These are the moments that shaped who I am, and why I do this work. I share them not for sympathy, but because somewhere in them, you might find a piece of your own story too.

My Illness, and the Turning Point That Changed Everything

Nine years ago, something in my body went quiet. My hormones fell out of rhythm, my period disappeared, and like anyone would, I assumed something was physically wrong. So I did what we’re taught to do — I chased answers. Doctor after doctor. Test after test. I went through more doctors than I have hairs on my head, and still, no diagnosis made sense.

I remember one doctor looking at my results and saying, almost in disbelief, “How does a girl have zero hormones? This shouldn’t happen.” From there, the guesses started — ovarian cysts, then a pituitary gland disorder, then something else, and something else again. Eventually: birth control medication, prescribed not to treat anything specific, just to manage what no one could explain. The medication brought its own storm — mood swings that didn’t feel like mine, swinging me between versions of myself I didn’t recognize.

Then in 2022, my life broke open. Personally and professionally, everything I had been holding together gave way at once. That collapse is what finally pushed me into a therapist’s office — not for my hormones, but because I simply couldn’t carry it anymore.

I started talking. About what was happening. About the medical mystery my body had become. And somewhere in the middle of that conversation, my therapist said something I will never forget:

“Alaa, I don’t think your problem is physical. I don’t think you’re paying attention to how you handle things in your life — even how you treat yourself under stress and anxiety.”

That sentence cracked something open in me.

It was the beginning of understanding that what I had been calling “illness” was never really in my body. It was a pattern — a way I had been quietly harming myself without ever realizing it. Trauma after trauma had moved through my life, and I never knew how to process any of it. I just buried it. Deeper and deeper, until my body started speaking the language my voice never had the courage to use.

That was the beginning of my path into holistic therapy — into understanding the relationship between the body and the psyche, why listening to the body matters, why our unconscious patterns can quietly injure us, and why mental health is never less important than physical health. Left unaddressed, it doesn’t just stay emotional — it can manifest as something very physical.

I studied — holistic medicine, somatic work, psychological therapy — not to treat a diagnosis, but to help my body finally heal. And I made a decision: I would stop the medication. I would listen to my body instead of silencing it. I would talk to it, the way I was learning to.

My hormones regulated. My period returned to normal. No medical intervention. Just listening.

But the story doesn’t end there.

My doctor, relieved but cautious, wanted one more test — just to confirm my uterus was healthy, that fertility wasn’t at risk. The results came back, and this time, the shock was different: active abnormal cells in my uterus, very likely a consequence of the years of hormonal chaos. Surgery. Immediately.

I will never forget that day. I cried until my eyes swelled shut. My friend was so afraid for me I think she nearly went into shock herself.

I agreed to the surgery. We booked it for a Sunday.

Saturday night, I called and cancelled. “I’m not doing it,” I told them. “I need to go away and breathe.”

People still ask me where that decision came from. I don’t fully know. But underneath everything I had already lived through, there was a certainty I couldn’t explain — a conviction that my body was capable of healing itself.

I flew to Bali to clear my mind.

The next day, I had an accident — and what followed was something called a near-death experience. It became an entirely different kind of turning point in my life, one I tell below.

After everything that followed from that accident — the surgeries that came as a result of it — I went back to my original doctor for the same uterine test.

The abnormal cells were gone.

My body had reset itself completely.

I share this story holding one truth above all else: never underestimate the power of psychological stress and mental exhaustion — and never underestimate the body’s capacity to heal from almost anything, when it’s finally given the chance.

My Story With Death — and What I Saw on the Other Side

Two years ago, in September 2024, I flew to Bali to breathe. The next day, I was in an accident — and somewhere in the middle of it, I experienced something I now know is called a near-death experience. At the time, I had no name for it. I just knew what I saw.

I saw my soul — small, white, suspended somewhere in the sky. And that soul was fully aware, watching my body lying on the ground below, lifeless, covered in blood.

