I stopped waiting.
Waiting to lose the weight before I took the stage.
Waiting to be accepted before I showed up fully.
Waiting for the industry, the room, the relationship, the mirror — to finally tell me I was enough.
The world was not going to get there.
So I went first.
I am a curvy, racialized woman who has been body shamed and sexualized in equal measure for most of my life.
Not accepted.
Not seen as fully human.
Just — managed.
And the research confirms it was never in my head:
→ Women in larger bodies in Canada are 16 times more likely to face discrimination than men (Obesity Canada, 2025)
→ 64% have experienced weight bias from a healthcare professional
→ Sexualized women at any body size are perceived as less human than non-sexualized women (PubMed, 2022)
→ Workplace weight stigma leads to burnout, anxiety, depression and wage penalties — disproportionately in women
→ Nearly two thirds of brand posts featuring diverse models still included sexualizing messages
We were handed the shame before we were old enough to question it.
Swipe to see what it costs — and what it looks like to finally put it down. 👉
I walked onto a TEDx stage in this body.
I built two businesses in this body.
I acted in six films in this body.
I am co-producing my first film in this body.
I won an award in this body
I walked on the runway in this body
I did not wait for the world to make room for me.
I made room for myself.
And I help other women do the same.
If any of this is your story — drop a 🌿 below.
DM me if you want to work with me.
The full article — where I break down all five financial wounds that made me say yes to 18 months of free labour, and the lessons that built my wealth mindset — is linked in my bio. (Read the posts with the music turned on)
Read it if you have ever given your best to something that never compensated you fairly.
Read it if you have ever convinced yourself you were not yet qualified enough to be paid.
Read it if you are tired of working twice as hard for half the recognition.
And when you are done reading — download my free Money Origin Workbook, The Abundant Creative, also linked in bio. It is where the healing actually begins.
Want to go deeper? Join me on Thursday, April 23rd at 7pm for the live masterclass where I go deeper. Link in bio.
Because the woman who interviewed the Prime Minister?
She was always worth paying.
And so are you.
#womenenterpreneur
#WomenEmpowerment #womenwhobuild #WealthEmpowerment #theabundantwoman
My money origin story is available on Substack to read. Link in bio.
It's based on true events, heartfelt moments and from a place of vulnerability.
I know there are many of you here that can relate to it. For some of us, it's very emotional, because we cannot tell these stories without remembering the sacrifices of our parents. I cried.
I cried because the story goes beyond my parents and connects to a land once I called home, and to my people who were denied the right to exist. A refugee lives as a refugee, always searching for a space to belong.
I am hoping that my story will help you unpack yours.
Entrepreneurship will expose every part of you that's healing.
AND
How you make your money matters.
If that sentence just landed somewhere in your chest — this carousel is for you.
I spent years chasing overnight success, following blueprints built by people who had fundamentally different lives than me. I lost $100K. I remortgaged my house. I barely recognized myself.
And then I started over — this time, on my own terms.
Swipe for the story. 🌿
The full essay is live on my Substack — link in bio.
#WomenEntrepreneurs #MoneyMindset #ImmigrantWomen #BusinessAlignment #Substack
Drop a 🌿 comment if you are a cool aunty & what you love about it
Having positive role models makes a big difference in life. I had one older cousin whom I looked up to, but she suddenly passed away last year. Miss her dearly.
Besides that...no other role models growing up.
Hopefully, my nephews will appreciate my humour and stories 😂. Not sure if they think I am cool. 🤔
By the way, this music on this video is on 🔥
Modeling for @more2lovebridal
The research confirms what so many of us have felt our whole lives:
→ 72% of mainstream media images stigmatize people in larger bodies (Obesity Canada)
→ Women with obesity earn up to 12% less annually — not for performance reasons, but body size reasons
→ Workplace weight stigma is directly linked to burnout, anxiety and depression — specifically in women
→ Plus-size women are dehumanized when sexualized — perceived as less fully human (PubMed, 2022)
The shame was never ours to carry.
The system handed it to us before we were old enough to refuse it.
I am a Registered Social Worker, Psychotherapist, Actress, Doctoral Student & the founder of @shakti_counselling
I help women heal and build relationships with their bodies so they can move away from shame to build the life they want.
DM me for therapy or coaching services.
#fatphobia #bodykeepsthescore #bodyimagehealing #BodyAcceptance #bodyimageawareness
Audio - Ovvoru Pookalume by K.S Chithra - One of my mother's favourite songs.
Amma.
You never got to bury your mother.
She was in Jaffna.
You were in Colombo.
Eight hours apart on the same island. (Sri Lanka)
And the war — the state-perpetuated violence against our people —
made even that impossible.
You chose our safety.
And you grieved alone.
I have been a psychotherapist long enough to know what that costs a person.
The grief that has no ceremony.
The loss that has no ritual.
The mourning that happens in silence because survival demanded it.
Tamil people were never given the right to grieve our loved ones. (Even now, we are policed when we mourn our freedom fighters)
The 1983 riots. The civil war. The displacement. The disappearances.
Stole not just lives — but the ceremonies that make loss bearable.
You are one of millions who was denied that.
And you carried it.
The way Tamil women have always been asked to carry impossible things.
You lost your own father at 18.
You held your family together.
You opened our home to girls fleeing the island.
You spoke Sinhalese to soldiers at our door at night so they would not find them.
You came to Canada and started again from nothing.
You stayed at the hospital, went back to school, worked for twenty years.
And at 60 — you chose yourself.
Our relationship has not always been easy.
I know that. You know that.
But I also know this:
You survived the unsurvivable.
Without therapy. Without anyone asking how you were.
With nothing but the strength you built from everything that tried to break you.
I became a psychotherapist in part to understand you.
To give language to what you carried.
