Carving our own path using mindful imagination
ever since i was little
i would escape into my imagination time
and again
not really knowing the power that was
vested in it
for me though dreaming about
possibilities or escaping into my
imagination
was a part of the process the process
that involved my struggle
striving and creation but many would
label my tendency to get
lost in this little world of my own as
an escapist
or mindless and futile endeavor that
would really yield no results
but today i am here to talk to the
dreamer in every single one of you
and encourage you all to immerse
yourself in this realm of possibility
by giving free reign to fantasy as i
take you on a journey
that goes beyond circumstance beyond
limitation
and beyond whatever is in your present
as we head into this realm where we
imagine what could be
and bring its magic through the process
of creation
so come with me and you’ll be
in a world of pure imagination
take a look and you’ll see
into your imagination
in this talk i’ll talk about striving
about breaking through
and the process of carving my own path
and through my story
i hope to inspire anybody that is
feeling stuck
or caged and suffocated in their present
because i would like to demonstrate that
it
is possible to break through and create
a future for yourself that goes
beyond whatever would be due to your
circumstance
i firmly believe that imagining the
future changes it
and today i would like to demonstrate
the role that imagination played in the
creation of my present
so we’ll begin with a spin
traveling in the world of my creation
what we’ll see will defy
explanation now before i head into my
story
i would like to just preface my talk by
briefly introducing the concept that
i’ll be bringing up today
with a small exercise this is the
concept of mindful imagination
so i want you all to make a grip like
this and consider it to be your
mindfulness
but i also want you to step away and
head into this realm of imagination
now go side to side and move back and
forth
you realize that the deeper you go and
the more you move
the harder it gets to keep your grip
right there the harder it gets to stay
mindful
i hope you can keep this exercise in
mind because i’ll be referencing it
throughout the talk
now let’s head in what i really want to
talk about today
is actually dreams so there are many
circumstances that limit our dreams
and many predicaments that impose
restrictions
on the nature of our grains and what we
truly consider possible
for us in the future most of the time
though we just come to internalize and
believe
all the things that we have been told
lie in store for us
and as such our thinking and imagination
are restricted because we come to see
all the dreams that have already been
dreamt for us
now my story of dreams began at birth in
india
quite comically actually so i was born
quite premature and when my father held
me in his hand
he started crying when the people at the
hospital saw him they were like
oh he’s crying because he had a girl
child we sympathize
then really he was just crying because i
was so premature
and he was really worried about my
health so since this moment on
my life societally at least had a
negative bias towards it
and even though my parents gave me all
the love in the world
all the dreams that they could even see
for me were dreams that were already
written
and manufactured by society this
assigned gender at birth dictated
who i was what i could be and what i
ought to be
and limitation was sort of the nature of
my reality
for years i was told that my fiery and
masculine temperaments were unladylike
and therefore nobody would marry me and
that i had to change myself to fit into
regressive ideas of femininity
so that i had all the ideal qualities of
a wife
so that someday somebody would marry me
now this is important because
indian society literally deems marriage
to be the biggest milestone of a woman’s
life
the ultimate purpose that she’s there to
fulfill
now unlike my grandmother and so many
other women in india whose fates are
sealed in their teens when they get
married off
my life still had some hope for it a
hope that i could not see for a very
long time
but this was because for years i was all
i was hearing was that
which means that my parents and my
family weren’t even my real family and
that
at my marriage my parents would
literally donate me away to this other
life
and so every single moment of my life
was literally preparing me for this
purpose of getting married and even
though my education was emphasized
it was always a means to an end and i
remember at the time when my parents
were supposed to be saving for my
education they were saving for potential
dowry and ceremonious costs of marriage
for me and my sister
at that time i felt like my education
wasn’t being emphasized
but in retrospect it makes sense because
it was literally going to be the biggest
expense of their lifetime
and every single thing that i had to do
in life was sort of decided for me
my education to my career to like how i
would get married
and i felt this intrinsic lack of agency
in my life
and anytime i would exclaim my desire to
be free or independent
i was told that before my marriage i was
under the guardianship of my father
and after my marriage would be my
husband so freedom
independence or having a life of my own
