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When Career Success Feels Empty: The Four Aims of Life in Vedic Astrology · Magic Thread Media

• 0:02
  Vish Chatterji: Welcome to Bending the Light. I'm Vish Chatterji, car engineer turned karma mechanic. Are you ready to explore karma, dharma, mantra, ritual, and yoga philosophy to help navigate life, but all grounded in our modern world reality, along with a dose of healthy skepticism, I mean, after all, I am a trained engineer. Join me as we navigate the timeless wisdom of my ancestors, the ancient sages of India, from yoga to meditation to Ayurveda and Vedic philosophy, and Jyotish, the science of light, to help make sense of yourself, your life, your karma, and the world around you,
• 0:43
  come with me on this journey to learn the power of bending the light.
• 0:48
  I am so excited to be with you again for my second full-length episode of bending the light, and today's topic is to talk about life purpose, how much money, time, and energy do we spend trying to figure out what are we here to do? So that's exactly a topic I want to tackle. And you know, for as many of you know, I worked in the corporate world for a long time, specifically in product planning and product marketing. And for any kind of product or new company, we would spend a lot of time figuring out the mission statement, and sometimes millions of dollars with an agency working on what is
• 1:25
  our brand statement, what is our mission statement, what is our vision, those kind of things. And today, I do that for smaller companies, I do that for individuals, and you know, there's so much heartache about you know what is my personal mission statement, and so when the idea of purpose comes up, when somebody says, "What is my life purpose? What am I here to do? People think it's a purpose statement or it's a mission statement, but it's actually a lot more complex than that. So I'm sure many of you in your time have thought, you know, I'm busy, I'm working, I'm enjoying, I'm
• 2:01
  earning. I have my family. I have my life. I have my friends. I have my social life, but there's got to be something more to life. Why am I here? What is the bigger picture? What is my bigger purpose? And sometimes people have kind of a wake up call. They have this moment in life. Maybe they get sick or they get laid off from their job, and they suddenly think, or the industry is changing, or you know, like today, that advent of AI, and all of a sudden you're like, "What am I really here to do? And you know that question has plagued us for generations, literally. And the Vedic people actually
• 2:37
  have a perspective on it. The ancient Vedic rishis, the seers, the ancient, the ancient yogis-you could say they had an explanation of what we're here to do. The short of it is that we are all here. We are all here. Every one of us are here on a spiritual journey. At the end of the day, we are spiritual beings, but a lot of us forget that and get caught up in our human experience, and we get so busy with our human experience, we forget the spiritual dimension that we're actually here to explore, and so we get lost in what is my mission statement, what is my personal brand, and we forget
• 3:14
  about the bigger spiritual perspective. We are here to discover our inner beings. We are here to discover, as they say in spiritual intelligence traditions, we are here to discover our higher self, and the more we start to connect and understand that higher self, the more we start to live with a sense of purpose. And it's important to live with a sense of purpose because people that live with a sense of purpose live longer, happier, and healthy lives. In fact, I wrote about this in my book, in my first book, *The Business Casual Yogi* Dan Butner, the researcher, anthropologist that wrote a
• 3:50
  book called *The Blue Zones Project* where he identified the the most healthy, long-lived, and happy populations in the world. And when he identified who the happiest, healthiest, longest-lived people were, he identified certain characteristics that all of them followed, even if they're different corners of the globe. And one of those things was living with a sense of purpose. Living with a clear sense of purpose allowed people to end up living healthier lives.
• 4:19
  Let me look that statistic up here. It's in my book, Dan Butner. Okay, so this is from page 72 of my book. In Dan Butner's work with the National Geographic, researching the longest living, happiest populations on the planet, dubbed the Blue Zones, purpose is one of the nine common denominators for happiness and longevity. In other words, statistically speaking, if you know why you wake up in the morning, you will live longer. He found specifically that people with a strong sense of life purpose had a 15% lower risk of an early death. Right, and so this is what drives me. If drives. Many of us
• 5:00
  to try to figure out what our purpose is, and we spend. I mean, the coaching industry is full of all sorts of methodologies, approaches, frameworks, and systems to try to help you figure out your purpose statement. Even I use a framework that I learned at the Troy Center in their coaching life coaching program, where we try to identify. We try to identify people that inspire you in your life, and try to understand the attributes of those inspirational people and how they relate to your inner purpose. I've also used another thing called the the purpose deck. Richard Leider was his name, and
• 5:38
  it was a set of cards called calling cards, where you would sort these cards to try and figure out what is your inner calling, but all of this is trying to identify the word purpose, which is actually a smaller part of our true purpose. The ancient Vedic seers, the rishis, identified that life has four key aims. They were called the purusharthas, the four aims of life. So life was not just about your inner purpose. Life was about many many things, and they divided into dharma, artha, kama, and moksha. Dharma includes your inner calling, but it's a bigger word. We'll describe what that is.
