A Conscious Wellness Voyage With Soniyaa Kiran Punjabi

In a compelling conversation with Augusta Mirchandani, Soniyaa Kiran Punjabi shares a perspective on wellness that is both practical and deeply introspective.

As the founder of Illuminations, she has spent nearly two decades helping individuals understand a powerful truth: stress is not simply something that happens to us; it is something we participate in, often unconsciously.

This episode moves beyond surface-level self-care. It explores the architecture of the subconscious mind, the intelligence of the nervous system, and the responsibility we hold in shaping our internal world.

Find Your Preferred Platform

Rewiring The Subconscious:

Mastering Energy, Nervous System Regulation, And The Art Of Conscious Living

The Moment That Changed Everything

At 19, Soniyaa experienced the sudden loss of a close friend in a car accident. The tragedy forced an uncomfortable reckoning:

Life is fragile, unpredictable, and far shorter than we assume.

Ambition, deadlines, and carefully constructed life plans suddenly felt secondary. The deeper question became unavoidable:

What are we actually here for?

Determined to understand suffering at its root, she immersed herself in psychology, energy work, and hypnosis. Her search eventually took her to India, where she spent six months studying wellbeing traditions at their source. What she encountered was not mysticism for its own sake, but frameworks for understanding the mind and regulating the body.

When she boarded her flight back to Dubai, she noticed something subtle yet profound: her reactions had changed. The same stressors no longer triggered the same responses. That observation became the foundation of her life’s work.

Building A Wellness Platform Before Wellness Was Popular

In 2006, conversations around mindfulness and nervous system regulation were not mainstream in the UAE. Wellness was often dismissed as indulgent or “woo-woo,” particularly in corporate environments.

Soniyaa saw something different.

She noticed practitioners working quietly from their homes, hesitant to position themselves alongside established professions. So she built a platform that would legitimise inner work not as an alternative to success, but as its foundation.

That platform became Illuminations.

What began as a modest initiative has grown into a centre that blends therapy, coaching, energy modalities, and structured training. Today, it operates not only as a healing space but as an academy, equipping individuals to become practitioners themselves across the Middle East.

The Core Philosophy: Inside First

At the heart of Soniyaa’s work is a simple but confronting idea:

We are conditioned to seek external solutions for internal problems.

Promotion for self-worth.
Distraction for anxiety.
Achievement for validation.

She argues that most burnout is not caused solely by workload, but by unexamined belief systems and an overactivated nervous system. In her framework, understanding causality reduces fear. When clients see how childhood conditioning, perception patterns, and physiological responses interact, symptoms begin to feel less mysterious and therefore less overwhelming.

One of her more striking observations is that modern distraction has become a coping mechanism. Endless scrolling, streaming, or comfort consumption temporarily regulates the nervous system. The issue is not the behaviour itself, it’s the unconscious dependency on it.

Emotional Fitness As Daily Practice

Soniyaa compares emotional resilience to muscle development:

It cannot be built in a single effort. It requires consistency.

She introduces the concept of “energy hygiene”, the idea that, just as we shower to cleanse the body, we must consciously clear the emotional residue accumulated from conversations, environments, and digital exposure.

A central tool she teaches is heart-brain coherence. The practice is deceptively simple:

Place a hand on the heart.
Recall a genuine memory of safety or gratitude.
Inhale for five counts.
Exhale for ten.

Within minutes, the body shifts from sympathetic overdrive (fight-or-flight) to parasympathetic regulation (rest-and-digest).

Over time, she explains, this reshapes baseline reactivity. The emphasis is not on intensity but repetition.

Legacy Beyond Revenue

For Soniyaa, impact outweighs income. Her purpose is to help individuals take full responsibility for their internal state, not in a self-blaming way, but in an empowering one.

Through in-person work at Illuminations and digital certification programmes, she is expanding that mission globally. The goal is not dependency on a guru, but education, giving people the frameworks to understand and regulate themselves.

Because when individuals understand their own nervous system and subconscious patterns, they stop feeling at the mercy of circumstance.

They begin creating deliberately.

Redefining Success Through Inner Authority

This conversation is not about wellness trends. It is about psychological literacy.

It asks a confronting question:
If we learned to manage our inner world with the same seriousness we apply to our careers, what would change?

For Soniyaa Kiran Punjabi, the answer is clear:

Everything, and for the better.

Listen to the full episode to discover Soniyaa’s insights on mastering your inner world, regulating stress, and creating a life of conscious wellbeing.

Find Your Preferred Platform