261: The Hira Collective: Feminine Flow Meets Tech + Entrepreneurship

Reema: 0:00

I felt that working and inspiring with children would support in how do we actually change a trajectory and how we build community, how we build and co-create learners and community members who want to make the world better.

Camille: 0:25

So you want to make an impact. You're thinking about starting a business, sharing your voice. How do women do it that handle motherhood, family and still chase after those dreams? We'll listen each week as we dive into the stories of women who know this is Call Me CEO. Welcome back everyone to Call Me CEO.

Camille: 0:46

This is your host, camille Walker, and here we support women building businesses, sharing passion and looking at alternative ways of doing everything. What is the way that you want to live your life in the most practical and connected part of who you are and what I love so much about. Our guest today is Reema. Kothani is the founder and visionary of Hira, the collective where it brings together holistic practitioners online that can help you to find resources no matter where you are, which really breaks down a lot of boundaries for income and where you live and everything else, and it's such an amazing resource. So today we're going to be talking specifically about how to incorporate rest and rhythm into increasing your revenue. What does that look like? And Rima is going to be sharing with us her steps and tools of how she was able to do that for herself and also building this amazing business. So thank you so much, rima, for being on the show today.

Reema: 1:46

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I've loved our conversations this far and just sharing about our own journeys and how you know we may have started similarly and how we've kind of we've built that into how we create purposeful businesses.

Camille: 2:01

Yes, absolutely. I feel like everyone has a journey that comes into this story of how we are where we are now, and that every season comes with a new twist and turn, which is why I love this show so much, because I selfishly get to learn from so many incredible people like yourself. So please share with us a little bit more about you. Where do you live? How did you come into this space? What inspired you to create the Hero Collective?

Reema: 2:26

Thank you. So I'm Rima Rima Rachel is the name I go by. I am from Canada, I'm from just outside of Toronto, I'm born and raised here, but my family actually immigrated from India in the late or the mid 1970s and so, you know, being in addition to that, we're from a displaced community that was actually in Pakistan and then had to move out of Pakistan during the separation. So, you know, home, or roots, has always been something that I've always, like, struggled with and like what is home, especially, we know, when we have people say to you, go back to your land, well, where is? Is that? Because I was born and raised here, and so I think that that journey began really early in understanding what is home, and that evolved into thinking about what does it mean to feel like you belong and what is community? Community, um, and so for me, part of that journey has been really about exploring what are, how? How does that relate to our well-being, right sense of belonging? Connection and community are human needs, um, and you know, my younger, my younger self, would often, you know, question things around like why do we light incense? Why does yoga look and feel different outside my home, in the practices, and it does with my parents and my and my grandparents, and so I started to realize that a lot of practices from my own culture were being extracted. At a very young age, I also toggled with or believed this like had this belief or faith in certain medicines because the doctor said so, versus like natural ways of healing. My grandfather, my grandmother's brother who I consider a grandfather never so much as took a Tylenol Not that I'm against medical medicine or Western medicine or anything like that but how do they, how can they both actually co coexist and how can we actually use both of them? And that's something those are some questions that I have. You know, community, belonging home, wellness they're all things that kind of like led me to becoming an educator that working and inspiring with children would support. And how do we actually change a trajectory? And how we build community, how we build and co-create learners and community members who want to make the world better. My journey in education has been 17 years. It's pretty incredible.

Reema: 5:02

And about nine and a half years ago, a week before my grandmother passed, the idea to build what I built, the Hero Collective, was planted in my heart. A week later she passed away and bringing it to life was really, really challenging for me because I I related it to my grandmother and it made me sad to build something. Fast forward, about three-ish years ago I started building it. I spoke to her brother, who was alive at the time he's since passed and I told him about what I was thinking and he said well, you must create it. And I felt like that was like a divine assignment, that I must do this.

Reema: 5:42

So I didn't have a name at the time, and when I thought about who and why and what influenced the creation of the Hira Collective, it was my grandma and her brother. Their last name is Hira, hira Nandani. My grandmother before marriage was a Hira, like her brother, and my grandmother's first name is Popati, which means butterfly, and so our logo is a butterfly with a diamond. So she, you know. At one point I felt like she's left me, and now I feel like she's with me as we're building the Hero Collective together.