• 6:20
  Artha is your financial prosperity, Kama is your joy and fun, and Moksha is freedom, liberation, your spiritual practice. Right. So let's take these each one by one. Take them apart. So we'll start with something simple. Kama. Have you heard this word, Kama? K A M A, like the Kama Sutra. Right. So often the Kama Sutra is considered to be a sexual manual of the Vedic tradition, but actually it's a manual of pleasure and fulfillment. So the word Kama actually means to have fun. So one of the four aims of life, one of the subsets of purpose in life, is actually to have fun. Kama is having fun,
• 7:01
  so having joyful experiences, having companionship, having love, having sexual experiences, having beautiful experiences in life, traveling, eating a nice meal. How many times you go take a stroll along a body of water and just have this nice feeling of happiness that is considered comma. How many times you date someone, you get in a relationship, and you have this kind of rush that comes with that experience. That's part of comma. You're in a married relationship. You go to dinner and have a really nice exchange and really nice meal. That's comma. You go on a family trip and you go to the
• 7:37
  beach and you enjoy and you splash in the water and there's this fun memory that's created that is also considered comma, and that is considered one of the aims of life. So if all you do is work, work, work, and never take a break, you're actually not honoring one of the major aims of life. But if you only have fun and you become hedonistic, and you're a hedonistic oriented person, and all you do is drink, party, take drugs, and hang and have fun. Sensually speaking, then you're also not honoring the other three aims. You've you've doubled down too much on one aim, right? So kama is one
• 8:10
  piece of it. So always think as I talk about these different four aims that you find a way to balance all four aims. They're all necessary. They're all required, but you don't want to do one at the exclusion of others, so kama is fun and enjoyment in life. Then the other is artha, and artha is actually earning money, financial stability.
• 8:34
  So who would have thought that one of the aims of life is actually to earn in such a way or to have financial stability, because it's necessary as a platform to support all the other things you're doing. So when you're working to earn money, that is actually fulfilling one of the major aims of life: that you work, or you have investments, or you have an inheritance, or somebody supports you, or you're in a religious organization and you're supported through donations. Whatever it is, that sort of ability to be financially whole is one of the aims of life. So I meet many spiritual people in
• 9:08
  my work where they're so focused on their spiritual pursuit, their meditation, their yoga practices, but they've never held a steady job, and they're always always financially struggling. And that financial struggle eventually catches up to them because they're unable to do their practices because they're constantly worried about how to make next month's rent. Right, so the Vedic theorist saw that your financial prosperity and financial stability are one of the requirements in order to live a healthy life. So now, if you're only working and all you do is work, work, work to earn, earn,
• 9:43
  earn, but you never have fun, then you violated this balanced rule of having all four in balance. So you have your kama, which is your fun in life, but your artha, which is your financial stability. And how do you create that financial stability? Well, you can get a job, you can earn a wage. You can save money and start investing it, and and have investment earnings. Perhaps you come from a well-off family, and the family supports you. Perhaps you're part of an organization. Maybe you're an artist, and there's patrons that support your artwork. All of these are sources of artha, but you
• 10:14
  have to have the financial piece organized in order to have the stability to be able to have fun, right? So fun and some financial stability; these are two of the of the aims. Then we come to the aim of moksha, which is your liberation, your spiritual liberation, your freedom. So moksha is this idea that you have this regular honoring of some kind of spiritual or religious practice, some kind of honoring of the divine, where you recognize that there's something beyond you. This is the recognition of the spiritual experience that you are a spiritual being and not getting lost in just being a
• 10:55
  being a human human being. Be a spiritual being as well. So moksha is this concept of recognizing that you're part of a spiritual journey and honoring that in some way. So perhaps that's your meditation practice. Perhaps it's your chanting practice. Perhaps it's a ritual that you do every day. Maybe it's in Indian tradition we have pooja where we're offering lamps and incense and flowers to a deity and water and food, perhaps it's some prayer you make every morning. Perhaps it's a gratitude journal. Perhaps it's just recognizing. Maybe it's going for a walk in nature and recognizing
• 11:29
  you're part of something greater. So now we've got three of the aims covered, right? You've got artha, which is your financial well-being, kama, which is your joy and pleasure, and moksha, which is your spiritual practice. Then we come to the big one, dharma. Big word, right? Dharma is thrown around a lot, and the typical translation of the Sanskrit word dharma is to honor your duties and responsibilities. That's the correct definition. The colloquial definition is often dharma means my life purpose. What is my dharma? What am I here to do? What is my purpose? But what it really means
• 12:06
  is your duties and responsibilities, and there's multiple ones of those. In the Buddhist tradition, the word dharma is sometimes referred to as the eternal law, and to honor and practice Buddha's teachings. So all of Buddha's teachings could be said to be dharma, and he gives a road map or lays out a way to to live in harmony with yourself and the universe. In the Vedic tradition, dharma has a little bit of a bigger meaning and broader meaning, which is all the duties and responsibilities that you have to live in harmony, to live in alignment with the universe, right? So, as an astrologer,
• 12:44
  many people come to me and say, "Hey, what is my life purpose?
