Saru Gupta is a global embodied leadership speaker and coach, bridging the gap between science, humanity and spirituality to empower self-aware, nourished and instinctive female leaders who can make a positive impact on the world. Through her powerful experiential practice in embodied leadership, Saru is unlocking true feminine leadership, transforming lives and creating deep awareness and understanding.

By helping female leaders tap into their human instincts, natural vitality and authentic ability to connect with themselves and others, Saru’s work builds empowered female leaders and productive teams. Having lived, led, loved and learnt in the East and the West, Saru brings a diverse perspective to the professional world, with 16 years of experience as a corporate leader and business founder.

Her specialised whole-self leadership approach has been developed over the last decade, through studies with global experts in a wide range of fields, including human behaviour, trauma, psychology, nervous system, mindfulness, embodiment and the wisdom of emotions.

Saru never thought she would be serving others through this work. She loved her corporate jobs and was only looking for answers for herself. Her journey to understand this work started a decade ago. Saru went through similar symptoms in all her corporate jobs in the USA, then in Australia and then when she started her business 8 years ago, where life looked great from outside but inside there was chaos, burnout, chronic fatigue and emotional mess. She tried pretty much everything from strict nutrition, to exercise, to yoga, to alternate treatments but these were still not good enough / permanent answers for these issues. And she knew these issues were not unique to her, but a challenge everyone around her seemed to be facing.

Having discovered a way to manage the ebbs and flows of life, her mother’s cancer in August 2020 forced her to start serving people who showed up from medical and corporate communities during that time. She was still denying that this work was what she was meant to do. Her mother’s passing in Jan 2022 was what finally made her accept that this is what comes naturally for her, and the world needs it more than ever.

Can you please explain the concept of ‘embodied leadership’?

Embodied leadership is a multi-layered approach, exploring the connections between body, emotions, energy and mind, building solid foundations for us as humans to thrive by working with our evolutionary nervous system.

It builds our emotional mastery, body wisdom and instinctive power as female leaders activating whole-self leadership, so we can support ourselves and those around us, without burning out.

Do you believe that we can truly achieve work-life balance?

Yes I do believe that we can achieve work-life balance, but not in the way that the traditional work-life balance is defined.

Traditionally all schools of thought look at work-life balance as having hard boundaries, where after a certain time one is not available. But the mind is still thinking of work, feeling guilty and not able to rest without some kind of distraction, despite being away from work. That is not how I define work-life balance.

Through my embodied leadership approach, work-life balance is the ability to address those compulsive things in our system (body-mind-heart) that force us to continue to dwell and worry over work even after we leave work. Or even when we are at work, we are not able to perform at our maximum capacity due to so much happening within our internal system. We use coping mechanisms to run away from those internal things.

Once we have addressed those and installed a new way of being, it is possible to achieve work-life balance and be present with what you are doing including difficult emotions and experiencing joy. Our productivity increases as our energy is no longer being used to suppress the unprocessed human emotions and past wounds. So when we are at work, we are able to be in flow and be present. And when we are away from work, we can cope with life’s ebbs and flows from true presence as well.

Do you think that sometimes society’s obsession with achieving the perfect work-life balance could in turn be more detrimental than beneficial?

I believe we as humans are evolutionarily conditioned to move away from pain and to go towards pleasure. So when someone is desiring work-life balance, in my experience – there is some kind of discomfort and suffering in the system. There is a deeper wisdom showing up as a symptom calling for a change. Hence, there is nothing wrong with wanting to feel peace, have space for oneself and to want happiness. 

What is detrimental is that we believe by working 9 to 5, or by perfecting that work-life balance, we can address the root cause that will address the discomfort in the system. When what we truly need is to look at the whole picture from an individual perspective and address what is happening, along with looking at it as a collective issue so one can truly perfect the balance from within.

Why do you think that there’s this perception that women leaders can’t have it all, and that we have to make certain sacrifices and compromise on other aspects of life in order to become leaders?

Women have joined the professional workforce in large numbers in the last 40 years or so, and before that women and men had specific roles: homemakers (women) and providers (men).

When women stepped into the workforce, they had to fit in to the rules designed for and created by men. Even though women stepped into the business world willingly, resentment has built as they’ve slowly had to strip away their true essence.

When someone is trying to fit into a stereotypical role of how they think they should be, it means they’re making sacrifices about who they truly are from a biological standpoint and this will impact other aspects of their lives.

The ability to assess a situation quickly through feelings and emotions is the gift of the feminine principle. The issue is that our emotions have been suppressed, denied and demonised to such an extent that the current paradigm in leadership is to “just do it” and “follow what everyone else is doing”. This makes sense, as it’s the only way to survive when our evolutionary fear takes over and we’re one of just a few women in the boardroom with 10 times the number of male colleagues.

This is all happening at the primal instinctive levels way below our conscious decision making. So either we find ourselves agreeing to everything, or our resentment shows up which actually stops others from hearing us as their defence mechanism takes over.

The women who have worked with me through my embodied leadership approach to work, have been able to step up as leaders while not denying and compromising in the other aspects of their life. They are able to get their needs met at home and also in the workplace.

On a separate note, I believe that the world needs more women leaders now than ever, because a woman who is truly in her essence can use her unique abilities to make an impact in the world, which is different from the abilities of a man.

What are some of your top tips/advice when it comes to drawing boundaries?

This is a hard question as I believe boundaries can’t be drawn or understood unless one is in the body. As it’s our body that gives us true wisdom about if it is safe or not, and also what our needs are.

There is so much functional freeze at the moment in most of the high-functioning men and women in our workplaces. This means either there is numbness in the body to some extent so the sensations telling us what we need can’t be detected. Or the overwhelm is so much that everything feels like it needs a boundary – everything creates a fear and anger response. All of this is happening below the conscious level, which is why none of the boundary work created by the conscious mind actually works. Even if people create boundaries, it is hard for them to keep them and this leads to self harassment and self judgement.

A few tips I can give to start with:

1. Be gentle with yourself and go slow when you realise that you need boundaries in life. I believe when one is healthy internally at an emotional, mental, physical and energetic level, boundaries are naturally there. And most of us are not healthy, even though we’re high-functioning adults.
2. Don’t follow other people’s rules for boundaries. You are setting yourself up for failure and more self-harassment.
3. Tune into your life and see where you are not happy or content. And then look at what emotions you’re feeling in all those areas (you might need help from a professional here) and what wisdom they are giving you.
4. Learn to soothe, release and process those emotions as not all of them will be from the current situation. Some might be stuck in your system from a younger age and every time a similar situation is triggered, you go back into that big emotion. By soothing, releasing and processing – you will be able to see clearly your current situation and not make hard boundaries that you later regret.

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