Champion Story 38 | Rhea Mehta
Recorded on January 23, 2019
Biography: Rhea Mehta, PhD is a molecular toxicologist, integrative health coach, and healthcare innovator who runs a cutting-edge Canadian company aiming to democratize healthcare by leveraging blockchain and smart contract technology to help individuals safely track, own and share their health and wellness data. She's been working in the fields of research commercialization, health data privacy, and holistic medicine for over 10 years. Most recently, she's been consulting in the psychedelic medicine space with a keen interest in disrupting mental health care and more broadly, chronic disease management.
Rhea’s the founder of Global Smoothie Day, an inclusive wellness movement aimed at making the adoption of a sustainable, plant-based smoothie lifestyle feel achievable and exciting. She also co-founded Reset, a non-profit organization that creates tech-free immersive experiences and 4-day summer camps for adults to help them feel like kids again. Additionally, Rhea is an industry advisory board member for top-ranked McGill University’s Masters in Management Analytics program and serves as longtime ambassador of Sandbox, a global community of passionate trailblazers seeking to create significant impact in our world.
Rhea is a current practitioner at the Center for Advanced Medicine and the Canadian Center for Integrative Health in Toronto, where she works with patients as part of an integrative care system to identify and eliminate toxins within their homes and lives that present as stress in the body and mind. She is also a featured member of the Mind Body Green Collective of global health and wellness experts, owing to her years writing for the platform and contributing as a thought leader in environmental toxicity. In her free time, she also practices and teaches breathwork, mantra, and kriya-kundalini yoga from the ancient Himalayan Vedantic Tradition and is currently working on her first mantra music album.
To start off with, I know that you've had a lot of amazing and diverse experiences before launching Bowhead Health. How did you get here?
It's a very, very long story and I'll do my best to make it interesting. I would say, if I look back on my last 10 to 15 years, one might think that it was all planned out. It wasn't at all. It was very serendipitous and intuitive. I took it day by day. Basically, there's a few key moments that led me to starting Bowhead.
I would say the first one was my PhD. I did my undergrad and biomedical sciences and then I really wanted to work on a project that was my own. I wanted to have my own thing, make my own rules and be my own boss. I always wanted to do that. I didn't fully understand entrepreneurship, but I just knew that I wanted to do my own thing. That led me into a graduate program.
That graduate program was really mentally intense, and I had some health complications. I grew up with a couple of chronic illnesses, one being a chronic autoimmune condition that was later re-diagnosed. I have lived with a lot of chronic pain since age 13. And basically, halfway through my doctorate, I just hit my rock bottom. That was very much a combination of the serious pressures of being a PhD student and having to do the same work every day, full of energy. Having to do things like solve problems all by yourself. Having to do new things every single day and without much support. That was a big moment for me, because I hit my rock bottom. I was bedridden and I couldn't go to the lab.
I was super embarrassed because I was supposed to be a scientist and yet I didn't know how to take care of myself. I thought it was weird that I spent all these years studying “science and "medicine” and “healthcare," but had no idea how to actually take care of my day-to-day self. That was a big, pivotal piece and turning point for me because I basically became the patient.
During that time, I also realized that part of the reason I felt so called to going to graduate school was so that I could become an authority in order to challenge some of the issues that I was experiencing with my own health and happiness around my medical condition. So, it was a big turning point for me, because I started to finally ask different questions and say no.
That opened up a whole new channel. It didn't take that much work. It just took me acknowledging that I wasn't happy with what I was doing. With that, came this really, really important turning point for me. From there, I started to carve an alternative path.
The alternative path would be for myself and all individuals who don't really fit under this one-size-fits-all approach to healthcare. I was helping myself, but I also really wanted to help other people. I already knew about this issue in healthcare because of my doctorate and what I was studying. It all came together. I made myself my own test subject, because a lot of what I was studying was actually relevant to my own life and I just hadn't pieced it together as yet.
