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When Life Asks Deeper Questions
When was the last time life asked something of you that your knowledge and experience could not answer?
For Coacharya trainer and PCC coach Dr. Komal Smriti, that moment arrived when she packed up forty years of life in India and moved to Canada. What began as a geographical shift soon became a far deeper inward journey.
Komal has been a lecturer, corporate professional, PhD scholar, coach, mother, and lifelong learner. She has moved across countries, immersed herself in philosophy, worked with people from diverse cultures, and spent years exploring both creativity and consciousness. What appears, on the surface, to be many different lives is, in reality, one continuous inquiry.
At the center of that inquiry is a question that has quietly followed her through every chapter of her life:
What truly lies beneath the surface of things?
This is a profile of the person behind that question.
The Invisible Thread
There has always been one enduring thread running through Komal’s life: a fascination with the human mind.
As a young student in a small town in India, she knew instinctively that she wanted to study psychology. But at a time when parental expectations strongly influenced career choices, the idea was quickly dismissed. Psychology, in her family’s understanding, meant psychiatry, instability, and limited prospects. So, she chose economics instead.
Even within that detour, however, the original curiosity kept finding its way back.
During her MBA, subjects like organisational behaviour, consumer psychology, and marketing drew her attention because they all touched human behaviour in some form. Around the same time, theatre became another outlet for the same fascination, an exploration of expression, emotion, and the many ways people reveal themselves.
After completing her education, Komal wanted to teach. What drew her toward teaching was not authority, but learning itself.
“A teacher is a lifelong learner,” she says.
But before she could settle in academia, her husband, then a close friend, posed a question that stayed with her:
“You want to teach business students, but you’ve never worked in business. What practical experience will you bring to them?”
The question felt valid. She entered the corporate world intending to return to teaching after a few years. Instead, she stayed for nearly seventeen.
Even there, the same thread remained intact.
Working in the mobility industry exposed her to clients across cultures, languages, and ways of thinking. What consistently held her attention was not the business itself, but the people within it. She found herself deeply interested in how human beings think, adapt, relate, and communicate.
Eventually, everything else began to feel secondary. Only one thing continued to hold her curiosity fully: understanding people.
That path eventually led her to coaching.
“This work keeps alive my hunger to learn, experiment, experience, and work deeply with people.”
Looking back now, the journey no longer appears fragmented. The road may have looked winding from the outside, but the thread was always there.
Motherhood, Identity, and Letting Go
When Komal speaks about motherhood, her eyes light up. She describes it as one of the experiences that fundamentally changed her relationship with herself.
Growing up, she often experienced a lack of emotional connection in certain relationships. Over time, her sense of self became strongly affected by how others perceived her, in what she describes as a deep “other orientation.”
“When the self feels fragile underneath, we become more attached to identity, control, and being right.”
That insight led her to a larger question: What does freedom actually mean?
“The deepest freedom is freedom from ‘I want.’ If life becomes only about what I want or don’t want, then I am no longer free. Attachment itself becomes the shackle.”
Motherhood shifted that understanding in a profound way.
When her children were born, their needs naturally became more important than protecting her own preferences or identity.
“It never felt like sacrifice. It simply felt obvious that their needs mattered more in that moment.”
Through that experience, she began to see that life unfolds beyond personal control. Love, for her, became less about attachment and more about moving beyond the constant preoccupation with oneself.
Her children, she says, freed her from being consumed by her own identity and opened her to a larger way of living.
On Values and Living Them
Komal describes her core values as excellence, grace, and integrity.
Excellence came early. She grew up in an environment where achievement was expected, and over time, she learned an important distinction: excellence is not the same as perfectionism.
Grace emerged through observation. She noticed a quiet beauty in certain people, in how they carried themselves, responded to life, and related to others, and consciously cultivated that quality within herself.
Integrity, however, required the deepest work.
Her definition is simple:
“Say what you truly think or feel. And do what you say.”
For Komal, integrity means reducing the distance between thoughts, words, and actions. It often required speaking honestly despite fear, discomfort, or uncertainty. But the result, she says, was liberating.
“It makes life simpler. There is less conflict within yourself when you stop dividing who you are.”
