Episode 003: Trusting Life with Nahal Farhi

Nahal Farhi came to the U.S. from Iran in 2006 and built the tech career she was supposed to want — good companies, good pay, good standing. Her heart, as she puts it, was never in it.

Then, in 2014, a phone call shattered her world: her father had ALS, combined with frontotemporal dementia. She watched the dearest person in her life fade, in a family of scientists with "not much internal resources to hold that pain." Grief became the doorway.

In this episode of Del be Del, I sit down with Nahal for an honest, heartfelt conversation about the ten-year path that grief opened — a book that felt like a download, Zen halls, silent Vipassana retreats, ayahuasca ceremonies from Peru to the Amazon — and about what all that practice turned out to be for, when she found herself in Iran as war broke out. Not once. Twice.

Nahal will correct me on one thing herself, and it matters: she didn't quit tech. She was laid off — and made the decision she wasn't going back. What followed was terror before freedom: the money fear, her mother's worry, the identity crisis of having no job title — until a moment on a bathroom floor in the middle of a ceremony, a stranger crying in her lap, made her calling "clear as light."

And we go deep on Iran. A five-week family visit that placed her in Tehran the night the 12-day war began — waking to an explosion and telling herself it was just the garden door. Flying back months later for Noruz and a sick aunt, five days before the second war. Two months without internet. A twelve-story building collapsing at the end of her childhood block. Three-hour meditation sits. And what actually kept her up at night — the arguments inside a family that loved each other, "not because of the bombs." This is one heart's view of days that millions lived.

When I suggest that her decade of practice equipped her for all of it, she pushes back: there were moments she wasn't centered, moments she took the bait. That honesty is the episode. And we end where Nahal's wisdom lands deepest — on surrender: "Let's dance with life... can I trust life enough that I'm held?"

Del be Del means "heart to heart" in Persian. This podcast is about honest, heartfelt conversations — the stories we live but rarely tell, and the conversations we don't have often enough.

If something in this conversation stayed with you, I'd love to hear about it. Leave a comment and tell me what resonated, who you'd like to hear from, or what you would have asked if you were sitting in this room. And if you'd like more conversations like this one, subscribe on YouTube or follow Del be Del on Spotify and Apple Podcasts — it's the best way to make sure the next conversation finds you.

Until next time — take care of your heart, and the hearts around you.

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