LIFEFORCE

Ashish Pant, writer/director of the 2021 feature film, ULJHAN (THE KNOT), speaks about class tensions in Lucknow between an upper-middle-class husband and wife who hit a rickshaw driver with their car one fateful night. Uljhan (The Knot) explores poignant questions of morality, compassion, and what happens when boundaries are crossed. "Can we exist trustfully in our intimate relationships when the moment we step out of our door, we don’t trust anybody? How you react with society is ultimately who you become."

Danielle Dejoie is a certified Flower Essence Practitioner and Holistic Health Coach whose passion is supporting women on their path of self-empowerment. Danielle brings healing, strengthening and balancing through flower essences, whose energetic vibrational pattern calls us into alignment with divine healing and wisdom. “It almost feels magical when you start to open up to plant spirits in that way and when you develop a relationship with yourself…because plant spirits reside in you anyway so you’re tapping into that inner well of wisdom.”

Founder and CEO of spice company, Disapora Co, Sana Javeri Kadri, talks about how her equity-based, sustainable spice company aims to overturn the supply chain of the spice trade that has “relied on enslaved people to grow, harvest, and transport goods…[thus] erasing Westerners’ consciousness that you should care about your spices and where they come from.”

Composer, producer, songwriter and the only female double violinist in the world, Gingger Shankar, talks about film composing, empowering girls and women, and reclaiming the unsung story of the women of the Shankar family, her Grandmother and Mother, two extraordinary artists who helped bring Indian music to the West in the 1970s along with Ravi Shankar and George Harrison. “This story has been written so many time; it’s been told so many times, but we have left out this entire lineage of women. It’s not just my mother and grandmother, there are so many women that are part of Indian classical history that we have no clue. It’s at every level. Their names are not in the archives…”

Wellness, yoga, and mindfulness teacher and consultant Anusha Wijeyakumar speaks about the spaces of wellness, which includes yoga and meditation. How have these practices been distorted here in the west and how can we reclaim their true authentic messages – to not only transform our lives but to become agents of transformation in the larger world? “Each one of us has a path of dharma, of right conduct, of personal power in this life. And are we stepping into it or are we ignoring those divine messages?”

Writer/director Shaina Ghuraya jokes that she is a triple threat - she’s a wheelchair-user, Punjabi, and a woman, and she doesn’t shy away from tackling issues of disability, race, and gender in fierce films that compel us to rethink limiting beliefs and reimagine a more compassionate world. “When I was four, a person in my family said, ‘We should just leave her in a room and throw away the key.’”

Ethnographer, ethnopoet, and criminal investigator Vítor da Silva speaks about human rights violations endangering indigenous peoples and our earth, and the ways they continue to resist and revitalize their communities. "Storytelling was and continues to be a form of resistance against cultural, linguistic, and identity loss."

Rajiv Bhateja, co-founder of They See Blue, a national organization to mobilize South Asians in America, and Anu Banerjee of They See Blue’s Georgia Team, speak about inspiring, educating, and activating South Asians across the nation to help win the U.S. presidential election and flip the Georgia Senate in one of the most-watched election seasons in history. "We just got to work. We knew what needed to be done. we chased every single vote."

Electronic Bhakti Music pioneers Aks and Lakshmi of Eclipse Nirvana create powerful spiritual experiences for their audiences while presenting the peace, love and pluralistic vision of poets such as Adi Shankara, Kabir, Mirabai, and Surdas. In 2013, their music and media company Eclipse Nirvana released “The Bhakti Movement”, a project that modernized traditional songs and was distributed worldwide by Sony Music. "These are stories about ultimate love, ultimate surrender, holding onto something that is much, much beyond human consciousness." 

Licensed MFT, a Buddhist practitioner for over 30 years, and founder of MET(T)A Protocol, a design for mental health agency treatment currently being utilized in trauma and addiction treatment centers across the country, Dr. Stephen Dansiger speaks to us about his own journey of healing from trauma and addiction, and how Buddhist teachings can inform a modern-day trauma-centered approach to therapy. After years of addiction, he describes how his "fever broke" twenty-one days into his meditation at a Zen monastery, and how that "started a torrent of other future-based, mostly positive, thoughts - like 'I'm going to live.'"