A Life That Refuses Narrowness
The famous Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh said, “The way to know life is to love many things.” It would not be wrong to say that Komal lives and breathes that quote.
Other than coaching, Komal’s world stretches across many forms of experience: Sufi music, poetry, macrame, silence, philosophy, long walks, cooking, books, and spontaneous conversations with strangers.
“If you ask me to choose only one thing, it feels like death to me.”
Curiosity, for her, is not selective. It moves freely across disciplines, experiences, and states of being.
Change itself feels natural to her. When life around her becomes too static, she laughs that she may simply rearrange the furniture just to feel movement again.
Energy, in her world, must keep flowing.
Some days are filled with deep coaching conversations and intellectual exploration. Others are quiet, still, and entirely unstructured. She can spend hours absorbed in books, immersed in creativity, or sitting silently with complete ease.
What stands out is not restlessness, but range, a person equally comfortable with solitude and connection, silence and expression.
“I just love making space for everything life has to offer.”
Acceptance and Getting Out of Your Own Way
One of the deepest shifts in Komal’s life came through understanding the role of resistance.
After years of self-exploration, she began to notice that much of human suffering comes not only from circumstances themselves, but from our refusal to accept them as they are.
“It was very difficult for me to arrive at a place where I could say: this is what it is. It feels painful, yes. But this is reality.”
For her, acceptance is not passive resignation. It is honesty.
“Acceptance is humbling. It asks us to recognise that there are limits to our control and limits to our understanding.”
Human beings, she says, rarely see the full picture of why life unfolds the way it does. Accepting that uncertainty requires maturity, not defeat.
She also questions the cultural glorification of struggle. Difficulty is often treated as proof of worth, while ease is viewed with suspicion.
“But some things can simply be easy.”
While challenge can certainly lead to growth, turning resistance into a permanent way of living often becomes another expression of ego, a need to fight life rather than participate in it.
The Books She Returns To
Ask Komal to name a book that has shaped her, and she immediately laughs at the impossibility of choosing only one.
Eventually, she names three.
The first is Map of Consciousness by Dr. David R. Hawkins, whose integration of science, spirituality, and consciousness deeply resonated with her.
The second is the Bhagavad Gita, a text she grew up around but only truly encountered later in life through slow, reflective study.
“If we truly imbibe this one book, we may not need anything else.”
The third is The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak, which came into her life during a personally challenging period. The novel’s exploration of love, transformation, and the relationship between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz left a lasting impact on her understanding of human connection.
“People try to define love, but it resists definition. This book brought me closer to understanding its essence.”
The Need to Create
Komal has always created things with her hands.
As a child, it was clay, flowers, dust, and whatever nature placed around her. Later came embroidery. Today, it is macrame and crochet.
The materials have changed, but the impulse remains the same.
For someone who spends much of her life in ideas, emotions, and intangible spaces, creating something physical offers grounding.
“You can touch it. You can see it exist.”
But for her, creativity is more than a hobby.
“It is a fundamental human need, the need to make something.”
We spend much of our lives absorbing information, experiences, and stimulation. But human beings are also designed to express, shape, and create.
She often reflects on this when people feel emotionally stuck or dissatisfied. Sometimes the answer is not to consume more, but to express more, through movement, art, conversation, music, or creation.
“Sometimes what we really need is not to take something in, but to let something out.”
Even speaking about macrame, she says, makes her visibly happier.
And for her, that is reason enough to keep creating.
What Komal Leaves You With
When Komal returns to the question of what lies beneath the surface, she says she has discovered one thing repeatedly:
Much of what makes life difficult is generated internally.
Beneath our fears, resistance, stories, and mental noise, reality is often more manageable than the version we create in our minds.
This understanding also has a bearing on the way she coaches.
She brings into her work the same reflective attention she has cultivated in her own life, creating space for people to slow down, see clearly, and ask what is truly needed in the present moment.
Her grounding in relational intelligence allows her to explore not only how people relate to others but also how they relate to themselves.
Her belief is simple: when people understand themselves more deeply, their relationships, choices, and way of being in the world begin to shift naturally.
Much like her own journey, she does not arrive with ready-made answers.
She arrives with the right questions.
