I am an ex-corporate 10+ year events professional who left the corporate world after a near-death experience and never returned.
Like a lot of people who had burnt out, hard work and ambition were the sacred cows to never be questioned. It was not until a life-changing event that turned my life upside down was able to ask myself some very hard questions about the nature of reality and my true purpose.
It was 10 pm after I had gotten into a very bad accident and found myself half-conscious in a hospital, kicking and screaming at the nurses who were trying to help me. Unbeknownst to me, I was near death, and it took a doctor’s faint voice in the distance to confirm that to me.
Instead of worry or anxiety, I just accepted it. I was okay with everything. I did not feel any fear. As I kept going in and out of consciousness, I found myself sinking into a dark place, so quiet, so full of love and peace. It was true – I had nothing to fear.
But a few hours later, I was accepted for a transfusion, and within 24 hours, I found myself going back to a quiet home, as if nothing had ever happened.
What I did not know was that, in the coming years, I was facing down a spiritual initiation into the underworld. A dark night of the soul, a deeply lonely and depressing time of complete spiritual upheaval, was coming my way, in addition to a spiritual awakening, where I absolutely overturned and questioned every sacred cow in my life. I would be forced to confront life in a way I couldn’t optimize, fix, or power through.
I was about to start the Great Work, as the alchemists call it. Something modern life does not even dare tell you about.
At the time, it was very depressing for me because I was such an ambitious, goal-oriented person, and I could not make sense of anything. No one could give me the answers I was looking for. My deeply stubborn African-Levantine spirit would not allow me to declare that I failed the life I desperately wanted for myself. I was convinced that this was a minor inconvenience and my life would go back to normal. It makes me laugh to even think about it now.
I came to realize with time that the life I was working towards was not, in fact, what I wanted.
It was what I was conditioned to want.
Did I even know myself? Are we all products of advertising corporate boardrooms, with our interests and our tastes selected for us?
Who was I, really?
While the modern world left me without answers, the spirit world made itself very known. And the answers would come, albeit very painfully.
Seven years exact. Ironically, the exact number of stages (7) it takes to turn lead into gold during the alchemical process.
This time I was forced to slow down and reassess every aspect of my life bit by bit. I had to be in the present and not constantly living in the future. It was not long until I had realized that society initiated me to participate in my own enslavement – i.e., adopting ideas that were not mine (often widely accepted and very wrong) was running the very foundations of my life.
It was work hard, money, money, find self-worth in your productivity, push, push, do not rest. Almost dying in an accident made me realize that this corporate life was just another form of feudalism. I was not much better than a slave.
It was just slavery. Except with toilets, air conditioners, and some semblance of technology that makes us feel better and more moder.
It was not long until I moved to the Mediterranean and found my only solace in nature, and just hoping things would get better because I had no idea what to do. I felt to go somewhere, anywhere.
For over a decade, probably even more, I lived in survival mode. I hid behind productivity, adrenaline and achievement. 10 years in events taught me to execute flawlessly under pressure, but it trained me to ignore my body, my intuition, my limits and the most precious thing, which was my time and life.
It was the first time I felt totally with myself.
Slow living in the Mediterranean – the pace, the presence, the return to simplicity, quite literally gave me my life back. When I could not find answers, I went back to nature. I went back to making things with my hands. And it made it impossible to keep building from the same mindset that broke me.
I also spent a few years living back in my ancestral homeland in East Africa. I visited my parents’ homeland, and while I appreciated it and now understood all the generational trauma from my entire lineage had come to a head and I had to be the one who experienced it and brought it to an end. My dark night was my soul’s way of realizing I had to clear it.
It was here that I started to eat real food, drink pure mountain water and learn about ancestral beauty rituals that helped me feel embodied again. The matrix created a disembodied woman who could not feel. And because I could not feel, I could not be present with myself. And this is how I got swept up in the wave without taking time to ask myself where it was taking me. I became a skincare formulator and started an organic body care business using ancestral ingredients my ancestors had been using for 6000+ years.
That season also forced me to start unlearning years of subconscious programming: hustle as worth, exhaustion as success, logic over intuition, working hard against my own feminine cycles, I began listening instead—to my body, my nervous system, and a quieter, more feminine form of knowing.
I’m still navigating how much of this belongs in conversations around business, events, and tech industries that rarely make space for rest, cyclical energy, slowness, feminine rhythm, and rest as a legitimate productivity model.
A regulated nervous system would have taken me further than any hard work – if only I had known back then.
Although I still have a burning fire to build, I have to do right by me. And if I’m building companies, communities, and technology now, I want them rooted in nervous-system safety, embodied leadership, and a version of success that doesn’t require self-abandonment.
As things stand, I’m incredibly proud of this evolution—and I want to create a space where it’s safe to talk about rebuilding after burnout, unlearning old conditioning, and creating work that honors both ambition and humanity, and choosing a slower, wiser way forward.
Thanks for following my journey.
