What Happens When You Finally Let Your Story Breathe
There is something that happens when you stop managing your story and simply let it move through you.

That’s what I experienced recently when I sat down with Janika Galloway on the Just You podcast, and it became one of the most beautiful conversations about my healing journey, my spiritual awakening, and the book that grew out of all of it.

Janika did something most interviewers don’t do. She went intentionally silent for the first half of our time together and simply let me speak.

No interruptions.

No questions to redirect.

Just space.

I talked about things I don’t always get to tell in sequence. Growing up mixed race, with spiritual experiences as a child that had no framework and no one to hold them with me. Losing my boyfriend at 18 to a sudden cardiac arrest, in front of me, and the years of depression, anxiety and PTSD that followed.

Over a decade in corporate work that never fit, feeling like a square peg in every room I entered. A toxic, financially abusive relationship that left me without resources, without safety, and, at one particularly dark moment on a London tube platform, without the will to keep going.

What pulled me back was grace. A flash of the faces of people who loved me. A knowing, quiet and clear, that said: this isn’t it for you.I believe that voice was the beginning of everything that came after.

The turning point that shaped Activate Your Light most deeply was my spinal cord injury, cauda equina syndrome, which left me suddenly paralysed on my daughter’s first birthday. I ended up in emergency surgery during the early days of the global pandemic, and then was sent home to my third-floor flat with almost no support to figure out a completely new relationship with my body, my life, and myself.

What I didn’t expect was that the stillness forced on me would become the portal.

Sitting by my window every day while my daughter napped, journaling, watching the trees, I connected to something I can only describe as divine love. My spiritual senses, which had been present since childhood but largely suppressed, began opening in ways I couldn’t ignore.

That experience became the foundation of a three-stage healing process: releasing what isn’t truly yours, reconnecting to yourself as a spiritual being, and expanding that light outward into your life and the world.

That’s the heart of the book.

Healing isn’t linear, and it isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about returning to the truth of who you’ve always been, underneath everything you’ve been given to carry.

Some of what we carry belongs to us. Some of it belongs to our families, our ancestry, the generations that didn’t have the safety or the freedom to sit with their pain.

Part of my work, and the work inside Activate Your Light, is learning to sort through all of it. To exhale what isn’t mine. To stop passing the weight forward.

My daughter is seven. And the ground I’m clearing now, I’m clearing for her too.

In this podcast, Janika held the space that allowed my complex and layered story to breathe.

If you’ve ever felt like your story is too much, too complicated, too layered for one conversation, this episode is for you.

If Janika’s work resonates with you, you can find her over on Instagram 

Activate Your Light is available to pre-order now, publishing with Hay House on 5th May 2026.