[00:00:00] Emily Race-Newmark: Welcome to This is How We Care, a podcast where we look at what it means to embody care, not as an individual practice, but a collective one, and to see what kind of world emerges from this place.

[00:00:12] Emily Race-Newmark: Thank you for being here. I am your host, Emily Race.

[00:00:15] Emily Race-Newmark: Today we are joined by Madame Gandhi, an award winning artist and activist known for her uplifting percussive electronic music and positive message about gender liberation and personal power. 

[00:00:28] Madame Gandhi: I would say my essential contribution is around being the light. Being warm, being positive, being a source of hopefulness, of joy, of inspiration, and also pushing ideas. If I look at the astrology, I'm so proud of my Aquarius cusp, Pisces Aquarius cusp, are you an Aquarius as well? 

[00:00:44] Emily Race-Newmark: Rising Aquarius. I really identify. 

[00:00:47] Madame Gandhi: Rising Aquarius. I have Mercury, Venus. I feel that sort of Aquarius spirit of I always have a very joyful and positive mentality on technology, not a naive one. I am very critical of who is making this technology and for what purpose and what values is it further affirming. But tech really is only as good as the people who are using it.

[00:01:07] Madame Gandhi: And so the more we are as humans stepping into our magic as beings of consciousness, beings of love, beings who are aware that our actions have consequence, that we are connected to nature and to the planet, and that we actually can use our power to make the lives of not only humans, but also living beings of all kinds better, and that that actually serves us in the long term because we are connected.

[00:01:30] Madame Gandhi: This motivates me. This feels like a very Aquarian kind of way of thinking, which is futuristic, positive, hopeful. 

[00:01:36] Madame Gandhi: My name Kiran, my first name Kiran, means ray of light in Hindi. Ray of light in the morning, first ray of light in the sunshine when the sun comes up. I really appreciate being named that because I feel that the sole contribution that I can make, whether it's through my music, my lyrics, my activism, my day-to-day interactions, my public speaking, my Thai massage, my yoga, the meditation.

[00:01:59] Madame Gandhi: I feel when I'm in alignment, when I am my high vibrational self, when I'm eating right, sleeping right, drinking water, all these things, the soul contribution that I can provide is a sense of positivity, is a sense of light, is a sense of sunshine. 

[00:02:13] Madame Gandhi: My favorite color is yellow. I'm sitting in my apartment. You can see my loft has lots of yellow. On my stage, we play on yellow drums. There's an intentional design with that choice, which is a sense of warmth, generosity, energy, high energy, confidence, confidence and using your confidence for more love, more expansiveness, more brilliance, more shine.

[00:02:35] Madame Gandhi: And the more we feel that that shine has positive value on other people rather than feeling like it threatens other people, the more I think we all can step into that. 

[00:02:43] Emily Race-Newmark: Oh my gosh. First, I love this connection to how you were named. I just love when things line up this way. It's like good on your parents for knowing who you were meant to be. 

[00:02:52] Madame Gandhi: Thank you. 

[00:02:53] Emily Race-Newmark: This is not the first time I've had the pleasure of interviewing Madame Gandhi. A number of years ago, Madame Gandhi appeared on a panel that I facilitated at Media Arts Lab, the advertising agency for Apple, that I worked at at the time. We were hosting a mini series on female leadership in honor of Women's History Month, and all the panelists were amazing, but I have to say that I loved Kiran's message so much because her presence alone was electric and brought you into this vision of what could be just by the way she was embodying it here and now.

[00:03:31] Emily Race-Newmark: She and I stayed somewhat in touch. I had been following along with her music. And as I was searching for guests for season two, I felt the call to reach out to Kiran and see if she would like to join us for a conversation.

[00:03:44] Emily Race-Newmark: Now, Kiran is someone who wears many hats. She is not limited by one facet of identity. She will not fit in a box. And I wasn't quite sure what she would want to speak to when I brought her on this podcast, but I just had to follow the hunch that it would be a worthy conversation to share. And of course it was, this conversation was lively. I came alive just listening to all the wisdom that she had to share. I hope that you too leave with the same amount of joy that I experienced in hearing Madame Gandhi speak. 

