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A full transcript follows.
Welcome to the last episode of season 1 of the Diversity rocks innovation! livestream and podcast! Thank you to everyone that has supported this first season.
Maneesh Kalra grew up in an Indian household in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He studied pharmacology and was about to enter med school when he had a moment that propelled him in a different direction towards Osaka, Japan. Maneesh’s experience traverses modern big business to the ancient concepts of Ayurveda. He brings his unique mix of experiences and talents to his current endeavours that seek to prepare people physically, emotionally and mentally to better handle whatever comes their way. We are pleased to welcome Maneesh as a guest speaker for the 2022 enjoi Wolfpack offering DEI discussions for men.
Please enjoy this last episode of season 1 as Maneesh challenges us to ask some important questions about wellness and what we are spending our precious time and finite breaths on. And keep an eye out for updates about season 2 on social media while we are on hiatus!
In this episode you’ll hear:
- The ‘kick in the gut’ Maneesh had as he prepared to enter med school and that made him change direction
- How coming to Osaka through the JET program opened him up to different ways of seeing and perceiving the world
- Maneesh’s return to Japan working in the Tokyo office of Goldman Sachs
- How Maneesh was drawn to South India to reconnect to his roots, study yoga, Sanskrit, and Ayurveda
- How Maneesh helps corporations investing in employee wellbeing
About Maneesh:
Experienced Chief Executive Officer with a demonstrated history of working in the finance, health wellness and fitness industry. Yoga, meditation & mindfulness advisor and instructor experienced with customized training for individuals and companies, corporate wellness courses, and offsite and retreats. Skilled in Japan & India market entry and strategic planning. Strong business development professional graduated from Ivey Business School at Western University.
Connect with Maneesh:
Website: https://www.manthan-wellness.com/?lang=ja
Connect with Jackie:
Website: https://en-joi.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-f-steele-phd/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/enjoidiversityandinnovation
https://www.facebook.com/jackiefsteelephd
Instagram: www.instagram.com/enjoi_diversity_innovation/
Transcript:
Jackie : Welcome to Diversity rocks innovation! volume 19, and the last one in our first season. We’ve left it at an awkward 19 on purpose, just to be sort of edgy. No seriously. I’m so excited for all of the different, amazing thought partners we have hosted this season and I’m very grateful to be ending with a wonderful, wonderful friend.
My name is Jackie Steele. I am a Canadian political scientist living and working in Japan. And of course the founder and CEO of enjoi Diversity & Innovation. enjoi’s a Japan based global facing business. And we work in Japanese and in English to really support leaders, corporate leaders, and organizational leaders in building out a diversity positive workplace and workplace culture.
We know, and we believe, that diversity truly rocks innovation. And we are interested in an inclusive form of innovation that amplifies and supports equality, and that really powers our people systems for personal and collective good, and for a sustainable long-term investment.
This livestream is aiming to shine a spotlight at the beautiful diversity of collaborators who agree to thought partner out loud, real time, with me here, live on the live stream, just as two human beings showing up, no business cards, minus any of the senpai-kohai, how old are you, how long have you been in Japan, this, that, or the other hierarchies or gender or race or any of that nationality based issues, that can really get in the way of just genuine human connection and expertise sharing and learning from each other.
I am thrilled to welcome today my guest for a wonderful thought partnering session, Maneesh Kalra. He is the founder of Atha Yoga and he is also offering some really exciting new support offerings to companies around wellness and holistic resilience through an initiative called Manthan. And we’re going to hear about that, and I’m very excited to hear about that today. So please join me in welcoming a kindred spirit, fellow Canadian, following the hockey game ongoing at the moment, go Habs, right? Have I got the right team? Maneesh, welcome to Diversity rocks innovation! Thank you for joining me today.
Maneesh: You got the right team and you got the right person here. Thanks very much, Jackie. It’s so wonderful to be here. And I just have to tell you, first of all, your diversity totally rocks, because your opening credits, I love the music. I was getting into it and then the poetry, fantastic.
Jackie : And, you know, fellow Canadian, Wali Shah, out of Toronto, a wicked poet, who I had such a fun time collaborating with to make that corporate philosophy video. So shout out to Wally for that beautiful work of genius, and also to Takeshi Morimoto who is here in Tokyo, who is my videographer for enjoi. And he put together this amazing combination of footage of the Tokyo scenes with Wally’s slam poetry being recorded real time in Tokyo. So it was really creative. Thank you. Big shout outs to those two people for that wonderful project.
And today though, we’re going to get into the deep dive to find out more about Maneesh, and there’s things that we know, and we can Google and find about you online. But we really want to try and sort of deep dive a little bit more into the unknown sides of who you are and what your backstory is, all the different, unique diversities that make your uniqueness, your who-ness, I would say, and I guess things that have become pillars in your core identities and your core values since all these different many years.
So to help us understand what you’re doing now, can we go back to Canada? Talk to us about maybe your upbringing, where did it all begin? And what did you identify, what would you identify as the kind of core elements of understanding your who-ness?
Maneesh: Sure. Okay. Well, lots to cover. I’ll try to nutshell it as we do, to kind of cover all those elements you laid out there.
So where did it begin? So I grew up in an Indian household in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Western Canada. So I was born and raised in Canada, but within the house we had a very good piece of tradition, a very good connection to the old world for the motherland.
So I grew up kind of always in this, back in the seventies and eighties, there was always this interesting, you can call it a tension. Maybe a healthy tension, maybe at times a concerning tension, between wanting to assimilate, be Western, and at the same time, being instilled from a very young age with the roots of Asian traditions.
So educated there, went to university, studied pharmacology. Did I skip through too much? I kind of skipped through a bunch. But I studied pharmacology in the faculty of medicine as an undergrad and I was planning to go to med school and everything was, all the pieces on the chess board were in perfect alignment, the right spots for me to move forward on this path that seemed so in line with what a good Indian boy should do. And I had this moment.
