Episode 130: Creative Magnetism & Nervous System Healing: Truth, Chronic Illness, and Returning to Yourself with Nitika Chopra
Podcast
Episode 130: Creative Magnetism & Nervous System Healing: Truth, Chronic Illness, and Returning to Yourself with Nitika Chopra
“Your nervous system has to feel safe enough to receive the life you’re trying to create.” — Nitika Chopra
This episode is your invitation to reconnect with your body, truth, and creative life force. I’m joined by Chronicon founder, host, and brand spokesperson Nitika Chopra for a deep conversation about nervous system healing, creativity, chronic illness.
Nitika shares the life-altering experience of being diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, a rare neuromuscular disease. After years in the self-help world and building a successful business centered around wellness and chronic illness advocacy, she found herself at a point that forced her to reevaluate everything.
Through nervous system work, bioenergetics, and somatic practices, Nitika began reconnecting to what she calls the “pure” version of herself, the unfiltered, truthful version underneath it all. We explore how creativity changes when you stop creating from survival mode and begin creating from truth.
We also talk about the evolution of creativity in business, from building Chronicon to learning how to support herself while holding space for others. Nitika shares her perspective on creative magnetism, why authenticity creates impact, and how trusting yourself can completely transform the way you work and create.
Whether you’re navigating burnout, chronic illness, creative blocks, or craving a more aligned way of living and working, this episode is a reminder that your creativity thrives when your nervous system feels safe enough to receive the life you are trying to create.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or on your favorite podcast platform while you cook, clean, or create. Get the full show notes & transcript below.
Questions to Reflect On:
Sit with these questions: Journal, take them on a walk, create a voice note, chat with a friend, or sit with a cup of tea and reflect on them.
Leave a comment on Substack or connect with us on Instagram @chefcarlacontreras & @nitikachopra to share your takeaway from the episode.
Where in my life am I creating from survival instead of alignment?
What helps my nervous system feel safe enough to receive support, creativity, or rest?
What parts of myself have I been performing instead of honestly expressing?
How does my body communicate when something is no longer aligned?
What does “creative magnetism” actually feel like in my body?
xo Carla
PS: Substack curious? Listen to the podcast episode about building your new digital home on Substack here.
Disclaimer: Always seek the counsel of a qualified medical practitioner or other healthcare provider for an individual consultation before making any significant changes to your health, lifestyle, or to answer questions about specific medical conditions. If you are driving or doing an activity that needs your attention, save the energy practice for later. This podcast is for entertainment and information purposes only. Note: Some of these are affiliate links. I receive a small percentage of the sales. I appreciate your support of my small Latina & women owned business.
SHARE THE PODCAST
Wherever you are listening, please rate, review + subscribe to Nourishing Creativity. Send the podcast to your friends, post in your stories on Instagram & tag me @chefcarlacontreras
Nitika Chopra
Nitika Chopra is the founder and CEO of Chronicon and The Chronicon Foundation, organizations dedicated to transforming the lives of people with chronic illnesses by expanding access to healing, empowerment, and community. Living with psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis since childhood, Nitika has become a leading voice in wellness equity, bringing visibility and compassion to an often-overlooked community.
Since launching Chronicon in 2019, she has cultivated a thriving ecosystem that reaches tens of thousands through digital content, live events, and strategic partnerships. In 2024, Nitika expanded her mission with the launch of The Chronicon Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit designed to make transformative support more accessible, particularly for underserved communities. That same year, she spearheaded a national multi-city tour, bringing education, resources, and inspiration directly to local communities.
Nitika’s work has been amplified through collaborations with leading organizations such as Google, Microsoft, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GSK Stiefel, Healthline, She Media, QVC, and Carrot Fertility, where she has championed inclusive health narratives and increased representation for marginalized voices. She has hosted more than 200 events, creating spaces where authenticity, vulnerability, and community thrive.
In addition to her work with Chronicon, Nitika served as the host of Naturally Beautiful, a globally distributed talk show celebrating diverse beauty and holistic wellness. A dynamic entrepreneur, speaker, and community builder, Nitika continues to inspire audiences by redefining what it means to live with chronic illness and by creating spaces that prioritize connection, inclusion, and radical self-love.