To make sure it does not travel any further unchecked through our family.
And what I found — when I finally understood —
was not resentment.
It was awe.
Happy Mother's Day Amma. 🌿
This is also for every mother, grandmother and ancestor who survived what history tried to erase.
You are the reason we are still here.
Drop a 🌿 for the women who carried us.
Share this if you know a mother who survived the unsurvivable.
I finished my PhD residency week at the Faculty of Social Work - Wilfrid Laurier University
And I did not expect to feel what I felt.
I went in with open eyes.
I have been in enough institutional spaces to know that the promise of a brave, socially just environment does not always match the reality of walking inside it.
I was prepared to be disappointed.
I was not disappointed.
For the first time in an academic space — I felt like I belonged.
Not because the room was perfect.
Because for the first time — I did not have to translate myself to be in it.
Anti-racism. Decolonization. Intersectionality. Disability justice. Indigenous rights. Gender equity.
Not as buzzwords.
As frameworks. As lived commitments. As the starting point of every conversation.
I did not realize how exhausting it had been to always be the one explaining —
until I was finally in a room where I did not have to.
I also saw something else I did not expect.
Faculty who looked like mentors I had never had before.
Colleagues who brought their full, racialized, complex selves into the room without apology.
Leadership modeled with curiosity instead of ego. Accountability instead of defensiveness.
And something in me that had been dormant — quietly put away after years of witnessing toxic and racist leadership — woke up.
The spark for leadership returned.
I am not naive.
Academia is still a colonial system.
There will be hard days ahead.
There will be moments where the walls show their age.
But I also believe in naming progress when I see it.
Because if we only ever critique and never acknowledge the change —
we leave no roadmap for the people building it.
I left that residency week feeling seen. Challenged. Energized. Hopeful.
And ready.
Drop a comment if this journey resonated with you. Share something positive to celebrate together
Swipe to read my full reflections. 👉
Send me a DM if you are a woman looking for mindset coaching or therapy services.
#phdjourney #academia #socialworker #torontotherapist #socialjusticeadvocate
Nobody talks about the women who are in therapy because of the people in their life who will never go.
You booked the appointment. You showed up. You did the work. You drove yourself there and sat in that chair and unpacked years of pain.
And half of what you processed in that room originated in someone who will never sit across from a therapist. Who will never name what they did. Who will never do the work you are quietly doing on their behalf.
You are paying — with your time, your money, your energy — to heal wounds that were handed to you.
You are learning to regulate around someone else's dysregulation. You are grieving people who are still alive. You are breaking generational cycles alone, in a room, with a therapist, while the people who created those cycles go about their lives completely unchanged.
And still you go back. Because you know that your healing matters even if theirs never happens.
That is not weakness. That is one of the most courageous things a woman can do.
Your healing is valid even if no one else in the room is doing the work. 💛
Save this if this is you. Share it with the woman who needs to hear it today.
Book your free 20-minute discovery call — link in bio.
#WomensMentalHealth #TherapyForWomen #GenerationalTrauma #BreakTheCycle
From being suspended for failing undergrad courses....
To doing my PhD.
Nobody saw this coming. Especially not me.
When the university suspended me I did not have the language to explain what had gone wrong.
I just knew I was carrying more than most of my classmates could see.
A new country.
A third language.
A family navigating survival.
A nervous system that had never been regulated enough to sit still and study the way the institution expected.
I was not lazy.
I was not unintelligent.
I was a first-generation immigrant woman trying to succeed in a system that was not designed with me in mind.
And when I failed — the system confirmed what I had always feared.
That I did not belong there.
It took me years to understand that the system was wrong.
So I went back.
Second degree. Dean's list.
Master of Social Work at the University of Toronto.
TEDx stage. Two businesses. Six films.
And now — a PhD acceptance letter with my name on it.
I am not sharing this to impress you.
I am sharing this because somewhere reading this is a woman who failed a course and is letting it write the rest of her story.
A woman who dropped out and is calling herself a quitter.
A woman who was suspended and is carrying that shame like a verdict.
This is your reminder:
The verdict was never theirs to give.
Swipe to read the full story. 👉
Drop a 🎓 if you are on a non-linear path.
DM me the word PHD if this landed.
Curvy. Brown. Loud. Ambitious. I am everything they did not expect — and everything my ancestors prayed for.
This body. This fabric. This woman. None of it was ever up for their approval.
They exoticized my culture and shamed my body. I chose to celebrate both.
I was told I was too much. Too ethnic. Too curvy. Too loud.
Too ambitious. I decided too much was exactly enough.
Drop a comment if you can relate
I was sitting in a fertility clinic. No partner. No plan. No savings. Convinced I was the world's biggest loser. Full Substack article linked in bio
That was the day everything changed.
Here is what my life looked like that day —
Failed relationships. A dead-end government job. Sold my first house to pay off business debt. Living in my parents' basement while my mother reminded me — lovingly, frequently — that I was unmarried, childless, and had failed to become a doctor.
I also had $100k with a cousin in England who was supposed to invest it.
He lost it. And then he lost me too.
I thought I had hit rock bottom.
The universe had other plans.
What followed was the messy middle I had spent my entire adult life running away from. The grief. The financial wounds. The friendships that disappeared the moment I actually needed them.
And then — slowly, unglamorously —
The rebuild.
A puppy. A six figure job. A Master's from U of T. A psychotherapy practice. A modelling career. Six films. A production company. A home. A man worth waiting for. A mother I finally understand.
And a life that looks nothing like the one I was planning in that waiting room.
Everything I thought I was losing was making room for everything I was about to build.
Full article linked in bio. 👉
Want to work with me? Links in bio
Drop a 💛 if you have ever sat in a moment that felt like rock bottom — and came out the other side.