[talking about game in background] I think I have a feeling I know who scored. I get to watch another game in that sense, in that respect. So trying to contain my enthusiasm right now.So after the undergrad, I was looking at going into med school, everything, like I said, was set up. I decided to take a year away. I had this kind of kick in the gut. People like to say epiphany, you know, these kinds of experiences, for me it was like a real kick in the gut.
It’s like I had this moment where it was like a voice said, should you do something just because you can? Just because the people around you or the world around you tells you it’s the right thing to do? Is that the life you should follow? And the clear, the answer was very clear. No. That’s not the reason.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that, but the reason should not be external. The reason has to come from somewhere inside. Now I probably couldn’t put this into words back then at the age of 22. Right. But over the years and looking back, I understand what that feeling is feeling was now.
Jackie : Can I ask you then, I mean, I want to pull a string around, you were lined up to do what a good Indian boy should do. And I kind of want to dig a little bit on that. I mean, for those who are maybe less familiar, of our listeners who are less familiar, what are the elements that you saw as contributing to the family values and the traditional values or those kinds of influences from your parents, that helped shape this idea of what a good Indian boy should do and pursue in life? Can you talk a little bit more about that? That’s kind of interesting to hear more about.
Maneesh: Yeah. I think if you grew up as a second generation, not just Indian and other Asian and probably other households as well, I’ll only speak from my direct experience, but you know, lots of similar background friends, similar background being second generation of maybe some Asian descent.
If you grew up in North America, you would generally have a similar type of experience where we often say that the good Indian boy goes into engineering, or becomes a doctor, right? Those are kind of the two major pursuits, education pursuits.
Jackie : Respectable, high-achieving status, education driven.
Maneesh: Respectable secure jobs, contributing to the world. And you’ll always have a decent paycheck and you’ll be able to get…
Jackie : Provide for your parents.
Maneesh: Provide for your parents. And also very important for Asian households especially, to be able to be marriageable. So these are all very important factors that interestingly enough, even though my family and my mother in particular had a very strong religious and kind of faith element to her, she was not attached to those ideas. I mean, she understood those ideas and she, you know, if that was good for me, then go for it. But it wasn’t even directly parents, I would say it was, it would be the entire environment, which means not just family and friends, but the entire kind of Indo or Indian sub-continent community, that’s in Edmonton.
And also the media that we watched. Anytime we went back to India to visit you would feel these vibrations, at least in the type of environment that I was in, and many of my friends were, and some of it was direct and some of it was subtle, you know, you just see that those people who were following those lives were looked at in a different way.
Do you know what I mean?
Jackie : They were respected and admired as having made it.
Maneesh: They looked secure, their family looked like they were having the right life. And so that was all programmed, and like for everyone, we’ve all been programmed. Right? We’ll get to why this is so important later, but we’ve all been conditioned. We’ve all been programmed, kind of insidiously and no matter what your background or where you grew up, right? We’ve all been socialized in a certain way.
Jackie: I really like that you named it also as a young Indian boy, because I think we often forget the fact that boys and young men are absolutely being gendered into this masculinity box. And one of our guests in the past two months, Shu Matsuo Post, the whole interview was about that. But how men are really socialized also into what is the acceptable man box that you’re supposed to fit into.
And then you add onto that, the racialization point or the ethno-cultural background, and being second generation immigrant to Canada, and that layers another layer of what does it mean to be a good son, who can provide for not only eventually being marriage quality to produce children and grandchildren, but also then to look after all the older age children.
So all of these socializations that we put on men into fitting into the right man box of success, that is not necessarily, as you rightly observe, intrinsically motivated from an internal intrinsic motivation, as Casey Wahl would talk about in his interview. It’s an external, it’s so much external socialization is, you should want this. This is success. We want this for you. You should also want it. And it’s being constantly projected onto us. So say if you stray from that path, there might be judgment. There might be nonacceptance.
And all of these kinds of indirect warning shots across the bow about, what are you letting go of if you don’t walk this path of what we all hope for you. And I think that’s really an important thing to contextualize. And how courageous your journey is, has been, and still is.
And so talk to us then more about this gut reaction that led to you saying, I’m realizing that it’s not my intrinsic motivation speaking about this path.
Maneesh: Yeah. I would say I realized that I didn’t know the answer to the question. So in other words, if I’m not sure that this is something I want to do, that I should be doing for some other reasons that I’m really, that really kind of, I can’t even think of the English word anymore more, I speak too much Japanese these days.
Jackie: You can say it in Japanese and I’ll translate for you.
Maneesh: Actually. Maybe that’ll be quicker.
If I really believe in it. I need to have a real strong belief. If I really connect with that idea then it’s fine. But if not, before I decide to spend the next four to six to seven to eight years in school and residency, and then pursue a life of a doctor for the rest of my life, it’s not like you can just jump around.
It wasn’t like I was going to do six months of an art, craft or something that I could always just switch and do something else. You know, not to say that crafts don’t take a long time. But it’s not something that I could just switch in and out of very easily. Right? So in order to commit to that level I wanted to explore this idea of, what are the eyes that I’m seeing the world with?
What are these eyes? What eyes am I seeing the world through? And in order to do that, I felt really strongly, or it came to me, that I need to get out of my environment, my conditioning, in order to see myself better. You’ve got to get out of that situation.
So I looked at opportunities. I said, okay, look, I’ll give myself a year. You know, the year off type of thing. I’ll give myself a year. I had a seat in university at med school. So I could always go and then come back. You know, everything’s all set, nothing to worry about. No one has to cry. No one has to worry.
You know, I can still have a decent life, follow the path if necessary. And so I looked for opportunities to go abroad, and I realized I needed to go to a culture I didn’t know. I felt I needed to go to a country where I had no clue what the environment was, that I didn’t understand the language even, because language obviously is intrinsically linked to culture.
And so somehow again, I probably didn’t realize it to that extent, what that all meant back then, but now looking back, I do. And so I looked at opportunities around the world and it just so happened, I won’t go through the whole story because it’ll take forever, but it just so happened I had a friend who had done the JET program, the Monbusho, ministry of education’s JET program, which many of your viewers may be familiar with, especially if they’re based in Japan.