• 12:47
  When I hear that question, I'm trying to I'm trying to help them understand what is their dharma. How do they live in a way that is aligned to the overall universe? And there's actually a ninth house in the chart called the ninth house of dharma itself. That house called the Dharma house. What is my higher purpose? What is my higher calling? So the Dharma has subsets. In Sanskrit, one of the there's a subdharma. There's a dharma to your body called the Sharira Dharma. Sharira means body. What is the duty and responsibility you have to take care of your body, so some kind of, you know,
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  maybe it's your 10,000 steps a day of exercise, maybe it's your going to the gym twice a week, maybe it's your getting a massage once a month, or maybe it's taking a bath once in a while and and giving yourself some time, giving your body time to rest, giving your body the right food, the right nutrition, choosing what is the right healthiest foods for you to eat, and then of course moving the body. Perhaps it's yoga asana, right? As as one way to take care of it. So sharira dharma is the responsibility and duty you have to take care of your body, because without your body in good
• 13:56
  shape, you can't really do anything you need to do, right? So without financial well being, which is artha, without being able to have fun, which is you know psychologically a great boost for all of us, and without taking care of your health and your body, and without doing some kind of spiritual practice on a regular basis, you don't really honor your existence in life. You don't have a good solid platform to go from. Right. So within dharma, we talked about sharira dharma, which is the body. Then there's another one that is called Parivar Dharma, which means the Dharma of the family.
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  What is your duty and responsibility to your family? So a mother and father have a responsibility to take care of their children. A son or daughter has a responsibility to take care of their parents, you have obligations and relationships with other relatives in your family that you take care of, that you uplift, you uphold, and so part of dharma is also honoring the natural law of taking care of your family members. So if you neglect to take care of your family, you start to violate this. Dharma rule, and of course, family are the people that are there for you when you have a time of trouble,
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  right? When you have a difficult surgery to go through or difficult health challenge, it's usually a family member that is there to help you, right? So, keeping those good family relationships, trying to keep those relationships in harmony, is part of dharma. Then we have another one called samaj dharma. Samaj Dharma means the obligation and duty you have to society. How do you honor and contribute to society is one of those sub aims of the aim of dharma in life. How do you participate in society in a meaningful way? So, being a volunteer at a local organization, at a local community
• 15:43
  organization, I volunteered and served in public office in my local community in the health district, and that is an example of samadhi dharma, where I was honoring a duty that I had to take my leadership into my local community. So, finding ways that you give back to your community, the way, and even think about your work. What does your vocation and job entail that helps and contributes and furthers society? What is your unique role in that company, in that organization, in that business, and how does that company and business uniquely help and satisfy something society needs? Right.
• 16:19
  So let's say you're an engineer at a technology company, right? Part of dharma is honoring society and contributing to society using your engineering skills to innovate and come up with new software, new products that company then sells to society, and society's life gets made easier through that product that you're making. So, kind of think about the work you do and what broader purpose does it serve in society? So so far, I've talked about many things that are outside of your own personal calling, right?
