Sundar Kadayam is one of the coaches that we found this month and we did a little interview with him. He impressed us with his wisdom and expertise.
He was a technologist and tech entrepreneur with over 34 years of experience. What began as a career rooted in rational skepticism and engineering took an unexpected turn in the year 2000 when faced with his father’s critical health condition. This pivotal moment set him on a profound journey of healing, self transformation, and self realization.
He combines his extensive technological background with intuitive healing practices, guiding others toward their inner power and the path of Self Realization. As a holistic coach, his approach is grounded in the belief that everyone’s true yearning is to be who they truly are, and he offers a systematic framework to bridge self care, healing, continuous self transformation, and Self Realization.
His clients not only navigate life challenges but also uncover the profound benefits of embracing their inner power, leading to lasting peace and fulfillment. Here is what he said.
Meet Life Coach Sundar Kadayam:
Name: Sundar Kadayam
Pillar: The Spirit, The Mind, The Body, The Heart
Who is this coach for: Anyone who wants to find their true power and embody their limitless potential.
How they can help: Through various coaching methods and techniques customized to each individual, by utilizing ebooks, courses, texts, and over 4000 articles that he wrote.
First of all, how are you and your family doing after these Pandemic times?
We lost many dear family members and friends to the pandemic.
As part of those who survived the pandemic, I feel deeply grateful.
This experience changed the course of my work and offerings.
I feel a deeper responsibility, even more than ever before, to be of service.
How did the coronavirus pandemic affect your clients? Did it affect you at all?
By March 2020, people were struggling with fears, anxieties, and were experiencing heightened levels of stress.
From anxiety about personal and family wellbeing to uncertainty at work to broader fears about an uncertain future, people were suffering.
I’m grateful that my spiritual practice kept me grounded through it all.
I created The Peace Practice in March 2020.
It is the art of grounding in your inner power, which is inner peace, through silence meditation.
I offered this in the form of daily 15 minute live meditations via Zoom to help people experience calmness.
This had a great impact on the people who invested 15 minutes each day with me.
This offering continues and I’ve led over 900 live meditation sessions to date.
What are the biggest lessons that you learned in this pandemic?
1. Transience:
Life is like a dewdrop.
Life is like lightning and thunder.
Life is like fog or mist.
An appearance in time and space on a vast timeless boundless canvas.
Here now, gone soon.
Don’t postpone to tomorrow, the love you should express toward your dear ones now.
Give them a listening ear, a loving smile, a warm hug today.
The past is history, and the future is a mystery, but the present is a trustworthy gift, ever present, here, now.
Don’t lose sight of the present.
Live in the present, be present, be the presence.
2. Gratitude:
Life brings many challenges.
But life also brings many gifts.
Even as you encounter challenges, always notice life’s gifts which are here, now.
Feel grateful for the gifts of life here, now.
The people, the things, the experiences that you ought to cherish, cherish them here, now.
Living with a grateful heart here and now is the preventive medicine for the pain and suffering of regrets, resentments, and guilt in the future.
Being grounded:
It is so easy to be perturbed, there are plenty of things that can trigger anger, fear, and their cousins in your life.
When you lose your calmness, you are a weaker form of yourself.
You cannot help yourself and certainly you cannot help others who need help.
It is best to be grounded through the storms of life.
Cultivating silence keeps you rooted in your inner power.
I was aware of all this through the course of two decades of spiritual practice.
I was teaching this to others.
Yet, the pandemic highlighted the importance of these for me, for which I’m grateful.
The Origin:
Tell us about you, your career, how you started with your coaching career?
I’ve been a technologist and tech entrepreneur for over 34 years.
In year 2000, life took a fateful turn when my father had a series of strokes and was given a couple of weeks to live.
This thrusted the rational skeptic and engineer in me into an unlikely journey through healing, self transformation, and Self Realization.
What started as impossible healing miracles, turned into unimaginable manifestations, blossoming of intuition, and many years of continuous self transformation on my spiritual path.
In year 2013, a chance viewing of an online video connected me with the nondual teachings of the awakened Master, Ramana Maharshi.
