Keynotes & Workshops · Schools · Organizations
Everyone in the room is carrying something.
You can see it before anyone says it — in the shoulders, in the short fuse at four o’clock, in the person who stopped putting their hand up. I run keynotes and hands-on workshops that leave people holding real tools for life: light enough to carry, and small enough to use in the ninety seconds when it actually matters.
Four in, six out — the extended exhale
Breathe in
Your first tool. Follow the line.
Why this works
Nobody ever gave us the operating manual for life.
We are taught to read, to code, to run a meeting, to file a return. Thirteen years of school, a degree, a career — and not one lesson on the three questions underneath all of it. Who am I? Who do I want to be? And how do I get there?
That is what I teach: the operating system of being human. What a feeling actually is. Where it lives in the body. Why the same argument keeps happening. What to do at four o’clock when it lands.
And it only works when you take all three layers at once — the psychology that explains the pattern, the physiology that fires before you have a thought about it, and the spirit that decides what any of it is for. Split them apart and you get what most people have already sat through: therapy language with no body in it, breathwork with no evidence behind it, or a beautiful idea nobody can use on a Tuesday.
Put them back together and something changes fast. I have watched it in hospital rooms, in classrooms, and in boardrooms. Same nervous system. Same relief.
Who I work with
Two rooms. Same nervous system.
For schools
Your faculty is running on empty and your students cannot regulate long enough to learn. You have already done the mindfulness assembly.
Here is the part nobody says out loud: it didn’t work. The largest randomized trial ever run on school mindfulness — more than 8,000 students across 84 schools — found no improvement in adolescent mental health, and found that the students mostly didn’t practice and didn’t like it.* I can tell you exactly why, and show you what I built instead.
Professional development days, faculty retreats, parent nights and student assemblies, drawn from the K–8 curriculum I wrote.
For organizations
Your people do not need another resilience webinar. They need something their body remembers at four o’clock on a bad Tuesday — before the email gets sent, before the meeting turns, before the good one quietly starts looking.
Conference keynotes, all-hands, leadership offsites and multi-session workshop series for teams that want the practice, not the poster.
* Kuyken et al., “Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of universal school-based mindfulness training compared with normal school provision in reducing risk of mental health problems and promoting well-being in adolescents: the MYRIAD cluster randomised controlled trial,” Evidence-Based Mental Health, 2022.
The Whole Human
Three lenses on one question: what is it to be human?
Most programs pick one. I use all three in every session, and I say out loud which is which — so nobody has to take anything on faith.
Psychology
What the research actually shows about thought, emotion and behavior — in language your room can use without a degree.
ClinicalACT · DBT · CBT · Internal Family Systems · Narrative therapy · Attachment research
Positive psychologySeligman and the Penn Positive Psychology Center · Tal Ben-Shahar’s Harvard course · Laurie Santos at Yale · Lyubomirsky · Fredrickson · The Harvard Study of Adult Development
Physiology
You cannot regulate what you cannot feel. Regulation sits downstream of noticing what the body is doing — so we build that first, physically.
Draws onInteroception research · Polyvagal theory · Window of tolerance · Somatic education · Motor imagery and mental rehearsal studies · Kinesthetic and embodied-learning research
Spirit & energy systems
Breath, movement, attention, ritual. Practices cultures have kept alive for millennia, taught honestly, with the mechanism named and the mysticism optional.
Draws onBreath & pranayama · Meditation & mantra · Subtle-body traditions · Rumi, Tolle, Singer, Chopra · Contemplative practice across cultures
Why me
I did not build a personal brand and then look for something to sell.
I built three companies first — a foundation, a product line and a school curriculum — and every one of them started in a hospital room. The workshops are what I learned doing it.
Speaking
Nobody remembers a talk. Everybody remembers what they made.
Every other session in this field is talking — which is exactly where a room quietly checks out. We move. We play. We craft. The tools get built with minds and hands, so people leave holding them instead of trying to remember them.
This is not a gimmick, it is the method. We learned it with children in hospitals who could not sit through a conversation about feelings but would make something with you for an hour. We proved it across a national product line. We wrote it into a school curriculum with craft and animation. Now we bring it to adults — who were never taught any of this, and who have spent decades being handed slides instead of scissors.
Nothing requires closed eyes. Everyone practices at the same time, so nobody is watched. Nobody is asked to tell the room their story.
30 minutes
The keynote
One question, one tool, one story. A conference opener, an all-staff, a faculty morning, a student assembly.
60 minutes
The keynote, with practice
The full arc across all three lenses, plus two practices the whole room does together — seated, eyes open, nothing embarrassing. Hands-on craft option available.
