Shownotes
In Inner Peace, Better Health, hosted by Nazish, Greg Pai unpacks the unseen systems quietly shaping how we think, feel, and live.
This episode is for anyone feeling stuck, disconnected, or chasing fulfillment without clarity. Greg shares a powerful lens: the tension between the “voice of the world” and the “voice of the heart.” Listeners walk away with a deeper awareness of how identity, purpose, and peace are influenced—and how to begin reclaiming them.
About the Guest:
Greg Pai is a cross-disciplinary author and systems thinker. His journey spans Wall Street, global humanitarian work, and a decade of exploring forces that impact human potential.
Episode Chapters:
00:00 – Opening: Why peace feels hard to hold
03:40 – Greg’s life as a “puzzle without a picture”
08:15 – The Tree of Light and awakening moment
13:20 – Two voices shaping identity
18:05 – Purpose, peace, and passion explained
22:10 – The hidden systems influencing life
27:45 – Reclaiming awareness and inner alignment
Key Takeaways:
- Peace is disrupted by systems, not personal failure
- Your identity is shaped by competing internal and external voices
- True peace comes from alignment with truth, not absence of conflict
- Early life systems quietly shape adult behaviors and beliefs
- Awareness is the first step toward reclaiming control
How to Connect With the Guest:
Website: VoiceoftheHeartBooks.com
Email: [email protected]
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Transcripts
00:00:07 Nazish: What if inner peace isn't something you find, but something that keeps getting taken? Not dramatically, not all at once, but Through the school you attended, the media you consume, the financial pressures you inherited, the beliefs you Handed to you before you were old enough to question them. Most of us spend years searching for peace without ever asking why it feels so hard to hold on to. Today's conversation is about finally naming what's been in the way.
00:00:40 Nazish: Welcome to Inner Peace Betterhealth, the show where we explore what it truly means to come home to yourself. One honest conversation at a time. I am your host, Nazish, and today my guest is Greg by a cross-disciplinary author and system thinker whose journey has taken him well from Wall Street to humanitarian work in Kenya and the South Asia. Through a profound spiritual awakening and into a decade of mapping the hidden forces that quietly compete for our inner peace. He is the author of The Voice of Heart and the Whispers from the heart. and his work has connected the readers across faiths, tradition, philosophical background. So today we are going to explore something that doesn't get named nearly enough. The invisible architecture around us that disrupts peace from the inside out. Greg, I welcome you.
00:01:43 Greg Pai: Thank you. Nazish. So I'm going to give a little bit of background to lay the groundwork as to how I got to this place where I think I have something very powerful to share with the audience. So imagine a puzzle. Thank you. So imagine a puzzle that comes in a box and there's no picture on the cover, just a bunch of pieces. Ten thousand of them. Well, that was my life for a very long time. See, in that box were pieces that spanned poverty and wealth, diversity across race, ethnicity, culture, faith, religion. I was raised by a single parent for half of my childhood, and then folded into a complex, blended family. And like one of those pieces, I never quite fit in anywhere. And yet, that isolation turned out to be a gift. It actually gave me the ability to see the world from kind of like a forty zero zero zero foot high. Having been so ostracized from it and being so different from it in many ways. So I had all these wonderful experiences. Though I was an accomplished musician, commercial photographer, I went on to build careers at the highest levels of business consulting at places like Pricewaterhouse technology, media and entertainment law, global entrepreneurship throughout Africa, the Middle East, North Africa, as well as Southeast Asia, and then on to Wall Street and finance and now an author. I worked with leaders across all those industries, people that you would know, and success followed me pretty much everywhere I showed up. However, something was missing, actually. Something was really wrong and I couldn't put a name on it until I finally could in this most unusual and unsuspecting way in place. So I had been. Decades later, I'd been in Africa with my family. My wife and I were kind of. We were going to actually a schoolhouse in the Masai Mara, Kenya, and there was a tree in the distance in the back of a sunset. My wife said, take the picture, take the picture. And I was like, I have so many sunsets. But this one looked different. And I would later realize that this was the picture on the puzzle box. So I took the picture. It's called the Tree of Light. It graces the cover of the book, but it's also a very well known photograph around the world. It's been in museums and galleries. It's a very powerful image, but not just for its beauty. What it did to me is it spoke to me and it put all those pieces in the box together. What I saw was something connected to something very vast, bigger, much bigger than myself, much bigger than