Vibha Sharma is the founder and a Holistic Spiritual Life Coach, Corporate Wellness Coach and Mindfulness Coach at Cosmicways Holistic Life Coaching and San Francisco Chapter Chairperson for Mindfulness, All Ladies League USA. In her powerful new book, “Turn Within” Vibha talks about one of the most prominent delusions of this modern world: that happiness and satisfaction come with a higher rank, fame, or money. “People are so blinded by the worldly pleasures that they spend their whole lives chasing materialistic stuff. They lose themselves in the race of achieving nothing but short-term happiness. To reconcile with inner happiness, we must believe in the real power of connection and magic of spiritual unfoldment.”- Vibha Sharma
“One of the most prominent delusions of this modern world is that happiness and satisfaction come with a higher rank, fame, or money. They can buy you temporary gratification in the name of joy, but these are the weakest of all sources if you are looking for true happiness. If this were true, we wouldn’t see celebrities attempting suicides. There is nothing wrong in aspiring for material success, but being discontent and too attached with worldly possessions leaves us feeling powerless and empty.”
On an everyday basis, Vibha Sharma offers, Holistic Spiritual Life Coaching, Corporate Wellness, Emotional Freedom Technique Sessions, Cognitive Behavior Therapy Coaching, Customized Guided Meditation Sessions and Mindfulness Workshops.
FWM: In this stressful time of the pandemic, how important is connecting ourselves with our source/divine self?
Every situation in our life has a purpose. There is a lesson to be learned, a message, an instruction for a new direction, and an action to take. In adverse situations like the COVID-19, we need to embrace acceptance, stay resilient, and extract the best out of them. Locked-down and disconnected, it is easy to feel alone and scared. However, we should consider it an opportunity to spend some quiet time – time to deepen our spiritual practices to nurture ourselves and our souls.
There are many good reasons to connect and strengthen our relationship with our higher self. You can also call it our soul, divine self, our access point to God, Spirit, Infinity, the source daily. When we connect with our higher selves, we experience greater clarity. We can quickly turn away from the distractions and disharmonious energies of the physical world, indulging in the bigger picture and meaning behind outside occurrences.
Developing our connection to the higher power/divine self within helps us overcome difficulties and understand the true essence of our being. It helps us make changes that might be scary and face uncertainty with faith, learn, and adapt to deal with the demands of life and perceive different challenges in a whole new way.
Many researchers have found a strong link between spirituality and medical health. Studies show that patients gained better self-control, faster recovery, improved mental, physical and emotional health, and the overall quality of life when they connected with their spiritual selves.
Establishing a relationship with our inner self and understanding consciousness helps us deal with the fear of medical lack or unrelenting viruses, panic, and stress, boldly being aware of our truth. Stepping into our divine identity helps us live a more peaceful, blissful life even among the outer chaos.
“A thousand may fall at your side and ten thousand at your right hand, but it shall not come near you, for He will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings, you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler. You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.”
Psalm 91
FWM: How important is regular spiritual practice/mediation?
Spirituality or having a spiritual connection holds significant importance in one’s life and serves as a coping mechanism in stressful situations.
With the practice of meditation when we center and align ourselves with the source/spirit-self inside, pressing into fear and moving closer to the truth, our outer problems seem less real, and irrational fears vanish. The number one reason people seek yoga and meditation is that they are known for reducing stress and anxiety and putting the mind and soul at peace.
In my own experience and work with the clients, I have observed that being mindful can help us manage certain emotions, replace negative thoughts with positive ones, and improve overall happiness and well-being.
Checking our emotions throughout your day, taking a few deep breaths, and understanding that fear is an emotion like any other emotion, we can learn to manage stress more positively.
Prayer is another powerful way to reduces anxiety. When we cannot go to a communal worship service or gathering, we can pray for others, if not with others. Reciting the following short phrases of Loving-kindness meditation helps us tremendously:
“May all beings be safe.
May all beings be content.
May all beings be healthy.
May all beings live with ease.”
Meditation practices help regulate mood and psychological well-being, reduce panic disorder symptoms, improve your focus and attention despite distractions, and the ability to work under stress.
FWM: Through your expert coaching, you work together with the clients to strip away the layers of conditioning, fear, doubt, guilt, and limitations from your soul. Share a few success stories.
Spiritual life coaching helps clients re-discover their strength. It helps them heal from past traumas and reconnect with their identity. It boosts self-confidence, enhances self-love, and helps them find the answers. It motivates them to live empowered, joyful, grateful, and peaceful lives without any preconceived notions, judgment, or bias.
The most common challenges people seek help with are about regaining lost confidence and self-esteem, develop self-compassion, emotional regulation, procrastination, lack of productivity, stress, relationships, conflicts, work-life imbalance, finding life’s purpose, among others.
