We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sheba Zaidi + Genevive Savundranayagam a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Sheba + Genevive, so happy to have you on the platform and I think our readers are in for a treat because you’ve got such an interesting story and so much insight and wisdom. So, let’s start with a topic that is relevant to everyone, regardless of industry etc. What do you do for self-care and how has it impacted you?
If you are looking to create a better life for yourself, we encourage leaning into mindfulness practices that help you become more present and make you realize that the past doesn’t exist, and the future is only experienced as the now, so the only real thing is the present moment. There are several different self-care practices that help build your mindfulness muscle. It’s important to find what works best for you. Below are three of our favorite self-care practices that have helped us be effective founders, friends and human beings:
• Journaling: The art of writing down thoughts on paper can be one of the most effective mindfulness practices. Its benefits include managing stress and anxiety, building self-awareness, synthesizing your thoughts and cultivating self-understanding. Of course, you can always start with The Human Being Journal as your first journaling experience. We created the journal after noticing high achievers all around us struggling to find tools to help manage their mental health and made sure the journal was monthly and non-dated – making it an easy self-care habit to incorporate into busy schedules. As founders who can sometimes feel overwhelmed, we know putting our thoughts on paper can help us process our emotions and release pent-up feelings. This can lead to a greater sense of calm, inner peace and emotional regulation.
• Meditation: It is an ancient wellness practice that focuses on training awareness, attention, and compassion. It helps you slow down, be present and put a stop to the incessant chatter in our minds. We recommend downloading some of the meditation Apps like Calm, Insight Timer or Headspace to get started and find the type of meditation that works for you.
• Breathwork: Remain conscious of your breath during the day. Most of us breathe shallow and need to retrain our lungs. Lamaze breathing — mostly known for childbirth — is a powerful tool to help relieve stress. According to a Japanese study — six, deep, prolonged breaths alone can instantly drop your blood pressure, raise alkalinity and change your psychological state.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
Our names are Sheba Zaidi and Genevive Savundranayagam and we are the founders of Mahara and the creators of The Human Being Journal – a non-dated, guided mindfulness journal that helps people manage their mental health, gain perspective and live their best lives. The journal invites you to go inward by answering questions rooted in the fundamental pillars of a happy life—including health, spirit, career, and relationships.
The journal has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, The Globe and Mail and Oprah’s Healthy Living ‘O’ List as a recommended wellness tool. Celebrities in the wellness space have also recommended it, including; Jessica Alba, Reese Witherspoon, Ellen DeGeneres, Jennifer Aniston, Miranda Kerr, Kourtney Kardashian and Lauren Conrad. Most recently, the journal was included in the official 65th GRAMMY Awards® and Oscar® gift bags that all nominees and winners received. We care deeply about giving back and a percentage of each sale goes to supporting global mental health organizations including CAMH and NAMI. Our journals are sold across North America. You can purchase it online at humanbeingjournal.com or purchase instore at in Canada at Chapters Indigo and Holt Renfrew, or in the US at Barnes and Nobles and Paper Source.
If you’re curious and looking for a mindfulness tool that might help you manage your mental health and level up, give The Human Being Journal a try. If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s that our time is limited, and you can’t hack your way to a dream life—ending up somewhere beautiful requires thoughtful examination. Our intention with Mahara and The Human Being Journal is to help people unlock their purpose and close the gap between where they are and where they want to be.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
The three most important qualities we think to be a successful human – whether you are an entrepreneur or have a corporate job – are stay curious, be compassionate and keep perspective. We believe these qualities have most impacted us on our journey as founders but also just helped us be better humans along the way.
1. Stay Curious: Curiosity arms you with the ability to stay hungry and find new solutions to problems that will inevitably arise as an entrepreneur. We experienced this early in our journey with Mahara — just two weeks after quitting our careers, the global pandemic hit, and we had to change course. Instead of wallowing, we got curious about what problems we could solve, and we decided to move into creating a product that could help with the mental health crisis that was unfolding all around us.
2. Be compassionate: The highs and lows of entrepreneurship can often feel like whiplash. This is why it is so important to have compassion towards yourself. For both of us, the mindfulness practices we had in place, including daily meditation, journaling, exercise and good nutrition helped us ensure we prioritized self-care. It was our way of showing kindness and deep compassion for ourselves which helped us bounce back from bad days.
3. Keep perspective: Perspective for us is defined by the ability to ask yourself; will this issue be important in five days, five weeks, or five years? And accordingly, assign the accurate weight to the problem at hand. Perspective allows you to remain optimistic, while keeping your eye on the long game. Having perspective helped us manage extreme shipping delays resulting from COVID, deal with damaged inventory, not having warehouse space to store product (so we converted our apartment into one!), and so on. We knew these struggles were part of our journey and that in a few years we will be able to look back and appreciate the lessons we learned during these early years.
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
“The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle is the book that changed both our lives. We say if you only ever read one book in your life, make it this one. “The Power of Now” changes your relationship with time and you realize there is no past, the future hasn’t happened (and even when you do, you experience it as the present) and that the present is the only thing that is real. The three big lessons for us from that book were:
1. The present moment is all you ever have. Wherever you are, be there totally.
2. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.
3. Stress is caused by being “here” but wanting to be “there.”
Eckhart Tolle’s other book, “A New Earth” was a source of inspiration for The Human Being Journal, along with our life experiences.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.maharamindfulness.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maharamindfulness/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maharamindfulness/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/maharamindfulness/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/maharalifestyle
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGywuX3nrM2UxKb480Lrdjg
Image Credits
Photos by August Media
