Amisha Ghadiali is an award-winning social entrepreneur, intuitive therapist, and the founder of the Presence Collective — an online community for creative, connected, and courageous living. Her work is centered around sacred activism, as she inspires international audiences to become effective agents of change and contribute to the collective wellbeing of the world. Her anticipated book, Intuition: Access your inner wisdom. Trust your instincts. Find your path is now available in Australia. the UK, and the U.S.
Amisha is the host of the globally acclaimed podcast The Future Is Beautiful, which explores the relationship between politics, spirituality, sustainability, and creativity. The show offers deep and insightful conversations with fascinating and diverse guests challenging the dominant world story and sharing ideas for co-creating a beautiful future. Guests have included Sonya Renee Taylor, Charles Eisenstein, Polly Higgins, Satish Kumar, Sally Kempton, and Bruce Parry to name a few.
Amisha has an extensive background in leading meditation, breathwork, yoga, and energy healing. An experienced facilitator, she hosts a variety of retreats, workshops, and online programs sharing tools for balance on a physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual level. She currently runs the Beautiful Leadership Immersion, an embodied learning and unlearning adventure for inner transformation and systemic change, and works one on one with clients in her Presence Leadership Mentoring program. Most recently, she held Style and Presence, a global womxn’s summit and reclamation of worth featuring 26 empowering speaker sessions with progressive voices and thought leaders.
Welcome everybody, welcome to Spiritual Biz Chat for Spiritual Biz Magazine, and today we have joining us spiritual teacher Amisha Ghadiali. Welcome, Amisha, thank you for being with us, how are you doing today?
AMISHA: I am good, thank you. As everyone, riding the waves of this pandemic and finding ever new resilience and joy. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.
It’s a pleasure to have you here, Amisha! Could you share the story behind your personal journey down the path to your current life’s purpose and work?
AMISHA: To make a long story short, I feel my story is like so many of ours. A push and pull between what I felt the most inspired to do with my life, and what I felt I should do (due to societal and family conditioning). Through a series of accidents (and in turn, near-death experiences), and also trying the things I quite enjoyed and thought I would be meant to do – and having them not quite work out or feel empty somehow, I came to find what really lit me up. I have worked across multiple industries and not had a clear-cut career path. My goal has been to learn, explore, and understand the weaving between things. I have found so much benefit in having experience and networks within politics, sustainable fashion, tech, and the healing arts. I don’t believe as humans we are designed to be so narrow.
There was a moment in 2012 where I had a colossal burnout. I mean, lying on the floor backstage before I did my TEDx talk because I felt like I had no energy in my body, kind of burnout. I had been trying to “change the world” and I wasn’t resourced or fully connected to myself. I made a decision to make my spiritual practice the center of my life and then let everything else unfold from there. After that, circumstances changed very quickly. Amazing teachers and mentors appeared, and I pushed myself out of the spiritual closet and integrated the wisdom traditions fully into all areas of my life and work.
That freed up so much in me, for example, giving up my house in London, and living out of a suitcase so I could spend time in places that really nourished my soul such as India, Bali, and California. I realized that it was the dance between the inner and the outer that really fascinated me. How can we be great activists and agents of change, and be rooted and connected to something bigger than ourselves? How could our spirituality make us more grounded and present? How could the businesses and projects we birthed into the world be aligned with soul, not ego? These are the questions that I am answering with my work.
How inspiring! Congratulations on your recently released book, “Intuition: Access your inner wisdom. Trust your instincts”! What was the inspiration behind this book? What do you hope for the readers to take away after reading your book?
AMISHA: I was invited to write this book, and it felt significant that intuition was being met in these times with more acceptance and curiosity. Our intuition is such an important part of who we are as humans and I believe that our intuition has the wisdom that we need on both a personal level to guide our lives and also collectively. Due to systems of oppression that have been active for centuries, we have been taught on a societal level to doubt or fear our intuition. We need to reclaim it, and I hope that it what everyone who reads this book receives – permission to be whole. In the book, I share nine principles of intuition as well as over 50 practices to support you in connecting with your intuition. It’s got something for everyone whether you are new to your intuitive intelligence or want to take the relationship deeper.
I wrote the book whilst staying in a treehouse during the first global lockdown. It was a wild experience to be deep in nature, at that moment of both collective stillness and chaos – and sit down to focus on this theme. In this time of post-truth and so uncertainty, it is so important to be able to listen to your intuition and navigate your own way forwards.
What kind of advice can you give to someone who wants to write a book but is afraid or hesitant for any reason?
AMISHA: Just do it! It’s easy to make these things such a big thing in our heads and to worry about it being perfect. I have found that if you sit down and let your heart flow onto the pages, trust yourself, and also have in mind those who you are writing for – that what you write will be well received. When most people read a book, they want to learn something new, they want to hear what you have to say, and they want to enjoy it. Self-judgement and doubt can take up so much space, and it can seem like such a big thing before you do it, but once you have done it, and the book is out there, it doesn’t feel like such a big deal.
You are the host of “The Future Is Beautiful” Podcast, which is also your relatively new creation. Can you share with us a bit about it and its purpose? What do you think sets your podcast apart from other spiritual podcasts out there?
AMISHA: The podcast launched in 2017 and was part of a project that I had launched in 2010. When we started, my aims were to remind everyone that we create the future by how we spend our time, money, and energy whether we realize it or not. I wanted to give people both permission to have a beautiful vision for this world, and a nudge to get on with creating it. We published a book that shared over 200 people’s collective visions for the future and ways to create it. This then evolved into a podcast, as I love the audio format and love to connect with people in this way and hear their truth.
A big part of the mission with the podcast was to host it from a feminine way – no preplanned questions or debate but to give people space to really share, and to see what they share when you keep giving them space so they add layers to what they see in this world. I wanted to make a podcast that was deep, meaningful, and real – where we didn’t pretend to know all the answers, but had good questions and explorations and were able to share from our own experiences. I wanted a show that helped us to move beyond silos and see the interconnectedness of everything. The podcast explores the weave between politics, spirituality, creativity, and sustainability.
We have a lot of women guests and many BIPOC. We feature people from all walks of life, from an incredible social entrepreneur who has escaped modern-day slavery to native American spiritual leaders to musicians who weaves folk music and nature connection to a lifelong sustainability campaigner. My questions aren’t the usual questions about their work, so it gives space for them to share something different.
What is your ultimate goal with your work? What is your mission? Your dream? What are some projects that are on your mind and that you are currently working on?
AMISHA: My work is all centered around connection – to ourselves, each other, and the earth. I believe that this is what we need to co-create a beautiful future. We have to be able to listen deeply to our own wisdom and that of others, we need to be able to recognize the importance of living a life of regeneration (not extraction).
I facilitate a leadership program that has two components. I believe that we are all leaders and that we need to redefine what this means and move out of the power-over paradigm. One aspect is the one-to-one work, Presence Mentoring where I dive deep into transforming subconscious patterns, releasing conditioning, awakening potential, and supporting you in making shifts in your life and relationship to yourself that feel more authentic to your essence. And this goes beside a group program called The Beautiful Leadership Immersion, which explores many key themes of what leadership really is. We also have masterclasses from some of the inspiring guests who have been on the podcast.
We are also building an app at the moment for The Future Is Beautiful community, which I am really excited about. It’s going to connect people both digitally and in the physical and offer ways of deeper exploration and embodying of the themes in the podcast.
Is there a final message you want to let our readers know? Or just any last little words that you have for them?
AMISHA: I just have a simple question to have readers ponder, how will you create beauty in the world?