And so I came out for a year, came to Osaka and life changed considerably.
Jackie : Talk to me about that crash course first arrival. And then did you realize that, ok, one year isn’t enough, and you really were going to stray from the path?
Maneesh: I wasn’t sure if I was going to stray from the path, what I would say was that one year away just completely opened my eyes to different ways of seeing things, different ways of thinking.
I know it’s totally cliche, right? But if you’ve experienced it, if you’ve actually had the chance to put yourself, or to be in a situation where you’re so far out of what is the norm for you, or for the first couple of decades of your life, you will probably have had a similar type of experience and some epiphanies along the way.
And I realized that it was just beginning. A year was just starting to reshape my eyes to see things in different ways to see what, I was very clearly black and white, it’s now to start to see shades of gray. There’s probably billions of examples if you want to get into it, but to put it really simply, you start to see that there are different ways of looking at life, how to raise children, or if to have children, how to live, and what type of apartment dwelling versus house. I mean, from the simplest and maybe mundane, how to eat things, to how to relate to people, how to work, relationships, work relationships, personal relationships, you name it.
So there was a real growing in that year that I realized I could not let this stop. I needed to do, I needed more time. So that became one year, two years, three years on JET.
Jackie : You gave up your seat in medical school. And what was the fallout around that?
Maneesh: Zero fallout from the family directly. I think, my parents, luckily, believe that I have some sort of judgment.
And also, no one can stop me anyway, so really you might as well go along with it. I’m not going to listen anyways. But no, I think in all seriousness, I think partly because of my mother’s faith and that things will work out. There’s a reason why he’s feeling these things.
And even though part of her, I’m sure half of her, was tearing at her because she’s also socialized and conditioned just like all of us. And half of her was saying, good, go for it, go for it, good for you, let’s see where you need to go, find your path.
Jackie : And so did you have a fairly, I mean, sometimes you hear in certain of the first-generation Indo-Canadian families, that they’re still very much a top down family structure where father does know best and is kind of the authoritarian rule, enforcer and decider for all of the children, particularly the sons, right?
That was not your experience. You had a very different dynamic at home it sounds like.
Maneesh: I had a very different dynamic. I think one big reason is my father immigrated to Canada when he was probably only 21 or so. So he was quite a young man when he came to Canada, he was really interested in assimilating, obviously, cause his background was very different.
He grew up seeing partition in India, which I don’t know if you know much about Indian history, but there was a very brutal, brutal time in India. We won’t get into those details, but he was a young boy. If you had a chance to speak to anyone from a generation that has lived through a war-like, extreme situation, partition in this case, there’s a very different, I mean, there’s no way I could even really begin to kind of understand it.
Jackie : You must get perspective on what really matters though.
Maneesh: And I also think there’s this incredible desire to escape that as well. To never have to be in that again. Especially if you’re young enough and it’s traumatizing enough. So I don’t really know all the answers to why these things, why life has kind of turned the way it did, but what I can tell you is that he was definitely more westernized and he really wanted to assimilate.
He was very, so he was kind of the westernizing force, besides being in Canada. And my mother was keeping the tradition, you know, more for keeping the tradition and there’s, I think in some ways, some sort of healthy balance potentially. But I think what that meant for me was I became quite independent very early.
I didn’t have to follow some, I started working very early, and I started really being independent, traveling alone in my early teens. So I think that gave me a lot of confidence to just, it was like I was going to do what I was going to do, and I wouldn’t be offending anyone by doing that either.
I wouldn’t feel like I’m hurting them, offending them. So I think that’s what propelled me to choose this and to just go for it with no holds bar.
Jackie : I think, I mean, certainly from different guests that have been on the show and what sort of resonates is, how important our parents are in creating what I think to be and what we would maybe now, back in the day we would never call it this, but now in retrospect I think we would want to speak about it as really creating a psychological safety in the home where you do have trust with your children, and you do trust their judgment, and you do want them to be empowered and self-determining and be able to have the right and the choice to make good choices for themselves.
Sometimes make bad choices and then live with those consequences. But that there’s an unconditional love and psychological safety, at least within the private immediate family, that can be a fairly important buffer against all of the negative toxic socialization being pushed on us in the outside world, or even from extended family and relatives and the broader extended family, relative culture, if you are an immigrant descent dynamic, but also from Canadian society as we’re growing up and those pressures there.
That relationship between parent and child, and certainly I feel that very strong ethical responsibility as a mother to say, how do we make sure that I’m building that consciously, and that our family, we’re building that for our children, because that’s going to be the core of their self-esteem, to know to trust themselves.
So that they can follow those gut signs that will pop up to say, don’t just be a people pleaser and follow what everybody else is asking you to do to fit into the model, but be your own individuality and be okay with what that looks like. Really exciting.
Maneesh: Yeah, I think that clearly that’s really important. I, to be honest, back then, especially at the age that most young parents were immigrating, I don’t think they had the extra space to be able to even think about those things.
I think it was really just about making it, dealing with this new environment. So I think for them to even, not consciously at least there was no way it could be about, unconsciously I think of course, how do we create a loving environment, secure environment and all these kinds of things.
But they were dealing with just being in this new land when they came, when my mother came to Edmonton there were very, very few Indians, you know? And she had never lived abroad until that point, because that was not so common. So I think they’re also dealing with all their socialization.
They don’t have the manual on how to do this and I didn’t have it clearly. But they’re kind of going through their process. So I totally agree that parents of course had played an incredible role. Maybe part of it is just watching them go through their own work on all this stuff, maybe, I don’t know.
I really don’t know. Cause I can’t really remember back then to that degree, because you’re so busy looking at the world through your eyes and trying to grow up and try to deal with your stuff. You probably didn’t have as much chance to see people around you. But at the time I do remember there was definitely, I recall kind of growth intention and how to deal with this kind of pull, from East and West pull, and familial pulls.
Jackie : And you talked about it maybe?
