Ramadan is often seen as a sacred month only for Muslims, yet its deeper invitation is profoundly human: a chance to reset your nervous system, release emotional weight, and remember that you are safe to lead.

For twenty years, I navigated a tumultuous, emotionally abusive marriage. The practice of Ramadan—fasting, reflection, and surrender—became the lifeline that helped me regulate my limbic system, reclaim my body, and rebuild my sense of self. That journey is what ultimately shaped my work as a Somatic Holistic Healer and the creation of my Four Mind Alignment™ methodology and my self‑guided course, Feel Safe to Lead.

Beyond food and drink, Ramadan can be a powerful somatic and leadership reset—even if you are not Muslim.

Consider fasting from:

• Self‑sabotage and negative self‑talk
• Low‑vibration people and draining environments
• Refined sugar, processed and GMO foods, caffeine, and heavy proteins that stress your body
• Social media and “energy vampires” that deplete your focus and confidence

When you treat fasting as spiritual, behavioral, and emotional forgiveness, you create space to:

• Hear your own intuition more clearly
• Release survival patterns that keep you small
• Reconnect to a felt sense of safety in your body

This is the inner work most leadership trainings skip—and the work that makes sustainable leadership possible.

My Four Mind Alignment™ methodology is designed to help you regulate and stay centered in your body so you can lead from resonance, not reactivity.

When you feel safe to lead:

• You stop outsourcing your worth to titles, metrics, or other people’s approval
• You can set boundaries without shutting down or exploding
• You access clarity and courage in moments that used to trigger anxiety, people‑pleasing, or freeze

Ramadan gave me a yearly structure to practice this: pausing, observing my patterns, and consciously choosing who I wanted to be on the other side of the fast. That same structure is built into Feel Safe to Lead.

In this week’s episode, “Rise, It’s Ramadan: Benefits and Tips for Non‑Muslims,” I share:

• How fasting can become a portal to emotional regulation and inner safety
• Practical ways non‑Muslims can engage with Ramadan as a 360° reset
• An excerpt on spiritual warfare and how it relates to the Four Mind Alignment™
• https://form.jotform.com/260272684303151 for nutritional assessment

If this resonates, let's connect https://calendly.com/theultimatejoygoddess/

Introspect on where you can forgive yourself.

See yourself in your greatest power

Commit to being that version of yourself

Devote 14 days to doing that by joining Feel Safe to Lead https://www.skool.com/feel-safe-to-lead-8430

#podcast #WhatPeopleMiss #Ramadan #benefitsofRamadan #MentalHealth #Emotionalwellness

Root. Reveal. Rise. with Embodied Visioning.

Every January for the past four years The Wholeness Center has offered The Visioning Retreat virtually and in person. This year I was one of the facilitators.

This episode is both a recap of this years' event from the perspective of each facilitator/ participant and one participant and an invitation to view visioning differently.

Bemene Piaro, the Founder of Wholeness Center and ICF certified transformational coach, defines "vision board" and the process utilized in her unique embodied visioning.

Madala Machini, a certified Yoga Instructor and Acupuncturist and herbalist in training, share her experience and contribution.

Robyn Shahda, an ICF certified Life Coach, shares her experience as a repeat annual participant as well as quarterly participant and where her vision has come to fruition.

I also share vulnerably about vision boarding and what this event has shifted in my life, my body somatically and world.

Whether you are new to vision boarding or embodiment practices, this episode will be eye opening for you.

Reserve your spot for the 2027 Visioning Retreat https://wholenesscenterva.com/events/

Cordelia Gaffar, known as The Ultimate Joy Goddess, is the CEO of Workout Around My Day Inc., an award-winning podcast host, author, and embodiment guide. She helps professionally successful, socially respected men—especially corporate leaders and founders—who are physically and mentally exhausted regain strength, confidence, and self-respect without shame, judgment, or emotional overwhelm.

This podcast is your sacred space to practice self-nurturing as a radical act, and to remember that you are allowed to choose joy and pleasure, even in seasons of grief, transition, and rage.

Learn more, explore current offerings, and join Cordelia’s joy-centered communities at:

https://www.cordeliagaffar.com

#InnerJoy #PerformativeJoy #WhatPeopleMiss #TheUltimateJoyGoddess #SelfNurturing #EmbodiedLeadership #MenAndMentalHealth #BurnoutRecovery #JoyOverPerformance #SavorYourLife

In this episode, Cordelia Gaffar invites you to stop contorting yourself to fit standards that were never made for your wholeness. Explore the hidden costs of being “palatable,” how those patterns once kept you safe, and how to transcend them through embodiment, presence, and joy. It’s time to move from surviving to savoring — from performance to authentic power.

Follow Cordelia at https://cordeliagaffar.substack.com/

Success has a shadow.

