From Grief to Grace: How Energy Healing Changed My Life and Led Me to Soul Tara

By Asmi Shah, Founder of Soul Tara

I help people harness the power of energy to improve their lives. But before I could do that, I had to learn how to harness it for myself. That journey took over 15 years, a lot of heartbreak, and more than a few unexpected turns. This is my story and I hope some part of it resonates with yours.

Growing Up Between Two Worlds

I was born and raised in New Jersey to immigrant parents from India. Growing up in a Gujarati Jain household meant I was surrounded by a deep reverence for Indian culture and ancient wisdom. We prayed daily. I recited the Navkar mantra, the holiest Jain prayer, every single day. I still do today. We went to the temple often and I grew up oiling my hair long before it became a wellness trend, genuinely loving every bit of that ritual.

At the same time, we were living in America. We were not practicing everything. Our food was different. Our daily life looked different. I existed in this in-between space, deeply connected to my roots but also very much a kid from New Jersey navigating the world around her. My parents struggled financially and we went through hard times. There was even a phase where I felt like an atheist because the world had too much pain in it and I could not make sense of any of it. My parents never forced me to believe anything. They gave me space to explore, to question, and to figure out what I actually believed. That independence shaped everything about who I became.

The Good Student With a Simple Plan

I was a bit of a nerd. I was good at math and science and I earned a scholarship to Cornell where I studied electrical and computer engineering. At that point in my life, my entire goal was simple: get into a good school, get a good job, and get a steady paycheck. Cornell opened me up in ways I did not expect. That is where I fell in love with international cinema, indie films, and the kind of intellectual curiosity that comes from being around the best and the brightest.

After college I moved to New York City and went into consulting. I remember working close to 100 hours in a single week. Many weeks were 60 to 80 hours, surviving on four cups of coffee and taking Nyquil on Fridays just to finally sleep. I was in my early 20s and that was my entire life. It was around that time I started thinking that yogis seemed really healthy and calm and I wanted some of that. I asked my parents to pick up yoga DVDs from the Jain Center and that is genuinely how I first discovered asana and pranayama, practicing alone in my apartment on the Upper West Side on weekends. I started connecting to my roots in a way I didn't fully understand or expect.

When Everything Fell Apart

I eventually moved into finance, which was even more demanding. My yoga practice quietly faded. I started feeling like I did not belong in that world but I did not know what came next. Business school felt like an option but an expensive one, and I wanted to be sure of whatever path I chose.

And then in the summer of 2009, my parents unexpectedly passed away within a few weeks of each other.

I am an only child. I was incredibly close to both of them. I called them every day and saw them at least once a month. Overnight my entire world crashed. Both of my grandmothers were still alive in India at the time and I remember thinking how devastating it must be for them to outlive their own children. Part of what kept me going in those early days was trying to show up for them. I started visiting India once a year. I called them three times a week. I built real, deep relationships with both of them and those relationships became something beautiful and unexpected out of the most painful season of my life.

But while I was trying to be there for them, I did not know how to be there for myself. I went through profound grief and depression. I could not sleep. I had a permanent low grade headache for close to a year. Outwardly I was showing up, seeing friends, going out, doing things. Internally I was drowning.

The Healing Tools That Carried Me Through

One day I wandered into a bookstore and found a book on healing mantras. Something about it just called to me. I picked it up, read the whole thing, and started doing 40 day mantra practices. I would chant silently in the back of my mind just to get through the next moment, to focus my energy somewhere, to simply breathe. That went on for about a year. The mantras helped. They slowly shifted something in me. But I was still struggling deeply.

Eventually my roommate convinced me to try therapy. As someone who grew up in a South Asian household, therapy was not something people talked about, especially not back then. But I was desperate to feel better, so I went. I stayed for about a year and a half and it genuinely changed things. It helped me process much of the grief, move through the emotions, and start to get clear on what I actually wanted from my life. It was through therapy that I finally decided I wanted to get my MBA. By choosing an MBA, I decided to forgo a PhD which was the dream my father had for me.  I had to learn to let go of the vision he had and build a future that I wanted.  I got into UCLA Anderson, moved across the country, and slowly started rebuilding.

The Second Unraveling

After business school I moved back to New York and worked at a few tech startups. One changed leadership and I no longer felt welcome. The second was a toxic environment. I found myself in my early 30s feeling like I had done everything right and still feeling completely lost and frustrated. I had gone to a great school. I had healed from losing my parents, as much as you ever truly heal. I had an MBA. I was dating. I was doing all the things. And I was still unhappy. I was applying to jobs for six months and could not even get an interview, let alone an offer. I remember crying in the bathroom at work and thinking this is not the life I want to live.

A coworker offhandedly mentioned yoga teacher training. She had done it recently and found it life changing and suggested I might enjoy it. I thought, why not. I had nothing better to do on weekends. So I signed up at the end of 2017 and spent the winter / spring of 2018 doing my yoga teacher training. It changed everything.

Coming Home to Yoga Philosophy and the Chakras

I went into yoga teacher training thinking we would mostly learn how to do headstands and handstands. That is not what happened. Yes, we learned the physical postures and how to cue students. But we also studied yoga philosophy, the Yamas, the Niyamas, the different paths of yoga. These were concepts that I had grown up with through Jainism and exposure to Indian culture (e.g. Mahabharata, Ramayana), but hadn't thought about them in years. Suddenly I was finding overlap everywhere. Things I had felt my whole life, but never had language for were clicking into place.

And then we got to the chakras and energy.