Soon, the blessing of awakening to my true self unfolded.
The initial stages of my work with others centered around healing.
As my personal practice deepened, I found myself intuitively leading others to transform themselves.
Today, the work on healing and self transformation has dramatically shifted, with a clear foundation of nondual Reality.
Healing means to become whole, yet Wholeness is one’s real nature.
Self transformation is powerful until one realizes that the source of their inner power is already their own real nature.
This Self realization is one’s destiny.
This experiential understanding guides my healing, mentoring and coaching work, as well as my teaching and writing.
What was your biggest obstacle that you had to overcome in your life that made you who you are today?
The obstacles I’ve experienced on my journey have varied.
At some times, my natural skepticism was a hurdle and I had to train myself to be open to new experiences and experience the experience while it was occurring and later analyze it.
At other times, it was the painful inability to coherently explain the experiences I was experiencing.
Miraculous life experiences were running way ahead of my ability to explain them.
So, lacking a clear model of how life could produce miracles in an ordinary person, I shut myself off from teaching and mentoring twice in my journey.
I had to train myself to be comfortable with “not knowing.”
When I embraced not knowing, I began flowing again.
For most of the journey, I was living life on two separate tracks: the rational technologist entrepreneur with CxO responsibilities on one track, and the intuitive healer and spiritual practitioner with miraculous life experience on the other track.
For the longest time, I couldn’t entirely blend these two lives.
With the help of a life coach, I realized midway in my journey, that I had to embrace the calling of my heart, which at that time was the “healer” and permit the healer to be present even in business settings.
When I allowed myself to embrace the calling of the heart, my experiences in business also started changing.
People in the workplace felt calmer and peaceful just being in my presence.
More recently, in January 2020, I had written and published my first book, “Awaken: An Experiential Exploration of Enlightenment.”
The pandemic hit hard as I was beginning my campaign to get the word out.
I had a plan, but life had a different one.
Life’s plan took precedence as I flowed with life’s flow.
That is what led me to creating the Peace Practice to emphasize the importance of recognizing your inner power which is inner peace and embracing it and rooting in it.
While I was heading in the direction of exclusively focusing on nondual teachings, life moved through me to establish the preparatory pathways and practices that are entirely consistent with the nondual truth of existence.
The biggest hurdle in life is judging that something is a hurdle.
Clearly any judgment like this emerges from limiting beliefs and expectations.
In turn, the biggest hurdle in life is me, the limited individual that I think I am, that has these limiting beliefs and expectations.
I am like the Sky (the real Me is Sky like) but have been identifying myself with clouds.
The point of hurdles, including the biggest hurdle, has been to point to me the boundless true self.
Hurdles have been an aid to this Self Realization.
The Coaching Style:
How do you innovate with coaching your clients?
Everyone’s experience of life is unique.
Even so, there are some fundamental commonalities.
Everyone desires peace, love, happiness, fulfillment, abundance, and freedom (“Sukha” in Sanskrit).
No one truly desires perturbation, fears, struggles, stuckness, and suffering (“Dukkha” in Sanskrit).
Everyone wants Sukha and no one wants Dukkha.
Why? Why are we wired to seek Sukha and avoid Dukkha?
Everyone’s true self is peace without change, happiness without cause, love without conditions, freedom without bounds, and timeless wholeness.
Whether they realize it or not, people miss their true self, and truly yearn for their own real nature.
Since everyone’s true yearning is to be who they truly are, my offerings are organized under a simple idea: Being YOU.
The essential innovation of my mentoring and coaching is centered around these ten truths, that connect self care, healing, and self transformation to Self Realization:
- There is a great power within you.
- Inner peace is your inner power, and it is in the silence of the heart.
- You have an innate ability to heal. The source of this healing ability is your own inner power.
- Your inner power is the reservoir of unchanging peace, unconditional love, and causeless happiness.
- Your inner power is the wellspring of clarity and wisdom, courage and strength, creativity and compassion.
- Everything you need to heal, everything you need to make wise decisions and take powerful actions, everything you need to succeed in your endeavors, everything you need to experience fulfillment, exists within you as your inner power.