2–3 hours
The workshop
One subject taken all the way down, built with movement and craft. Everyone makes something and takes it home. Runs beautifully as a series of two or three.
3 days
The Science of InnerJoy
The full intensive for a faculty, a leadership team or a retreat. We do not build understanding — we build the practice, and the shared language that keeps it alive after I leave.
What your room walks out with
Portable coping skills. Not a nice feeling that wears off by Thursday.
- 01A named practice for each state. Activated, shut down, spiraling. Different physiology, different tool — and everyone leaves knowing which one is theirs.
- 02The mechanism, in two sentences. Adults cooperate with explanations and resist instructions. Every practice comes with the real physiology behind it, short enough to repeat to a colleague.
- 03Language for what is happening inside. Most people have almost no vocabulary for sensation. Tight, buzzy, heavy, open, sinking. You cannot work with what you cannot name.
- 04Something they made. A reset menu, a council, a glimmer list — built by them, with their hands, in the room, and taken home. Not a handout. Theirs.* Full craft option available for sessions of 60 minutes and longer.
- 05Practices that survive the hallway. Every tool has a fifteen-second version that works standing in a corridor, in a car, or in a meeting, with nobody noticing.
Stages
Where I have spoken.
Speaker
Tory Burch Foundation
Speaking to founders on building a company from the thing that broke your heart.
Speaker
Pharma
AstraZeneca · Women in Rare · Johnson & Johnson. The rare-disease community, and the families living inside it.
Keynote speaker
Spread The Joy Foundation
The annual gala keynote. Over $1M raised to date to send care packages to hospitalized children.
Regulation Library
InnerJoy Ed
Teaching the tools directly to educators and families, from the curriculum I wrote.
Workshops
The Science of InnerJoy.
Three days, built directly from the 36-week InnerJoy Ed curriculum I wrote for elementary school — rewritten for adults, because most adults were never taught any of it either. Same arc the children get. Same craft. Nobody has done this for grown-ups before.
Three days · Faculty · Leadership · Retreats
Who am I?
Who am I? Who do I want to be? How do I get there? That is the InnerJoy arc, and it is the whole intensive. Every practice is invitational, everyone practices at the same time, and nobody is ever asked to tell the room what happened to them. Every day the lesson ends up in their hands, because we build it with movement and craft rather than slides.
Day one
Who am I?
Notice & meet
The body has a language and almost nobody was taught it. Sensation vocabulary, the alarm system, triggers and glimmers — and The Council of Me, where every part of you gets a seat at the table.
Day two
Who do I want to be?
Choose
Values, above and below the line, and the version of you already living the way you say you want to live. This is where visualization stops being woolly and starts being a method.
Day three
How do I get there?
Build & keep
The reset menu, the daily practice, the fifteen-second versions. Each person leaves with a made object and a plan that fits inside the life they actually have.
Signature workshops
Each one runs all three lenses. Here is exactly what it draws on.
75–90 minutes, or 2–3 hours as a deep dive. All hands-on.
Narrative therapy · Somatic · IFS
The Council of Me
Everyone gets a seat at the table.
You are not one voice. You are a table full of them — the striver, the critic, the one that keeps you small so you stay safe. We draw the table, name who is at it, and find out what each part has been protecting you from. Then you write a letter to the least loved one.
PsychologyInternal Family Systems · Narrative therapy · Attachment and the protective origin of every part
PhysiologyHolding your part somatically · Sixty seconds of silence · Co-regulation in pairs
SpiritRumi · Tolle on the dissolving of ego · Singer’s thorn — what keeps returning until it is met
University researchRichard Schwartz — Internal Family Systems · Shadick et al., randomized trial of IFS, Journal of Rheumatology · White & Epston on narrative practice · Kristin Neff, UT Austin, on self-compassion
CBT · DBT · Polyvagal
Triggers & Glimmers
The things that set you off. The things that light you up.
Everyone has both and almost nobody has catalogued either. A trigger fires before you have a thought about it, which is exactly why willpower keeps losing. We learn to catch the body’s cue first, then build a glimmer list you can actually reach for.
PsychologyCBT — the thought/feeling/behavior loop · DBT distress tolerance · ACT cognitive defusion
PhysiologyNeuroception — the alarm that fires before the thought · The ninety-second wave · Extended exhale
SpiritAttention as the only currency you truly spend · What you tend is what grows
University researchAaron Beck, Penn — CBT · Marsha Linehan, University of Washington — DBT · Stephen Porges on neuroception · Matthew Lieberman, UCLA — affect labeling, “Putting Feelings Into Words”
ACT · Motor imagery · Intention
If I Can See It, I Can Be It
Time travel, and the person waiting at the other end.
