Celebrating the first anniversary of The Sattva Collective CIC, and the reason it was always about than just me.
I want to tell you something I don’t say often enough: building The Sattva Collective CIC was never just about creating an organisation. It wasn’t just about filling a gap in the menopause conversation, though that gap was real, urgent, and still is. It wasn’t just about the content, the community, the media appearances, or the growing platform.
It was about leaving something behind that mattered; it was about legacy.
And when I tell you that my daughter is the Co-Director of The Sattva Collective CIC, that she has chosen to stand beside this work, beside these women, beside me, I want you to understand what that means to me.
Everything. It means everything.
A year ago, I asked a question out loud.
What would happen if South Asian women in midlife finally had a space designed entirely for them? Not a space that nodded in their direction, not a mainstream platform with a culturally diverse stock image on the homepage. A space built from inside their experience, their silence, their complexity, their specific and layered and often invisible reality.
The Sattva Collective was that question, made real.
In twelve months, it has become something I genuinely could not have fully imagined when we launched. Over 50 original articles published. An interview series featuring extraordinary South Asian women, including Mani Kohli MBE, psychotherapist Shireen Noor, coach Sadia Hameed, and Parita Kuttappan of Awarify Coaching. Monthly gatherings. A growing directory of culturally aware practitioners. Media coverage spanning Asian Image, Eastern Eye, DESIblitz, Asian Voice, London Daily Digital, Legacy Woman Magazine, FORCE Magazine, and South Asian Heritage Trust. Radio. Print. Real conversations, in real spaces, with real women who needed them.
The silence has not disappeared. But it is cracking. And every crack lets light in.
What I know about legacy now that I didn’t know when I started.
Legacy isn’t something you build at the end. It’s something you build in the middle, in the decisions you make daily, in the values you hold when no one is watching, in the community you choose to show up for, even when you’re tired.
I am a South Asian woman in midlife. I know what it is to carry more than you show. I know the particular exhaustion of being the one who holds everything together, quietly, for everyone else. I know what it means to reach midlife and realise that you have spent a considerable portion of your life living for an idea of yourself that someone else wrote.
The Sattva Collective exists because I decided to write my own, and because I want every South Asian woman in midlife to know that she can write her own, too.
My daughter. My co-director. My greatest source of pride
Here is the part that makes my heart full in a way I cannot fully articulate.
My daughter is the Co-Director of The Sattva Collective CIC.
She didn’t have to be. She chose to be.
She is of the generation that will inherit what we build, or fail to build, right now. She is watching how South Asian women treat themselves in midlife, how they speak about their bodies, their worth, and their right to be supported. And she chose to step into this work not despite her youth, but because of her clarity.
There is something profound about building something alongside your daughter. Something that cannot quite be put into words but lives somewhere between pride and hope and the particular love that a mother feels when she watches her child become herself.
I started The Sattva Collective for the women of my generation, for the aunties and the mothers and the women sitting in silence in doctors’ offices and family gatherings, carrying experiences that didn’t yet have a name. But having my daughter beside me in this work means we are building something that reaches forward, too. Something that says to the next generation, “This conversation matters.” Your mothers’ experiences matter. And the culture you carry is not something to be ashamed of, it is something to be understood, honoured, and, where necessary, gently, lovingly changed.
This is what legacy looks like in practice. Not a monument, but a movement, passed between hands.
To the women who found us this year
You are why this exists.
Every woman who sent a message saying I thought I was the only one. Every woman who read a piece about grief, or faith, or financial independence, or navigating love after forty, and felt something shift in her chest. Every woman who joined our gatherings and sat in a room full of women who understood. Every woman who shared something quietly with a friend, not making a big thing of it, just passing something she thought they needed.
You built this, too, and we are nowhere near finished.
The summit is coming. The content goes deeper. The community grows wider. And as long as there are South Asian women in midlife who need a space that truly sees them, we will be here.
To my daughter
Thank you for choosing this. Thank you for choosing me. Thank you for understanding, at your age, what I only came to understand later: that the most important things we do are not for ourselves alone, but for the women who come after us.
The Sattva Collective is my life’s work, and because you are part of it, it will outlast me.
That is the whole point.
Want to be part of the next chapter? Visit our Support Us page, donate via our crowdfunding campaign, or simply join our community. We would love to have you.
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