[00:04:20] Emily Race-Newmark: If you haven't heard her music yet, you gotta check that out after this interview, but in the meantime, let's head back to our conversation with Kiran, which was originally recorded in September of 2023.

[00:04:30] Madame Gandhi: The problem of our time is great distraction. Great distraction. The problem of our time is distraction. Here's some junk on Instagram, stay scrolling. Here's the new shows on Netflix, stay watching. Here's the new drugs on the market, stay numb. You have depression, anxiety? No problem. Smoke a little weed, come have a cocktail. Oh, you're feeling sad? How about some retail therapy? Go and buy junk that you don't need. Food: we're gonna inject it with sugar. We're gonna inject it with fat. We're gonna make sure it tastes delicious, even though it's fake. And all of these things keep us distracted.

[00:05:03] Madame Gandhi: America is only 300 years old and it's founded on the promise of abundance of freedom. And on the one hand, I actually have seen even in my own career, the opportunity for financial abundance in America is unparalleled compared to any other place in the world. Undeniably so. Absolutely correct. That's why so many people all around the world do want to come to this country because it is true.

[00:05:24] Madame Gandhi: The amounts of money that are available through brand deals. Sometimes I meet somebody and I'm like, "You make money doing that? Like how?" It's amazing, right? And so there's lots of opportunity. And I think that's quite a positive thing because there is a sense of openness and sure, why not? And let's try. And I find that to be very inspiring. 

[00:05:41] Madame Gandhi: The flip side of that is that then many, many people are also staying incredibly numb and distracted under the guise of abundance or the promise of something that's not actually real. And for me, I have to walk this kind of fine line because there's many times when I'm like, "I'm moving to India. I'm moving to London. I'm moving to Latin America, to Brazil." I learned Portuguese. I always want to be in these more wholesome places where family values, food, movement, spirituality are much stronger.

[00:06:10] Madame Gandhi: At the same time, as a musician, as a speaker, I absolutely see the creativity, innovation, and economic abundance that's available to us here in the States. And so I myself am constantly navigating, how do I participate without drowning? How do I participate in a way that's elevating and contributing value without suffering?

[00:06:28] Madame Gandhi: Many people in America are suffering. Loneliness. Depression. Anxiety. It makes sense. Of course there's anxiety. No human is supposed to know by opening their phone what thousands of other humans all around the world are doing at any given time. It's not normal. Of course you would have anxiety. You will never feel good enough. As long as we don't feel good enough, we stay running our credit card. We stay buying stuff. We stay buying stuff that tells us, "If you buy this, you might be good enough. If you eat this, you might be good enough. If you lose this weight, maybe you'll have a chance of being good enough." It's a hamster wheel that we stay addicted to.

[00:07:01] Madame Gandhi: So the biggest problem is distraction. And the biggest antidote is consciousness. I notice more so than I ever have at any other stage in my life. But I am tired, moody, upset about something. I watch myself want to just numb out by watching a TV show or numb out by eating food that I know is not good for me. At least there's the awareness. So this is the beginning. And I've actually had to make radical changes in my life, Emily. I'm not the kind of person who's like, "Yeah, I'll have one or two drinks. Yeah, I'll have one or two desserts every once a month." That's not my style. It's always been all or nothing. 

[00:07:34] Emily Race-Newmark: Same. 

[00:07:35] Madame Gandhi: Yeah. And so I actually had to just in the last couple of years cut so many things out of my life with a hard line. So for me right now it's no coffee, no alcohol, no smoking anything, no meat, no dairy, no gluten, like just hard lines across the board. And I watched the miracles that this has served me because even when I'm in my worst, my moodiness, not feeling good, not feeling adequate, at least there's healthy boundaries that make me choose other things. It makes me phone a friend, it makes me journal, it makes me cry it out, it makes me have to take my meditation more seriously, it makes me have to take rest and water, and the benefit is that I watch these simple, simple things, cure the antidote immediately, within one day, two days. And sometimes it takes time, maybe it takes longer, but the more you learn how to take care of yourself, the better you get at it. And we all have to be brave to make these changes. The distraction is the biggest problem. And consciousness is the response. 