• 16:48
  So the big category of kama, which is enjoyment and pleasure, the big category of artha, which is your financial prosperity, the big category of moksha, which is your spiritual activities and pursuits, then the big category of dharma, which is your overall duty and responsibility to the universe, that has a subset of responsibility to your body, responsibility to your family, responsibility to society, and then we get to what is called sva dharma, which is the responsibility and duty you have to honor your inner calling, and so you cannot really honor your inner calling
• 17:25
  until you have all these other things satisfied. If you're unhealthy, if you have difficult strained relationships in your family, if you're not contributing to society in some way, if you're not financially comfortable, if you're not having fun in life, if you're not having some kind of spiritual perspective and outlook, you'll have a hard time being able to honor any kind of inner calling. But that inner calling is what is most elusive, and it's the one thing we're trying to figure out. Right? I think everything I explained today so far, you know how to tackle. You know what to do. And
• 17:55
  if you're finding that it's a little tricky, of what is he saying? I don't really fully understand. I want to know more. You can read the Business Casual Yogi, my first book, and I went into a lot of detail in Chapter Three on the aims of life. Why are we here? The aims of life. All right. So now, for the rest of today, I want to talk about how do you figure out that inner calling. All right. And I believed my inner calling for most of my life was to be a CEO of a business. I grew up in Hong Kong, seeing these you know men primarily in dark business suits and ties, running organizations,
• 18:31
  running companies, running businesses. And I said, when I grew up, I want to be one of those powerful men. And so I went on my own path, my own journey. I did well in school. I got into Northwestern engineering. I worked as an engineer in the automotive industry. I loved cars. I thought that was part of my calling is to work on cars. I used to engineer high horsepower engines, and then from there I went to business school, did my MBA. I loved cars. I thought my calling was something to do with cars and engineering of cars and building cars. I went to Daimler Chrysler into what was called
• 19:01
  advanced product planning, and in that I designed what the future vehicles were going to be for the world. And I got to travel all over Germany, all over the world, actually all over Europe, all over South America, all over Latin America, all over Asia, studying people and figuring out what kind of car to build for global markets. Amazing job! Like I got to study people's psychology and figure out what kind of a car do we need to build that serves global markets for Mercedes-Benz and Chrysler and Jeep, which are all one company at the time. And it felt like I was honoring my calling, but was I
• 19:32
  really right? Because at some point that job started not feel satisfactory to me. I hit a certain stage, I hit a certain level of promotion, and I was feeling a bit empty. I got recruited by a tech company to move out to LA. It was a company called Belkin, and I thought, "Hey, let me try the tech industry. And even though my heart was in automotive, I took the tech job because it paid more, right? So in a way, I made a sacrifice. I said, "Like you know, maybe I'm not going to do my perfect dream job, but they're going to pay me a lot, and I get to live in." We can all go home, and I
• 25:02
  thought to myself, "Wow. Back my head, I thought, "Am I being asked to be a yes man? Is this what happens when you work your butt off your whole career, that you reach a certain point and you have to learn to be better at politics? Politics, that word politics. You have to learn to say yes more, and you kind of go along with the flow and not challenge things so much.
• 25:26
  My whole life, I've been an innovator. I've tried to break the mold and do things differently. I'm not wired to do that. He even used the words, you know, you've done a lot of out of the box thinking, but let's keep it in the box now. And I had that moment where the whole world seemed to dissolve in that room. The wood paneling kind of melted away. I had a some Vega moment where I thought to myself, all that work watching these dark business suit people in Hong Kong as a kid, going to Northwestern Engineering, going to a top five MBA school at Michigan, getting an amazing job at Daimler
• 26:09
  Chrysler, starting divisions at Belkin, quintupling the stock price of a company. After all that, this is what's at the end of the road for me, and I was heartbroken. I didn't know how to react. I looked him in the eye and I said, "Okay. And I left that office. I thought to myself, "Hell no, hell no! This is not how I'm wired. I cannot do this. I cannot be a yes person. I cannot be an in the box thinker. I didn't have astrology at the time. I mean, if I just glanced at my astrology chart, it would have been obvious what was going on. But at the time, I was like, "This is my inner calling,
• 26:55
  and I'm basically having it snipped away, cut away, shut down. And I went home that night, very sad, very disappointed. And I came to work the next morning with a letter in hand. And I went up the elevator, and I went to the executive assistant. I gave her the letter, and I said, "Give this to the CEO. It was my letter of resignation. This is not my path to left, and I had enough earnings from the stock appreciation that I used to just fund a startup. And so my next path was to do a startup, and I thought, "This is it. This is it. I'm going to be my own CEO, right? So I got a friend of I of
• 27:37
