She Watched the Body. I was Running From Mine.
Last week I told you the questions never left.
How do humans and systems shape each other?When things break — what do we actually do?
This week: I turned the lens inward.
This series has been shaped by two lineages of women.
The ones who taught me to observe systems — Margaret Mead, who went into the field and watched what humans actually do. Jane Goodall, who sat still in the forest until the truth revealed itself.
But there was another lineage running beneath the surface.
One I didn't fully recognize until much later.
The women who mapped the inner world.
While I was studying how humans collaborate under stress, other women were quietly doing something just as radical.
They were mapping what stress does inside the body.
In the 1970s, neuroscientist Candace Pert showed that emotions have physical roots — that neuropeptides, the molecules of emotion, course through the body and brain, docking on receptors in the gut, the immune system, the tissues themselves.
The body and the mind, she insisted, are not separate systems.
She was dismissed as too radical. Her work endured anyway.
Decades later, clinician Deb Dana took Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory and made it accessible — mapping the nervous system's states not as dysfunction to fix, but as intelligent responses to understand.
Ventral vagal safety. Sympathetic mobilization. Dorsal shutdown.
A language for what the body already knows.
That language — safety, mobilization, shutdown — is one I now recognize in every founder I work with. And in myself.
Neither Candace nor Deb were names I knew at the time.
What I was really studying.
My training was in user experience — observing where humans get stuck, identifying the gaps between what a system promises and what a person actually experiences. Heuristics. Pain points. Opportunity spaces.
I was trained to center the human.
But corporate life has its own agenda. Agendas bigger than the desire to always help the human. Politics that could make the clearest research findings disappear into a meeting room and never come back out.
I could spot a broken user experience from across a room. It took me longer to name what was broken about the room itself.
And underneath all of it — something I was observing but couldn't yet articulate:
The way a body tightens when a deadline lands. The way language hardens when blame is in the air. The way a room can hold collective dread and call it productivity.
I was watching the nervous system of the organization.
I just didn't know yet that my own nervous system was keeping score.
The industry created inner friction.
Years in tech. Years of being precise, credentialed, capable. Years of delivering.
And underneath it — a quiet, accumulating exhaustion that I didn't have a framework for.
The tools I had were brilliant for systems. Not so useful for the person inside the system.
I knew I needed something different. I just didn't know what it looked like yet.
Then I came across Sura Flow.
Sura Kim — known as Sura of Sura Flow — had been a Chartered Financial Analyst and Vice President at Goldman Sachs.
High-pressure. High-stakes. High-performing.
And then: burned out. In pain. At rock bottom in New York City.
She sold everything. Left for Asia. Studied at spiritual centers. Came back with something to teach.
I had been aware of her work for a while. Something about her story — Wall Street to meditation, finance to flow — felt close to a truth I was circling.
During Covid, I went through her training.
And something in me that had been running on overdrive finally began to slow down.
Sura Flow isn't about hustle with a meditation app bolted on. It's a complete reorientation — toward energy, toward inner guidance, toward the kind of effortless presence that high-achieving people are taught to distrust.
She is now a TEDx speaker, a bestselling author, a certified executive coach, and a teacher who trains meditation coaches around the world.
She left Wall Street. She built something truer.
And she opened a door I walked through.
What I hold now.
Two lineages of women shaped me.
The ones who taught me to observe systems — Mead, Goodall, the researchers and teachers who modeled what rigorous attention looks like when you're willing to go where the humans actually are.
And the ones who taught me to come home to myself — Candace, Deb, Sura, and the teachers and practitioners who mapped the inner landscape with the same devotion.
The systems thinker and the meditation coach. The one who watches how humans move through pressure and the one who helps them find their way back when the pressure has been running too long.
That's not a contradiction.
That's the whole point.
🦋 Next week: what happens when the observer finally builds something.The PhD that closed. The Women's Day vibe coding session.And what I'm building now — for founders who are ready to come home.
→ What's your Pause Archetype™? Take the 2-minute quiz: quiz.omnimindfulness.com
Your pause is your compass. 🦋 — Shilpa Lewis Founder, Omni Mindfulness
Sura Flow: suraflow.org
The Pause with Purpose™ Quiz isn't a personality test.
Grounded in polyvagal theory, somatic awareness and psychometric design, it maps your natural relationship to stillness across 8 universal pause energy archetypes — this month, each one is illustrated through the lens of a woman.
Not a label. A mirror.
Reflecting your wiring so you can work with it, not against it.
This month, discover which woman archetype lives in your nervous system.
🦋 What would you find if you paused long enough to listen to your own nervous system?
A small personal note before we wrap up week 3 of Women's History Month.
A small personal note before we wrap up week 3 of Women's History Month.
Once upon a time, I thought the next chapter would be a PhD.
The research was real. The questions were alive. The path seemed clear.
Then the door closed.
But the work didn't stop. It just found a different shape.
Next week I'll tell you about the moment I stopped waiting for permission — and what I built on International Women's Day instead.
More on that next week. 🦋
✨🦋 Women's History Month Fun Fact: Candace Pert discovered the brain's opiate receptor in 1973 as a Johns Hopkins grad student—earning her PhD there in 1974. Supervisor Solomon Snyder got the Lasker Award. She didn't. She proved emotions live body-wide—in neuropeptides binding immune cells, gut, tissues. Medicine called her radical. Now she's mind-body foundational.
→ Take the Pause with Purpose™ Quiz: quiz.omnimindfulness.com
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Your pause is your compass. 🦋 — Shilpa Lewis, Founder of Omni Mindfulness
With love & light,
Shilpa 💛
Founder of Omni Mindfulness
Your 🌐 AI Strategist Meets a 🧘 Spiritual Sage
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