[00:08:34] Emily Race-Newmark: If you're liking what you're hearing so far, there is more great content from Madame Gandhi at our Patreon. 

[00:08:39] Emily Race-Newmark: Every contribution, no matter the size, is a massive help to fund the production of this podcast. And as a thank you, you will receive extra bonus content such as: 

[00:08:50] Emily Race-Newmark: The challenges and lessons that the COVID 19 pandemic taught Madame Gandhi in her perspective on multidimensionality; how to create more positivity in the world without enabling toxic positivity, and the difference between the two; and Kiran's take on the future being female and how this has evolved since 2016.

[00:09:09] Emily Race-Newmark: Thank you so much for being a part of our community, sharing and supporting conversations like this one. 

[00:09:15] Emily Race-Newmark: Let's get back to Madame Gandhi as she shares more with us about her vision for the world.

[00:09:20] Emily Race-Newmark: Let's just wave a magic wand for a moment. Imagine that the world looks exactly as you'd like it to, lean into more of this point you made around the consciousness. What would that image of the world look like for you or feel like? Or how would you experience that? 

[00:09:32] Madame Gandhi: A lot more inclusivity. You see somebody working on something and they're like, "Hey, come on over." There's a lot of inclusivity. There's not this kind of fear, clicky, in crowd, out crowd. In my shows, I also try to create a very inclusive environment. Since I was a kid, I was very bullied when I went to an all girls high school in New York City.

[00:09:48] Madame Gandhi: I was very bullied. And that was a hugely painful experience, but it was a hugely profound shift for me because I never wanted anybody to feel the way I felt in those situations. And so I have watched how my project feels inclusive, my access feels inclusive, my desire to bring people in is inclusive.

[00:10:05] Madame Gandhi: That's a big one, and it's overlooked. 

[00:10:08] Madame Gandhi: When you look at some of the places in the world, the quote unquote "blue zones" where people are living past 100 years old, the number one thing is a sense of community. And within that sense of community is a sense of purpose. "Oh, this person's really good at this thing. This person is really funny. This person we know because they're da da da."

[00:10:26] Madame Gandhi: So when you're part of a community, you know that you're missed, and you know that you have a positive influence and you actually matter at least to one other person. And that if you do go... it would have a sad consequence on somebody else's life. So you choose life. You don't choose to just allow your life to be dimly lit and then pass.

[00:10:43] Madame Gandhi: I think another thing that I would want to see in this magic world that you describe is a lot more attention to just eating from the natural earth. The less we process things and try to sanitize them and clean them up, the better we are. The reason why we have to process things so much is because we're wanting to do things at this massive level that's completely unsustainable and unnatural. So of course we have to make processed foods that sit on the gas station shelves for a year or two at a time without decomposing. 

[00:11:07] Emily Race-Newmark: Right. 

[00:11:08] Madame Gandhi: That's not natural, that's not normal, but that's because we need to make things at a huge level. And this is why we're all getting cancer and heart disease and sickness, because the food that we are eating... it's toxic. It's not natural. It's very hard now to eat naturally because it's very few spaces to actually plant your own food. There's a lot of dependency. I myself, I'm like, if the stores around me disappeared, I actually would be in trouble because I don't have a garden right now in this space in my life.

[00:11:35] Madame Gandhi: That's a evil thing that they have set us up to be in. That's not natural. We should be able to have access to our own food supply and water and this kind of thing. I think another thing, so it's food, water, another dream for the planet I want us to be in is movement. And it doesn't have to be that we're all doing crossfit and we're lifting thousands of pounds. It's just movement. Walking to the lake, going for a walk with your parents, lifting up your kid. You're a mother now, even holding your kid, that's movement. That's using your muscles. In India, we have our yoga and our stretching, keeping the mind and the body right, active. That's a big one. And then of course, sense of purpose. What is the thing that you're contributing to other people? What is your passion and how can that passion light up others? 

