Mindful & Millionaire

#5 Maggie Doyne: Look for those moments that turn you upside down

• Steffy Roos du Maine • Episode 5

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In this episode of the Mindful and Millionaire podcast, we encounter some exciting topics revolving around spirituality and purpose. We are sitting down with Maggie Doyne, the founder of the Blink Now Foundation and best-selling author of the book Between the Mountains and The Sky. Some great insights to look out for in this interview. 

Key Takeaways:

  • Her story of moving to Nepal and working in partnership with the community there
  • What are some things that she learned by herself along the way?
  • Change is slow; it’s organic. It’s not something that happens overnight; it happens over generations 
  • If you do all the right things, if you do good, if you try to make a difference, life will reward you
  • Education is one of the world’s greatest equalizers

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Photo credit: Stance Photography.

Steffy Roos du Maine: Welcome to the Mindful & Millionaire podcast. I'm Steffy Roos du Maine and I'll be interviewing the most inspiring guest on the culmination of spiritual growth and business success.


Maggie Doyne is the founder of the BlinkNow Foundation. This nonprofit organization empowers the youth and community of Surkhet in Nepal. This year, her first book has been published called Between the Mountain and the Sky: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, Healing, and Hope.


Welcome, Maggie. It's great to have you on this podcast. 


Maggie Doyne: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to chat.


Steffy Roos du Maine: I'm really excited, too. I know your story, of course. I read your book and I saw a documentary about what you do. Can you take us a bit in your life because it's so amazing? For me, it's hard to sum it up in a few words but maybe you can. What are you busy doing now? 


Maggie Doyne: I live and work in Nepal, in the western region. I raise children. We specialize in orphan care and in working with vulnerable women and children. We have a school and a women's center and all kinds of sustainable programs looking at how children can thrive and grow in a community after war, or from being victims of poverty. We call ourselves the BlinkNow Foundation.


Steffy Roos du Maine: What I really liked about you was that I read in your book that colonialism with a good heart is still colonialism. I like that you have this holistic approach to doing good, I feel. Can you tell us a bit more about that?


Maggie Doyne: Yeah. In the beginning of the journey, I knew that I wanted to help but I didn't know what help looked like. I learned early on that often our idea of development is going into countries and showing how we want things done. I was really just wanting to learn and listen, and address the issues that the people themselves saw as the needs in their own community and then just be a part of the puzzle and bringing resources in and helping create a plan, and some initiatives around that. That ended in me moving to Nepal and living and working in partnership with the community there and unexpectedly becoming an adopted mother. 


There was a huge amount of learning and I think deep partnerships that went into figuring out for us what change looked like, what a healthy thriving community looked like, what working with vulnerable impoverished children and communities looked like. A lot of the beginning of the book is just learning and figuring out what it looks like.


Steffy Roos du Maine: Listening and instead of just pushing, maybe. 


Maggie Doyne: Which is really hard when you're from a different culture and you have a different background and you speak a different language because a lot of times you go in and you're like certain issues look really black and white, and like this child marriage is wrong, the practice of chhaupadi is wrong. Chhaupadi is a cultural practice where menstruating women and girls sleep in cowsheds. The corporal punishment for kids being beaten is wrong. As you see through learning in the bucket wasn't as simple as just being like, this is right, this is wrong, this is black and white; it was really about creating a team and a community and a system to address those issues and have the people themselves decide what was right and wrong for them in their own culture.


Steffy Roos du Maine: What is the biggest thing you learned from all of this by yourself because you learn a lot of things, such as how to help others, but it's also some things you learn about yourself?


Maggie Doyne: I thought in the beginning that I could just throw my body into this situation and things would get better. I thought a lot of the solutions were really simple. When this journey started, I was only 18-19 years old, or so. With that, came this really amazing youth, passionate invincibility, anything-is-possible perspective like this pride, like, "Let's just do this. Let's just make the world better." I think that got me really, really far because passion and grit and building a team get you really far. 