I started to explore complementary medicine and personal healthcare. Basically, optimizing mind, body, spirit. Very much like biohacking -- reinventing my entire lifestyle and all while still studying. I was still very driven, but through that process, I started to develop a lot of data that I felt was not just relevant to my own life, but relevant to so many other people I knew. That was where I started to build a platform for sharing. Towards the end of my PhD I was sharing a lot of my anecdotal learnings using a Facebook group. I started my own Facebook group. This was before people were really into groups and social media.
Facebook had just come out during my PhD. I was an early adopter in starting to build out platforms and share. I wasn't doing it at all for business. I was just doing it to share, because I was like, “Holy shit, I landed on this secret sauce and it didn't require any medicine!” It actually required mindfulness and repetition, like daily practice and tension setting. All these beautiful things that really fall under personal development and routine mastery and not so much in the healthcare space.
That's how I started to understand that I was interested in helping people self heal and unlock their healthiest potential. As I started to share more, I learned that other people were benefiting from what I was sharing. So much of it was anecdotal. I was shocked. Here I am, becoming a scientist, and people are benefiting and feeling better from simple daily practices that I'm sharing that are not scientific at all. That was all really interesting for me. From there, I developed this curiosity for starting my own consultancy.
Again, I jumped into it. I thought, “You know, what? I want to work with people. Directly with people and see if I can help them as much as I helped myself.” That turned into me starting my own optimal health consultancy. I worked with changemakers from around the world. I went to different communities all around the world.
First of all, I cultivated a community. I made a bunch of friends. I said to them, “Hey, let me help you reach your goals, but not burn out in the process.” That was my messaging. It was awesome because I got the chance to put together programs that were very much focused on helping people optimize mind and body using mindset, routine mastery, functional nutrition, supplementation.
These weren’t all things that I learned in grad school or in my scientific background. Instead, I learned some of them through self-experimentation and taking care of myself. My scientific background and my PhD helped with credibility and helped me build out my platform. But a lot of what I was sharing was through self-learning during my own healing and health crisis.
What are your values as a founder and as a person? And when you look back at your experience, what has allowed you to discover those values?
Yeah. It's a great question. My values today are very much shaped not so much by what I'm working on, but what I read about and what my communities care about. Before starting Bowhead, I knew a lot of people who moved into business and then found themselves. For me, I found myself and then started a company. So, it's a bit of a different approach where I already knew that I wasn't willing to compromise on self-care.
I made it very, very clear when I first started and when I first joined as co-founder that self-care is my everything. That means I need my morning routine. I would never lose my morning routine. These were all programmed in, so I would never really lose them, but I was very clear about hours and about what comes first. I'm very lucky that I took that approach.
In terms of values, what allowed me to discover my values is all the stuff that I do outside of work that basically allowed me to self-discover. I've done lots of self discovery. I've spent a lot of time working on myself emotionally, spending time on my emotional development, and my personal development.
I started meditating in 2012. And I've found my spirituality by taking care of myself through food and nutrition. I have a plant-based diet, vegan. I have a deep respect for our planet. All of these things, these values, are very much shaped by the time that I spend outside of work to learn about the world around me and spending time cultivating communities.
Reset. Reset is an example. Reset taught me a lot about inclusion, accessibility, equality, justice. That came from a combination of people, my co-founders, and listening to what they care about. Listening and reading and learning. I wouldn't have been able to do any of that if I was like a workhorse spending 24/7 living and breathing blockchain and finance and economics and healthcare.
My values have shifted over time. And now, I have two communities. One is Sandbox, which is my global community, and one is local, which is Reset. Both of those communities really help me shape my values, which I do my very best to embody.
What has helped you heal those parts and make you become a better leader, so that you can serve the way that you do now?
It's very much a combination of a number of different tools.
Step one was realizing that I didn't really have a community for a very long time. I was always moving around and had always moved away from best friends or they moved away. I was also outgrowing a lot of the people who were my immediate friends. I was also left very alone. The first thing I did was have a deep realization and acknowledgement that I didn't have a community and I wanted one.