From there, my soul watched something I can only describe as a film of my life — thirty-two years, replaying. I don’t know how it’s possible, but somehow the entire reel passed in what felt like less than two minutes.

When it ended, I saw three lights. Light. Freedom. Happiness. And with them, a message, in three parts:

The first: let go of every attachment to material things in this life.
The second: once you let go, you arrive at complete freedom.
The third: once you reach that complete freedom, what waits for you is eternal happiness.

I don’t know how long I stayed in that state. I only know I felt at peace.

When my eyes opened, I heard a whisper in Arabic in my ear: “If you close your eyes again, you will not come back to life.”

I cried — not from pain, but from the sheer weight of what my soul had just witnessed on the other side of life.

There’s something else I want to be honest about: I believe my soul left my body before the accident even happened. I have no memory of the accident itself — none. And before any of this happened, I had been asking God a question, quietly, in my own way: Who are you? Why does everyone see you differently? Why does every person believe only their own way is the right one?

Maybe, after I came back to life, I found my answer.

For a long time afterward, I sat in disbelief. I didn’t believe it had happened to me. I was exhausted — from the accident, from the aftermath, from trying to make sense of an experience that had rearranged something fundamental in me. It took time before I could even begin reading about near-death experiences, and finding that so many others have lived something similar. At first, I resisted it. I didn’t want this to be my story.

Now, I see it as one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me.

Almost everything shifted after that — how I see life, how I understand my purpose for being here. And since that day, there is no longer a place inside my heart for fear. It simply isn’t there anymore.

Today, I help others find their own purpose and message in this life — whether or not they’ve had a spiritual awakening of their own. You don’t need to almost die to start truly living. But if my story helps you ask the questions that matter sooner, then it was worth telling.

The Girl Who Was Never Asked What She Wanted

I come from a community with very conservative views about what a woman is allowed to be. Nothing dramatic, nothing anyone around me would have called unusual — just the ordinary, quiet way a girl is treated differently from her own brother. He had a say. He had freedom. He didn’t need to ask permission to have an opinion. I learned early that I wasn’t given the same. Not because anyone said it out loud, but because it simply was the air I grew up breathing.

Freedom, in any real sense, barely existed. The unspoken rule was always the same: the family knows best. Don’t ask why. Don’t ask for more.

Something in me refused that. I don’t know exactly where it came from, but I grew up with a defiance that didn’t feel normal for a girl in my world — a quiet certainty that I could be someone with a voice, someone with her own opinions, someone who could succeed on her own terms. I understood early that if I fell, that was simply part of being human. What mattered was that I could always find my way back up again.

I looked around me and saw so many girls who never had that. Girls with no real voice. Girls who weren’t allowed to have dreams, because the only future anyone ever painted for them was marriage and raising a family — as if that were the single destination a woman’s life could possibly lead to. And if a girl did have ambition beyond that? It simply didn’t matter. It wasn’t going to lead anywhere, because no one around her believed it could.

I made a decision: I would become independent from my family. I would build myself, by myself. I would say — quietly, then eventually not so quietly — that it was allowed. That I could be successful. That I could be independent. And through all of it, I always felt God standing behind me, at my back. That presence became my support — and it turned out to be a far better one than the absence of any other support I didn’t have.

Today, I help other women and girls see that there is another picture available to them — one that isn’t the picture their community handed them by default. That they’re allowed to grow, to succeed, to have dreams of their own. And if they don’t want any of that either — that’s allowed too. They are still worthy. Still loved. Exactly as they are. Their value was never meant to be measured by what they perform or provide for someone else’s approval.

I help women heal their sense of self-worth, rebuild their love for themselves, and see themselves again — not through the image their family quietly built inside them growing up. Not the belief that we’re not enough. Not enough to be seen, not enough to be valued, unless the people around us finally accept us. Not the exhausting belief that we have to earn love by constantly proving we’re good — a nice girl, agreeable, easy, pleasing.

You were never required to earn the right to exist exactly as you are.