I thought, anything I ever knew. And it occurred to me that there was this invisible war against humanity. Now you might say, well, how does a tree do that? Well, you're going to kind of see that as the story unfolds. But suffice to say that the tree by itself was a lone acacia tree, beautiful sunset, nothing else around it, but it appeared to thrive in its own. And it also appeared to grace the glory of that sunset in that environment. It was what I called fulfilling its purpose. And it occurred to me that everything in creation has a purpose and fulfillment, like a cycle of well connected design. Even when we create. Like when we make something like when Steve Jobs created the iPhone, he designed it or his team did anyway for a purpose and a market. But there was one thing that did not fit that equation, and that was humanity itself. I realized that humanity was under siege. It was being attacked by something which I can only name as an invisible war at the time. Now, some would frame that as a spiritual idea. I would personally agree with that, but it's not necessarily. It doesn't have to be a spiritual idea. You could be of any denomination or even an atheist, not believe in anything bigger than yourself and come to the same conclusion because there are concepts of that that are universal, like good and evil, pain and pleasure, love and hate. These are ideas that are not debatable. They're the nature of our humanity, the human condition. And what I saw was that there was a manifestation of attack that would basically disrupt our cycle of purpose and fulfillment. So what happened was this photograph just stuck with me. And as time went on, a couple months thereafter, I started to develop the. It almost like unfolded naturally, this idea about this war. And I came to the conclusion very quickly that there are two types of people on this earth those who are openly struggling emotionally, mentally, financially, physically, spiritually, the oppressed, the enslaved, the dependent. And then there's everybody else who are simply unaware that they are struggling, too. And part of the greater struggle that extends beyond the self. You see, I know this because I lived in both camps. I was the person who felt enslaved or felt emotionally detached, empty. I was also the person who felt there was nothing wrong as long as I was chasing the dream, In whatever that dream was. I was doing good, and as long as I was doing better than everyone else, I was doing great. But it did occur to me after that, a moment in that in that environment and that tree, that something was disconnected, something was really missing. So and by the way, I know a lot of people when they're hearing this, they're on either side of that debate and I can fully respect that. All I would say is that be patient. Look at what is your potential and try to be honest about that. I mean, when you read my book, it calls for three things a mirror, a map, and a megaphone. The mirror being looking in the mirror and really seeing yourself and seeing. Are you living your true identity? Are you living a life of truth and peace? Are you passionate about what you're pursuing? I mean, truly passionate. Not just, oh, I can't wait to get that new house or buy that new car, but something that's lasting and enduring. Is there something driving you to a place where ultimately people see you and they say, what is with that person? They just look so happy. They look like they don't live here on this planet with the rest of us. So I realized that the war I had to put an identity because a war has, you know, an antagonist and a protagonist or two parties at least, sometimes more. And I realized that the war was actually kind of taking a place someplace beyond what we could see. The only reason I could conclude that is because I could not. We all like to blame people for everything we like to say, oh, they did it, or that political party is to blame. Or this, my boss is terrible. That's very easy to do. It's very hard to step back and see what is really creating this disruption. I remember as a young adult, when I would see a young kid that would commit a crime, sometimes a heinous crime. And of course, everyone wants to see justice and it is somewhat appropriate to have justice, right? But I always used to ask myself the question, why did that person commit the crime? Well, I empathize with that spirit because I don't think any of us are evil, and I don't think any of us want to do wrong. But I do believe that there's tremendous temptation and pressure to do wrong to ourselves, to our loved ones, and to our fellow men. So the two characters I came up with were these voices. Now you might say, oh my God, this guy's hearing voices. Well, yes, I'm hearing voices. And you do too. From the time you're born, before you can even speak. Before you can even make a sound except cry. Someone's talking to you. People are talking to you. They are planting the seeds of your identity and influence from the day you're born. And it only gets worse from there. And so there's the people that love us. Those are voices. There's our people that we admire. Could be a mentor, a talent, an entertainer. There's the education system. That's a voice. There's our voice in our head. And there's