Find + Work With Nitika Chopra
Carla (00:01):
Welcome to Nourishing Creativity. The cycle of the last few years has left you and me feeling mentally, physically, emotionally and creatively drained. Nourish your very full life through interviews with creatives and entrepreneurs about how they create and move through their creative blocks. If you don't know me, I'm Chef Carla Contreras, a food stylist and content strategist. You can find me Chef Carla Contreras across all social media platforms and more information in today's show notes. Nitika, welcome to the podcast. I am so excited to have you here. Can you introduce yourself and how you serve your community?
Nitika (00:49):
I am the founder and CEO of Chronicon and the president of the Chronicon Foundation. I am a host and a brand spokesperson, and I really focus all my work on empowering those who are navigating and living with chronic conditions. And we can get into all of it, but that's kind of a high level.
Carla (01:06):
Can you tell us the last experience that sparked creativity for you?
Nitika (01:11):
Oh my gosh. I feel like you're catching me in a really exciting time. So I feel like in the last week alone, my birthday was a few days ago. And so I just have been in such a portal just a little over a week ago last week. I was on Good Morning America and I did this whole part of this campaign that I was hired to be a spokesperson for. A lot of press was around it. And so I was able to do that. And it's not so much about the press specifically, but one of the things you and I have talked about privately and that I do talk about a bit in my work too, is just how much I've had to really shed so many layers that are not serving me. And I personally think that chronic illness is very connected to the way that we feel in scarcity and in lack in our bodies and in our lives.
(02:09)
And I've had to just really work on that. And so I've had a lot of other times in my career where there's been exciting things and so it's not like the first time, but I will say this feels like the first time I've actually received it. Even for my birthday, it was the same kind of feeling. It was just like, I've had great birthdays before. It's not like someone did some one thing that was like, oh my God, this has never happened in my life. It's not that, but my position with everything, my ability to receive everything is just at another level.
Carla (02:44):
Do you think that that is because of your bioenergetics training? I
Nitika (02:50):
Think that it's because of a couple of trainings that I've been doing. So I started doing nervous system work in 2022, and I did that with my coach, my nervous system practitioner, Amy. And we started working together because I had gotten diagnosed with a rare neuromuscular disease at the time. And it was really an extreme rock bottom moment for me. And it really felt like I had been doing all of these things in my life. I've been in the self-help world for as long as I can remember. And you and I connected back when I started my first company, Bella Life, and I've just been a positive, wanting to think the best of everything kind of person for so much of my life. And then to start a company like Chronicon that's all about empowering folks with their health, and then to get hit with such an extreme condition, myasthenia gravis can be fatal.
(03:48)
It is really scary. My grandmother had it for most of her adult life and it is traumatizing. I stopped being able to talk. I stopped being able to see properly. I couldn't swallow food. And I literally couldn't go outside without short circuiting. My brain just felt like it was short circuiting. And this went on for months and months and months before I got diagnosed. And so it was a moment for me to be like, okay, I'm intuitive enough to know something is going on. Something is trying to get my attention. Everything else has not been it. I thought those other things were it, but it wasn't. And so I started working on my nervous system and it changed everything about my life, which is what nervous system work can do when you work with the right person because we are often acting from a fight or flight place when we aren't actually under literal threat.
(04:47)
And so that then has our entire lives reflect a more fight or flight experience versus a parasympathetic rest and digest experience. And I think that's what people don't necessarily understand about nervous system work. It's not just one thing. So in doing that, that then led me to meeting this woman, Sherry, who is one of the founders of this interpretive somatics school. And it's based on the study of bioenergetics, but it has a bunch of other things like mixed in. And I met her about a year ago. Yeah, just about a year ago. And I went to her retreat and it was totally life shifting, life altering in a different way than the nervous system work was. It was very much in this way of really stepping into the full energy of who I am. That is the most basic way I could say it. We do that through practices and different sort of exercises, group work, all of that.
(05:49)
And now, yeah, I'm in school to become a practitioner. It's really been a long journey.
Carla (05:56):
That's amazing. How do you define creativity when it comes to your work?
Nitika (06:02):
I've always had to kind of define it for myself because I feel like I didn't really have a lot of role models of people who were doing things like the way that I wanted to do them. And even just dealing with my health as extremely as I had for so many years, even when I started my first company, I was 28. And just a few years before that, I was bedridden for the first half of my 20s. I didn't have the same trajectory that so many other people had where they were like, "Okay, I'm going to go to NYU, and then I'm going to get this amazing internship, and then I'm going to go to business school, and then I'm going to do all these things." That was not at all my reality. And so I had to, from the very, very, very beginning, be creative about the ways that I was going to work that were going to really support me physically and have my own rhythm.