were not really words that i knew
were not even the dreams that i could
see and for years i just
internalized this reality and came to
believe it
and anytime that i was mindful of my
circumstances or my present
i would just become complacent in it and
submit to whatever was happening in
front of me and whatever was
in front of me and so in this kind of
mindfulness
all i was seeing was what was in front
of me and i could not go beyond
to see all the possibilities for myself
and because of exactly this i would
escape into my daydreams and in this
lava land where i was just this escapist
but i believe that your imagination has
immense creative power
but this can either be unmanifested or
misused
and this was the pendulum that i kept
swinging on because
on one hand my imagination was
unmanifested when i was doing
mindfulness
in a complacent way where my mindfulness
was inactive and
passive because all i was seeing was
what was in front of me and i could not
transcend and go beyond to see all the
things that my future and my reality
could look like
now if you go back to the grip that we
made
if you stay at that reality if you don’t
move and you don’t transcend
what happens is that you get attached to
it when you’re
in that present moment you get dragged
along by life
into a future that would be and this was
the unmanifested kind of imagination
where i was doing mindfulness wrong and
because of exactly this
i swung to the other end of the pendulum
where i was this escapist daydreamer
where i would get lost in this la la
land and i was a lost boy from neverland
and this was literally the pendulum i
was swinging on but i believe this was
because
i was taught mindfulness wrong for a
very long time
i was told that i was supposed to be in
just the present moment
and just see what was in front of me but
today i want to tell you that that kind
of mindfulness is actually
so inactive and passive and the kind of
mindfulness that i want to teach you
today
is actually a transcendental kind
one that goes beyond that present moment
and heads into this realm of possibility
where you see all that could be even
your past present and future exists
so there is this reality which is
two-dimensional
and there is this other reality which is
your reality of imagination
where there’s so many possibilities and
so many things
and you have to create this conjunction
make that pendulum stop swinging
and you come up with mindful imagination
this kind of mindfulness that is so
transcendental that you’re able to see
beyond your reality and we all know that
there is more to reality than what meets
the eye
and that’s just what i’m here to show
you today the first step i had taken
towards carving my own path was actually
to start
mindfully imagining instead of being
introduced swinging on this pendulum
when i started mindfully imagining and
working with my reality in my
imagination
instead of against it i started creating
possibilities
that could actually occur for me because
imagining within your reality is sort of
like creating doors for yourself
it might not be possible to open all of
them but if you’d never thought of
something it would never be a possible
option for manifestation and i just want
to emphasize
how important mindfulness really is
because initially i reacted to the idea
of it
because i was seeing it wrong but with
your imagination too
you have to be mindful that you have to
be mindful
because then dreams become more
important than reality
you just get lost in the thought record
where you’re just daydreaming and you
forget to create
and do things and exist in your reality
and both parts of my pendulum swinging
were actually complacent
and mindful imagination is the one that
is active
mindful imagination is the one when you
start carving your own path
now when i started expanding my horizons
actually seeing that maybe my future
could look different
and saw this within my reality instead
of this other reality
i realized that maybe i could make it
come true i
expanded my barriers to another point
i expanded my barriers from here to here
now what do i mean by this
i want you to take a look at this
balloon now if you see this balloon in
the two-dimensional reality
the reality where you just see what is
in front of you
you’ll only see those barriers these
barriers that are right here
but with your imagination you actually
blow into the balloon
and you turn this reality to a
three-dimensional reality
which brings in the realm of imagination
to this 2d reality
before what i was doing when i was
escaping was actually blowing out to the
balloon
but working with reality is to blow in
the balloon
and you have to once again do it
mindfully because you remember
the harder the deeper you go the harder
it gets to keep your grip
and the same goes with the balloon the
more you blow the more you risk
bursting the balloon but you have to
slowly with trial and error blow it
slowly slowly
slowly and that is how you know that you
are expanding your horizons
and you’re testing your true limits of
your reality
instead of the limits that were there in
the first place when you were doing
mindfulness in this passive way
this is how i would sort of describe
mindful imagination
but now that we’ve spoken about
mindfulness i actually want to talk
about action and activity that i’ve been
emphasizing for so long