our voice in our heart. There's our voice that, you know, sometimes characterized as a devil and an angel on our shoulders where we're conflicted about something that we're considering. There are many voices that are speaking to us. And I call all those voices the voice of the world. And then there is the voice of the heart, the true voice of the heart, the thing that really separates us from everything else in humanity. I mean, everything else in creation separates us from flowers. It separates us from a donkey. It separates us from the sun. And that is this, this, this something that's special inside of us. I often call it the void. Someplace that needs to be filled and we fill it with different things. Sometimes we fill it with pursuit, materialism. Sometimes we can't get enough love. So we just chase love. We'll, we'll love people that don't love us back. And this is a manifestation of this voice. But the void itself is actually occupied by a very quiet voice. That's the voice of the heart, the voice that we were born with that can determine what our identity is. It can make that choice even after people have already told us who we should be. It could also identify truth, what, you know, the difference between good and evil or black and white. It knows those things and what it doesn't know. It gives us the critical ability to go and pursue and research the truth, not just let someone else tell us, like the news or a politician. And then finally, the passion. Well, I always thought I had passion. In fact, I was passionate about being a giver. I would love giving. Until I realized that the only reason I was giving was because I needed to substantiate myself and also as a means of control. So I actually have an adage that I that was born out of something that many people have heard, don't give a man a fish. I would say don't even teach him to fish. Ask him first if he even wants fish. And you see, even giving can be corrupted. So for me, my giving was corrupted. My passion was corrupted. Also the things that I was chasing, wanting more, wanting more recognition, wanting more success. I later found when I went through this whole evolution, that much of that went back to what I call the soil systems, the systems of family dynamics, education and religion. It went back to me not being properly nurtured and fed as a young adult and a child. So I was pursuing things that I was desperately trying to compensate for the hurts and the wounds. I didn't need to do that, but I was doing that because that's what the world informs us to do. And so these two voices, the loud one, which is the voice of the world and the soft spoken one, the voice of the heart, are going after the spoils of our identity. What are those? Our purpose, peace and passion. You've heard me say that a couple times. Purpose is what defines us. It's who we really are. How many people do we know that go through life? Maybe their father was a doctor, so they become a doctor. They want to emulate their father. Or maybe there was family pressure, and then they get to a point in their career and they say, you know what? I never really wanted to become a doctor. I wanted to be an artist. I want to be a fireman or a teacher. Or maybe I wanted to be a nurse and not a doctor. So purpose is filled or actually occupies or synonymous with our identity. Now, peace is interesting because we think of peace as sort of the opposite of war, but it's not true. Peace is not the absence of debate. It's the presence of truth. We can have peace and have difference of opinion if we are both arguing truth. But if you tell me the sky is, you know, something that it isn't, and it's what we see with our eyes. And that's my position. We can't have peace. We can only have discourse that is never ending. And then finally, the last is passion. Passion is real important. I call it the fire. It's like what really drives us. And I got to tell you, when I converted my, My my giving from giving for me to giving for you. I started to feel passion. I started to love giving and it started to be more fulfilling. And guess what? The people I were giving to appreciated it. A lot of people who are givers will know that the people they give to, they might appreciate them, but that's only on the surface. There's actually a lot of resentment because you're the one that has and they're the one that does not. And so that's never a healthy relationship. But when you're when you when you have this equation straightened out and your passion is fueled by the very things that drive love, what I call an agape love. It's a love that transcends understanding. Then, you know, you're really, you really have passion. You're really loving what you do. You can't wait to get up the next day. And it doesn't matter what else is going on in your life.
00:16:16 Nazish: Absolutely. I mean, that is such a beautiful perspective. I believe, you know, it is a journey and that people live and learn and so much goes on around it. And the first and the foremost thing that you can do is have that awareness about these things. And you picked us in this platform to give that awareness to a lot of people, and I believe it is going to resonate with them, and it is going to feel home to a lot of our listeners today.