[00:12:16] Emily Race-Newmark: Mm. Beautiful. So I don't wanna make any assumptions here, but I do want to talk about liberation specifically because that's a vision of mine that I want to help birth into the world. How do we create more experiences of liberation? I want to hear from you, what does liberation look or feel like?

[00:12:31] Madame Gandhi: Liberation starts from within and it starts with a desire. And I think for me, I watched that when I'm not in alignment and when I'm out of balance, all my bad habits start and actually that's not freedom at all. That's complete dependence. Or if tomorrow the coffee shops shut down, this was years ago, I'm like completely hot, like feeling a headache because I'm not getting caffeine.

[00:12:53] Madame Gandhi: This is dependence. This is the opposite of liberation. This is small. I want to be in a situation where something happens and I'm completely fine. No problem. "Oh, we can't have a coffee today? No problem. Oh, we can't have a meal today. No problem. I'm used to fasting. Is water available? No problem. I'm able to sleep."

[00:13:10] Madame Gandhi: And if I'm not able to sleep, instead of me trying to buy something that will now numb me to sleep, listen, I'm grateful that we have modern medicine, of course, every now and then, if people need help with things, I'm grateful that we have these incredible scientists who are able to sell us these things, but we don't want to create long term dependence. We want to create radical self reliance. Obviously this is a big Burning Man thing, but truly, truly truly radical self reliance means no problem. Take it all away. I'm still smiling. Take it all away. I'm still laughing. Take it all away. It's my great joy to be in service to somebody else. This is inspiring to me.

[00:13:41] Madame Gandhi: This is personal liberation. And when I don't need anything from anybody, then when I interact with them, the interaction itself is pure. It's one of human to human sweetness, one of human to human kindness. I don't need anything from you. If you're moody to me, I'm okay. If you're loving back to me, I'm okay.

[00:13:57] Madame Gandhi: It's my choice to show up with love. It's my choice to show up with a smile. It's my choice to not be bothered by what's going on in the world around me. And when we come into life with this calm, relaxed state, which is so absent right now from the way the society is, but calm confidence, a sense of relaxation, it's not that you're naive or unaware. No. It's that you are able to calmly assess the situation. With great reason, great awareness, and make a decision from a place of hyperintelligence and intuition that not only might benefit you, but might benefit others. So this is sort of the beginning of a conversation of liberation for me. It starts from within, not needing anything from anybody, and really cultivating your own mind and spirit to be healthy and full of positivity and love. 

[00:14:41] Emily Race-Newmark: I want to dig into that a little bit more because I'm hearing almost two things and I also hold space that there can be tension, right? And that's still okay. You're describing dependence on certain substances or things that were being sold and I am totally with you on that. I'm hearing in your vision too, the acknowledgement of our interdependence, the ways in which we rely on community. So speak to me about this.

[00:15:00] Madame Gandhi: No. Yeah. May we always be interdependent. May we always be checking for our friends and family. My happiest days are when I pick up the phone and tap in with my friends, even if they live in different cities. Codependence, whether it's in a relationship, means needy. It's the same way we might be dependent on the coffee in the morning, or an alcohol at night, or something to help us go to sleep, or something to help us wake up, or something to help us feel better. All of these different things.

[00:15:24] Madame Gandhi: Codependence can have a neediness where you're needing the other person. Interdependence is, "I have this gift and I have this light and I really want to share it with you because when I light you up, I feel like I want to keep living years on the planet. My life has meaning. My life has great profoundness. My life has great depth. So I cherish my life. I get up early with excitement and a desire to give." If I'm not doing that and there's not somebody else to receive the gift. Of course, you hear about the monks and the yogis meditating by themselves for years in the mountains. Maybe, you know, maybe, I think there's a little bit of that. But even for me, when I sit for meditation, when I come out of the meditation, I want to apply what I have learned in this plane. I don't want to sit and meditate by myself. I want to walk a life of great positive impact. Interdependence is the one, and codependence and dependence on substances is not the one.

