pictured below with ESTHER PEREL AT THE COMPLETION OF THE RELATE TRAINING IN 2017 IN BOULDER COLORADO.
Bidisha (She/they)
Pronunciation: Bi-di-sha (another name for the Goddess Kali; an ancient indigenous and Buddhist Indian city)
I am a systems changemaker, somatic educator, and writer operating at the fluid intersections of human ecology, ancestral wisdom, and structural resilience. Raised between the landscapes of India and Lawrence, Kansas by a single mother who pioneered social work education, my life’s work has been a non-linear inquiry into how complex human and ecological systems thrive, fracture, and heal under pressure.
Holding two degrees from Yale University, including a Master’s from the Yale School of the Environment, and a Bachelor’s in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, I have spent over two decades designing containers for collective care and systemic transformation. Early in my career, I co-founded Encendia Biochar—a clean-tech venture rooted in indigenous soil practices that secured backing from the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute—and served as a core climate strategist for organizations like 350.org and the Tamil Nadu Organic Farmers’ Movement.
For five years, I served as the Program and Founding Curriculum Director for the Dalai Lama Fellowship. In this role, I designed a flagship Heart, Head, and Hands curriculum that empowered hundreds of global social innovators across thirty countries to lead at the intersections of justice, peace, and ecology. This foundational framework—which I had the honor of presenting directly to His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, securing millions in institutional foundation funding—continues to be taught at Stanford University, the University of Virginia, and other leading global institutions. Harvard Divinity School subsequently recognized this work, inviting me into its selective cohort of global spiritual innovators.
In recent years, my path has folded inward into deeper, more intimate terrains of somatic adaptation. Becoming a parent, living with an autoimmune condition and navigating a profound, late-in-life ADHD diagnosis, I found myself entering what Bayo Akomolafe calls the "generative cracks" of the status quo. I spent seasons composting old definitions of transactional productivity, translating my Strozzi Institute and ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) somatic mastery into structural toolkits for teams and leaders navigating organizational conflict, burnout, and collective grief.
Today, my work lives where global systemic design meets the lived intelligence of the human body. Whether facilitating organization-wide Rupture and Repair structures for foundations, advising on human ecology for sustainability sectors from the U.K., Japan and Budapest, or writing my current manuscript, I am dedicated to co-creating new ways of being. I partner with forward-thinking networks, philanthropic systems, and social innovators to build organizations where the quality of our collective relationships mirrors the health of the earth we inhabit.