Camille: 6:12

Oh, that's beautiful. I love that. It brings so much of your history and connection, of who you are and the blessing and gift that it is to have access to Eastern and Western medicine and understanding of all of the roots that you have, because it expands so far and that's reflected in the name and in the symbology of that. I love that.

Reema: 6:34

Thanks, yeah, so the Hero Collective was born out of. You know my own experience of like wanting to reclaim. You know ways of healing, but also my experience of working with or experiencing harm from other practitioners. You know we are in an industry that's completely unregulated and there's a lack of accountability. Practitioners obviously work individually, their individual businesses, and that's not what the purpose is.

Reema: 7:07

The purpose is for us to be collective and building community together, and so building the Hero Collective was really intentional in that it's a vetted process. We had over 270 practitioners apply and only 17% were successfully vetted, which is a bit alarming to know that there's that much harm that can exist in this industry. And it's not just a booking directory, it's also a community where practitioners support one another, where we have retreats and we have sacred circles and we have listening circles and we have town halls where we work and learn together. You know, supporting one another and holding space for one another, and I think that's really critical, because I think that we're moving away, then, from an individualistic way of running our business to more of a collectivist way, running our business to more of a collectivist way, and so those are all values that I learned from my grandparents, and how we ethically build conscious businesses and be a participant in our community as we're continuing to evolve.

Camille: 8:20

I love that. So, in layman's terms, the HERA Collective is a group of holistic practitioners that people can access online for many different things that they're looking for help with. Could you give us an example of, maybe, what the examples are of the different kind of practitioners you have or the ailments that people are looking for help with?

Reema: 8:45

Yeah, for sure. So you can search by modality, ailment, symptom or intention, and we have practitioners that range from Reiki, energy healing, tarot, astrology. We have some personal trainers. All the practitioners on our platform offer virtual sessions, and many of them offer in-person sessions, so you can also search by location. We do have a wealth of resources on our platform as well, where you can search by articles, blogs, videos as well, and this is just the beginning. We are also going to be creating community spaces where people can be asking questions, almost like a Reddit, where people can ask questions and get responses from practitioners from the platform as well as anyone else who wants to chime in. So we're also creating that community, not just within the practitioners, but also outside. And then we have a ton of events. We have virtual events, we've got online events, all of which are also listed on our platform. That's awesome.

Camille: 9:40

So in the terms of rest and rhythm and revenue, how has that related to you and building this business? My gosh, I love this question so much.

Reema: 9:51

I want to go back to the first question that you asked, because I think that that relates so much. Going back to my journey. You know, developing here, I came from a place I was planted in my heart nine years ago and I ignored it because of all the like, the level of grief that I was experiencing, and in my 17 years of education I've experienced a great deal of harm over the last few years. And so when my grandpa, when I told my grandpa about all the harm I had experienced and I just come back from Costa Rica someone in Costa Rica had asked me, if you weren't doing this, if you weren't teaching, what would you be doing? And I was in this space. I was completely clear, I was in a completely new environment, and that's when the idea re came back right. It was almost like a whisper that my grandma was around reminding me of that, that I bringing Kira back to life, and I distinctly remembered a butterfly flying in my grandmother's first name means butterfly when I spoke the words of well, actually there's this platform that I want to build, and I'd gone to Costa Rica as an escape from all the grief, all the pain that I was experiencing in my workplace at the time, and so rest, rejuvenation, was really really important for me, because I needed to. I needed to still feel like I was of purpose, but it didn't. I didn't want it to come at the cost of feeling so debilitated and abused, quite honestly. And so, yeah, when I shared that with my grandpa, immediately I went into this mode of, well, this needs to be hard work and I had to really work on rewiring. Well, if I don't want to feel like this in my current workplace, then I can't build a business with that energy either. And that was a really, really important awareness that I invite everyone to also kind of think about when they're building a business or when they're, you know, looking at their business in like, okay, well, does this feel? Do I feel like how I want to feel? Like, yes, we're going to have nights or days where we're working really like long hours, but the energy of feeling excited and illuminated and expansive, as opposed to feeling depleted, that's what we want to honor.

Reema: 12:09

And so it took, you know, a lot of work with nervous system regulation. I worked, I tapped into all of my resources. Having had so many bad experiences with unethical practitioners, I'd, you know, built a community and a support around me whom I knew I could tap into and lean into, and so my one. You know I worked with three different therapists. Actually, I worked with EFT emotional freedom technique, which was incredible, and I continue to do that with my therapist as well as on my own.