Maneesh: Yeah, I think to some degree, but sometimes it was the not talking about it that also gave me lots of clues, and that made me think.
And then I have a younger sister who was great about, she is still as great about talking about things. Yeah, I think it’s hard to understand how that whole dynamic affected this interest of mine and ability to be able to have confidence to go to do these things.
Jackie : And in some ways they’re probably navigating. I mean, they would have been perhaps navigating the pressures that back in the day with so few numbers of Indo-Canadian in the community in Edmonton, they’re in this dynamic of feeling pressure to be the model minority, right? They’re a visible minority.
They’re standing out from Canadian society in the way that you and I stand out all the time in Japan. And I think there’s, I certainly feel a pressure that I need to be in some ways, a model minority, a model foreigner here, so that we have a good reputation for Canadians and for whatever that represents, that we can show respect to Japanese society and blend in and learn Japanese, and adapt, that we’re showing we do adapt.
And we don’t just assume that everything should adapt to us. And we get those pressures then, and surely those pressures, plus obviously there’s still racism happening in Canada then, and there’s those pressures facing them. So as you mentioned, all that they were juggling with and dealing with real time. I’m always amazed at our parents’ generation, how, in some ways it feels more laid back then for parenting than it is now.
And now there’s so much more pressure put on because we’re consciously mindful about, you need to do this, and we need to build this in our home, and we need to, the research shows this for children’s development. And there’s like all these different things now that to be a successful parent, not like scarring your children for life, you need to be careful of.
And then you’re also dealing with it as an immigrant. Like we’re immigrants in Japan, also dealing with how do we protect our children from not only what we deal with as immigrants, but then how they receive impacts as immigrant children. And that’s just another whole ongoing issue.
Maneesh: That might be a sign of how the world, the evolution is, things are going maybe, I don’t know, in the right direction, if there are more conversations around stuff that either were ignored back then, or people just didn’t have the wherewithal, they were just trying to make it day to day, get by, figure out how to deal with community, their issues with assimilating and not assimilating.
Where is that healthy balance of, should you be assimilating completely so that you’ve completely diluted? And I have this conversation in Japan as well with friends, it’s like, yeah, we want to, we don’t want to, I don’t think it’s necessarily healthy for us to turn Japanese, to quote the vapors. I think that was the name of the band. But at the same time, how can we help? How can we make sure things run smoothly? We don’t offend, and at the same time allow our kind of uniqueness and creativity and diversity to add to what’s happening in this part of the world.
I think they struggled with that, but they had so many other things that they probably couldn’t spend the time having this kind of conversation. I don’t think so.
Jackie : Right. And so you ultimately did three full years on the JET program and then chose to do what after that? Obviously you decided not to do the medical track, but you did something else.
Maneesh: So actually, what I did was, after the three years I had to re-interview for med school. So I actually went back. I actually went back for a bit. I re-interviewed for med school to get the seat again. And during that, it was so clear again, the gut said, well, what are you doing here?
I mean, this is not what you’re supposed to be doing. There’s something else out there that you got to figure out, you got to, you know, this isn’t right. Nothing wrong with it. Maybe I could have done it and maybe I could have done it well, but it’s not, it wasn’t calling.
And in fact, I think I’d grown to a certain degree where I’d really realized it much more than the three years prior, that there was something else to be had, something else to do. I came back to Japan because, through the work I’d done those three years, I’ve made some contacts.
I came back on a similar program to JET directly with the Osaka Board of Education. And also at the same time, I started helping some businesses just because I’d started to have a little bit of language ability. So I was able to converse in Japanese and help with English things. And so I started helping a couple of import export businesses, and these things, these experiences, to again put it into a nutshell, these experiences made me realize that I do want further studies, but it wasn’t med school.
It was going back and trying to encapsulate what my experiences over the last, at this point, it’d be five years. What these experiences actually made me a more interesting, a more holistic, a more diverse, a more kind of aware, and in many ways more able, candidate for any type of job, regardless of the industry, for a company working globally particularly.
And so I went back and decided to do an MBA and pursued that. So I was doing my MBA in Western Canada, at Richard Ivey School of Business. And I was also working in New York parallelly, or not exactly simultaneously, but during those two years, back then it was a two year MBA.
Jackie : And that’s not a bad choice, not a bad choice for an Indian boy.
And it allows you to really leverage in different ways, perhaps your Japanese language skills, if you decided you wanted to go back, which I think you did. So 47 interviews later?
Maneesh: Yeah. So what happened was the second year of the program, you end up, there’s campus recruiting, or you start to look at what you want to do afterwards.
And so I happened to meet Goldman Sachs from different Asian offices. I think one was from Hong Kong and then actually it was the whole Asia team, they’d come out. So hiring for Tokyo, for Hong Kong. I’d also parallel met with different other banks and consulting firms because those were the two jobs to be in. Maybe they still are. I don’t know. I don’t follow that so much anymore, given my new lifestyle.
So I met with a bunch of companies on and off campus while in New York and also just outside of Toronto. And you know Goldman, the way they talk, it felt like they really understood, at least the people I met, this kind of package that, not that I’d really put together by design, but kind of where I ended up, given my variety of experiences growing up, undergrad, living in Osaka, working in these types of environments, and then getting the MBA and working in the US.
So I got an opportunity to really further look at working with Goldman and, yeah, 30, 37 interviews later, I think I counted, we decided on which position, which office, and all that together, and that ended up being Tokyo.
Yeah. So that was with, do you want to jump in? We’ll let you jump in for a second if you like.
Jackie : I mean, you had your Hatsu Tokyo, I guess. And now the diversity Kansai Kanto and now it’s like, did you speak with a Osaka Ben and did you get laughed at?
Maneesh: I totally did. And no people loved it. They loved it. And in fact, what I found out was a number of people in that banking or investment banking world, none of the Japanese were actually from Osaka now in Tokyo.