  mine and me. We started working on a project together. We started building this company. I'd been building on the side on nights and weekends, and this some Vega moment in the CEO's office for the moment. I thought, let me go ahead and do this thing. Let me finally do the startup for real. And I started running the startup, and for for a few years, so I went 2014 to 2015, and around that time, we went through all sorts of ups and downs: early revenue, getting customers, building a startup, pitching, building product-I mean, just crazy pitching, fundraising, all of that. And I went through a
• 28:09
  really hard time about a year and a half into the startup journey. And I, you know, and and for any of you that are involved in a startup, it is a crazy ride. It is a crazy journey. And in that, I finally decided I need to take some time off. And Yogrishi Vishwaketu, my yoga teacher from the Himalayas in India, was doing a retreat in Canada in the forest. And I thought, let me go meet Vishwaketu at this forest retreat. So I, you know, packed my bag, get on the plane, fly to this retreat. You know, get into yoga mode. I'm wearing nice, comfortable yoga clothes every day, out of my
• 28:47
  business suit of the day, and we're doing yoga in the morning. We're doing meditation. We're doing you know pranic, good quality vegetarian food lectures with Vishwa Ketu, and one day we got a little bit time in the afternoon to go first stroll, and you know, I'm walking with a Himalayan yogi in the forest in Canada, and I said, Vishwaketu, my business is having a really hard time. I'm I'm struggling my business, and I wouldn't say it was quite a some Vega moment, but I was like, I'm working so hard, and I'm not just not sure if this thing's going to work out. I don't know where it's
• 29:18
  going. And Vishwaketu looked at me and said, "Ah, Vishwajit, Vishwajit is my you know my Sanskrit Indian name. And he said, "Ah, Vishwajit, you do more yoga business. Your business will be okay. I was like, "What does that mean? Yoga business? What is yoga business?
• 29:39
  What is he talking about? I don't know what that means, and you know, it's one of those moments where I had no idea what my life purpose was. I thought it was to be an executive, but a yogi, a trained Himalayan yogi like Vishwa Ketu, he sees things. He doesn't look at me as a human being in a body. He looks at me as a spiritual being with a life purpose. He can literally see my dharma, so he said, "You do more yoga business. I'm like, "Well, what does that mean, right? And this was before we wrote a book together called "The Business Casual Yogi. This is well before that. "Business Casual Yogi"
• 30:14
  came out in 2019, and this is in 2016, around that time. So I thought, well, what does this mean, yoga business? So I said, well, I think this guy is trying to scam me-not scam me. I mean, he's my yoga teacher. He's my dear brother, but I think he's kind of trying to get some free work out of me. Maybe he wants me to help him build his website. Maybe he wants me help him build some business. So I said, you know what? How about this? How about I volunteer and help you out? So I helped him with some of his marketing work. I helped him with building a website for his online. If you go to his
• 30:46
  online program, there's online yoga classes now. I helped him with you know all sorts of sort of you know business advising things, and then he was coming to LA to do a yoga a yoga festival, a huge yoga festival called Bhakti Fest, and Bhakti Fest is an amazing, amazing yoga festival out in the desert in Joshua Tree, California. It's basically a bunch of yogis dancing to music in the in the desert, and then doing yoga classes, meditation classes, pranayama classes-a real gathering of of a tribe of yogis, 1000s and 1000s of people. And he was coming to teach there, and he's one of the
• 31:22
  headliners. And I said, you know what? Why don't I volunteer to be your assistant? So I said, hey, I'll be your assistant. So he comes to LA. I'm carrying his bags around. I'm, you know, driving him wherever he needs to go for meetings, driving him to Bhakti Fest. And in that time, he got a dinner invitation to meet Gurmukh Kalsa for dinner, and Gurma Kalsa. If you're in the yoga world, she is a legend. She's opened the first ever yoga studio in Los Angeles back in I think the '70s. She is the mother of the Kundalini yoga movement. She's one of the very esteemed teachers of Kundalini, and
• 31:57
  very very famous yogi for for decades and decades. A student of Yogi Bhajan, and she also was very good friends with Vishwa Ketu, so she invited him to dinner, and so he said, "Can I bring my friend Vish? And she said, "Of course, yeah. And so I, I'm his driver, right? So I drive him to this place in the Hollywood Hills, this fancy mansion of one of her students. There's Thai vegan food being served in typical LA style. There's all these famous yoga people. I think the CEO of Wanderlust was there, and Gurmukh was there, and of course Vishwakethu, who's his own legend. The drummer for
• 32:31
  Krishna Das was there, which is one of his famous musicians that I follow. And I show up, and Vishwa Ketu introduces me, says, "Ah, Gurumuk, you know, and they're like hugging each other, so happy to see each other. And she, he says, "Oh, Gunwook, this is my good student and friend, Vishwajit. And so Gurmu looks at me. She looks at me, and again, I don't think she's looking at me. It's she's looking at my spiritual being, and she says, "Oh, Vishwajit, where do you teach? Teach, and you know, since she was observing some spiritual dimension of my being, I almost thought she wasn't looking
• 33:12
  at me. I'm like, "Are you talking to someone else? And I kind of looked around, and I turned out she was talking to me. So, yes, where do you teach? I said, "Me teach? Oh no, I'm I'm a I'm not a teacher. I'm a I'm a student of this guy. I'm a student of Vishwa Ketu. I'm a student. I don't teach.
