Celia Sankar is a gifted and compassionate  motivational speaker and writer. She has been a life-long seeker of truth and student of wholesome living. Through her Canadian inspirational bestseller Journey to Joy, inspirational newspaper column, motivational lectures, and an inspirational radio talk-show which she co-hosted, Sankar has touched the lives of thousands in many parts of the world. 

She has been a writer for more than 15 years. Over that time, she has interviewed hundreds of people, including researchers, authors, psychologists, therapists and religious leaders, and has conducted extensive research on personal growth and recovery from life's traumas. Her own journey to selfhood has led her to dedicate her life to writing about personal growth, and to conducting seminars and workshops. She sees her purpose today as sharing a message of hope with the world.

Sankar is an internationally acclaimed journalist whose work has appeared in magazines, newspapers and journals in Europe, North America, South America and the Caribbean. She  covered British Royalty and shook hands with the likes of Fidel Castro and Shimon Peres. She earned her Master's in journalism in London, England, where she did an internship with The Times and The Sunday Times and did some work with BBC Radio. She has won several international journalism awards, including the Commonwealth Press Union Fellowship. 

Born in Trinidad, for over a decade, Sankar worked for the Trinidad Express, one of the Caribbean's leading daily newspapers, where she rose to the position of associate editor. She migrated to Canada in 1998 and served as a writer in the Vancouver bureau of the Canadian national daily The Globe and Mail, and as the municipal affairs reporter for one of Western Canada's largest newspapers, The Vancouver Sun. She has also written a weekly inspirational column for northern Ontario's largest daily The Sudbury Star. Sankar has taught writing at the tertiary level institute White Mountain Academy of the Arts in Ontario, Canada. 

She is a resident of a small town in northern Ontario and has travelled extensively to lecture and share the inspiring message contained in Journey to Joy. 

Sankar is the founder and executive director of the DiversityCanada Foundation, a non-profit organisation that operates DiversityCanada.com, Canada's premier  workplace diversity solution. The DiversityCanada Foundation promotes opportunities for Canadians, regardless of background, to participate fully in the economic, social and cultural life of Canada and countries around the world.

She currently spearheads Monaco Revue, a celebrity and lifestyle magazine with a philanthropic purpose. Monaco Revue is a commercial venture by the DiversityCanada Foundation in collaboration with Damascus Press Inc. (D.P. Inc.), which dedicates half of its profits to supporting the education of orphans of AIDS.

Q: What do you do with your free time?

A: Our natural environment is the outdoors and I'm happiest there. I love to get my hands dirty in the garden. Frequent walks through the woods provide me with spiritual refreshment. I also enjoy being out on a frozen lake and hearing nothing but the wind in the distant trees and the swish of my cross-country skis under me.

When I'm indoors, I love to play the piano. I've never been formally trained in music, and, to my utter surprise, I've discovered that I can compose piano pieces.  The next step was to perform publicly, and after psyching myself up and calming myself down, I've played my compositions before audiences of about 150 to 300. We — that is a soloist, the choir and I (as the pianist) — performed one of my compositions for midnight mass at the French church in my town and it was quite a moving experience for me. My compositions are poor, simple pieces, but my own — and my way of expressing thanks to the Creator for this life with which I've been blessed.

Q: Who are your idols?

A: I don't idolise anyone, simply because I realise we are all imperfect beings, no matter how much we accomplish in any field. But I do admire a great number of people for their mastery of various aspects of their lives: Abe Lincoln for his resilience; Ben Franklin for the breath of his endeavours; Dr. Norman Vincent Peale for using and sharing his faith; Oprah for letting her light shine...oh, I could go on and on.

I believe each of us has something out of our experience of this life that we can share with the world and I try to learn from a great many people, both famous and uncelebrated people.

Q: What are your immediate goals?

A: On a professional level, my goal is to share the message of comfort and hope contained in the book Journey to Joy across North America and worldwide through the media,  through lectures and through other resources I'm developing. I feel very passionate about life and about inspiring myself and others to make the fullest use possible of the time we are each allotted. On a personal level, my major goal today is to find an enlightened and loving man with whom to share this adventure of life.

Q: What is your philosophy?

A: It's more important to "be" than to have. I was born in the Caribbean, into a family with very little. My parents did their best to provide for us with the meager resources they had. From my childhood, I know it's possible to live well, to be happy without material possessions. It's perhaps cliché, but it's true that we can't take our possessions with us to the grave. We're going to leave them behind anyway, so why spend our lives in misery and stress chasing after material possessions? I believe all we possess are ourselves and time (and even that isn't quite accurate for in truth we don't really possess those as they belong to God). I've seen from observing the lives of others and from my own life that when you focus on making the best use of your talents, when your focus is on doing something creative with your life, your existence is more fulfilling and and it's richer, and as a bonus, the material comforts we require appear in our lives as well.

Q: How would you like to be remembered?

A: When I was younger, one of my ambitions was to not be forgotten by Time, in the way that Shakespeare and Austen and Dickens still seemed alive and present in the world so many years after their passing. I've grown up enough that that's no longer an ambition, nor do I preoccupy myself with thoughts about my legacy. In my opinion, the most important consideration is what we do with the time in which we have to live and accomplish; our legacies will take care of themselves.

Consequently, I see myself as having two missions in life. The first is to create resources (books, lectures, audio recordings, courses, etc) to inspire myself and others to make the best use possible of this fleeting opportunity to live with which we are blessed. My second mission is to create the mechanism to allow the transfer of funds and resources from those of us who are fortunate enough to have the luxury to work on our personal growth and enlightenment to those born into unfortunate circumstances in which they have to struggle to take care of their basic needs. To that end, I see myself building a successful business, a motivational resources company, and I see myself using a great part of my life to establish and direct a not-for-profit organisation that redistributes much of the wealth I've caused to be generated. Most crucially, I would like to help provide access to clean water, basic health services, education, housing and entrepreneurial skills in developing countries like the one I grew up in.