- A steady practice of cultivating silence (Mauna, silence in Sanskrit), and adjunct practices such as cultivating gratitude help you connect with your inner power and unleash it as a steady life experience.
- You can be a better form of yourself today than yesterday (Shin Shin Kaizen, continuous improvement of heart mind in Japanese). The steady embrace of your inner power enables sustained self transformation.
- The steady cultivation of silence is also a powerful preparatory practice that enables Self Realization (Atmabodha or Atma Jnana in Sanskrit), experiencing who you really are, experiencing your real nature, experiencing Reality.
- When you realize your original nature (through Atma Vichara, Self Inquiry in Sanskrit) and live as your true self, the One without a second, that is Enlightenment (a stateless state of No otherness, Nirvana aka Liberation).
Rather than a mishmash of techniques and hacks, everything here is rooted in the notion of your inner power whose source is the real YOU.
Everything is streamlined to guide you to Being YOU, being the real YOU.
Every person is at a different stage in their journey to being their true self.
For some, the need is healing of some challenging physical or mental conditions.
For others, it is overcoming life or work issues, or transforming unhelpful attitudes or behaviors.
For sincere spiritual seekers, it is the yearning to awaken to their true self.
Each mentoring and coaching session with each person is unique and flows in exactly the way it needs to.
The principles are the same, the tools and techniques are the same, yet the flow of it is tailored to the person and their present need.
What’s unique about your coaching approach?
I came though fifteen years of study, practice, and growth through healing work and self transformation.
I had learned and spottily applied literally hundreds of techniques and practices over this time.
For the rational skeptic in me, the investment in these experiments brought unbelievable experiences of miracles.
Yet, something was missing.
As a natural and creative problem solver and a systems thinker, I was still not seeing the big picture, as evidenced by the utter lack of answers to many profound questions from my experiences and from life itself.
The answers came when I turned inward to inquire into “Who am I?” rather than solely dwelling on finding answers outside of myself to my profound questions.
The answers came in and as Self Realization.
It is these life experiences that have shaped my holistic coaching approach.
What I offer is a systematic framework to aid in self care and healing, continuous self transformation, and Self Realization.
What I offer has the same single thread running through it all, the emphasis on your inner power, the cultivating of your inner power and its practical and profound benefits, the foundation it lays for Self Realization, and realizing the source of your inner power as your original nature.
The tools and techniques that I apply in the mentoring process are sourced from diverse traditions such as Yoga, Traditional Japanese Reiki, Bhakti (devotional surrender), and ultimately Advaita Vedanta (the direct wisdom pointers to true self).
The approach I use starts with meeting people where they are in their journey and holding their hands as they walk their path to being their true selves in their own way and pace.
What benefits do your clients get after working with you?
The healing of physical or mental conditions, the growing sense of calmness and all its attendant benefits, these are common benefits that people experience.
When people approach me with life or work challenges, they often find their way to deeper understanding of themselves and unique ways to overcome their challenges.
They gain the clarity and wisdom they need.
They step out of their limited and often limiting perspectives and get their “ah ha” moments which open the door to flowing in their life or work.
The most valuable benefits they get, in my view, come from following my guidance and establishing their own steady daily practice.
It is the gift that keeps on giving.
Do you use any specific tools to be efficient with your clients?
In my coaching, I emphasize the importance of building the foundation, and that is singularly aimed at connecting to one’s inner power, embracing one’s inner power, and rooting in one’s inner power.
Without it, all there will be is a hodge podge of unrelated tools and techniques.
I do use many tools, techniques, and select hacks in my coaching and mentoring depending on the needs of the individual and the situation they are in, and the stage in their life journey.
Sourced from diverse traditions, many of these tools and techniques also have scientific evidence of their effectiveness.
The purpose of most of these tools is to return the person from their place of weakness to their place of inner power.
I also apply my related offerings, in the form of original healing and meditation tracks, eBooks, digital courses, and books in print as needed at a given stage in the mentoring process.
I also tap into a vast and growing repository of over 4000 articles I’ve written to help the person gain deeper understanding and make progress in their journey.
The Impact:
If you had a super megaphone that, when you speak into, the whole world will hear your message, what would you say?
