I’m a creative mind, author, and entrepreneur, the creator of the Human Software Optimization modality. An innovative natural model to optimize human transformation in 360 degrees.
My career as an Organizational Psychologist, executive coach, and mindfulness teacher at UCLA, and Perfectly Here are founded in my own self-development through academic, scientific, and spiritual training locally and internationally. The results are optimizing my own life and the life of many others in the past decades. I have developed and conducted hundreds of curricula, workshops, and retreats and spoken at conferences worldwide.
In my latest book, Life Intelligence and Human Software Optimization, I’ve identified the 5 stages of human software that define our life and drive all our actions. I uncover what it takes to change faulty codes and programming to ones that enable us to live fully and effectively.
By working with me you can expect a lot more than the common practice of mindfulness. My approach will take you through deeper and higher levels of mindfulness techniques to overcome the internal and external limitations you face today.
Learn what it takes to redesign your human software
My Story & How I Got Here
I lived a life filled with pleasures, parties, dancing, beautiful outfits, music, lots of food, travel and leisurely time. But somehow, all passed and left no residual happiness behind. I have nothing to show for all that pleasure I consumed and engaged in. In fact, with it came a lot of pain and suffering. A lot of aversions and clinging. A lot of expectations were not fulfilled.
I finally found some healing when I attended Codependence Annonymous. That was a revelation for me. So much so that I wrote this book, The Turtle’s Shell. My purpose was to explain how the life of the addict was fed by the codependent and to take it as far as the courts and the legal system to say stop the codependent. They, we, are the collaborators of such illness. We don’t let the addict heal and become sober. I was so sincere about this that I was willing to take the blame for the addicts’ behavior. Just like a good codependent would. Well, I never published that book, because somehow, I knew there was more to it. Indeed, there was.
Later, I divorced and went through a few years of intense emotional and financial difficulty and pain. Luckily, I found my way to Mindfulness and a full spectrum of Buddha’s teachings, which helped me understand how I suffered and how I could free myself from within me. The Turtle Shell was the right idea, but not to hide from the outside world, rather to build a safe space within my own heart. One day, at a mindfulness retreat I had a profound insight into how my mind creates my own suffering by bringing up painful past memories and reliving them fully at the moment. I had heard the phrase, pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. That day I said NO to the pain option. I heard my heart saying, “NO, I will not take the option of suffering. I will get to the bottom of this and be done with it.”
As I practiced, learned, and then came to teach I started writing my insights down especially after each session. Examples of difficulties, anxieties, worries, jealousies and agitations, self-judgment, and many other issues that would come up in classes, which I’d spontaneously had a great response. I’d write them down and decided to put them into a book, which I called, Pain is Inevitable, Suffering Is Not An Option.
I wrote 32 chapters, but I hadn’t felt confident enough to go for publishing. They kept sitting in my digital folders. I also had gone through two other painful relationships, somewhat narcissistic and continued learning how to heal from it. On my educational journey I drew from other sources, psychology, science of the brain and many other sources.
I got a doctorate in Organizational Psychology to train organizations, but I was dedicated to the Buddha’s teachings and my methods were not mainstream so I didn’t pursue corporations that much except for those students brought me to such as Disney and others. Instead I started a non-profit to offer Mindfulness, which my partner was the teacher. Eventually, I got certified by UCLA to teach Mindfulness. I kept learning, practicing, going to the monasteries, taking ten day retreats, teaching afterwards and training and coaching people one on one. As I taught others, I usually learned more because I’d hear myself say things I hadn’t heard before. I began to have a following of a group of students who kept saying what’s next and I kept designing courses and teaching them without marketing or advertising much. Then the most unthinkable happened. My beautiful son, 26 years old, passed away of fentanyl.
This loss shattered my brain, put me into such a shock and disarray that I fainted 35 days in a row. My brain would shut down. Through this incredible pain and suffering I learned many things. That grief of a mother was not emotional, psychological nor due to bonding. It was neurological, physiological, a loss at a cellular level. Where every cell in my body had lost, my brain, ever cell in ever organ had lost. The pain was not up to me. I felt like having Covid for a whole year.
After the first month I started teaching again. My students would say, ‘Manijeh you are fine when you are teaching. We wish you would teach every night so we could take your class so you can be fine.’ It was an amazing journey of facing the truth of things, going through an unfathomable amount of pain and sorrow. I traveled to several cities and countries in Japan, New Zealand, Thailand, England and brought his ashes with me to every monastery I visited. The ritual of honoring his life and intention for happiness became a mission for me.
As I felt my pain and healed from it I taught others the same. My heart of compassion expanded like never before. I understood all pains and sufferings of the world and every time pain of grief would hit me I’d wish that no being, no matter how evil, should ever experience such pains. Within the last five years I have lost eight very close and special people in my life including three of my closest friends, my father, my aunt who was my soulmate and my child.
Through my own and others’ journey I discovered a natural developmental and transformational process, what I call the Five Stages of Human Software Optimization. I also realized people take a seminar or course about Mindfulness with a teacher, go to a retreat somewhere else, watch this Youtube video, learn different aspects of Mindfulness and related teachings in bits and pieces and in random fashion and don’t get the whole picture. I realized, there is a whole system, a life intelligence, that all human beings must learn, which we don’t necessarily learn when growing up and the classes I had designed per students’ request to go further offered a full spectrum well beyond Mindfulness and transformation. It encompassed other aspects of life that we, humans, must understand.