Visualization has an image problem and a serious evidence base. We use it the way athletes and surgeons do, then go further and meet your future self. Most people discover they have been making decisions on behalf of a stranger.
PsychologyFuture-self continuity research · ACT values work · Implementation intentions
PhysiologyMotor imagery and mental rehearsal studies · Why the body prepares for what it pictures
SpiritIntention and the field of pure potentiality · Chopra · Manifestation, described honestly
University researchHal Hershfield, UCLA — future self-continuity · Peter Gollwitzer, NYU — implementation intentions · Gabriele Oettingen, NYU — mental contrasting · Decety and colleagues on motor imagery
Conscious leadership · ACT · Window of tolerance
Above and Below the Line
One question, asked all day: which side am I on right now?
Below the line you are defending, blaming and certain you are right. Above it you are curious. The skill is not staying above — nobody does. It is catching the drop within seconds, and having a reset you have already practiced. Everyone leaves with theirs, made by hand.
PsychologyThe 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership · ACT psychological flexibility · DBT wise mind
PhysiologyWindow of tolerance · Catching the drop in the body before the mouth opens · Reset menu design
SpiritNon-judgment as a daily practice · Relinquishing the need to defend
University researchSteven Hayes, University of Nevada — ACT and psychological flexibility · Dan Siegel, UCLA — window of tolerance · Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School — psychological safety · Chris Argyris, Harvard — defensive routines
The Alarm System
Fight, flight and freeze as protection rather than malfunction — and what to do in the eight seconds afterwards.
Anger Has a Shape
Anger as boundary information. Where it lives in the body, and how to give the push somewhere to go.
Bodies Together
Co-regulation. Why calm and panic are both contagious, and what that means for anyone who leads a room.
The Comparison Machine
Social media, appearance and shame — approached body-first, never as a lecture.
Radical Self-Love
The mission underneath all of it, and the least sentimental version of it you have heard.
Built for your room
Faculty, leadership, sales floor, parent night. Same spine, rewritten for whoever is actually sitting there.
Where it all comes from
The InnerJoy Ed curriculum, for children.
Every workshop on this page is the adult translation of something written first for a child. InnerJoy Ed is a full social-emotional curriculum — 36 weeks per grade, with craft, animation and portable coping skills — built with industry-leading experts and designed to be delivered by an ordinary teacher inside an ordinary twenty-five minutes.
It is the reason the adult sessions work. The material has already been tested on the toughest audience there is: an eight-year-old who will tell you immediately if something is boring.
About
The biggest research subject of my life was me.
Hi. I’m Shalini, and this is my daughter Aria.
When Aria was six months old we were given a diagnosis that changed everything. She was “one in a million” — a rare illness, and years that turned into hospital stays, procedures and a lot of waiting in rooms nobody wants to be in.
I could not control her physical health. So I put everything I had into the one thing I could reach: her emotional wellbeing. I homeschooled her through it, Montessori-inspired, determined that she would thrive rather than merely get through. And I went looking for tools. Not inspiration — tools. Things you could actually do in ninety seconds in a hospital corridor with your hands full.
There was almost nothing. So I made it, and I made it the way a child will accept it: with their hands.
The kits went to the children in the beds around us — that became Spread The Joy Foundation, now in more than 300 hospitals nationwide. Then it became obvious that every child needed these tools, not only the sick ones, so I started Open The Joy, which was picked up nationwide by Target, Walmart and Nordstrom almost immediately. Then it became obvious the tools belonged in schools — so I raised capital, founded InnerJoy Ed with my partners, and wrote an entire curriculum with craft and animation alongside industry-leading experts.
These workshops are the last step. Everything I learned building products for children and writing a curriculum for schools, brought to the people who were never taught any of it and have been carrying it the longest.
Don’t let what you can’t do stop you from doing what you can.The line I ran everything on
Aria
Turns out my daughter is quite the speaker as well.
Hear her journey, in her own words.
Aria’s talk Watch on YouTubeWith Joy
Three companies. One question.
What does it mean to be human — and what science-backed tools can we carry for the journey?
Every one of them is an answer to that, built for a different age and a different room.
Booking
Tell me about your room.
Who is in it, what they are carrying, and what you need them to walk out with. I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for it.
Tell me your organization, who is in the room and roughly how many, your date, the format you have in mind, and what you need them to walk out with.
- Audiences
- School faculty & professional development · Corporate · Conferences · Parent nights
- Travel
- Based in Princeton, NJ. Available nationally and internationally.
- Also available
- Virtual keynotes and remote workshop series.