Who is Imani?
Who is Imani? I suppose the answer depends a little on who is asking.
When I first chose the name, I was drawn to its meaning. Imani is a Swahili word for faith or belief, originating from the Arabic īmān. But faith is an interesting word, because what exactly are we being asked to have faith in?
For me, it was never about believing blindly. It was closer to trust: trust in yourself, in what you sense before you can necessarily explain it, and perhaps in the possibility that there are things beyond ourselves that we don't fully understand yet.
Over time, Imani became a woman in my mind, although not one I could describe to you completely. She is rational but doesn't dismiss what she cannot rationalise. She has ambition, softness, intuition, discernment. She is deeply connected to herself and to others. There is something almost ancient about her, while at the same time she feels very much like a woman of today.
Maybe that is why I don't want to define her too precisely.
Is she a muse? An archetype? A version of ourselves we recognise before we have quite become her? Perhaps she is all of those things.
What matters is that Imani was never created as another ideal for women to measure themselves against. There are enough of those already.
She's a muse, not a mould.
What is the Imani Way?
We hear about the “right way” surprisingly often. The right way to heal, to have a relationship, to build a career, to make a difficult decision. Even the more alternative spaces, which often position themselves as an escape from conventional ideas of how we should live, can come with their own set of rules.
So what happens when there isn't one?
The Imani Way is, in some sense, a made-up way. There is no predetermined path to follow and no philosophy I expect you to adopt. I chose the word way precisely because of the space it leaves open: Imani might give it a name, perhaps even a direction, but what it becomes in your life is something you have to discover for yourself.
That also means being willing to look in more than one place. Science can help us understand an extraordinary amount about ourselves, but not every human experience currently has a scientific explanation. The body can communicate something before we understand it intellectually. An intuitive impression can be worth exploring without immediately deciding what it means. And sometimes what we experience asks for curiosity before it asks for an answer.
You might arrive because something in your life feels stuck: a pattern you keep repeating, a decision you can't seem to make, tension or pain in your body, or simply the sense that something isn't quite right. Or perhaps you're here because you've always sensed there is more to explore. You notice things. You feel things strongly. You want to understand your intuition or become more attuned to the information you pick up from yourself and the world around you.
The point isn't for me to answer those questions for you. My role is to assist the process, offer different tools and perspectives, and help you access parts of yourself that aren't always easy to reach alone.
There are different ways we can do that, individually and collectively. What we use, and where it takes us, depends on what we find.
Who is behind The Imani Way?
My name is Kristina, and if you had asked me ten years ago what I would be doing today, this probably wouldn't have made the list.
I studied Fashion Brand Management and spent almost a decade working in fashion. At the same time, there was another part of me that didn't fit quite as neatly into that world.
Even as a child, I remember sensing things I couldn't really explain. But somewhere between adolescence, becoming an adult and learning how the world was supposed to work, I stopped giving those experiences much attention.
They eventually became harder to dismiss.
My intuitive and psychic abilities began opening up again in adulthood, and I started working more consciously with what I was experiencing, including channeling. Around the same period, I was living with chronic knee and hip pain that had already followed me for years. I had seen specialist after specialist, had scans, MRIs, physiotherapy, acupuncture, injections and other treatments, but nobody seemed able to fully explain why I was still in pain.
I knew about psychosomatic symptoms. What I didn't know was whether my pain could be one of them, what that would actually mean, or how on earth I was supposed to get to the bottom of something I couldn't see.
At some point, those two parts of my life met.
If I could receive information intuitively and channel energy, I began to wonder whether I could turn that same attention towards my own body. If nobody else could give me the answers I was looking for, was there a way of learning to ask differently?
That question sent me looking for what I then called “self-healing modalities”, and eventually led me to somatic work. It didn't magically end a now seven-year journey with pain, nor did it give me one simple explanation for it. What it did was radically expand the way I understood the relationship between the body, mind, nervous system, emotion and our internal experience.
What began as something deeply personal eventually became professional. I trained and became certified as a Holosomatic Bodywork® practitioner, while continuing to develop my intuitive practice. Alongside this, I am studying psychology at the University of London, which has given me another language through which to ask many of the same questions.
For a while, I think I believed I had to choose between these worlds. The intuitive, sensitive part of me belonged to one life; critical thinking, education and professional ambition belonged to another.
I don't believe that anymore.
I'm fascinated by what psychology and science can tell us about being human, while remaining equally interested in where our current explanations end. I don't pretend that scientific knowledge, embodied experience and intuitive knowing are the same thing. They aren't. But I do believe they can sit at the same table.
In fact, the space between them is where some of my most interesting questions live.
The Imani Way grew out of those questions, but also out of my own experience of having spent years looking for a space where I didn't have to leave one part of myself at the door in order to explore another.
And eventually, I decided to create it.