One of my clients was struggling with anxiety, which was affecting her health and negatively influencing her work-life balance. She was taking various medications to combat her condition, but after a month of regular sessions, she was able to wean off the pills. With some initial handholding, during the session practice and homework, she started meditating regularly, changed her mindset, developed self-awareness, and became more conscious about her eating habits. Soon, she was back to normal. The change reflected in her work, as well as in her relationship with her colleagues and husband. She continues to be my client, even today.
Another client was suffering from low self-esteem, self-doubt, limiting beliefs, filled with negativity, and had a strained relationship with her boss. She liked her job and was good at it, yet growth was not happening for her. She didn’t seem to her boss suitable for a promotion yet. Although she loved the place and wanted to stay to gain promotion, she was considering resigning as the only way to progress in her career, which made her gloomy and a little uncertain of the future. I asked her to dig deep, find the reasons holding her back, work on getting rid of her own limiting beliefs and self-doubt, and shift her focus to her strengths, potential strengths, and skills. This allowed her to change her self-perception to a more positive one. Just after a few weeks of working with her, she found new confidence and perspective about her power to make essential changes in her life. Through the new ways and patterns she formed in her life, she soon availed new opportunities and also achieved the promotion.
In another case, the client was going through a problematic relationship with her mother for several years. My client was also expecting her first child and was concerned about her mother’s old-age and deteriorating health conditions. She wanted to repair the bridges and establish a healthier relationship with her mom, but all her exertions so far had gone in vain, and she was having a hard time staying optimistic. But due to her hectic schedule, she did not have enough time to work on her relationship with her mother. With her help, I identified the problem and urged her to draw a imagine how she wanted her new relationship with her mother to turn out. She wanted to try but was having a hard time imagining that, and was totally unable to come up with any ways she might move herself to that new goal state I helped her realize that the reason behind this is that she is still secretly carrying old grudges towards her mom and needs to work on forgiving her internally. This new perspective helped her let go of the hostility and anger which occupied this area of her life and she could finally think of a thousand methods to restructure a new relationship discovering that giving love without expecting something in return was a concrete option.
In coaching, with a collaborative process, clients report improved stress management, sleep, calmness, executive presence, being more centered, mitigation of self-doubt, more confidence, worthiness, and growing mindfulness. They develop more social intelligence and empathy to assist with navigating difficult but needed conversations on personal as well as professional fronts.
FWM: What changes have you seen as a result of the pandemic?
Due to the nature of my work, being mostly virtual, more and more clients are reaching out for help now through phone, online, and text. Virtual coaching is needed more than ever to help clients experiencing personal and professional challenges because of the shift to remote work. People are forced to live an isolated life and are looking for ways to deal with this situation. Coaching organizations are scheduling online virtual sessions for the members to connect and address the challenges and to bring our community closer together to support one another.
Online coaching is an excellent alternative to face to face sessions and means to work with clients during this time. Working with clients remotely strike an excellent balance and offers a way to continue coaching while minimizing the risk of infection.
Juggling with managing work and family, overworked, stressed, scared, and isolated, people are becoming more open to exploring their inner lives, start meditating, and find ways to feel better.
FWM: As a Corporate Wellness Coach and Mindfulness Coach at Cosmicways Holistic Life Coaching, what challenges you believe people are facing during this turbulent time?
During this uncertain time of extraordinary disruption and anxiety, everybody is experiencing an underlying sense of panic and fear. People are dealing with stress as a result of social isolation, health, and uncertainty.
Clients are going through significant changes at work and taking extra responsibilities due to lay-offs in their company. Some are worried about the possibility of getting laid off, and the clients with jobs are working long hours and find it hard to manage work and family life. I have clients telling me that it’s hard for them to discipline themselves and not overwork while others lack the motivation to work from home.
For clients with young children, this is an incredibly difficult time. Schools are closed, and kids are staying home. When both parents are working, it’s a challenge to take care of them. Due to social distancing, they are not able to get any support from extended family either. They need help to define a proper mix of work and parenting that works. Kids need activities and attention to maintain health and overall development.
Families are having a hard time and need support in addressing the pandemic with children and the elderly. Proper self-care is another issue many are facing.
FWM: How has your work as a Global Goodwill Ambassador’s nature reflected in your new book, “Turn Within?”
GGA’s mission is to unite and recognize individuals who are doing humanitarian work to make this world a better place and who do goodwill towards others.
An essential part of being in the Global Goodwill Ambassadors’ Family is a commitment to support their humanitarian mission. It has multiple groups working on different causes like a Group of universal thinkers and advocates volunteering and taking steps needed to advance a common goal of peace throughout the world.
I volunteer whenever I get a chance to teach guided meditation to kids, women, and seniors.
I believe seniors in retirement communities must learn and practice meditation to deal with emotional and physical issues they usually go through. They feel lonely and have different health challenges. Helping residents with many body and mind exercises and guided meditation sessions makes them feel more relaxed, peaceful, and sleep better.
