My Years in the Eye of Karen Ruimy’s Creative Storm (and Why I’m Back for the Breakthrough Experience)

Karen Ruimy changed my life once already. Now she’s doing it on a Sunday afternoon.

I still remember the first time I saw Karen Ruimy. She was drifting through that small office, tucked away in the cobbled back streets of Fitzrovia, in one of her famous Kalmar kaftans, humming to herself like the rest of us weren’t even in the room. Queen of kaftans, queen of her own world. I was in the early stages of my career and had already worked in a high pressure creative environment at Universal Pictures’ press office, so I thought I knew what busy looked like. Nothing prepared me for the sheer creative output that came out of that small office.

There were just two of us running things day to day, me and Elena Herrera, a friendship that’s lasted long after the job ended. Our days were a blur of reviews, journalists, editors, musicians, artists, clothing and perfume manufacturers, book publishers. Every single day looked different from the one before.

I joined ‘Team Ruimy” at a frantic point in Karen’s career. She’d just published The Voice of the Angel, a collection of spiritual writings designed to guide the reader on a “voyage to the soul’, and was simultaneously releasing her album Come with Me, which brought together Rai, Moroccan Arabic music, with pop and dance beats Broadway World and was remixed by the dance DJ Paul Oakenfold, a remix that went on to become a proper club hit. The whole project was built with her long-time collaborator Youth Martin, known for his work with Pink Floyd and Paul McCartney, and Karen later went on to record an album with the late, great Phil Ramone.

Working with Karen was my crash course in something I now think of as feet on the ground commercialism, wrapped around proper, fearless creativity. She pushed my potential into places I’m not sure I’d have found on my own. She trusted Elena and me completely with her projects and her artistic direction, which is a rare thing when you’re young and that unproven. She shared everything. She collaborated rather than dictated. She made you feel part of something bigger, and made the impossible feel completely achievable. It usually was.

“Karen didn’t tell me this. She showed me, every single day, just by being herself.”

When I left to build my own freelance career, what stayed with me wasn’t the album or the book launches. It was Karen’s generosity and her loyalty. She’s the one who introduced me to Sue Whiteley, former head of Givenchy at LVMH, putting my name forward for creative projects without me having to ask twice. I’ve never forgotten that someone believed in me enough to do that.

It makes sense, then, that someone with Karen’s history would end up running rooms designed to help other people make their own leap. She started as a banker in mergers and acquisitions before becoming a director at the age of 28, then walked away from finance entirely to become a dancer, singer and spiritual author.

That’s exactly what’s happening on Sunday 28 June, when Karen hosts The Breakthrough Experience at the Royal Geographical Society in London, running from 2.30pm to 5pm. The workshop is built around the patterns most of us carry without realising it, the ones rooted in early psychological imprints and protective mechanisms that quietly influence behaviour at a largely unconscious level. Through guided processes, inner child work and embodied practices, Karen will help participants spot those patterns and start moving beyond them. Rather the aim being a flash of insight, it’s a genuine shift toward more clarity, agency and alignment in how you move through your life.

I’m about to start a PhD, and I’m not sure I’d even be on this path if I hadn’t spent those years working with Karen. She showed me that you can change your life at any point, that you can be creatively relentless without burning out, that there’s always enough to give, and that art and talent are worth generating because they end up benefiting everyone around them.

I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to be in that room on the 28th. This isn’t a recommendation built on secondhand research. It’s my own lived experience of being around Karen Ruimy, and what I can tell you is this: you’ll leave lighter, you’ll leave inspired, and you’ll walk out with a kind of family you didn’t expect to find in a workshop.

The Breakthrough Experience

Sunday 28 June 2026, 2.30pm–5.00pm

The Royal Geographical Society 

Instagram: Karen Ruimy 

karenruimy.com