• 33:31
  I'm a business guy. I build divisions of companies. I make business. I'm running a startup. I I'm a you know product guy. I'm a business guy. I don't teach. And she looked at me, and now she was looking right at me-not my spiritual being, but this, you know, other being that we think we are, the ego being. Looked me straight in the eye, brought her finger out, and wagged it at me, and said, "You must not die this lifetime, just being a student, you need to go and teach. And then she moved away, got another helping of Thai vegan food, started talking to somebody else, and I stood there as
• 34:13
  if my soul was chiropractically adjusted at that moment. That's what these yogis do. They see your spiritual nature. They see or dharma in you, and of course, then Vishwa looks at me and says, "Okay, Vishwajit, you come teach at my next retreat. Okay, you come teach at my next retreat. I said, "Yes, okay, and sure enough, I did. My first experience teaching on a spiritual subject was a workshop on sankalpa shakti, setting your intentions at the next retreat he did that Vishwakithu held. So that moment in LA with Gurmukh really changed things for me. And around that time, my startup was going
• 34:53
  through a very difficult time, and somebody reached out to me, asked me to coach them, and I didn't quite know what coaching was, but of course, as an entrepreneur. Said yes, sure. I'll coach, and that journey ended up leading me to get referrals. My first client referred me to other clients, referred me to others, and then I realized I had to go and figure out what this coaching thing is. What is this? I don't even know what coaching is. I remember Vishwa Ketu had mentioned it, you know, briefly in some other context a while ago, and I enrolled at the Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute,
• 35:26
  this amazing institution at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and came into contact with the Dr. Mark Rittenberg, who's also got a podcast, The Ballet of Empathy, on this network, Magic Thread Media, And he, at some point in the training, asked the question to all of us: "What makes you different as a coach? Who are you as a coach? And I realized that I'd been a yoga student, a yoga practitioner for decades. I'd been as business executive, a leader in the corporate world with with very successful successful track record, and I could combine these sort of Vedic teachings, yoga
• 36:05
  teachings, with business world, the executive world. So I decided to make myself an East meets West coach, Eastern tradition meets Western MBA and management thinking. And in all that training at Berkeley, I decided I was going to dedicate a year to going deeper into the spiritual traditions of India, so I went to study Ayurveda, mind body medicine. I went to study meditation techniques and how to teach them, and of course, I then enrolled in a yoga teacher training program. And where was that program? In Rishikesh. I flew all the way to the Himalayas in India to Rishikesh to the ashram,
• 36:42
  the yoga center of teaching that Yogrishi Vishwakethu teaches at, and I enrolled in the 200 hour yoga teacher training, and I attend yoga class every morning, meditation, puja, fire pooja rituals, learning Sanskrit, learning all the philosophy. A couple of days before the graduation of the yoga teacher training program, I went for a walk along the Ganges River. So, if you've heard of the Ganges River, it's a very spiritual river in in the Indian tradition, in Hinduism, in yoga tradition, in Vedic tradition, and it's called Ma Ganga, Mom meaning mother, mother Ganges, the mother Ganges River,
• 37:25
  and from the yoga ashram, there's sort of this path that meanders way down, goes down to the towards the water, and then you kind of walk this very crowded, bustling, crazy city, kind of town developed area, and there's a police station, and the rumor is, if if you've been to Rishikesh, everyone knows, across from the police station is a wall, and in that wall there's a hole in the wall, and you go through the hole in the wall, and you end up in this beautiful forest on the other side of the wall, across from the police station.