(06:57)
Even to this day, I really pack in so much rest in my work. And I think that's so counterintuitive when you're running a company and doing all these different partnerships and being on social media and all this stuff. I constantly have to remind myself, you do not have to keep up with anyone. You just have to be on your own rhythm. But I would say that's been a huge part of my creativity from the beginning. And then also just realizing I never even knew, I never, I guess related to myself as a creative person until I started my first company because I always thought creativity had to be like, you're really good at drawing or you're really good at visual art. That's what I always thought. But I'm a really good curator. That's the thing I absolutely love. And I've been doing that online magazine with Bella Life.
(07:48)
I was curating all hundred of our contributors and all of our content and all of our events and getting the partners and doing everything. And I think it's just been really empowering for me to be like, "Yeah, I have such strong creative life force in me. I think we all do. " And that's what I'm learning a lot with bioenergetic specifically is that creative life force is just like whatever really makes you you. It's not really what anyone else thinks it is. It's really what makes you, you, and tapping into that.
Carla (08:22):
What is your current relationship with creativity?
Nitika (08:25):
I mean, I'm obsessed with it. I feel like I'm obsessed with it. And it's been really fun because, I mean, this is so random, but so I was just talking to a friend this morning about this because I've been getting so obsessed with thinking about fashion lately, which is so random because I'm not a fashion girly. I enjoy beautiful, nice things and cute outfits and stuff, but I'm not a fashion girly. I'm more like a beauty skincare person than I am a fashion person. And most of that is because I was covered with psoriasis for so much of my life. And then even when I got sick a few years ago, I had to take steroids and I gained like 40 pounds in three months and my body just was not my body for a really long time. And so I've just kind of felt like fashion is sort of like a means to an end for so much of my life versus like a creative act.
(09:22)
But lately, I think because I've been feeling so much more in tune with myself and also just like I've had more vitality and I feel so healthy and all those things, I'm like getting obsessed with fashion right now. I'm like at the very beginning. So if there's an actual fashion person out there who's like wanting to go look at my outfits, do not because it's not like that. But I'm just like gathering. I'm noticing like this is like my process. I like to understand things in my brain and then I like to gather all these images and ideas and kind of concepts and then I like to slowly curate things. So that's what I'm doing right now with work. I mean, I think creativity, it's just been really interesting because I have so much creativity inside of me, but I haven't always known how to put the strategy behind it.
(10:15)
In some ways I have like really well, like with Chronicon, obviously when we launched that, it was such good strategy and really successful. But when it comes to me just sharing my creativity, I feel like you can have strategy that could actually like, you know this more than me, but just with like tiny tweaks, you could like take this creative act and make it really have an impact. And that part is actually the part that I'm really looking at right now. And as I kind of clear away a lot of the blocks and a lot of the things that were holding me back, it's been really fun to be like, okay, I have this idea. How do I make this idea into like the right kind of social post or the right kind of Substack or the thing that's going to actually make the idea have an impact?
(11:01)
So that's sort of where I'm at with my creativity. It's like all over.
Carla (11:05):
And my next question, it directly ties into this. It's how do you nourish your creativity? I feel like there's so much visual and also intention that goes into your work because we've worked together and I've been able to see this. What is it like to be in that process? Because you took a huge break from Substack during the summer, like you leaned into your intuitive process.
Nitika (11:32):
Yeah. I think the thing that keeps coming up for me, which I'm like a little shy to say this, but the word that keeps coming forward when you ask me that is pure. I think that's what all of this work has been about, like the nervous system work, the bioenergetics work, like any work I'm doing on my own, it's sort of like all getting me to this pure place. And what I mean by pure is really like truth. That's like really what's under pure. It's not like purity, like good or bad. It's not that at all. It's truly just like, this is the pure essence of who I am. This is the unfiltered, unapologetic, like I'm not pretending I'm putting the mask down, I'm deciding that I'm going to show my full self, even though I've been trained extensively not to show my full self and I'm going to just go for it.
(12:26)
And that's the times where I feel like my creativity, it also ends up having the most impact. There's this magnetism I think that I've been really playing with and acknowledging, but it happens when I'm being that pure, true, honest, full version of me. It doesn't happen when I'm like, "Oh, I saw this amazing influencer do this thing, so I should probably do that thing," which is what so many people do. And I've definitely done that just because you're trying to figure out it out. It's not even like you're copying or you're doing anything negative. It's just kind of like this feeling of like, "Well, I see someone else just did that and that went viral. So maybe I should try to talk about it this way." And I just feel like more and more and more, I mean, sometimes it feels so slow because it's not as flashy and it's not like this gimmicky thing that can blow up necessarily, but I think that eventually things do really start to shift and the magnetism starts to become quite undeniable.