I think what I learned is that change is really slow and it's organic and it doesn't happen overnight; it happens over generations and over years, and maybe I came in really strong. I needed my co-founder, Tope, who you've read about in the book. He was always there to temper and soften and quiet, like, "Just take our time, do what we can. We can't help everybody." I really needed to surround myself with that perspective because I went in with a lot of love, a lot of passion, a lot of fierceness, and I had to soften that. I had to learn by myself that I had to soften. I had to also take care of myself on that journey, and that's what I'm still learning. I don't think I've mastered it yet. 


Steffy Roos du Maine: A balance between taking care of others and taking care of yourself is just probably the hardest balance to find if you're that passionate as you are. I heard you say and I thought it was probably a good thing that you're that young when you started—only 18—because she didn't think of all the hurdles. Maybe it's a good thing that you didn't know how hard it was going to be because you just did it with a lot of passion, just went for it. Do you think you still have that passion? Do you need that?


Maggie Doyne: I think I needed that to get started if I knew all the hard things and the complexities and the hardships that would lie ahead. I would have gone at it differently. I think in the world today, there's a lot of waiting for, like, "I'll do that when I'm more established. Yeah, I'll do that when I'm retired," or "I'll give back when I have more money," or "I'll do that when I have my family or when I have that degree." think I really went at it with this, like, "No, there's no time to wait. We have to do this right now. We can't have children suffering in our world. There are repercussions to that." That was how I jumped in and I still have that passion and that fierceness, and that drive, but it comes with more wisdom and more learning, and more years at it. 


Steffy Roos du Maine: Maybe a bit of both—the experience, the hard work, and passion.  


Maggie Doyne: I think I have the team now, which is really important like the last decades and 15 years missed in building a team and realizing that you have to go at it together with the group, and it's been great. I love that we had no resources. I think a lot of times we'd go in with huge multi-million-dollar budgets and plans, and we're going to do this big thing. I love that the foundation of BlinkNow is about doing one thing or one small thing, one small step, one small action, and then letting it grow slowly and really organically. When you don't have huge amounts of money or resources, you make sure that everything – you don't have room for a lot of failures, just like making a mistake, so it helped us. It helped our own journey as an organization doing this work for sure.


Steffy Roos du Maine: It's beautiful. This podcast is, of course, called Mindful & Millionaire. It's about the connection between spirituality and success. I'm wondering what spirituality means to you because I read about satsang and you feel your spiritual deepness inside you? What does it mean to you? It's a deep question.


Maggie Doyne: Spiritually, for me, has been being quiet and present enough to listen to my own inner voice and my heart and a connectedness with the human family and compassion, and knowing that we're all the same—we all want the same things in life. I found a lot of solace in nature and in quiet meditation, the ability to dream and have a vision, but then work really hard for that, and working and envisioning a world that we want to live in. I think I also embraced that there's a mystery element to it all. A lot of times when I looked for the answers to the question of why, why, why, like, why are we born into a certain place or a certain time and someone else isn't. There aren't really answers to those questions. 


Rather than making sense of it, I think my spiritual practice has been to get into how we can create more equality, more opportunity, more insurance so that the rest of our human family will have their most basic human needs and rights met. I think in the yoga world, they call that being a karma yogi. 


Steffy Roos du Maine: Yeah, true. 


Maggie Doyne: A theme in the book is the questioning of just not being able to make sense of it, but knowing that something isn't exactly right here in wanting to change it. 


Steffy Roos du Maine: There's a beautiful piece in your book, you said something like, this girl could have been me in another life, or I could have been her sister in another life, but now we live like this. It's like we're all one but we're not.


Maggie Doyne: There was this saying during the pandemic that it was basically how "We're not in the same boat, we're in the same storm, but not all of us are riding in the same boat." I thought I'm going to watch that quote, but it's true, we're all in this together but we're not because what we have and where we start are so vastly different. We have so much of our humanity on the brink of survival and trying to survive every day. It's really interesting to be in this time and place of all of us are so different. 


Steffy Roos du Maine: How was it there? How was it grown? How did you survive? I can imagine already you're working with kids, it's hard to have a home for them, and then something like this happens. How do you deal with it? 


Maggie Doyne: When I wrote the book, part of that practice, for me, was going back and looking at my 18-year-old self and reliving a lot of that story in that journey and that falling, and that loss. What I realized is, like, "Oh, my God! I went through so much, so much loss and grief."