• 37:57
  So you walk down there, you go through the wall, you end up in this forest, and the forest path then leads you through all these huts where saints and sadhus live, saints, babas, yogis, ascetics, mystics, and then you come walk down towards the banks of the river, and you're long walking along the banks of the Ganges River. And this evening the sun was setting, and I was just going for this contemplative walk, and in the distance, walking the other way, the opposite way, walking along the river north upstream, while I was walking downstream through this forested area behind the wall, I
• 38:32
  see this woman walking with this turban and flowing robes, and I'm kind of intrigued. And it's a Western woman, older Western woman, these flowing robes. As get closer, I say, "Oh my God, it's Gurmukh, Gurmukh Kalsa, the same woman who chiropractically adjusted my soul in L.A. about a year and a half before that moment. And so we got closer. I said, "Oh my gosh, Gurmukh, do you remember me? I'm Vish. I'm Vishwa Ketu's friend, and she says, "Oh yes, here you are. And I said, "Do you remember in L.A. a year and a half ago we were at this dinner, and you asked me if I teach and where I
• 39:11
  teach, and I said I was a student. Well, I've enrolled in yoga teacher training, and I finish in two days. And she was beaming with delight, I mean, from the you know fancy Hollywood Hills home of home of L.A. to the banks of the River Ganga in Rishikesh, she gives me this enormous hug, and she's delighted, and she says, "I will be at your graduation. And so, sure enough, she contacted Vishwa Ketu, found out the details of graduation, and when I finished my yoga teacher training, I got a specific blessing from Gurmukh, the teacher's blessing. And there's a picture, beautiful picture. I
• 39:53
  should post it someday of her. Maybe I'll post it on my Instagram after this episode releases. But of her giving. Me a blessing and showering me with flowers on my journey as a teacher, and that was back in 2017. And since then, I have found my dharma. I guess I've found my calling. It is to teach. It is to teach the wisdom of my ancestors to modern day leaders, modern day people, modern day society, and so East meets West Coach turned out to be the path that I decided to follow. And you know, it's interesting because I'm the only one surprised by that whole journey. Because when I tell
• 40:32
  this story, as you're listening, you're probably like, "Yeah, well, obviously you're that Vish. When I told friends of mine or people that I, especially work colleagues, that hey, I have decided to become a coach, and I sit one on one with people and listen to what they're going through, and combination of mentoring, advising, coaching, inquiry, asking questions. They say, "Well, of course you're a coach, Vish. I'm like, "How? What do you mean, of course? Like this is? I was an engineer. I was an executive. I was a leader. What do you mean? I'm a coach. How do you know this? This and
• 41:03
  and over and over, people would tell me, well, when you're in the corporate world, you know meetings get rescheduled. You'd move things around because you had to based on this meeting or this availability, but you considered one-on-one meetings with anybody sacred, and you never rescheduled them. It's true. When somebody reached out to me for mentoring in the corporate world, I would schedule that meeting, and I never ever shifted it. No matter what, I would move a senior executive meeting before I'd move a mentoring meeting for somebody junior in the organization. And so, there's
• 41:33
  clues along the way, right? Along the way of your life, there are clues to what is your inner calling, what is Your destiny. What is your gift and talent? What is a special thing that you offer the world that is unique? I am blessed that at this age of 50, I am able to work in a vocation that is lined with my inner calling. I am earning from doing my inner calling work.