So they would love to, that gave me, in some ways, an edge at least in terms of having fun with some of these people. I was an insider, you know? Yeah, I was lucky because I’d had the earlier experiences in Osaka, both linguistically and culturally, call it Kansai culturally, it was so much easier to get things done, you know? Because I had an ear for people and because I didn’t have to just use Japanese or use a translator, I was able to get a lot more things done maybe, or at least a lot more fun getting them done.
Jackie : So why did you shift after three years in Tokyo to Hong Kong? Where was this inkling? Did you feel like you needed to get new eyes again?
Maneesh: You got it. I think there’s a, I’ve always felt that there’s this kind of three or four years, maybe four or five years, but you know, it’s kinda like you go to junior high school, three years, high school, three years for those of us in Western Canada, at least.
And then university is like four years and then you may do a master’s, PhD two to three to four years, something like that, depending on your program. There’s something in that rhythm that really kind of felt right to me to at least some sort of inspiration or some sort of change, whether it’s environmental, what you’re studying or what you’re working on.
And it can be within the same firm. Of course it could be within, it might just be, we need a little bit of a new kind of energy and excitement and inspiration. So I had actually, I didn’t kind of mention this earlier, but I had known from day one that I was not going to be the Goldman Sachs banker for the rest of my life.
This was not necessarily a calling, that’s why I was doing it. It was more of, I understood that there was something in this experience I needed. I couldn’t quite place it, what it was. And part of it was being in a professional organization like Goldman, part of it was also having some financial stability of course, to be able to think about other things.
And part of it was, I wanted to live in Tokyo as well. So to get that experience to work professionally in Tokyo. But I knew it wasn’t a long-term thing and coming close to the three years, I felt like I had gained enough experience. I’d learned to talk the talk, walk the walk, of that field.
And it was getting time for me to figure out how to spend whatever time I had left in this world. How do I spend it? You can see just by having those kinds of thoughts, you can see why I do what I do now. How do I spend this limited time that I have? Is this where I really want to do it?
And I really had a strong desire to work close with the homeland, motherland, India, and also China. I had been a few times and I just, the silk road, the idea of the silk road, from India through China and to Japan, I really feel a very strong connection.
And I can see, as you go back down, you reverse down that road you feel you’re getting closer to a kind of home, right? There’s something in there obviously far beyond what I can put into words, but I grew up with it. It’s in my genes, it’s in my bones. I can feel it.
And so I wanted to work closer with India and China. So I was looking at opportunities to do that. And having that conversation with my bosses in Japan and internationally we decided, hey, go to Hong Kong. A little better, a little more responsibility. So I got to run a department there and my two first big projects were India and China. So it’s like, oh, okay, this gets me closer to something, it’s the next step. It’s the next stepping stone onto wherever else I’m going, which I have no clue where that is.
So that got me to Hong Kong, because Hong Kong for Goldman is, at that time, what looked at the new projects in India and China.
Jackie : And you spent about a year and then at some point you decided, if this is as good as it gets, this is not enough? Or what happened? What was the next sort of inkling?
Maneesh: I took that step and it felt like the right step, and there was nothing wrong, I didn’t leave upset, or working too hard and overheating type of thing, I wasn’t burning out, but it just felt like I’d gotten the next kind of stuff, whatever I needed to get.
And now the next stepping stone was starting to appear. My life was really transforming. All these years before I’d been practicing yoga, I played sports for all my life, but that started moving into more yoga and the physical aspect started to move, or morph with my upbringing, which was very much philosophical.
At home it was all around, philosophies of yoga and Hinduism. So to extract the religious part out of it within the yoga philosophy, how to live and what’s important in life, things like purpose, things like Dharma, our duty in life, or how we’re supposed to live, ideas like Karma, right? How actions and consequences affect where we are today and how our actions today will affect consequences tomorrow.
These things, and the idea of practice, of practice meaning a devotion to a specific practice, whether it’s Aikido or Kendo or Chado, right? Ikebana, or tea ceremony, or whatever is your practice.
And in fact, anything can be a practice potentially. So that was the practice that I wanted to devote more time to. I came to the point where I needed to devote more time. And so the next step was to figure out how to do that. And so that’s what led to the next chapter.
Jackie : And it almost feels like you were going home to your mother’s culture. Like your mother’s philosophy very much in terms of the upbringing, but going back deeper into where her roots were coming perhaps, from that you’d grown up in the family and it felt like home, but didn’t have the deeper experience of directly, like it was mediated through her upbringing of you.
So in your choices then, you went to India, and can you tell us about that experience? I would love for us to bring that into what you’ve been doing through Atha Yoga, how that paid forward, your pivot. And then now of course, we’ll also then connect that forward to the COVID implications of that.
Maneesh: Perfect. So again, after Goldman and after a short little bit of work consulting, I went to India and I spent a year, and the reason I went to India was partly just to get back into the roots, to be in that environment, and partly to study with specific teachers. I want to study yoga with some specific teachers, Sanskrit, or kind of the ancient language, the root behind, my mother tongue, which is actually Hindi and Punjabi, and also to look at, because I was still fascinated by medicine I wanted to study more Ayurveda and it’s intimately linked to yoga and lifestyle, right? Care and lifestyle, holistic care. So in order to do that, nothing like being in the homeland and the motherland of all that. So went to India, went to South India and stayed, yeah, I didn’t know how long.
It wasn’t a plan, I’m going to be here a year and then I’m going to do this. Like the rest of what seems my life since undergrad, I went there planned to go for a couple of months and then somehow that kind of became more and more and more. That became longer and longer and ended up being a year and then had an opportunity to come back, to set up a business in Japan.
And that would bring me back to Japan as well. And I was debating whether to stay in India or you know what to do, but Japan called me back and sometimes we don’t know why, especially those of us who’ve been here more than a decade or two. Even if you go away, you get called back.
Jackie : I think I sometimes refer to Japan as the Hotel California.
You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
Maneesh: But you can never leave.
Jackie : Something keeps bringing you back, in your heart or your relationships or everything. All of it. There’s just a deep connectedness, “goen”, that is never interrupted I feel like. That’s the way I think about it, but I think it’s in a positive light that I see it that way certainly.