There's this narrative in our world that if you do all the right things, if you do good, if you try to make a difference, if you are generous if you're kind, if you're loving, if you're spiritual and you pray enough, or you go to church enough, in a mosque or a temple, whatever it is, good things will happen to you, and I definitely subscribe to that. I was just like, "Do hard work, anything's possible, and do the right thing and life will reward you, and good things will come your way." 


I think when I lost Robbie and when I went through multiple losses of children and people close to me, I realized that that is just not true. You can do all the good in the world and try to make all the difference in the world and bad things will still happen, and you'll still feel suffering and you'll still feel hopelessness. In the beginning, that was really hard for me to come to terms with, but I also didn't want that to be the end of my own journey. At the end of the day, I was still a mother and I still had a family, and I still had hope. I'm still incredibly grateful to have been given support like I needed every kind of counseling in the world, every kind of intervention in the world to get myself back. 


I still found love again, and I still found joy again. I still found that purpose and I'm still at it. I think it's just about perseverance and sticking to it and not understanding the why of it all. When our time is up, our time is up. I think it's definitely been the kids though who have made me feel more hope than anything in the world, more joy and more belief and what is possible, but that comes with "With great love comes a lot of suffering," worry and attachment, I guess, attachment to them. This is incredibly hard.


Steffy Roos du Maine: Especially attachment, I think it's like what might be a spiritual practice to detach more, but it's hard if you work with kids you love. It's hard. 


Maggie Doyne: How to love without attachment, I haven't figured that out yet.


Steffy Roos du Maine: That's the hard one. You already talked something about your purpose. You were really young I think when you found your purpose. Can you tell us a bit about that? How did you know, like, "This is it, this is why I am here, this is what I'm going to do" because a lot of people have trouble finding purpose? Maybe you can give a bit of insight on that.


Maggie Doyne: Yeah. I think I was so lucky to be able to find that really young. In leadership coaching, they tell you there's a full-body yes, a full-body, like, "This is what I have to do; I didn't even see another path." I would just say my advice would be look for those moments that just turn you upside down. It was a whole body, like, "I have to do this, I have to try to solve this problem. I want to stay. I want to figure this out. I want to get answers to these questions." Through that questioning and through that process, it's led me to this life, that I have found purpose, and I have found meaning. Not all the answers to the questions want to start to do it all in a really beautiful life. 


I think look for those moments that really stop you in your tracks and be willing to listen and follow your heart. Do what excites you. Do what makes you feel like you're going to come alive. When you see something that you want to change, take a step towards changing it. Just take one little baby step and ask that question or dig in. I think that has always led me to a good path.


Steffy Roos du Maine: Maybe not to think about all the problems and hurdles, just make a step and we'll see. 


Maggie Doyne: Do that one baby step, the one human kindness, the one act of generosity, the one act of giving back, the one act of love will lead you to another step, and then another step, and then another step, just being present enough to bear witness to it all. Because I think in this world that we're living in, there's just so much being thrown at us all the time like distraction and we have to survive and we have our jobs and we have our family, and we have stuff to buy and do schedules.


In that distraction and the constant go, go, go of it all, there's very little time for self-reflection or quiet. The most incredible things that happened in my life happened in those moments of pause, those moments of quiet, those moments of like, "Oh, something's not right here, let me just stop and think through this a bit." Our culture and our modern-day society don't allow for a lot of quiet, or a lot of questioning, or a lot of stillness. That's my advice.


Unfortunately, there are a million causes and a million things that need doing in this world of ours because we're in a really tough place. I don't know what it'll take for the world to collectively and conscientiously get to a time and a place of peace and less suffering. I do know that education is one of the world's greatest equalizers, a world where children are educated and safe and loved and nourished will lead us there. I know that to be true.


Steffy Roos du Maine: You've seen it firsthand.


Maggie Doyne: I know that to be true and that's what I've decided to plug away at and chip away at because I know it works. That's what I decided to dedicate my life to because I believe in it. 


Steffy Roos du Maine: It's beautiful. You wrote the book—your story—sharing it with us. What do you hope your book will inspire others to do? What do you hope for the book to achieve? 


