The story behind the Root & Rise Method

Where It Began

Ever since I was little, I've carried a kind of anxiety that felt far too big for a child to hold. I didn't have a word for it back then. I just knew that something inside me was working overtime, and I couldn't switch it off. So, quite young, I started asking a question that would end up shaping my entire life: why do we suffer, and is there a way out? A piece of Buddhist wisdom found its way to me early on, that pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice. I didn't understand it fully then, but something about it lodged itself in me and never let go.

The Eldest Daughter

As the eldest daughter, I grew up believing love was something you earned. From an early age I felt responsible for my younger siblings, and by around fifteen, I volunteered to look after my baby brother, all while still feeling I had to be top of my class, good at everything, easy for everyone. Around that same time, I developed hay fever, and later, asthma. I sometimes wonder, looking back, if some part of me needed permission to stop, and being unwell was the only excuse I'd allow myself. So I got very good at looking after everyone else and very good at ignoring myself, and for years, I proudly called that being nice, caring, easy to be around.

Being Persian myself, I understand this pattern from the inside, not just as a practitioner, but as someone who grew up inside it. The expectations, the sacrifices our parents made so we could have a better life, the quiet, unspoken pressure to make it all worth it, to achieve, to never falter, to make the family proud. That's often where the unspoken contract first gets written: the belief that belonging has to be earned, and achievement is the price of it.

I grew up in Iran and have spent most of my adult life in the UK and Spain, and that journey has given me a rare vantage point across different cultures. I've come to believe we're more alike than we know, but I've also learned to see clearly where cultures shape us differently, in what we're taught to earn, to prove, to hide. That understanding lets me work effectively with people from very different backgrounds, because I'm not guessing at your context. I recognize it.

Nice vs. Kind

It took me a long time to understand the difference between being nice and being kind. Nice is what I was: agreeable, accommodating, always ready to smooth things over, because some part of me needed the affection and approval that came back in return. Nice was fear of not being liked. Kind is the choice to be true to yourself, liked or not. Kind means being honest even when it's uncomfortable, holding a boundary even when someone's disappointed, and the person you owe that kindness to first is yourself. I didn't know that distinction existed back then. I just knew how to be nice.

The Safe Choice

When it was time to choose a career, I didn't ask what I loved. I asked what would keep me safe. Finance felt solid, sensible, the kind of choice nobody could question. And I threw myself into it, worked hard, built something I was proud of. But there was always this quiet hum underneath everything, a sense that I was slightly out of step with my own life, going through the motions of a story that wasn't quite mine.

When My Body Started Telling the Truth

Eventually, my body started telling the truth my mouth wouldn't. First through chronic hives that no cream or antihistamine could really explain. Then, not long after I got married, something much harder to ignore, a serious health diagnosis that led to major surgery. And suddenly, the question I'd been quietly avoiding for years was impossible to dodge any longer. What do I actually want, for me?

That question cracked something open in me, and it's what led me to RTT, and to a way of healing that finally goes to the root instead of just managing what's on the surface. I trained as a practitioner while privately carrying a truth I hadn't yet let myself feel, that my marriage of eight happy years was already unraveling. Not long after, it came to a real end. It remains one of the hardest chapters of my life, and honestly, looking back, one of the most important, because it asked more of me than any training ever had, and it's what finally brought me all the way home to myself, the same work that let my ex-husband and I stay close afterward, instead of becoming strangers. My fascination with the mind, the one that started with a frightened, curious child asking why, has only deepened since then, into the work of teachers and mentors like Byron Katie, Martha Beck, Shirzad Chamine, and Tsultrim Allione, alongside RTT, always learning, always going a little further.

Coming Home

And now, I get to actually live what I once only hoped for. For the past couple of years, I've been in a relationship that has never once asked me to earn my place in it. It simply makes room for me to be exactly who I am, and that alone has taught me more than any course or certificate ever could.

Now, it's what I get to help others find too. You have abandoned the one person you cannot live without: yourself. My work was never about becoming someone new. It's about finally, gently, coming home to yourself.