So the business you set up, was it therefore Atha, or was it something prior?
Maneesh: It was actually Ayurveda based, it was an Ayurveda skincare based business, where we would use skincare and products to also explain how to live a kind of healthy, radiant, beautiful lifestyle. And so yoga would be one aspect of it, but we’d also have a product.
And so we set that up and it’s actually still going, you know, just a small business. And we do mainly little work in Japan, a little bit overseas. But after the setup phase, because of my science background and my interest in Ayurveda, and in Eastern, Western medicine, my main role was to kind of get it going, figure out the products, work with scientists around the world, work with doctors in India.
And so I spent a number of years actually researching, and then coming up with a product, working with formula, working on the designs and all that kind of stuff with people. So it was another kind of step. It was like, learning a lot of that was new for me.
And so learn that, and through the setup of, how to set up a business and drawing upon what I learned at a massive company such as Goldman in this very small way, with a very different number of zeros after the one. It’s a different game obviously, but many of the concepts applied clearly.
And so that’s how these different pieces of my life before, undergrad and pharmacology and MBA, where we studied branding and promotion and things like that, Goldman Sachs financial, understanding that all came into play and helped to set up that business. But meanwhile, I was starting to teach a bit more yoga, and I had already started teaching before that, but there was more need to formalize it.
So I started to teach, collaborating with yoga studios, and then at a certain point it was like, it took on more, there was more demand. I needed to do this more, for some reason it just felt right. And if people wanted it, and if it felt right, and why not do it?
That started to take over my life. It took on more shape, a different shape.
Jackie : It’s like you were honing your craft. This is you honing your craft as a teacher holistic teacher, almost too, right? And then positions you. You do retreats as well, that are wellness and mindfulness that are more, not just the physical side, but bringing in all of the elements that you have, the expertise you combined in that interdisciplinary approach, right?
To what does wellness look like? And certainly, I mean, what a wonderful gift then for COVID Japan for you to then have this opportunity to offer Manthan, right? Which is the new focus on this broader, really broader picture, big picture view of wellness and resilience, and as someone who researched resilience on leadership in post-disaster Tohoku during a crisis, what we do pre crisis, is going to be completely indicative of how we navigate and can adapt and have agility and resilience post crisis. And so building these practices and habits of wellness. So essential. So talk to me about Manthan, and please, maybe, can you tell me what Manthan means? Is there like a symbolism around that word?
Maneesh: Yes. So Manthan means churning. There’s a story in ancient mythology of the churning of the ocean. It’s called Samudra Manthan, and it’s the churning of the ocean story where basically it’s an allegory, or a metaphor, I would say, for how in order to really find out who you are, and find the elixir of immortality called Amrita.
What that means is how to find truth, how to find real truth in your life, who you are, how you want to be spending your time.
Jackie : The essence that will surpass this physical world.
Maneesh: And also in more practical terms, how you want to live your life right now. Am I saying the things that I really feel? Am I acting in the way I really want to act?
Or am I doing it because I want something from someone, or I think everybody wants me to be this way? Am I fulfilling a role? Am I fulfilling identity? Am I being a man? Am I being a teacher? Am I being a leader? Is that what I’m trying to do? Am I trying to check off these boxes, or am I being true to myself?
So it’s really practical too. It’s not just kind of esoteric. Which is really important because that’s why it impacts us every day, and impacts how we work, how we play, how we interact with everybody in our lives. So Manthan is the story of basically by going in, the only way to find that, and this is important, the only way to find that is by going in, by going into yourself.
And when you do that, a lot of stuff comes out. A lot of bad stuff comes out if you really face yourself. So a lot of clinical psychologists may agree with that concept, right? And then, in the end invariably, if you work at it, if you work at it, if you stop putting your antennas outside, coming inside, then you’ll start to get closer to this truth.
And so this truth is partly what we want to share. These practices, like you said, when stressful times, and with the idea for Manthan is we want to start building that ability to physically, and mentally, be able to handle whatever comes your way. And also in the meanwhile you enjoy life more because you’re more present, and again another cliche to be present, but it actually is something. Right now, Jackie is present with me.
I can feel that. I don’t see you going, oh my God, I got to pick up bread afterwards, you know, and I’m not even thinking about the next hockey game, so there you go. I’m actually here right now, I suddenly thought of it.
Jackie : I called this livestream thought partnering out loud because I wanted it to be in the moment, like real time.
Maneesh: There’s no editing. There’s no editing. There’s no going back and photoshopping.
Jackie : No, we are what we are. We show up in all of our beauty and all of our ugliness, and all of our errors, and all of our idiosyncrasies and craziness, and that’s okay. That’s okay.
Maneesh:
You digest, you eat better, you digest better. Cause your organs are not being crunched by you sitting in a really funny position, which we were not built for. We were not built to sit on chairs. We were not built to work in front of these computers or else they would have been there.
Jackie : For 10 hours a day.
Maneesh: Yeah. You know, to punch our fingers, on these little phones and look at screens this big and look at that kind of back lighting. We weren’t built that way, but this is our lives now. So how do we best deal with it? If we can take better physical care. And then if we can start to get into breathing and into kind of better mental care, mental care meaning just developing resilience, which is really being kind of here, and being, we call it, burenai shin in Japanese, right? A core strength that you’re not able to get pulled off of too easily.
Jackie : And a core strength that’s like a kokoro, right? It’s the mind. We talk about the mind often in English, but what I really love about the Japanese language is we center it back in the kokoro.
And the kokoro no care, right? Like heart care, heartfulness or heart care.
Maneesh: And yeah. And when we translate it from Sanskrit, mind actually is not brain, there’s different components of when we say mind as well. So what I’m talking about now is that kind of more esoteric mind. It’s not the thinking brain.
The thinking brain is actually, we start to look at and we start to calm it down. And that’s where we get into meditation and mindfulness and all these practices. And you know, there’s tons of data, tons of research, Harvard researchers have tons of great functional MRIs of the amygdala region in the brain and how it changes after just eight weeks of a little bit of meditation.