Maggie Doyne: Year after year, we would be portrayed maybe in the media—on CNN or The New York Times and Forza (ph), her show was game-changing for us. It was an episode. It was seeing a day in the life or a few days in the life. I wanted the opportunity. Year after year, I felt like there were a few levels deeper, that I wanted to go to talk about and find words to process, what I had gone through and just the story of our family in my own journey. 


To be honest, I just wrote the book for me and my own healing and of my own journey that I was on, and I wrote it for the kids because you realize life is so precious and I wanted something to really pass on to them. The third reason was I just want to help someone else who's struggling with these same questions or the same unknowing, or is on a similar journey of love, grief. I felt like I had more I wanted to say than had just scratched the surface really quickly, and running the nonprofit and the hustle of it all and just all the good stories getting out there. 


I just wanted to take a moment of pause to also share the truths and more depth of the complexities of what I was going through personally, but we, as an organization, we're going through and the other players involved. I wanted to bring the other characters to life because the other thing about the media, to go back to what I was saying, is it was a story that was very much about me and I was very centered. I wanted a chance to talk about the founding story and all the other people involved. It was just something I needed to do for me, I guess.


Steffy Roos du Maine: It sounds beautiful.


Maggie Doyne: I write my own story in the way that the kids would have it.


Steffy Roos du Maine: That's nice. Now, other people can enjoy it and be inspired by it, too.


Maggie Doyne: I know.


Steffy Roos du Maine: I'm sure. What I wonder is—because the show is always about success and how it can go along with frugality—with success, we normally measure it in euros or profits, you have a nonprofit organization and your mission is to help a lot of people, how do you define success? What does being successful mean to you?


Maggie Doyne: Oh...


Steffy Roos du Maine: Another hard question. 


Maggie Doyne: At the beginning of my journey, the culture that I was raised and taught me that get into the good college, the right university, find the right job, have enough money to buy a house, a nice house. The fast track to success is very tied to material wealth and getting into the right name of the right place and the who's who of it all. My own experience taught me something very different like the greatest joy, the greatest accomplishment, the greatest sense of success in my life has only come from love. 


Money expands and it grows and you can invest it. It's a certain energy in a sense, and it can do a certain thing. Love is the same, it's such an incredible force in this world. Just helping others and creating a world with more love and more quality and giving back, and generosity has brought me more joy and love than I could ever imagine. It's just an expanding force. I think I stopped chasing what I thought, what I was told things looked like and started tasting something different, and I'm really grateful for that. I love that. I've had a beautiful life because of that. I think we could use more love in this world.


Steffy Roos du Maine: Absolutely. A question I always ask on the show—I'm going to finish with that question, I think I know the answer—do you feel rich and what does feeling rich mean to you? 


Maggie Doyne: Oh, my gosh! I feel so rich, I think rich in love, rich in family, rich in good health like I'm healthy. I think richness, for me, lies in having enough food to eat, having a roof over my head and a warm blanket at night, and a safe family without rockets pouring down on us; the threat of war, violence. I think the greatest richness is to be able to be alive and just breathe every day and have children breathing and laughing, and joy.


I think if you measured richness in family and love, I'd be one of the richest women in the whole world. Instant motherhood—I feel incredibly grateful.


Steffy Roos du Maine: Thank you for your inspiring words. It's such a cool story you have. I love being able to interview you and hear a bit more about everything. 


Maggie Doyne: Really deep questions there. 


Steffy Roos du Maine: Really?


Maggie Doyne: You bet.


Steffy Roos du Maine: I liked it. I mean, you wrote a whole book so people can read that.


Maggie Doyne: Thank you so much. Thanks for inviting me to the show and for the book, too.


Steffy Roos du Maine: I will share it everywhere.


Maggie Doyne: Thank you. 


Steffy Roos du Maine: Thank you. 


Maggie Doyne: All right. 


Steffy Roos du Maine: Nice meeting you.


Maggie Doyne: Have a great day. Good to meet you, too. I'll be in touch. 


Steffy Roos du Maine: Yes. Thank you. Bye. 


Maggie Doyne: Bye. 


Steffy Roos du Maine: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Mindful & Millionaire podcast. I hope you enjoyed and got inspired. You'll find all the interesting links and information in the show notes. Let's keep in touch on Instagram, steffyroosdumaine, and I'll be super grateful when you will rate, review or share this podcast.


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