00:16:45 Greg Pai: Yeah. And you know, what's beautiful about the book, um, is and it's, it's five hundred pages, so it's not an easy read, but you don't, there's actually a reading plan in the back. So you can do the quick and dirty two hundred page read and still get the essence of it. Or you can take the full trip and you get a lot of my personal story, which is very interesting. And I think what there's the middle section of the book, describes the systems of society. There's twelve of them, and they indelibly connect to that very tree that I mentioned before. Ironically, this was not by design in my mind, because it's so remarkable how everything has come from that tree. Let me describe what I mean. The tree structure represents our life. So there are four parts of the tree, and there are four different parts of the systems or four different categories of systems. So tree start in the soil with roots. So these are called the root systems. And there's three three systems in each part. So the root system includes family dynamics education and religion. This is these are really important because this is where the whole idea of life starts. And you know again, we don't have a whole lot of say in those three areas when we're when we're coming up as children, people are deciding these things for us. Uh, our family dynamic. We could be the middle child and have that middle child syndrome. We could have a single parent that is struggling. We could have two parents that are simply not around because of the burden of working. Um, there's all kinds of dynamics that play into and feed our roots and start to corrupt our soil education. Well, education has become an enslavement system. See, all these systems are infiltrated by the voice of the world. So when we look at education, they have not taught us how to think. They don't teach children any more critical thinking. They teach them road education. It's all standardized testing. Socrates said something very interesting. He said the only knowledge worth having is none at all. So what was he saying? Be ignorant and stupid. No, actually quite the opposite. He was saying that knowledge is not the know. Not knowing something. It's the pursuit of knowing something. It is the pursuit. It's the action of finding something out. So when I was traveling all around the world, I would go to countries that no one wanted to go to. Like I went to Vietnam one time and people said, why do you want to go there? And I said, well, first of all, I know it to be beautiful. I've been out that area. And they said, well, aren't you scared? I said, well, when was the last time you were in Vietnam? They said, I've never been. I've never even been out of the country. I said, well, there you go. You know, Vietnam from what the media has told you, you know, people around the world, you know, have cultures, you know, of people down the road from you on the other side of town because of what someone told you, that's what you actually figured out yourself. So knowledge is the pursuit of education, not the knowledge of education. And that's a very powerful idea because these systems and including religion, which is also a system that unfortunately has been infiltrated. Um, I think first of all, I advocate a spiritual journey, which is an individual pursuit. If someone tells you, hey, you need to be this, you need to be that my religion is better than yours or whatever. You're never going to hear that from me. I believe that the only way you fill the void of spirituality is through your own journey for truth. Period. But you see, the corruption that can happen in this in these soil systems, then feeds up through the trunk systems. And the trunk systems include media and entertainment, news and information technology and data. So just think about if you were kind of the child that was neglected. And then now the roots are feeding the trunk. So the soil is corrupted and the nutrients are coming up in there poisoned. So now your social media addiction is going to amplify the weaknesses in your personality. You're going to see people posting beautiful things about their life, and that's going to hurt you and hit you even harder because you're missing that. Or maybe you, you see that your, your, you know, your people are engaging about you on social media and they're determining who you are versus you knowing who you are. You're letting other people tell you on social media. And that's because there's a hole in your heart that you've been trying to fill from the time you were young. And then, of course, news and information. Well, that's always been a problem. It goes back to the Stone age. Just the idea. You know, someone asked me once, what do you think was the worst event in news and information? I said, the invention of the printing press. I of course it was with a little jest. But we don't we. We use information and news to propagandize, to control, to manipulate. And that's again, the voice of the world. If you want to want news and information, pursue it, research it yourself, and don't look at single sources because even computers will tell you what you want to hear. Now, especially a lot of the AI engines, which are learning about you while you're using them and know how to react to you, respond to you. And then finally, and really a catastrophic one is technology and data. Everyone's scared of the AI, you know, influence and I can understand that. But remember, AI is still always AI. It's still artificial intelligence. It is not human intelligence. It will never be human intelligence. It can only evolve from human intelligence. So it doesn't endanger me. It doesn't scare me. Now, what does scare me is the way mankind will use it to control and manipulate. That does scare me. But the bigger fear with technology and data is the data itself, our digital identities. Because now that we do have a digital footprint that we don't own or control, someone has not only influence over us, they have total autonomous control over us. The last two groups of systems, I'll kind of breeze through them just in the interest of time. One of the branch systems. So from the trunk come the branches. And this is how we reach into society. This is how we find relevance among our human kind. Those are the systems of economics or finance, if you will. Government and social structures, things like friend groups, work relationship, that sort of thing. And what do we do well, like branches trying to kill each other. We try to wrap around or overshadow the other trees. That's not the way we're designed. If you look at a forest, that's not how trees work. In fact, if you could get under the tree and look at the way the root systems interconnect with some trees, like the California redwoods, it would astound you how much better made they are. Now, I'm saying that as a joke because they're not better made than us, but they have better application of their capability than we do. We just try to shadow each other. We try to grow over each other. We try to drop limbs on each other. And those three systems, we have financial systems that are corrupted, that have what I call takers, middlemen, functions that just extract value out of the system. We have government which is overbloated or manipulative in almost every culture, every country on the globe. It's not ever serving the people. I can't think of a single government that does. And then finally, we have social structures. Why do we create social structures? Because we want to be better or different than someone else. Um, so we lose sight. There's nothing wrong with that. But we do lose sight of the community of humanity when we preference our country club group or, hey, this is my bridge group. We play bridge together and there's nothing wrong with that. But is that superseding the community of humanity? And then lastly, the systems, the legacy systems of health and wellness, law, order and justice, and finally, the military industrial complex, which should be weighty on everybody today considering the political geopolitical environment. Those three systems are. They are supposed to support the continuance of humanity. In other words, a lot of creation becomes extinct for one reason or another. Humanity is designed to populate, to grow. However, those systems threaten the cycle of perpetuation. Any one of those three systems can either threaten us in terms of extinction event, or just make us too sick or too much in bondage to fulfill our potential as the human race.