But the point is, you can look at all that research, but the point is by doing these things, it gets you somewhere. It makes you stronger physically. You feel better, you’re more energized. Guess what? You can do more work, right? You can deal with people better. You don’t get angry as easily. You can put up with stuff more easily.
You can see the good in people instead of always looking at the negative.
Jackie : You have that “yoyuu”, I don’t know how to translate it.
Maneesh: Yoyuu, you have space.
Jackie : Flexibility or extra bandwidth.
Maneesh: Bandwidth, a great word. You have bandwidth.
Jackie : You have extra bandwidth, and extra patience too. I think patience is such a huge part of yoyuu because particularly when you’re raising children, it’s the patience barometer that we really need to keep high if we’re trying to be able to balance pressures of work, but also against a home life that’s peaceful and supportive, and that’s a challenge, right? That’s such a challenge when parents have their yoyuu go down, it just ends up hitting the kids in some ways, I think.
Maneesh: Anyone, if your neighbor’s yoyuu is down, they’re going to yell at you for something, you know?
And there’s thousands of examples, when you look at an email from someone and you haven’t read it yet and you go, oh my God, I don’t want to read that email, because you’re already projecting something. And also you just don’t have the yoyuu, that space, that flexibility to say, wait, I’m cool.
It’s all right, let me check it out. It’s all right. Life ain’t so bad.
Jackie : Yeah. There is a really cute play on words though, in Japanese, with the whole “Man Tan”. Cause you know, when you fill up your tank of gas…
Maneesh: Yes, Man tan.
Jackie : And you fill up your tank. So it’s kind of like, that’s gorgeous.
Maneesh: Well whenever I do, whenever I do a lecture or explanation about meditation or webinar, I don’t just talk about it. I get people to take like three deep breaths, for example, you know, and I get them to do just a very simple practice that takes less than a minute.
And that alone you go, oh my God, I’m energized. You know, we always say, if something’s wrong, if you’re stressed out, what do you do? You just did it. You take a deep breath. All right. You know, I gotta look at the time. I gotta make sure everything’s running well, you know? And so I can take a deep breath and I go, wait a sec, here I am, right here, right now.
Let’s deal with it. Let’s go. We need to make that a default habit, not something that, once in a while, I remember if I’m lucky or when someone reminds me.
Jackie : And a friend of mine, Sarah Bull, and we’ll give a shout out to you, I believe is the one who was saying, how do we get to the point of not, in particularly this was in a group I’m in for coaching and it was about too often, I think, women get to the point where our tank is zero and we’re coasting on fumes before we carve out space to do self care because there’s just 50,000 demands and emotional needs. And things being placed on particularly women and mothers and spouses, wives and all of that.
And that just overload. If we, as women can be leaders in our own self care to say, if the tank is just above half, it’s probably time for some self-care. We are not going to wait for it to go to be on running on fumes, to really be in crisis mode to say, no, I need some self-care now.
We need to be having stronger boundaries about really managing.
And that’s a part of being resilient leaders as mothers and working mothers, active leaders in our communities and in our businesses and business owners and CEOs and all of that combined, to build that resilience really needs an attentiveness and a diligence around that self-care.
And I think you’re providing that for companies, right?
Your offerings are supporting companies for their employees and their leaders to build these practices actively so that they can be leaders at work and better holistically nourished, yoyu naru people, right? Individuals in their space.
Maneesh: Yeah, the whole world is starting to get this. Its prevention is ideal.
If you’ve already gotten to the point where you have to take care, that’s fine. If someone’s already injured or sick, that’s okay. We’ll deal with it. But prevention will save you so much time, heartache, money, all these other things, right? So this is what we offer.
So we talk about everything from a holistic approach to, yes, we can give you yoga. We can give you poses that help you to get physically better posture, postural ideas, to give you reminders on how to keep better posture, to make that a default. We’ll talk about breathing.
We’ll talk about meditation mindfulness. We’ll give you practices. We’ll talk about eating, Ayurvedic approach to eating. How mindfully eating can change your day completely instead of eating in front of the desk while you’re thinking about work and you’re looking at your emails and suddenly whatever you had is gone.
And guess what, if you haven’t to some degree faced mukiau, I don’t know if that’s the right word in English, but faced what you’re eating.
Jackie : Like actually tasted it.
Maneesh: Tasted it and looked at it and said, hey, we used to ring the bell, right? And there used to be the saliva started to build as food was getting slowly cooked and you’d start to smell it.
Your body would get ready to digest it. Your salivary amylase and other enzymes start to digest it.
Jackie : It was an experience, right? It wasn’t just a transaction. It was an experience.
Maneesh: Not only that, not only was it an experience, it was actually part of the digestive process. Cause the enzymes in your mouth, salivary amylase, and other enzymes would start to digest the food.
But if you hadn’t had a chance to build that up, because you bought a plastic food at the konbini, right? And as soon as it’s open, you haven’t smelled it, you just dump it in your mouth and it’s gone because you have to rush the next thing. You’re no longer digesting even properly.
If you’re not digesting properly, guess what?
You’re not absorbing. You’re not absorbing the nutrients you need to live or to be really strong and healthy. And you’re going to cause other problems, digestively, which will only impact pain, not make you light and soft, it will make you heavy and constricted. That’s the last thing you want.
Jackie : Well, as someone with a variety of immune system issues, certainly it’s something that’s been on the brain for myself. And my sister is working on that in Southern France with a retreat space, that’s actually catering to people with dietary constraints around celiac and Paleo diet and a whole bunch of range of immune system and gut issues.
So a shout out to my sister, Jan, in Southern France, but I think absolutely those holistic thinking about why we need movement, why we need yoyu and pause in our day and why we need to take time for being present and actually experiencing our food and digesting properly to support our immune system.
And like you say, building up the habits of strength and resilience, both mind and heart and body, that is a really exciting offer. And I think something that is so interesting for Japan, because I feel like it’s a part of old school Japanese mentality of how here in Inaka in Northern Nagano, that’s how I certainly was socialized from the beautiful 60 to 90 year olds that I have been having the pleasure to know over 25 years.