Reema: 12:46

I invite people to like look on YouTube, check out different practices, to re first to check in to see like, what are the beliefs that are sitting in their body and what, where is the trauma sitting in their body? I worked a lot of, with a lot of energy, with one of my other therapists. We did a lot of Akashic Record reading, we did some NLP and then I had a talk therapist. I also then started seeing someone who did angel reading as well, and him and I I would meet with him every few months and so, as I was starting to dabble and build Hira, my focus for about 80% of the initial stages was me, was my energy, was like really becoming you know who I wanted to be, so that I was building something. I wasn't just building, sorry, I wasn't just building. So that I was building something. I wasn't just building, sorry, I wasn't just building something, I was building me, and that's so important.

Reema: 13:48

When we're building businesses, we also need to remember that the outcome is also who you're becoming, and I think that's that's so juicy right. It's not a means to an end of like okay, well, I'll build this and then I'll have revenue. It's also I'll build this and I'll feel safer in my body, I'll feel happier with my purpose and I'll be able to sustain myself, because we're all deserving of wealth, abundance and money. There's no question about that. But how do we get that while also honoring our spirit in this life, that we have Some other tools.

Reema: 14:30

One major tool that I've also implemented in how Hira operates is honoring my cycle. You know, camille, as a woman, we operate in a world where we're fighting with the patriarchal cycle and our own body cycle doesn't sync up to the 24-hour clock right, like in the 30-day months, and the right it's. Our cycle operates in four different areas, and one of which is our bleed and what you know, what our body needs and how it needs to be tended to nutritionally, through exercise, even through output, and what we can create during that time looks different in each one of those four parts of our cycle, of our 28-day cycle and so it starts small for me. It started with tracking my energy. Where was my energy? What was I drawn to doing during each part of my cycle? I did obviously some research about what are some like exercises and food I should eat. I started seed cycling. Highly recommend people looking into seed cycling.

Camille: 15:36

What is seed cycling. I haven't heard of that.

Reema: 15:39

Oh okay. So seed cycling is like different seeds you have during different parts of your cycle. It's just a blend. There's really just two blends. You can purchase them online. I just purchase the actual seeds and blend them and then keep them in a container, and so I've got two blends one's for during my bleed and just after my bleed I can't remember the terms right now and then the other one is the other two parts of my cycle, and so I just check my, the app that I use.

Reema: 16:06

I use Moody Moody. If you want to sponsor me, feel free to check, reach me out. Reach out, no, but I love Moody, I absolutely love it. And so I use Moody to see where I am in my cycle and accordingly, just like put whatever seeds I need into my smoothie in the morning or in a salad at lunch, and it's really made an impact in like my, like just my energy reserve and just like keeping things like calm. But simultaneously, I've also been like not vilifying myself during my bleed or just before my beat if I can't get something done, because productivity just looks different. You know, during those times I'm more focused on reflecting and gathering data and connecting, and so I know that certain tasks are better during different parts of my cycle, and that was really important for me to understand about my own body and then start to live.

Reema: 17:00

That and as I started to employ people as part of the Hero Collective, is actually how our deliverables and how our team functions as well. So we're all synced. There's five of us on the team, women. Even though we all work virtually we're all women here. I does honor and honor and prioritize hiring mothers specifically, just to ensure that you know, just to promote those who often get overlooked, quite honestly, and so all the women on our platform are women who are purposely marginalized by the system in addition to being mothers. So two of us are not, we're aspiring mothers, we'll call it and the other three are our mothers, and so they. So now our deliverables and our. Because we're all synced. It's really simple, because we're all kind of like in our bleed or before our bleed, now we all know kind of where we all sit all the time, which is kind of hilarious. That's funny, it is so funny, and so all of our deliverables are based on that. Our team meetings are like, okay, well, that doesn't make sense for you to do that then, because you're going to be bleeding then. So why don't we move this this week or that for then? And then it's just so interesting and it's you know, we had a reflection a couple months ago on like okay, so now it's been six months, no, it'd been eight months. It's been eight months since we've been doing this now, and every month we kind of like adjust and see what we need. How does this feel?

