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
And...
The reason I included Ingrid's story is it's a good reminder that our beliefs are not these sacred, immutable truths, right?
There are flimsy entities that don't always have a strong basis.
It turns out that for Ingrid, when she was a little kid, her mom had cautioned her about sharing these stories, not because...
She was ashamed of them.
Her mom was very proud of the stories, but because she didn't want Ingrid to face discrimination or violence from people who didn't understand.
The little Ingrid's mind had interpreted that as, well, if I'm being told I can't share this, it probably means this thing is bad.
And so that's an example of how we can just take messages in and not really evaluate them.
And for me, what I realized is...
I had been taught for whatever reason from the time I was little, you know, maybe it was growing up in an Indian American family and hearing the conversations between my aunties and other influences that most of my worth as a woman in this society would come from becoming a parent.
Like that is where I was told that my life's meaning would come from.
And if I didn't achieve that goal, I would never live a full, satisfying life.
And obviously, that's a problematic message in a lot of ways.
But I had internalized that.
I really had.
Because when I envision my life without a family, I imagine a grayscale life, like it lost all of its color.
And one of the very freeing exercises I'm engaging in in real time is to ask myself whether I should believe that or whether I should believe that, of course, I can live a happy, full life without having children.
Yeah.
And again, this is just a call to action for everyone to just ask themselves, what are the beliefs that I'm carrying in my life that are self-limiting in some way that a change in my life can inspire me to reevaluate with a new perspective?
So to summarize, right, what we've talked about before.
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