For many successful men, it’s the quiet exhaustion that comes from constantly managing how others see you.

In boardrooms, at home, and even in friendships—you’ve learned how to be “palatable.”

Charming. Strategic. Controlled.

But behind that mastery lies a truth: being endlessly adaptable is slowly draining the very energy you need to live fully.

When you spend years being "selectively you," your nervous system stays in a loop of performance—reading the room instead of resting in your body. Your limbic system, designed to protect you, becomes hypersensitive. That’s when anxiety, irritability, and emotional numbness begin to take over.

This isn't a weakness—it’s a wiring issue.

My work helps you reset your limbic system so you can reconnect to your inner power—the kind that doesn’t need permission.

The kind of confidence that comes from embodiment, not performance.

The truth is, being palatable keeps you safe—but it also keeps you small.

Let’s wake up your body’s intelligence so you can reclaim your strength, assert your boundaries, and lead with grounded confidence.

You deserve to rest in the full weight of who you are.

→ Join my new self-guided experience The Ultimate Confidence Guide for Men Over 50!

Cordelia Gaffar, known as The Ultimate Joy Goddess, is the CEO of Workout Around My Day Inc., an award-winning podcast host, best-selling author, and embodiment guide who helps professionally successful, socially respected men—particularly corporate leaders and founders—who are physically and mentally exhausted to regain strength, confidence, and self-respect without shame, judgement, or emotional overwhelm.

Inner joy is quiet, rooted, and lived from the inside out—performative joy is polished, public, and often exhausting. This episode of What People Miss invites listeners to stop staging happiness and start actually feeling it.

Episode overview

In this solo episode, The Ultimate Joy Goddess, Cordelia Gaffar, unpacks the difference between inner joy that nourishes the nervous system and performative joy that keeps you on an endless treadmill of proving, pleasing, and performing. You will explore how childhood conditioning, corporate culture, and social media norms train you to prioritize looking happy over being deeply well.

Cordelia guides you to notice where you are still “performing joy” in your relationships, leadership, and daily life, and how that performance quietly drains your body, focus, and self-respect. Then she offers embodied questions and gentle reframes to help you begin sourcing joy from within, even if you are physically and mentally exhausted.

Who this is for

Corporate leaders and founders who look successful on paper but feel numb, burnt out, or disconnected inside.

High-achieving men who are praised for their performance yet rarely feel safe enough to rest, feel, or receive.

Anyone ready to move from surviving, proving, and performing into savoring life on their own terms.

About Cordelia Gaffar

Cordelia Gaffar, known as The Ultimate Joy Goddess, is the CEO of Workout Around My Day Inc., an award-winning podcast host, author, and embodiment guide. She helps professionally successful, socially respected men—especially corporate leaders and founders—who are physically and mentally exhausted regain strength, confidence, and self-respect without shame, judgment, or emotional overwhelm.

This podcast is your sacred space to practice self-nurturing as a radical act, and to remember that you are allowed to choose joy and pleasure, even in seasons of grief, transition, and rage.

Connect and explore

Learn more, explore current offerings, and join Cordelia’s joy-centered communities at:

https://www.cordeliagaffar.com

#InnerJoy #PerformativeJoy #WhatPeopleMiss #TheUltimateJoyGoddess #SelfNurturing #EmbodiedLeadership #MenAndMentalHealth #BurnoutRecovery #JoyOverPerformance #SavorYourLife

Dress your soul in color: discover how style, presence, and embodiment can move you from survival mode into savoring your everyday life.

Savoring life through color, embodiment, and presence, this conversation with producer, host, and author Inna Korobkina invites you to see your everyday world as a living canvas for joy and self-expression. Together, we explore how what you wear, how you move, and how you see color can become a pathway out of survival mode and into a more intentional, pleasure-filled life.

• How color influences your mood, nervous system, and sense of possibility—and how to consciously curate your visual world for more grounded joy.
• The way style, fashion, and image become a language of personal branding, embodiment, and self-respect, not performance or perfectionism.
• Practical ways to “rise and thrive” in your daily rituals so you feel more at home in your body, your story, and your presence in every room you enter.

Inna Korobkina is an actress (Dawn of the Dead, Transformers, Far Cry 6) Creative Director of Jewel Branding Studios, host of The Tapestry Podcast, and an indie film producer, who is using her skills as a storyteller to push forward the idea that developing a unique personal style is intimately tied to developing a strong character in life. As an author she created the audio-visual fashion journal “My Style Journey Guide” a tool for fashion education and style inspiration that helps the user build a strong identity rooted in authenticity and courageous self-expression.

• You are ready to move from performing for the world to savoring your life, one intentional choice—one color, one breath, one outfit—at a time.
• You want a gentle but powerful reframe of style, visibility, and self-expression that honors your nervous system, your history, and your desires.