You are not a weak or limited individual.
There is a great power within you.
Inner peace is your inner power.
Cultivate inner peace and unleash your innate healing ability, a strong foundation of calmness, and tap into everything you need, such as clarity and wisdom, courage and strength, creativity and compassion, to gain success and fulfillment in life.
Start with self care and healing, go deeper into continuous self transformation, and eventual Self Realization.
This is your birthright.
Realizing your true self is your destiny.
The world awaits you being YOU.
What is the greatest lesson you have learned in your life?
I have felt like a weak, limited, powerless individual in a world gone crazy.
Big family, society, and national problems always seemed daunting and insurmountable.
Profound questions seemed impenetrable and without any answers.
Why am I here? Why do bad things happen to good people? What is life?
In addition to these common imponderables, I had my own unique questions:
Why were miracles happening in my life? What is their source? What unleashes them into life experiences?
I spent tens of thousands of dollars in the bazaar of promises that would lead me to the land of milk and honey.
Many teachers and their teachings did help reveal pieces of a puzzle.
But the puzzle itself never seemed to reveal its true shape.
The greatest lesson I’ve learned in my life is that I am not who I thought I was.
My real nature is not limited, weak, or powerless.
My real nature is timeless and boundless.
If that lesson was only conceptual, it would have had limited value.
Through glimpses and extended consistent experiences, I received the gift of this greatest lesson that not only there is a great power coursing in me, but the same great inner power is coursing in everyone.
“I am” is not the personal, little me.
The real “I am” is existence itself.
I am not separated from life.
It is not adequate to even say that I am connected with life.
The greatest lesson implies that life and I are One, and that life is just another name for the Real Me.
I am not living life.
Life is living as the little me just as it is as everything and everyone else.
The greatest lesson I’ve learned is that I am not the otherness I feel, rather, the Real Me is the source of the inner power that courses within.
My true nature is No otherness.
It is not even “my true nature”, rather, it is what is Real.
The greatest lesson I’ve learned is not that “I have learned the greatest lesson”, rather, the sense of otherness in which I’ve been vested is unreal.
Pointers to this have been there in plain sight in authentic scriptures all along.
Somehow, like Superman wasn’t visible to those who only saw Clark Kent, Reality has been invisible to the little me, the otherness I thought I was.
The little me was obscuring Reality.
There isn’t a “Sundar” here, just a sense of “Sundar ness”, whose nature is less material than the mist that obscures the mountain.
Like a mirage which appears real, but isn’t real as it seemed to be, so too is “Sundar” which appears real, but is merely a “Sundar ness” which doesn’t really exist in stillness or silence.
Your final thoughts?
No matter what challenges you face in life, know that there is a great power that is already within you.
You can unleash this great inner power into your life through simple and effective practices starting with silence meditation.
The fruits of the investment in cultivating your inner power are manifold: clarity, wisdom, courage, strength, creativity, compassion, mindfulness, heartfulness, healing, calmness, contentment, love, abundance, and freedom.
The great Martial Arts Master, Bruce Lee said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
In the same way, it is wise to practice one foundational technique, the art of silence, the way of connecting to and embracing your inner power.
When you get adept at it, when your practice deepens, it will effortlessly unleash everything you need in life to make wise decisions, take powerful actions, and lead a successful and fulfilling life.
The source of this inner power is your own original nature, your true self.
When you realize this, you are truly free from all of life’s limitations, struggles, and suffering.
It is the same foundational path of silence that also prepares the ground for your eventual Self Realization.
Self care and healing, continuous self transformation, or Self Realization, whatever your need may be and wherever you are in your life journey, I can offer help and guidance based on authentic teachings and direct, personal experience.
If this resonates with you, check out my website, and feel free to reach out to me to explore.
Where Can You Find Sundar Kadayam?
If you liked this interview and you would love to find your own true power and embody your unlimited potential, go to https://sundar.com/ and see what Sundar has in store for you.
If you’d like to connect more personally with him, you can do that through LinkedIn, Facebook, or by sending him a message on his Email [email protected]. It was an honor having this interview with him.