now your action and activity either
psychological
or real action can be of two types
now initially my action the
psychological one when i was imagining
my striving was in it but your action
can be of two types
real or psychological correct now this
is either reaction
or pro-action and i was sort of always a
reactive
i would just react to things when i was
stuck but and i was stuck in between the
stimulus response stimulus response
cycle
but because i was a reactionary i sort
of lost mindful imagination
now let me explain so i reacted to
mindfulness say when i was taught it for
my adhd like
inattentive daydreaming and then i also
reacted to my gender when i was told
this is what it means to be a woman so i
was like okay i’m a boy now
anytime i was told to do something i
would just do the exact
opposite and overall at school and
otherwise i was seen as this reactive
rebellious and oppositional delinquent
now were any of those stances that i
took that were oppositional wrong
not really but i forgot to mindfully
imagine i just jumped
from one place to another i could not
see all the possibilities that were
there
i could not see how mindfulness was
useful i did not see the beauty of my
gender non-conformity
etc etc and i want to say that proaction
does not mean that you don’t take
oppositional stances
i did take one and i’ll tell you about
that in a minute but proaction is a
little bit different
it is using mindful imagination where
you’re being mindful and not
mindlessly reactive and examining
possibilities before action
say for example i did take that
oppositional stance
when i was told that you had to become a
doctor or an engineer
and i was like no i want to become a
social scientist
and even though i was coerced into
taking stem subjects
i stepped my foot down and i was like
with or without your consent i’m gonna
take these subjects at school
but this was a proactive action why
because it was something i
was doing for myself not just because it
was something that i was reacting to
i was carving my own path not not just a
reactionary path
and that is why i want to emphasize
pro-action today
because when you’re being proactive you
start carving your own path
and slowly slowly i started opening my
parents minds to possibilities of what
my future could look like
i asked them if i got a full scholarship
out of india would you let me go
they were like okay but i’m pretty sure
at that point they were just thinking
that i was building castles in the air
but i was so stern on finding a way out
for myself
that i started using all this
imagination and proaction
to build my path and so like i said
before the 2d and the 3d
i was using this 3d when i was actually
getting inspired from my past
seeing for years when any time i
confronted somebody about their gender
bias
they would just get defensive and i
usually didn’t end up accomplishing
anything
and so maybe like the way i expanded my
parents horizons to
possibilities of what my future could
look like i could expand people’s
horizons to different worlds
and i thought that maybe i could come up
with a board game that would reduce
gender-based implicit biases using
storytelling
and role-playing and this was this and
this was an idea that i pitched to a
research team in bangalore
called the collective mind of end lab
and i asked them if they would help me
and to my amusement they were readily
and to my and to my amusement they were
actually really ready to help me
with their help i was able to bring this
game to fruition and i applied
for the national science fair in india
and at this national science fair
my game was selected to represent my
country at the intel international
science fair
and when i heard my name on stage i had
tears of joy
because what it meant for me was that
maybe i could have this new life that i
wanted for myself
and soon after the fair i heard from the
university of toronto that i had been
awarded the lester b
pearson scholarship and all of the
and all of the cards just turned in my
favor and
i felt like i had created my path
towards this
end towards this new life where i could
have the education
that i wanted and pursue the career that
i really wanted for myself
i feel that using mindful imagination
and pro-action
i was able to carve my path into this
new future
but i would just like to say that it is
not always possible to break through
and i would not dismiss any role that
luck played in my life
sometimes the balloon you’re given by
life is so small
and the barriers are so thin that you
can’t really blow much into it
and this is the story of countless women
in india
who still have the strength every day to
face their reality head on
and be mindful in their reality and i
am the story of all of these women i am
my grandmother’s story and i am my
mother’s story
but i’m really just this bird that gets
to sing and fly
and i’m so so eternally grateful for
having carved my own path
and having found a way to find meaning
and fulfillment in my life
and career and i would not dismiss that
maybe someday i could find it in a
traditional household
but at least now it’s not limited to it
and i hope that we all today can support
each other and build each other up while
we’re all
trying to face our realities and carve
our own parts
hopefully now using mindful imagination
and proaction
i hope you enjoy the talk and have a
good day