Reema: 18:29

And a lot of the comments that were coming up with like I don't beat myself up as much anymore, I don't like, I don't like I don't dishonor my body when it can't do something. And the beautiful thing that's come out of that, too, is their partners are honoring these women a lot more during different parts of their cycle. One of them has a son and he knows that he can like warm up a hot bag and give it to his mom or like that's when he can provide more tender and love to his mom. And it's just, it's so beautiful that it's not just like it went from, like me doing this for myself and then doing this now with the other women on my team, and how that is now impacting their families, their daughters, their sons, and it's really beautiful to see and feel, and I think that's been one of the major pieces of when we talk about rest and rejuvenation.

Reema: 19:23

They both need to happen in balance, right? Yes, we need to rejuvenate, but how does that look like? And it's not always rest, sometimes it's how are we up regulating, how are we feeling energized? And I feel like honoring my cycle allows me to find those times where I'm resting. And what does rest look like during those times? And when am I feeding my soul and spirit to get excited, to be excited to produce and get creative and connect with others?

Camille: 19:54

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Camille: 20:23

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Camille: 20:56

I love that, as a business leader, that you were able to invite that energy into let's discuss this and that it doesn't, because I mean, I don't know about you, but with the way I was raised, it was like well, you it's just. You pretend like it's any other day. People don't know, like if they do know, that's a bad thing and that it's something to like hide away and almost like shameful, you know, so just changing the language around it, and that it's just a part of the way God intended our cycle in our body to rest, just like nature does. So I think that's really cool that you've incorporated that into your business.

Reema: 21:32

Thank you. Yeah, it's been pretty magical and it's also actually seeing it, it's even moving. I think initially I was in acceptance and I think as a team we were more in acceptance was I was in acceptance and I think as a team we were more in acceptance, and I think now we're seeing it as a celebration, like wow, our bodies get to do this really cool thing and that we get to like be this like evolution every 28 days, where we get to actually remove all that doesn't serve us and our body dispels that. And how do we then use that to connect with the earth? How do we use that experience? And there's different practices in different cultures, and one of which is like you offer your blood to mother earth. There's different ways of honoring that and I think those are the kind of conversations we're starting to happen now on our team.

Reema: 22:21

We do have a few practitioners on the platform who do womb healing Yoni Steams, you know. We've got another one who, for her new her practice and sharing her nutrition as a nutritionist, is around like nutrition during different parts of our cycle, and so really learning from all the practitioners too, and taking it slow as we're learning too right, not not demeaning ourselves or beating ourselves up like why wasn't I doing this before? But it's like oh, this is like new information. How do I now incorporate this in an easeful way into my life? That feels manageable, and so it's been really exciting that we've moved from like acceptance to like this is really beautiful and I can celebrate it. And, to be quite honest, camille, like our productivity is skyrocketed because we're not fighting against our body and like what feels like upstream, we're in flow with our body and so much more magic is created as a result.

Camille: 23:24

That's really interesting and so cool to see that result in a positive way, that you're celebrating that together and like, wow, look at how productive and awesome this is to embrace that feminine flow and energy and not fight against it. I love that so much, would you say, with what you've learned at this point, with building your collective, and that it's continuing to grow. What are some lessons that you've learned that you would say to someone who's maybe looking to start something of their own, whether it's to become a practitioner themselves or maybe to embrace a new way of doing things or starting a new business. What have you learned that you would give that advice to, either whether it was yourself or just someone new starting now?

