I spent years building a life. Then I began asking who I was underneath it.
My path to meditation wasn’t linear.
I didn’t leave school knowing exactly who I wanted to become.
I began my career in care and eventually became an entrepreneur, building what would become Leora Healthcare.
For years, my life revolved around growth.
Building teams. Solving problems. Taking responsibility. Raising a family. Creating opportunities. Looking after people. Becoming increasingly capable of carrying more.
And I loved much of it.
Achievement taught me courage, resilience and what’s possible when we commit ourselves wholeheartedly to something.
But achievement can also become an identity.
The builder.
The leader.
The mother.
The wife.
The person who holds everything together.
When you’ve spent decades becoming those things, a quieter question can eventually appear:
Who am I without all of it?
My journey inward
Meditation initially gave me moments of stillness.
Eventually, it gave me something much bigger.
It showed me how much of my life had been lived from the outside in.
How often I was measuring myself.
How much I was doing.
How productive I was.
How successful I was.
Even how my body looked.
Constant judgement. There was no observation without an internal dialogue of judgement. And it was never good enough.
My deeper spiritual practice particularly the time I spent immersed in yoga and meditation in India gave me an opportunity to step outside the constant movement of everyday life.
Without the usual noise, I began noticing what was underneath it.
Thoughts I had mistaken for truth.
Patterns I had mistaken for personality.
Sensitivity I had sometimes treated as weakness.
Expectations I had unconsciously absorbed.
And an identity that had become deeply intertwined with what I did.
I began understanding something that now sits at the center of my work:
Transformation isn’t always about becoming more.
Sometimes it’s about removing everything that prevents us from experiencing who we already are.
I haven’t rejected ambition.
I still believe in building things.
I believe in meaningful work.
I believe in discipline.
I believe we can create extraordinary lives.
But I no longer believe that achievement and inner peace need to sit at opposite ends of our lives.
I am interested in the space between them.
The path for me is not a choice between them.
It is embodying peace whilst being able to achieve.
Can we be ambitious without abandoning ourselves?
Can we lead without constantly operating from stress?
Can we care deeply for other people without disappearing from our own lives?
Can we take care of our bodies without constantly fighting them?
Can we create success without expecting success to tell us who we are?
And can we become still enough to recognise when the life that once fitted us is beginning to change?
These are no longer abstract questions for me.
They are my work.
