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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 5.

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The Genius Life · 542: The Science of Navigating Change, Grief, and Uncertainty | Maya Shankar, PhD · 14 Jan 2026 podcast

And we finally found out that our surrogate was pregnant and we were over the moon with joy and then she miscarried.

And I remember,

I felt so disoriented in this moment because I'm so used to hustling my way through challenges.

I'm so used to figuring out what it would mean to just work harder, to overcome something, to get past something.

OK, I can find creative workarounds.

I'm still going to get from point A to point B.

But in the context of fertility and family planning, there's no such thing as working harder in the conventional sense, right?

The universe doesn't really care how much you want something or how much of your emotional life is wrapped up in this thing happening.

And I found myself not only grieving, but also grieving the loss of this future, but also grieving my identity in this really profound way.

I think that...

Sometimes when only when we lose something, do we realize how much it defined us in the first place?

And I was sort of confronting the fact that this aspiration of motherhood had been an identity that I had anchored myself to from the time I was a little kid.

You know, it's probably my earliest identity that I ever sought out.

And

In that moment, as I was going through these painful emotions, I heard this mantra over and over again, right?

Well, Maya, you can't control what happens to you, but you can control your reaction to what happens.

And it is meant to be empowering, and I totally get it.

But in that moment for me, I was like, WTF.

How do I actually make that true?

It's so easy to say change your response, but it's not like there's a switch in my brain that I can flip on and off to suddenly feel differently about my change or more hopeful or to have greater perspective or wisdom.

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