The moment I heard about chakras I just knew. This was it. This was the missing piece. It gave vocabulary to the invisible 'thing' I had been feeling for years. Chakras are energy centers that regulate the body's vital organs and emotional states and learning about them felt like finally finding the missing dot that connected everything. I felt like I was coming home. If you are curious about what chakras are and how they work, we go deep into this at Soul Tara through our products and community offerings.

The Singing Bowl That Started It All

During yoga teacher training someone brought in a singing bowl for a show and tell. She played it for just a minute and I was completely mesmerized. I went home that night and researched everything I could find. I could not make sense of the different kinds of singing bowls and price points so I set it aside, knowing I had just landed a job at Google and needed to focus on my professional career.

I started at Google in May of 2018. A few months later I attended their Search Inside Yourself program, a two day mindfulness and stress management workshop. We journaled about our values and I wrote about how much community service meant to me and how I had drifted away from it. Something stirred. I felt called to share yoga with people. I eventually found a Black-owned nonprofit yoga studio in Brooklyn called Emerge Soul and that is where I taught my first class. I was honestly terrible. I had memorized a script and refused to move off my mat. But the owner believed in me and continued to support me. That opportunity unlocked a new door in my life.

Around the same time I bought a small Himalayan singing bowl just for my personal morning practice and started pairing it with pranayama and meditation. Then one weekend I visited the wife of a dear friend who had passed away unexpectedly and something told me to play the bowl for her. The moment I played it, the energy in the entire room shifted. Everyone felt it. That was the moment I knew this was something real and profound. Within a week I had booked an advanced Himalayan singing bowl training in Nepal for December 2018.

Nepal and the Energy Shift

I went to Nepal not really knowing what to expect. I thought I would learn to play the bowls and maybe do some sound baths for friends. I did not have a bigger plan than that. On about day five or six we practiced an advanced technique where singing bowls are placed directly on the body. I did not feel much during the session and honestly felt a little underwhelmed. Then at dinner I felt this enormous wave of sadness wash over me, not about anything specific, just this deep, heavy grief. I got through my soup and went back to the hotel and cried for half the night, feeling a profound energy shift move through me. I woke up different. Something had released that I had been holding for years.

Sound healing works with vibrational frequencies to restore energetic balance and it has roots in ancient healing traditions around the world. What I experienced in Nepal was a real, physical demonstration of that truth. Our ritual bath soaks and aura sprays at Soul Tara were born partly from this understanding of how energy shifts through sensory and vibrational experience.

Pranic Healing and Going Even Deeper

Back in New York I was doing my Google day job while teaching yoga and sound baths on evenings and weekends. Life felt full and good. Then in the summer of 2019 a business school friend who had become a pranic healer did a quick healing on me over the phone. I had been going through a heartbreak and nothing was helping. After just a few minutes of her working on me, I felt instantly better. I had not felt that kind of relief in days.

I enrolled in pranic healing classes in January 2020, mostly on instinct. Pranic healing is a no-touch energy healing system developed by Master Choa Kok Sui that works with prana, or life force energy, to cleanse and energize the body's energy centers. By March the world was in lockdown and I spent much of COVID going inward, practicing sound healing, pranic healing, and Twin Hearts Meditation; really doing the deep inner work. That time gave me the space to ask the question I had been avoiding for years: who do I actually want to be?

The Birth of Soul Tara

At the end of 2021 I started writing intentional questions for myself, not New Year's resolutions but real frameworks for how I wanted to live. How do I take everything I have learned and turn it into something I can use every single day without staring at a blank page? That question became the seed of what would eventually become our Cosmic Starlight Guided Journal.

Around that same time I met my husband Amit. He was already into Reiki and meditation and later completed all of his pranic healing training. In 2024 we launched Soul Tara, a spiritual wellness brand built on the tools that genuinely transformed our lives. We sell guided journals, energy healing infused aura sprays, and ritual bath soaks designed to help you reconnect with your own energy and live with more intention. Soul Tara has since been featured in BuzzFeed and we are so proud to have served customers including YouTube, UCLA, and Cornell. I continue to offer workshops, private healings, and events, and yes, I still work at Google full time.

What 15+ Years of Healing Has Actually Given Me

It is hard to put into a few sentences what this journey has meant but here is what I know to be true.

I am calmer now. I used to live in stress as my default state and I did not know how to turn it off. For years I struggled with sleep. Now I can genuinely rest and down-regulate my nervous system in a way that once felt impossible to me.

I am more patient. I used to joke that patience was a virtue I simply did not possess. These spiritual wellness practices taught me how to pause, be intentional, and extend grace to both myself and others.

I have learned how to give and receive love. That sounds simple but it was one of the biggest unlocks of my life. Learning to feel worthy of love and to give it without conditions or attachment is what ultimately allowed me to build a real partnership and get married. I do not think I would have gotten there without this work.

I am more resilient. Having something greater than yourself to believe in puts even the hardest seasons into perspective. It does not mean hard things stop happening. It means you have a framework and an inner support system that goes beyond what is visible.

And perhaps the most unexpected gift: I became creative. I used to think I was just a math and science person. I never imagined I would start a business. Entrepreneurship was not on my radar at all. But I care so deeply about these tools and what they have done for my life that I am willing to be uncomfortable, to keep learning, to put myself out there.

That is what Soul Tara is built on. Not a trend. Not an aesthetic. A 15+ year journey of real healing that I want to share with you and 10+ years of my husband's journey that is embedded in every product we offer.

If you are feeling called to start your own energy healing and journaling practice, explore our Cosmic Starlight Guided Journal and join our monthly virtual Soul Friend community. We would love to have you.