Maya Shankar
speaker
1,518 appearances
8 recordings
7 series
first heard Oct 2025
last heard 5 Jul
Maya Shankar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 5.
Appearances
to being a violinist, such that when I lost it, I felt like I was not fully intact, right?
Fast forward a few decades, I'm now confronting another challenge in my personal life.
My husband and I had spent six, seven years trying to start a family.
We're unsuccessful.
We encountered
heartbreaks and losses and disappointments.
And I remember on the night of the second miscarriage with our surrogate when we lost identical twin girls, I again felt in a much deeper way, though, this fundamental threat to my identity, right?
I remember thinking, this is the dream I've had.
This is the earliest identity I think I ever attached myself to.
From the time I was three, I assumed that one day I would become a mom and have a family of my own, right?
So one thought exercise we can all engage in, and I would urge your listeners to do this, whether they're in the throes of a change or not, is to learn to attach your identity, not simply to what you do, to the roles or labels you have, but to why you do those things or to why you want those things.
So let me make that more concrete.
When I asked myself what it was that I loved about the violin, sure, I loved the physicality of playing it, but at its core, I loved the fact that the violin
allowed me to foster deep emotional connections with people.
Music was a vehicle through which I could feel close to my fellow humans.
Just because I lost the violin didn't mean that I lost what led me to love it in the first place.
And so if I could anchor my identity to that, to my why, oh, I'm the type of person who loves emotional connection, then the exercise becomes, OK, well, I can't play the violin anymore, but how else can I find ways to express this part of myself?
And it turns out that subconsciously I've been drawn to spaces that are all about human connection, right?
As a cognitive neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist, I study the science of human connection.
In my podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, in writing my book where I was doing interviews for years, it was all about forging deep emotional connection.
Showing 541–560 of 1,518 · page 28 of 76
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