(13:28)
It takes that courage, I think, to be like, "Oh my God, I know this looks so lame and no one else is doing it this way." But I mean, that's how I started Chronicon. No one else was ... Now we have so many chronic illness influencers, which is amazing and we need them, but this was before the pandemic. I had just started talking about chronic illness lightly and it was hard to find people who were even talking about chronic illness when we were positioning everyone for the speakers for the first Chronicon and stuff. It was a revolutionary act for me to be like, "Yeah, we're going to come together and we're going to do this and we're going to be beautiful and exciting and fun. And we also happen to have these illnesses." Now there's another major evolution that needs to happen that I'm in the middle of right now, but that was revolutionary when it happened because it was just pure.
(14:19)
It was just the honest thing, even though there was no one else doing it.
Carla (14:22):
I usually ask about creative blocks, but we chatted briefly about something before we hopped on the podcast about having space held for us as spaceholders. And you have a retreat coming up and I would love to know about what it's like to hold space while you're doing all of this important work yourself for others.
Nitika (14:51):
Yeah. I think that's been a bit of a growth edge for me, honestly, and I'm so glad we're talking about it. As you mentioned, our retreat is coming up. It's on June 5th, 6th, and 7th. I'm doing it with one of my best friends, Amna Altai, who wrote the book, The Ambition Trap, and we're doing it at Omega, and it's really such an extraordinary institution to come to and get your meals and be in nature and also obviously hear from both of us. And the conversation is really about finding your authentic voice and igniting your purposeful ambition and seeing how you can really get to this place of purity and truth within you so that your ambitions align with that. And so it's really actually very aligned with what we're talking about today. And yeah, to answer your question, that has been a process for me because I think when I first started Chronicon, I was really just focusing on there are one in three adults in the United States has a chronic illness.
(15:55)
Over 133 million Americans, and I think the number has risen since then, since we got that number years ago, have a chronic condition. It's more than half the population of the United States. And it's just like, why do we feel so alone? And I was just so consumed by that number. And so I really self-sacrificed a lot in the beginning. I really was just like, "These people are suffering. I have to do something to help them." And so I think getting myasthenia honestly was the wake-up call that I needed to be like, "Hey, yes, this is important. This is never going to not be important to me. It's my purpose for being here is to help that population." I really know that and I'm a part of that population.
(16:41)
I also deserve care and support and all of those things. So finding these teachers that I shared with you with Amy and with Sherry and the school, that has been the way that I have worked on getting my cup filled, but it took me a long time. I always did therapy and things like that, but it didn't quite feel the same in terms of the type of shift that was happening in my life. So yeah, it's a big thing, Carla. It's a really big thing. It can be really easy to get consumed by this magnificent thing that we want to create and then the people that we want to help. And I think that's such a noble worthy thing. And I also think it's not helping anyone, including the people you really want to help by not getting your cup filled and not getting the support.
(17:31)
So everybody's different. I mean, I know you have a family, people who are dealing with certain conditions who can't necessarily get out of bed or you can't afford certain things. There's so many nuances to this conversation and privilege is definitely something to always bring up even as a woman of color with three chronic conditions. I still have privileges that other people don't, but there's always a way. There is always a way. When I was bedridden and I couldn't literally get out of bed, I found ways while I was lying in bed to connect to something bigger and better than my pain and then my heartache. And I think with getting your cup filled, that's a huge part of it, just being dedicated to that.
Carla (18:13):
This has been so nourishing. Lynika, how can we find you? How can we work with you? How can we support you?
Nitika (18:21):
Well, I am on Substack. You can search my name, Nitaka Chopra, or you can look for The Truth Today, which is my Substack. And I also, of course, am on Instagram @NitaCachopra, and I also work with clients one-on-one in my LifeMastery Incubator. And so that's also a great way to connect with me and you can learn more about that on my Substack too.
Carla (18:42):
Thanks so much for tuning in to Nourishing Creativity. You can find me chef Carla Contreras across all social media platforms and more information in today's show notes. While you have your phone out, please leave a review on iTunes or Spotify. This is how others find this show. I really appreciate your support, sending you and yours so much love.