I did everything in my power to search. I did a bunch of health things to find people in the health space. Then, I would like to go into entrepreneurial things. I did a lot of that. I also feel very lucky and privileged that I had the opportunity to go and travel outside of Canada to explore these communities. That was really critical for my healing, because I found people who were able to hold my heart and not just my mind. Most of my friends were very intellectual and I didn't have people who were actually able to help me be really raw and vulnerable.
When my father passed away, all I wanted to do was cry all the time and I didn't want to be alone. It was the people in my community who really showed up. That's the first thing I always tell people, “Go and find a community and keep going. If you're not vibing it's okay. There's so many groups. You can find them around, like the library. Just go and find a community.” Also, do your part in terms of figuring out what your love languages are and how you can give back into the community and what you can offer as a service.
From there, a number of tools really helped me, but journaling and meditation were huge in terms of really allowing me to feel and helping me to understand that I didn't have to numb my emotions.They helped me to actually recognize my feelings, let them be there and learn how to actually breathe them out or let them go or distance myself from them.
I basically found these different practices, these different tools that I really resonated with because only we can know our own personalized protocol. You have to go and explore a bunch of different tools and see what you want to do the next day that you just did today. Is there one of those tools that was interesting that you want to keep going? I found communities around those different tools. I found a meditation community. I found a journaling community. I found a heart-centered community. I found all these communities that were centered around things that I knew would help me better face my demons and step into my truth more. I would say those are the main ones.
The thing is, a lot of people might be freaking out because they don't know where to go. Before I even knew where to go, because I was new to Toronto, I'm from northern Ontario, I was always kind of a loner. Like I mentioned, I was always traveling on my own. So, all I started doing is setting my intention. All kinds of things that were probably already happening, but weren't in my awareness because I wasn't looking for them, intention helped me find.
For the longest time, for a lot of my friends, every party I would go to, I would be “the intention person.” I've been doing it for so many years because it brought me so much value. It takes a lot of the work out of it. You don't actually have to know how to get there. Just be very intentional. All that's doing is bringing you back into the present moment. It's a very, very powerful exercise that allowed me to then attract these different tools and practices.
From there, I got clarity on which ones resonated and I kept going. If meditation does not work for you, for a certain person, there's no reason why we should do something that irritates us.
When you think about our entrepreneurial and tech community, what can people do to help move mental health forward?
I mean, step number one is to start to share our own struggles and journeys.
Every single person has struggled with stress, unless they've lived their entire life fully enlightened. There's a very low chance that's happened for a majority of people. I think we have to start creating spaces where we can openly share stories, personal journeys and personal anecdotes around our mental health struggles or even moments of championing mental health. Where we share what we've done to accomplish X, Y and Z and how we've been able to get out of these dark tunnels. I think having this space to share is step number one. And, having a support system around us so we can share.
And then, I think it’s about having opportunities to actually practice and build a routine. Everything takes work, but after a certain amount of practice it's like riding a bike. After a certain amount of practice, you just do it. You know how to do it and it's not hard anymore. It actually becomes really fun and easy and joyful. Just like anything else, you spend 20 to 30 days meditating. Eventually you'll have programmed it in.
And the last thing is allowing ourselves to be more vulnerable, and carving that into the work environment as leaders. Carving in the spaces in the schedule for people to have mental health breaks. All I can do is talk about my personal experience as a founder to try and inspire our team to go and explore on their own. I’m not directive, telling them to do this or do that, because that's really unfair and takes people away from their personal freedom, and then, of course, they become resistant.
By offering tools and creating the flexibility in one's schedule to go and practice if they don't want to. If they just want to play a video game or whatever it is, that's fine. But creating the structure and building that into the daily routine and then doing it.
And embodying those values yourself. For founders and leaders, our teams are watching us. If we say something, but do something else, obviously they're not going to take it seriously. We have to like to live and breathe those values.
Thank you so much for sharing your story and your perspective. I appreciate the honesty and vulnerability with which you share. Thank you for being part of this.
You're so welcome.