That’s in some ways the rhythm of how they connect with their land, and they till their plot, and they grow their own rice, and they trade their rice and their figs in their tree, in their yard with the neighbors who have plums and peaches.
And there’s just this whole interdependence and slower rhythm to that dynamic. That our fast paced salary man, salary woman, Tokyo, big city, overpopulation, overstimulation, everything world isn’t remembering about what used to be a pretty important part of what I see to be as a beautiful part of Japanese culture.
And a part of that diversity of Japan that isn’t really being put on a pedestal anymore because it doesn’t make a ton of money like Tokai, big Tokyo and Kansai makes so much more money for the economy and that’s where the focus is turned. But we’re getting to the point of being out of balance in the Japanese economy with just exacerbated concentration of people in two cities and then shrinking regions that are these gorgeous regions of Japan we need to support and bring back.
And this interesting part of having you as a foreigner, but immigrant in Japan, Indo Canadian, second generation in Canada, now being in some ways a voice of these ancient traditions and philosophies of the slower life and the good life, the wellness life that we have to reintroduce to big Tokyo.
And I’m certainly trying to raise awareness about the beautiful diversity in Japan. That’s here, like in Japan, not just what’s outside Japan, but the diversity here in Japan. How can we carve out permission for that huge diversity of Japanese people and people living in Japan that also has been kind of erased over the last 75 years in particular?
So it’s a unique moment in Japanese history, and I think for Reiwa Japan, that we can hopefully bring these different “gyaku yunyu”, like a reverse import sort of a presentation of this traditionalness of what used to be seen. It needs to be amplified and given voice.
I would love you to give me one final inspirational takeaway or message that we can give our listeners before I sign off today.
Maneesh: Always a tough one. There’s so many good stuff. There’s so many good stuff. So many great expressions from the world of yoga and mindfulness. But look, I think ultimately, we’ve been given a limited number of breaths. We’ve been given a limited amount of time in this world, is that deep?
But it’s true. That’s a great thing, just because something’s deep doesn’t mean it’s not true. It doesn’t mean it can’t be real. So how do you want to spend the rest of your time? Whatever that time is, how do you want to spend it? Really be honest about it. The best way to serve anyone else in this world is to start by serving yourself.
You make yourself happy. You let yourself start to live the life that you want to lead. And guess what? That’s going to reverberate through everyone else around you. They’re going to feel happier. They don’t need you to be miserable. That’s not how this works. It’s not a zero sum game.
I think that’s the right term. It’s not a zero sum game. You don’t have to make less money because you’re taking time to enjoy your food. In fact, it’s the opposite. The better your practice, you don’t need to make a long practice, but man, you practice for 15 minutes meditation, your next 45 minutes of work, it’s what you did in five hours previously. Cause you’re so focused. You’re pinpointed in. Nothing throws you off your game. You can actually make more money. You can actually be way more productive. The evidence is all there. It’s not about productive.
Find what you want to do with your life. Spend these breaths the way you want to, and spread the word. Make that something that everyone around you can also strive for.
Jackie : That is gorgeous. And I love this takeaway and I’m going to also just go away and think about that. How many more breaths do I have and how do I want to spend them?
Is a tremendously deep and pragmatically concrete realism that focuses the mind on what matters. So yeah, let’s spend that on being in our highest purpose as individuals, as diverse, creative, unique individuals.
So Maneesh, wow. Thank you so much for this thought partnering out loud. I had no idea what we were covering really.
You sort of vaguely know, but there’s just so many gems that came out of this exchange and from a Diversity rocks innovation! perspective, just so much beautiful journeying and storying and learning in this pathway, across the world and around the world that you’ve been doing. And I personally am so grateful for the last three, four years that we’ve known each other.
And I look forward to our next collaborations too, coming forward. So thank you one last time and I look forward to what we’re going to accomplish next. And I look forward to watching you beam the happiness out from your place right now in Miyako. Oh my God. Gorgeous.
I’m shining the Northern Nagano perspectives here, which is another space of wellness, if you like cold and green, like I do. But down warm in Miyako jima looks lovely too, very inviting. So living the good life, keep doing it. I think you’re really shining a beacon. So thank you very much.
Maneesh: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.
Jackie : So I would love to give a shout out to our listeners and thank you for joining the last 19 weeks that we have been putting out, or a little bit more than 19 weeks, of this live stream, and we’re going to take a little bit of a hiatus in particular to build out some yoyu, some flexibility, and some time for more self-care for the enjoi team. And also certainly for myself to have a little bit more time with my family. And that’s a big priority for me as a feminist mom.
So just going to take a hiatus for some rejuvenation, so we can pay it forward. And I would encourage you to stay tuned for social media channels, which will announce the next season when we’re ready to think about launching that. Just a reminder that enjoi Japan, we put out workshops and executive education for leaders in Japanese and English.
We’ve had so many interesting comments from participants in our workshops, for the intersectional thinking workshop that we offer, about the fact that when they walked away from the workshop, they observed back that they had such an expanded understanding of not only the concept of gender, but also just the meaning of diversity in Japan, for Japan.
So that was really inspiring for me to hear that. And they felt like they had more confidence to be more of a leader in their workplace and to be a better ally. And they said, you know, wow, I had always sort of realized where my marginalizations were, where I might be at risk of being marginalized, and where I might be punished for being this, that, or the other.
But I had never thought about all my privileges that I actually have. And if I don’t acknowledge my privileges, I can’t show up and be a good ally to others in my workplace. So I was floored by the learnings that came out from these participants in the workshops we’ve been doing.
So I’m going to encourage people to get in touch with us. If you’re interested in the intersectional thinking workshop, it’s about mapping our diversities from personal system individual to the systems of the company and the ecosystem. And it works. It’s powerful. And we’re also working on a bunch of other projects, but I’ll leave it at that.
And thank you all for joining season one of Diversity rocks innovation!