We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Shivani Bhatia. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Shivani below.

Hi Shivani , thanks for joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

My favorite part of equity work is the people in it — the human lives we touch and shape with every interaction, the gloriously chaotic ways we imprint on and are changed by each other. Resonant and relational connection is, after all, one of the antidotes to so many ills and violences.

When I started writing again last fall, just a little seed of what I was allowing to gestate and grow, I found its voice easily — deeply intimate, infinitely caring, abundantly femme, turning towards pain and unafraid to do so — and also unafraid of joy as the most vulnerable emotion.

I find that this too is the work of nourishment — not just allowing our delight, our tenderness, our pleasure, but holding them with as much sacredness as our grief. Joy is vulnerable because it reveals our immeasurable hopes, our most precious longings, the dreams we are too afraid to speak out loud.

So, this is my joy, today — the wonder of stepping into this beautiful era, the gentle delight of celebrating with the sea and the sun and the twist of citrus and the tender daffodils in the woods — and the launch of my little company, founded with and grounded in some of my deepest values.

We are TULSI STRATEGIES, an equity and justice consultancy. We nourish people to heal systems. I’m Shivani, founder and chief equity officer, and I’d love to work with you.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I’m a maker and a mender, a queer disabled brown femme, an eldest immigrant daughter, and an equity and justice consultant. I work to nourish my communities and heal our systems of care, in pursuit of health equity and racial, disability, and reproductive justice.

I’m currently based in New York City, where I live with an overflowing sewing basket, a cherished community garden, and a
sourdough starter that’s been alive and fermenting since the late 1800s.

Over my career, I’ve been a health equity expert for the COVID pandemic response, a leader in maternal mortality prevention, an innovation consultant, a crisis counselor for sexual violence survivors, a full-spectrum birth and abortion doula, a trauma-sensitive hatha yoga teacher, a sex educator, and a cognitive neuroscience researcher studying the effects of music education on brain plasticity. I have designed, implemented, and evaluated public health programs in Boston, Denver, New York City, and Mumbai, India.

I went out on my own in 2022 after a few months of rest and recovery, a few years of transformation, and a decade of dreaming. I saw a need for equity and justice work that bridges the personal and the political, the embodied and the embroiled, the human and the systemic.

I love the elegant and imperfect chaos of our identities, our glorious riotous revolutionary ancestries. I believe that joy is the most vulnerable emotion, that the antidote to violence is resonant and relational connection, that queer and disabled and bipoc people and survivors have each other — that we have us.

Today, I help BIPOC folks radically care for themselves in the face of ongoing -isms, so we can grow in pleasure, abundance, and joy. I help white people use their privilege to interrupt bias and discrimination, so our environments and our programs become stronger, more sustainable, and more equitable. My approach to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice work is unapologetically intersectional and deeply rooted in healing and nourishment.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

To be an eldest immigrant daughter is to consider all the ways in which we could light ourselves on fire to keep those we love warm. Sometimes, it is to do it. Often, it is to fight the urge, to resent the flames, and simultaneously to feel most alive when we are alight. What a marvel, to be so warm.

Sometimes we will stand in front of those we love, searching for water — hands cupping the flames, hair singed and wild — and they will look back at us, unmoved and unmoving, and ask why we lit the match. They are not always wrong in asking.

I wonder at all the things we do to feel warm — the self destructive and the restorative, the messy middle and the clean finish. We forget the greens languishing in the fridge and order takeout instead; we bottle up our ruminations until they explode in a tearful frenzy; we plunge into hot baths after a cold November 4pm sunset chill; we have sex with the wrong people and occasionally the right ones.

When we get it right, the heat is soft, easeful, nourishing. A hot water bottle tucked between the sheets, a reckoning within relationship that brings deeper intimacy, a dollop of honey and bourbon in a cup of tea, a hurt navigated with integrity and dignity, a giddy book of erotica late into the night. Tending to our needs and wants is the hardest easy medicine.

Sometimes we come at each other with a blade in one hand and salt in the other. Sometimes we remember the vegetables before they wilt and cook a broth that makes us weak at the knees. Maybe, in the end, we will spoon out the stew for those we love — cooked over a simple, soft blue flame — and delight in the warmth, when nothing and no one has burned.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

2022 passed in a haze of grief, illness, and loss. It was debilitating; I collapsed. I learned, yet again, the breathtaking ways in which discrimination morphs into gaslighting, patriarchy dismantles intimacy, injury — physical and emotional, traumas and viruses — makes shapeshifters of memory, time, reality.

I am stupidly grateful for the many safety nets that caught me — the friends who sat shiva with me through the grief, my sister who kept me fed and our home running for the weeks I wasn’t physically able to leave the house; for the access to clinicians who believed me from within the enveloping blur of chronic illness; for any number of people who poured into me for months on end when I could offer very little in return; for the season after, of recovery, rest, compost.

But the beginning of the living year seems like a good time for compost to shift to a resilient little seedling. When I started writing again last fall, just a little seed of what I was allowing to gestate and grow, I found its voice easily — deeply intimate, infinitely caring, abundantly femme, turning towards pain and unafraid to do so — and also unafraid of joy as the most vulnerable emotion. I find that this too is the work of nourishment — not just allowing our delight, our tenderness, our pleasure, but holding them with as much sacredness as our grief. Joy is vulnerable because it reveals our immeasurable hopes, our most precious longings, the dreams we are too afraid to speak out loud.

So, this is my joy, today — the wonder of stepping into this beautiful new era, the gentle delight of celebrating with the sea and the sun and the twist of citrus and the tender daffodils in the woods, and the launch of my little company, founded with and grounded in some of my deepest values. We are TULSI STRATEGIES, an equity and justice consultancy, and we nourish people to heal systems. I’m Shivani, founder and chief equity officer, and I’d love to work with you.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.shivani.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shivanimb/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shivanimb/
• Other: https://thecopperapothecary.substack.com/

Image Credits
Nagaraj Shirali Shivani Bhatia