• 42:01
  That is not the case for everyone, and so I I really want to debunk this idea that when you find your calling, you'll earn money from it and you'll be happy and everything's just perfect, right? You find your passion, do it, and the universe will reward you. I'm not sure about that, right? I got rewarded very much better compensation when I was doing work in the corporate world as an executive that wasn't my calling, and many of my clients they work in a job that pays the bills that gives them good artha gives them good income, but they end up doing some other activity that honors their
• 42:37
  inner calling. So very few people are lucky and blessed enough that their inner calling, their deeper purpose, the higher dharma aligns with their vocation and their work. In some cases, they align; in many cases, they don't. So don't feel like when you find your life purpose, it means you give up your job. You may use your job as your platform for artha to make the money to support your inner calling and calling work. And in Vedic astrology we have two different houses that relate to this topic that we're talking about. We have the 10th house that is a house of career. What is your
• 43:09
  profession? We have the sixth house, which is what is your job? Not a profession, not a career, but a job that just earns money. The hard work work that you do. So let's say you're a waiter or server or you know, working in a warehouse like that's your sixth house. You're doing the job to pay the bills, but it's not your deeper vocation profession. One day maybe you'll go get an education. You'll go get a profession. That would be the 10th house. The ninth house is the house of higher purpose. It's a different house altogether, and that is something that is your sort of higher calling
• 43:42
  aspiration. So you have a house of pure work that's maybe miserable and not fulfilling. You have a vocation or career that's fulfilling at some level, and then you have a deeper purpose, a deeper dharma that's seen in the ninth house. And so we look at all three of those to understand the different things in somebody's life. So for me, what's interesting is I do not have the birth chart of a CEO, but that was what I felt my calling was my whole life. I worked hard on that track, and had I known astrology, maybe I would have changed my trajectory a little bit. Maybe, maybe not. I had to
• 44:18
  learn the lessons I learned. I now advise CEOs. I'm now a coach to CEOs, and that is very evident in my chart. Right when I look at my 10th house of career, it shows Jupiter, the guru, the wisdom, the teacher, the spiritual advisor. It's with Ketu, the spiritual planet. It's so Jupiter together with that gives a spiritual teacher kind of combination, so that's very very clear, right? So we have to try to understand. And if I look at my ninth house, it's ruled by Pisces, which is the most spiritual sign of all, and so you can already see that there's a spiritual connection both in my career
• 44:59
  house and. My higher purpose Dharma house, and so for all of us on our journey, you may not know what your higher purpose is. You may not know what your calling is, but you have to trust that every step along the way is your journey towards that deeper purpose and higher spiritual living. On that journey, there are clues. You meet people who see you, who see you who you truly are. There's people who are experienced. There's people who are spiritually advanced who will see and point things out. You get clues from the universe all the time. My simple clue that wow, I never renegotiate the
• 45:35
  one-on-one meetings that are scheduled on my calendar. That was a clue. I never connected the dots, right? So one thing to contemplate as we come to the close of this episode is: what in your life brings you peak joy? What work do you do?
• 45:53
  What service do you do for society where you lose track of space and time, where you enter a flow state, where you love doing it, you love doing so much that you would do it for free. What activities within your day-to-day work do you do where you lose track of time? My one-on-one mentoring sessions, I lost track of time. I was in flow state preparing PowerPoint presentations, not a flow state for me, right? But they're both part of the job. Part of the job was mentoring. Part of the job was PowerPoint presentations. Right, so you start to notice now solving problems. Whether I was an engineer,
• 46:30
  whether I was an executive, whether I'm an executive coach or an astrologer, I love solving problems. That's a common thread throughout it all. So you start to see that certain activities you love to do, you enter a flow state when you do those things. They fulfill you. They feel really good. So you'll see in the stories that I shared with you, I didn't always know the direction. I didn't always know what was in store for me, and I went through moments of crisis, like I called them some Vega moments, moments where everything around me seemed to be dissolving, and a moment of disillusionment,
• 47:04
  a moment of dissolution as well. And in those moments, as dark as they were, a light emerged. The truth of me emerged. And so, if you're in a difficult time in life, just realize that maybe something will be revealed to you along the way. Be open to outcome. Be open to meeting people who may point you in that direction. And notice that in my stories, when I look back, there seems to be some connection. There's a dot that connects it all. But at the time, I just didn't understand what those dots were. The universe is unfolding exactly as it should, and the coincidence of meeting Gurmukh
• 47:44
  in L.A. and then running into her on that riverbank on that evening, all the way across the planet in Rishikesh, India, at the timing two days before my yoga teacher training graduation, connected to her teaching comment to me in L.A. that year and a half ago-I mean, that's miraculous. What else can you call that? But that is exactly an observation or an example of the way the universe works in incredible ways beyond our ability to understand it. So learn to trust. So between now and the next time we meet, start to notice what things in your life give you the most meaning. What
• 48:32
  responsibilities and duties do you have to yourself and others that need to be honored? Where do you need to let go of false identity? And where do you need to embrace in understanding your inner truth and your bigger dharma with a capital D, your purpose with a capital P?