Reema: 24:10

I think and this is like also reflecting on some of the areas which I wish someone told me was that full heartedly believe in yourself. I think we're very quickly we're apt to look for a business coach specifically, or someone who's like an ex, you know, a self-proclaimed expert in the business world, and I think that can actually be really, really harmful because it does. It can I shouldn't say it does it can take you off your why and it can create questions about what you want to create and instead, like, appease this coach or this person. So I'll share an example. So the Heroic Collective is very much a vetted platform. I had over 270 people apply. Only 17 got accepted, and I had a business coach that strongly believed that that was not the way to do it. It was I should just let everyone in, because at least that way I'd be getting money into the platform very quickly and then I can start vetting people after we have money to work with. And I was really firm on my decision because I had to come back to my why, and so, had I listened to this person, we'd be having a very different conversation and I also wouldn't feel like I'm honoring my body, my spirit, like why I wanted to start this. The reason I'm, you know, I've chosen or choosing to move away from like a nine to five and someone telling me how to do things is so I can do things on like. I have the freedom not just of time but also of like spirit and how I want to run something. So if you're chasing like profit and again profit's important, totally think it is but if you're chasing profit in the wrong way, in the wrong reason, you're abandoning yourself, you're abandoning your own spirit. So my first piece would be don't abandon yourself. Don't jump to hiring coaches which sounds ironic, because I have a platform of coaches you can hire, but don't you know, really get real on your why. Get really clear on your vision. Get real on your. Why get really clear on your vision? Work with people who are not necessarily business coaches but are able to help support you and helping get clear on your vision, whether that be like you know I was saying, like a therapist or an angel reader or something that could help support, like bounce ideas off of, but not someone with a business background. Specifically, get really clear on it. I would also encourage to have like a skeleton of a few journal questions that you revisit every couple of weeks. On Fridays I do a very deep dive on my week what worked? Well, I have like specific questions that I use each month, depending on the goals for that month and it really and I use the NLP techniques to help me build like reflecting and then moving forward how does this look? And I think that's also really, really important. We've got some great tools with chat, gpt and then AI that can help support, create those journal questions for you If you just punch in like what are the resources or what are the goals that you have to help you reflect, and that can be your source.

Reema: 27:21

Another piece of advice is find community, find people who are outside your circle, whom you can learn from and learn with. Not everyone you meet is going to be someone who you're going to keep around forever and be okay with that. Be okay with, like, the acquaintances, the connections and the people that you meet and take the magic and the gems that you can take from those conversations and relationships, as well as the gems and magic that you share with them as you move through the path. The journey is not about the destination. It really is enjoying and pausing and enjoying each part of it. Um, and those are, I think, my two big pieces, because as long as you're rooted in your why and your vision, you can follow the nudges. You can follow you know the pedals that come around your path so organically and so naturally that it won't feel like you're walking upstream.

Camille: 28:15

Yeah, yeah, oh, I love that advice. I think it's so important to really listen to your intuition and to reflect, because I actually have a five-day free resource that's called Discover your why, and it's all about helping you to define and understand what your why is, because it all comes back to that when things get hard, when you start to lose motivation, when the money isn't coming in quite as quickly as you thought it would. Going back to that why and reflecting is so important. I'll make sure to have a link for that in the show notes below. But yeah, this has been so wonderful. I would love for you to share with the audience where they can find you and also to connect with the Hira Collective and what that looks like as far as in terms of investment or how they get going in that, so that they know how to get going.

Reema: 29:06

Yeah, thank you. Okay, so we are across Instagram, facebook, youtube and Pinterest, on all our socials. Please ensure that when you are searching us on all the socials, you don't forget the the. It's the Hira Collective. Hira is spelled H-I-R-A. Our website is wwwthehiracollectivecom.

Reema: 29:31

On our website, you can search by modality, ailment, symptom or intention. There's a lot of really great resources on there. You do not need to book with a practitioner, but we encourage you to. Of course, we've got some immaculate practitioners on the platform and the guest work's out there for you, right? If 17% of practitioners have applied on the Hero Collective, you can trust that we back them. But the idea, too, is that there is a third party involved in this relationship in the session that you have with a practitioner. So should anything come up, any questions or whatnot, you're welcome to reach out. We also do have, if you wanted to book, a free discovery call with our community director, rashida. You're able to do that right through the platform and by booking with Rashida, she can support you in navigating the platform, finding the right practitioner support modalities that you might want to book with. That aligns with what your needs are, and we have a ton of virtual events coming up as well, so I highly encourage you to look out for that as well.

Camille: 30:25

Fun. Well, I'm excited to dig into it more and see what we have going on, so we'll make sure to link with that below. And again, thank you everyone for tuning in. I so appreciate it. Anytime you comment, like or share, subscribe or leave a review. That's a huge help to us in helping to encourage women-owned businesses and to share the show. It means a lot to me. So thank you for being here with us and thank you, rima, for being on the show. Thank you, thank you so much for having me. Hey CEOs, thank you so much for spending your time with me. If you found this episode inspiring or helpful, please let me know in a comment. In a five-star review, you could have the chance of being a featured review on an upcoming episode. Continue the conversation on Instagram at callmeCEOPodcast and remember you are the boss.