Tune in to remember that your wardrobe, your environment, and your presence are all part of your self-nurturing practice—and that you are allowed to feel good in your own skin, today.

Follow her online https://www.instagram.com/innakorobkina/?hl=en

To apply for The Portrait Social

What People Miss with Cordelia Gaffar is a space for women who are done merely surviving and are ready to savor life, even in the midst of grief, transition, and rage. Through intimate, unfiltered conversations, award‑winning podcast host, best‑selling author, and Ultimate Joy Goddess Cordelia Gaffar walks you through the quiet moments most people skip over when they are trying to be “strong” and keep it all together.paste.txt​

In this powerful episode, Cordelia opens the new solar year by inviting you to create from a place of savoring life instead of repeating old patterns of burnout, silence, and self-abandonment. She shares how her Replenish Me process evolved into Four Mind Alignment—honoring the body, belly, heart, and brain—so you can move from survival mode into continuous moments of joy and pleasure.paste.txt​

Cordelia is joined by her longtime friend and client Maritza, a home‑educating mother of six and blues singer whose life was shattered when her husband was killed in a sudden, preventable accident. Maritza vulnerably describes how grief destroyed her from the inside out—stealing her voice, her music, and her sense of self—until somatic practices, community, and “sweet talk” helped her reclaim wholeness.

Rooted in Afro‑Latina and Caribbean traditions, Cordelia and Maritza share how moving their hips, somatic breathwork, and kundalini‑based practices became portals for healing rage, grief, and exhaustion stored in the body. Cordelia weaves in her training in somatic movement, Tantra, and somatic sexology to show how sensation, breath, and rhythm can restore your nervous system and even transform your relationship with your own aging body.

This episode dives into what people miss about the throat chakra, especially for Black and Brown women who are taught to fear the “angry Black woman” stereotype. You will hear how singing pulled rage out of Maritza’s locked throat, how redirected rage became art and therapy, and why refusing to hold emotions to make others comfortable is a radical act of self‑nurturing.

If you have ever lost a partner, a role, your voice, or your sense of who you are, this conversation offers a living example of moving from shattered to stage—literally—from a grieving widow who is now performing at the International Blues Challenge. You will walk away with a felt sense of what it means to prioritize yourself, honor your emotions, and choose joy and pleasure without pretending your pain does not exist.

Tune in if you are ready to reclaim your body, your voice, and your life—and to discover what you have been missing about truly savoring your existence.

To work with Cordelia go to https://cordeliagaffar.com

Why do so many of us comply with norms that don’t actually fit who we are?

In this episode, we pull back the curtain on respectability politics—how they are shaped by colonization, religion, and the longing to belong—and what it costs us to keep performing “acceptable” instead of being fully alive. The conversation traces how compliance often grows from a desire for safety and community, not weakness, and why justice can never be one-size-fits-all when every story and body is different.

Together, we explore how curiosity can soften defensiveness, how discomfort becomes a portal to growth and resilience, and how emotional maturity asks us to seek understanding rather than assume, even when we disagree. You will hear how personal politics of respectability vary widely, how joy can be experienced as a frequency that transcends culture, and why incremental growth matters for those living with expansion anxiety.

This episode is an invitation to notice where you are still shrinking to fit, where your nervous system is clinging to compliance as protection, and where your heart is ready to take one more brave, small step toward authentic self-expression. Tune in if you are ready to hold both your need for safety and your longing for liberation, and to practice a politics of respectability that honors your actual humanity rather than someone else’s script.

When was the last time you felt truly safe to choose pleasure, not just power?

In this episode, Cordelia Gaffar, the Ultimate Joy Goddess and Guide for Intimacy Intelligence, invites you to step out of survival mode and into a life you can actually savor. Through stories, somatic reflections, and courageous truth-telling, you will explore what it means to self-nurture in a world that profits from your exhaustion.

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You will hear how healing your relationship with your body, emotions, and boundaries can:

• Rewire your nervous system from hypervigilance to ease
• Transform leadership from performance to intimacy
• Turn everyday moments into rituals of joy-bonding™ with yourself and others
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This conversation is for high-achieving women, exhausted leaders, and secretly tender powerhouses who are ready to detach from expectations, reclaim their joy, and lead from a deeply replenished heart. Press play if you’re ready to move from “holding it all together” to being free to be fully, unapologetically you.

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Call to action:

If this episode speaks to you, share it with one woman who looks powerful on the outside but feels invisible on the inside, and tag Cordelia on LinkedIn or Instagram so your breakthrough can ripple through your community.

#SafetyAndBelonging

#IncrementalGrowth

#ExpansionAnxiety

#SeekToUnderstand

#BeyondRespectability

#EmbodiedJustice

#HeartAndMind

#LiberatedJoy