[00:16:18] Madame Gandhi: And the other thing I was going to share about that is that it's not just about giving. May we be so vulnerable and brave to receive. Many of us are too afraid to receive, this is sort of the feminine, the feminine spirit has been so oppressed over so many years, we can't trust anything anymore. Because actually, if you look at Mother Nature as the great feminine archetype, it's abundant, it's of course, it's my joy to shine the sun for you, it's my joy to grow these gorgeous blades of grass for you, oh my god, please come and smell the flowers, when you smell the flowers, I feel good, right?

[00:16:51] Madame Gandhi: But then what happened is we have colonization. We have capitalism. We have commercialism. We have land grabbing. We're like, "Oh, great. I'm going to keep exploiting this rather than honoring it. We are now so afraid to receive anything and to give freely and purely because of being taken advantage of or exploited.

[00:17:10] Madame Gandhi: And this is where consciousness really is the antidote because if we are aware we can see where something is given with pureness and with goodness and we can see where something is being exploited. And I think I don't want to live in a world where all of us have to have our guards up 24/7. I want to live in a world where we can receive with great joy and say, "Wow, thank you. Your gift lights me up. Your intelligence is an inspiration to me. I love the way you dance. When I saw you sing the other day, you made me go home and want to sing myself, even though I don't know how to hit the notes." This is what that interdependence that you're talking about really is. 

[00:17:43] Emily Race-Newmark: I'd love to transition now to focusing on how folks could bring this vision to life. If folks could pause right now and take an action, what would that be? 

[00:17:51] Madame Gandhi: You have to optimize for your own joy. I make sure that I take at least one opportunity a day to do something that allows me to have joy.

[00:17:58] Madame Gandhi: Many people feel very guilty for this. Parents feel guilty for this. People who have highly demanding jobs feel guilty for this. 

[00:18:05] Madame Gandhi: But the truth is that if you don't have something to give, if you're depleted, it negatively impacts everybody. And so I've learned actually to honor this. 

[00:18:13] Madame Gandhi: Even in my own partnership, it's very funny. I'd be like, "Please let me sleep so that I can wake up and give what I want to give and show up as the joyful human that I want to show up as because right now I'm only on four or five hours of sleep and I know my mood will be affected and therefore I know my loved ones will be affected."

[00:18:29] Madame Gandhi: So it's a very empowered place to be self aware and share that with others so that you can optimize for your own joy and bring that to the space.

[00:18:36] Emily Race-Newmark: Totally. Beautiful. Thank you so much. 

[00:18:37] Emily Race-Newmark: Thank you so much for everything you shared, for your presence. I have left very inspired and wanting to bring more yellow vibration colors into my life. 

[00:18:45] Madame Gandhi: Hell yeah. Mwah. Thank you, Emily. 

[00:18:47] Emily Race-Newmark: Mwah! Take care. 

[00:18:48] Emily Race-Newmark: If you enjoyed this conversation with Madame Gandhi and you want more, follow her on Instagram at Madame Gandhi and of course check out her music. Her latest album is called Vibrations and is out on Spotify and Apple Music. You can also get more from our interview by checking out the additional edits at the This Is How We Care Patreon page.

[00:19:07] Emily Race-Newmark: Once again, that's patreon.com/thisishowwecare. 

[00:19:10] Emily Race-Newmark: Thank you again for all the ways that you support this podcast, whether it's through Patreon contributions, listening and leaving reviews, sharing episodes with the people in your life, or subscribing to our newsletter and Instagram to be a part of the conversation.

[00:19:24] Emily Race-Newmark: This episode was produced by me, Emily Race, co produced by Kimberly Anne, with audio by Andrew Salamone and music by Eric Weisberg.