community, there are going to be people you don't like. A true community isn't just all people who are getting along and friendly. And you're right, if we're all really staying true to ourselves, is inevitably going to be conflict or people that we don't really want to be around. And that seems really healthy and in line with the natural diversity that we see in ecosystems. We need a lot of different kinds of people to be well and healthy.
Uma Girish:
I look at the weight loss craze in the world, the ozempic trend. We came here to have different body shapes and sizes. We are meant to honor the diversity there as well. And yet everyone is trying to follow some cultural model and trying to look real thin, because looking good is more important than feeling good, it seems, in the world today. But when we all begin to you know, go inwards and say, what is my body need to feel good and healthy? How do I need to eat for my body? What feels nourishing to me? That's when we'll embrace different body types and sizes and give up this illusion of there's one perfect model for all of us. Yeah.
Megan Leatherman:
Yeah, I feel like in every area of life, there's that work to do. Every area we look around, there's some formula we've inherited or think we should follow. it can, yeah, I hope it does continue to crumble and so that we can step into something new. Well, this has been such a rich conversation. Is there anything that we haven't covered today that's on your heart?
Uma Girish:
I keep coming back to this theme of women ruling the world. I think it was on another podcast a few months ago that I was asked about my vision for the world. And I said, I dream of a world where women lead, where we're by feminine, we're living by honoring feminine energies and feminine wisdom. And I really long for that to, to, to be true and to happen so that we can birth a world of gentleness, compassion, love, kindness, equity, inclusion. Those are values we should all aspire to.
Megan Leatherman:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, lovely. Thank you. Well, where can people find you and follow along with what you're doing?
Uma Girish:
The best place to find me is my website, is umagiresh.com, firstnamelastname.com. My new book, Sacred Fire, will be out on the 19th of May. It'll be available everywhere books are sold. So I'd love for you to check that out and love for your audience, your listeners to check out my books as well. I have a podcast called Being Fully Me, where I just do six episode seasons which relate to one specific theme. So I've done seasons on human design. I have one coming up on spiritual mentoring, what it means and why we need it. So all that good stuff is on my website.
Okay, great. I'll put those links in the show notes so it's easy for people to grab. Well, thank you so much, Uma. This has been really lovely and just, yeah, I just even feel good having listened to you for this time. So thank you so much.
You know, this was a dream of mine. just, that call, the Zoom call that we were on together, I just had this sudden thought it would be so nice to record a podcast episode with Megan. And then two days later, you send me an email and you invite me. This was like, you know, the best case of manifestation. And I've just enjoyed every minute of this. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Megan Leatherman:
Yeah, it's mutual!
Okay, well, I hope you really loved that conversation with Uma and I encourage you to check out her website and her new book. She also has a podcast called Being Fully Me that you might want to check out as well. If the show has supported you, I welcome your contributions, financial or otherwise, if you have a few dollars to chip in or if you'd like to become a monthly sustainer and go deeper with this work while supporting the show in a meaningful way, you can do both of those things at BuyMeACoffee.com slash Megan Leatherman. If you're not in a position to do that right now but you still want to support the show, it's super helpful for you to share it with loved ones or friends or to leave a rating or review on Apple or Spotify. And I really appreciate all of you who are supporting the show in ways that I know about or don't. It just means the world to me. I will see you in two weeks for our final interview on the subject of growing into Village. And after that, we'll cross into the summer season together with a solo episode on the solstice. And then I have some big plans for the summer season of the show. So I'll share more about that probably in the solo episode to wrap up this season. But I'm excited for the journey that we're gonna go on this summer. I hope you take such good care and I will see you on the other side.