As a Spiritual and Metaphysical life Coach, I use meditation to help my clients manage stress and get clarity to deal with everyday problems.
In my book, ‘Turn Within’ as the name implies, I have emphasized the benefits and importance of adapting meditation to live a more peaceful and fulfilled life.
My book will be available by mid-June 2020 and will be accessible on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, and on my website.
FWM: In your book, you talk about one of the most prominent delusions of this modern world: that happiness and satisfaction come with a higher rank, fame, or money. Share your insight.
The answers to more happiness, peace, and greatness are not to be found in the goals you’re chasing but by fulfilling our soul’s mission to help others. You can live a fulfilled life you dream about, not through working harder and for longer, but by reconnecting to the divine wisdom within to strike a proper balance in making money, maintaining health, and nurturing relationships.
Our new journey of life begins the day we realize our self-worth and discover our inner self. Certainly, the human body is more than just flesh and bones. We recognize its actual value on our journey towards self-dependency and self-actualization, reclaiming the inner peace and joy and the healing of mind and body through meditation.
Like Jim Carrey says: “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.” Likewise, you cannot buy peace of mind or inner satisfaction through worldly stuff. For that, you need to work on yourself, evaluate your inner self, and realize your actual worth.
The answers to more happiness, peace, and greatness are not to be found in the goals you’re chasing but by fulfilling our soul’s mission to help others. You can live a fulfilled life you dream about, not through working harder and for longer, but by reconnecting to the divine wisdom within to strike a proper balance in making money, maintaining health, and nurturing relationships.
Our new journey of life begins the day we realize our self-worth and discover our inner self. Certainly, the human body is more than just flesh and bones. We recognize its actual value on our journey towards self-dependency and self-actualization, reclaiming the inner peace and joy and the healing of mind and body through meditation.
You have helped clients to find the “missing link.” What is often the “missing link?”
Despite all the material success, sometimes people feel lost and miserable. Stress, depression, dissatisfaction all stem from a disconnection with your divine source, your life energy, and a loving Universe.
The sense of something missing that keeps you up at night is your guidance, indicating that its time to attune yourself to your powerful truth. People often mistake their yearning for peace and inner satisfaction with worldly pleasures and try to compensate for the empty void with materialism. They rely on objects and other people for their happiness, whereas true happiness comes from within.
Spirituality or inner connection is the ‘missing link’ that holds the answer to all the problems and not just solutions but their cures as well. The first step to achieving spiritual healing is self-actualization, and knowing your actual worth is that you are more than what you believe.
Spirituality is not just a practice. It’s a spiritual experience that takes us beyond human limitations. Through spiritual learning, we get to explore who we are and what our life is actually about. Spirituality often refers to as an experience of getting in touch with your honorable compass — a method of knowing what is right and what is wrong, rendering to your own beliefs and philosophies.
Once you connect yourself to God/the Higher Power, you will find new strengths, protection, and guidance every single day. Not only will you be able to take care of yourself better, but you will also be a source of strength and help to others – a beacon of hope and guidance.
With my clients, when we carry out a step-by-step plan based on their beliefs and background, it’s always gratifying to see the results they get to live a joyful, passionate life they deserve to be living.
Through various guided imagery and visualization techniques in the state of their deep mental relaxation, they connect to their center and find the peace that leads to multiple insights and answers.
Clients have breakthrough moments all the time as they find the key to solving their problems. I heard them say these things all the time: “That’s an absolute surprise…you have changed me for good….If somebody had told me a year ago that I would stop doing this…and do this, I would have not believed that it was possible.”
You are the San Francisco Chapter Chairperson for Mindfulness, ALL (All Ladies League) USA, the world’s biggest all-inclusive global women’s chamber and an international movement for the welfare, wealth, and well-being of all by endowing women leadership. What is your vision for 2020?
The purpose of this largest multinational chamber and network of inspiring and open-hearted women from ALL parts of the world is to come together in a spirit of “sisters beyond borders” to support one another for our greater friendship, entrepreneurship, and leadership in ALL walks of life.
The Founder and Global Chairperson of the All Ladies League (ALL) and Women Economic Forum (WEF), Dr. Harbeen Arora quotes, “The vision was to create a seamless space for women, a ‘country of women,’ an alter-family, a sisterhood, beyond caste, color, creed, ethnicity and even gender to empower ALL through the agency of women’s inclusive and inspired leadership.”.
My vision is to connect, invite, and support as many women as possible and provide them a safe, nurturing space to share, care, grow, and expand the circle of like-minded women. And create more self-help and support groups, fostering a caring, helpful, and engaged community where every person participates and contributes with inspiring thoughts. As a chair, I want to be there for all women who need support and networks, irrespective of their economic, social, cultural background.
www.vibhasharma.com
To learn more about Vibha’s work please visit https://cosmicways.com/.
Thanks, Jules!