00:25:45 Nazish: you know, if there is one thing that I am going to carry with myself after this conversation is that it you know that the piece you have been reaching out for isn't out of reach because something is wrong with you. It's been interrupted quietly, systematically for a long time. And the moment you you see that clearly, the work of reclaiming it can begin finally.
00:26:11 Greg Pai: Yeah. Actually, I'm so glad you said that. And you picked up on all of my rambling because there isn't anything wrong with this. In fact, there's something awesomely great about us and we just don't know it. I have, you know, I have a saying. It's in the book. If you're at the bottom of a broken Ferris wheel, one of those amusement rides, you can be thankful that you're safely off it, but you can never ride it again until the people at the top are brought safely down. So what does what does that say that says, if you think of, you know, analogous the Ferris wheel to a system of society like education or government or family. If you are okay, you're really not. Because as a creation, we're missing. The most important component is that a community of human race that's almost doesn't exist. And so when you do understand that, guess what? It's not. Now people say, well, you know, I don't really care about that, but hear me out. Everybody is rushing to the self-help books. Everyone is rushing to the therapists. Everybody is rushing to the podcasts. But those don't fix anything.
00:27:34 Nazish: Absolutely.
00:27:35 Greg Pai: They can only put a Band-Aid. And I love all those people because their hearts are right. Most of them, anyway. They want to help. But we've got to fix systems. We got to start with our eye on the prize, which is we're better than this. And there, you said it before. We're not. There's nothing wrong with us, Okay. We have been invaded. Now, whoever you want to call or whatever you want to, you want to make up little characters, fine, I don't care. But we have been invaded because something has found its way in the middle between us and our potential.
00:28:12 Nazish: Absolutely. So, you know, Greg, before we wrap up, I want to ask you, where can our listeners connect with you, with your work, the books in the framework and everything you have been building? Where is the best place?
00:28:28 Greg Pai: Yeah. So, um, the, a lot of the infrastructure for the franchise is getting built out like the website, but there is a website, it's voice of the heart books dot com, but there's not much. There's not much there. However, you can reach me at info I n f o at voice of the heart books dot com. I love to engage with people that want to learn more. People I can help. I try to do as much as I can on an individual basis. So feel free to reach out info info at voice of the heart books plural dot com. The best place to go and just learn a little bit more. And you don't have to buy the book. I recommend you do, but you don't have to. And oftentimes Kindle will do like a free Amazon Kindle will do a free download, things like that. I encourage you to keep an eye on that or follow me on Amazon, but go to the Amazon listings for my books. Just put voice of the heart books. Greg Pie. It will come right up and read what's there in the listing. To get a deeper idea, look at a sample. If you reach out to me, I may send you an abstract from the book. If you say, I'm dealing with this, or can you tell me a little bit more about something, I want to be as helpful as possible. Please don't hesitate. Everybody's got to get this message and everyone will get this message.
00:29:42 Nazish: That is so beautiful. I mean, absolutely beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. And I am pretty sure a lot of our listeners are going to reach out to you and learn from you. And I will mention all these details into the show notes so that it is easy for everybody to connect with you. Great. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. This could this was a connection I know will stay with people, not just as an idea, but as a permission, you know, permission to stop wondering what's wrong with you and start asking what's been in the way.
00:30:15 Greg Pai: Right. And one last thing is this. I encourage all of your guests because I've listened to many of them and they're brilliant. I love what they're doing. I encourage them to get the book because not to change what they're doing, but to add a little icing on the cake, so to speak. And that's what a lot of therapists are doing. They're using the book to create a more powerful adaptation of their own ideas of how people need to be healed, what they should do. There's, there's amazing tools in the book, a lot of exercises. So I hope this is helpful to everybody. And thank you again.
00:30:53 Nazish: Wonderful. I am pretty sure it is going to be helpful to a lot of our listeners and their listeners. You deserve the peace that goes deeper than a good day. Come back to yourself slowly and gently with curiosity. This is inner peace. Better health. Take care and we will see you in next time.
00:31:11 Greg Pai: Thank you.
