How I Turned Chronic Illness Into a Path for Soul-Level Healing – An Interview with Angela Attar
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
Most people do not need to be “fixed,” they need to be gently guided back to the truth of who they are. Angela Attar is a North London-based holistic healer, spiritual guide, Kabbalistic energy healer, and homeopath whose work helps people move beyond old emotional patterns, inner noise, and disconnection through her signature programme, Journey to the True Self. Born from her own experience of healing a chronic illness and a profound spiritual awakening in 2009, Angela’s approach weaves together Kabbalistic wisdom, soul-level healing, and holistic medicine to uncover what is really keeping people stuck.
In this interview, she explores why healing often goes deeper than mindset, why old patterns repeat despite years of inner work, and what it means to guide others while still walking her own path.
Angela Attar, Holistic Healer & Spiritual Guide
What first led you to create Journey to the True Self?
It began with my own experience of being unwell in a way that medicine couldn't fix. For years, I lived with endometriosis, a chronic condition that caused relentless pain. Conventional medicine offered management but no answers, and deep down, I knew the illness was telling me something. My body was in dis-ease, asking me to listen.
In 2009, everything shifted. I came across a book about the healing power of thought and something stirred in me that I can only describe as an awakening. I began exploring the mind-body connection, natural medicine, energy healing, and eventually the ancient wisdom of Kabbalah and piece by piece, I healed.
What became clear through that process was that healing isn't just physical or even emotional. It is a return to the soul. Journey to the True Self grew from that understanding, a programme I wished had existed when I was at my lowest point, now held open for others who are ready to begin their own path home.
How did your own healing journey shape the practice you have today?
My practice didn't come from a textbook. It came from necessity.
I trained as a Reiki Master because my first energy healing experience opened a doorway I hadn't known existed. But almost immediately, I felt called to go deeper, and that led me to Kabbalah, a tradition that, for me, holds the most profound and complete map of the soul I have ever encountered.
Over time, I came to understand that what I had always been reaching for in a session had its roots in Kabbalistic wisdom. The Reiki Foundation gave way to something I now call Kabbalistic Energy Healing, a practice that works at the level of the soul, not just the energy field.
Alongside that, I studied homeopathy, which spoke directly to my belief in the body's innate intelligence. Each thread of my practice arrived through lived experience first, and I think that is precisely what gives the work its depth. I didn't arrive at this as a theory. I arrived at it as a human being trying to find my way back to myself.
What makes Journey to the True Self different from coaching or therapy?
Coaching tends to work with goals and strategy, where do you want to go and how do you get there. Therapy tends to work with the past, understanding what happened and why. Both are valuable. But Journey to the True Self works at a different level entirely.
It works with the soul.
That means we're not just talking about what you think or what happened to you. We're exploring who you truly are beneath the patterns, the fears, the conditioning and gently returning you to that. Sessions weave together spiritual guidance, emotional healing, and Kabbalistic Energy Healing, which means we're working on every level simultaneously: the mental, the emotional, the energetic, and the spiritual.
People often arrive having already done therapy. They know their patterns intellectually but can't shift them. That's because some things can't be talked through; they have to be moved through at a soul level. That's what this work does. It doesn't just relieve symptoms. It supports lasting transformation from the inside out.
Why do you think so many people are feeling disconnected from their inner guidance today?
We live in a world that rewards output above all else. We're conditioned from an early age to look outward for answers, to experts, to metrics, to the opinions of others and to distrust the quieter, more subtle wisdom that lives within us.
Add to that the relentless pace of modern life, the noise of constant connectivity, and the pressure to perform, achieve, and appear well, and the inner voice simply doesn't get a chance to be heard.
Many people I work with aren't broken. They're exhausted. They've been running so long, managing so much, pushing through so consistently, that they've lost touch with themselves. They don't know what they actually feel, what they truly want, or what their soul is calling them toward.
Disconnection is often the result of survival. The path back is not about doing more; it is about learning, perhaps for the first time, to slow down, turn inward, and trust what you find there.
Where does modern wellness often stop short when it comes to fear, stress, and anxiety?
Modern wellness has given us extraordinary tools: breathwork, mindfulness, movement, and nutrition. These matter. But they often address the symptoms without touching the root.
Fear, stress, and anxiety are not simply physiological states to be managed. They are, in my experience, signals from the soul. They arise when we are living out of alignment, when our choices, our relationships, our daily lives are disconnected from who we truly are and why we are here.
When we treat anxiety only as something to calm down, we miss the message it is carrying. When we treat stress only as something to reduce, we miss the invitation it is offering.
The missing piece in much of mainstream wellness is the soul. Without that dimension, we can feel better temporarily but never truly free. Real, lasting change requires us to go beneath the surface to understand what the fear is pointing to, and to address that. That is where Journey to the True Self begins.
What is one sign that someone is living from fear rather than soul alignment?
The clearest sign I see is a life built around avoiding rather than choosing.
When we are living from fear, our decisions are driven by what we don't want. We avoid conflict, avoid failure, avoid being seen, and avoid change. We say yes when we mean no. We stay in situations long past the point they are serving us. We keep ourselves busy so we don't have to feel what is underneath.
There is often a pervasive sense of heaviness, a feeling of going through the motions, of performing a version of your life rather than actually living it. People describe it as feeling like they are watching themselves from a distance, or like something essential is missing, but they can't name what.
That gap between the life you're living and the life your soul is calling you toward, that quiet, persistent ache, is one of the most common things I encounter. It is almost always pointing to something that deserves to be heard.
What helps a person begin rebuilding trust in their own inner wisdom?
The first and most important thing is learning to pause.
We are so accustomed to reacting to life, to emotions, to other people, that we rarely give ourselves the space to actually feel what is true for us. The practice of pausing, even briefly, begins to create the conditions in which inner wisdom can be heard. You acknowledge what is arising. You slow down enough to understand it rather than push past it. Gradually, you begin to soften the grip of the habitual response, creating room for something truer to emerge.
From there, it becomes a practice of noticing. Noticing when something feels aligned and when it doesn't. Noticing the difference between the voice of fear and the voice of the soul because they do feel different, and with practice, you learn to tell them apart.
Trust is rebuilt through small, consistent acts of listening. Every time you honour what you genuinely feel rather than what you think you should feel, you are strengthening that connection. It is slow work, but it is the most important work you will do.
How has being on your own healing journey shaped the way you hold space for others?
Profoundly and in ways I'm still discovering, because I'm still on it.
I don't hold myself up as someone who has arrived. I am a fellow traveller who has walked far enough along this path to guide others with some steadiness, but I know what it is to feel lost, to struggle, to not yet understand what a particular season of your life is trying to teach you.
That lived experience means I don't hold space from a place of distance or clinical detachment. I hold it from a place of genuine recognition. When someone sits with me in their fear or their confusion or their grief, I am not watching from the outside. Something in me knows that terrain.
I also think it keeps me humble. The moment a healer believes they have all the answers, something essential is lost. Staying on my own journey, continuing to learn, to grow, to be challenged, means I remain a student of this work even as I guide others through it. I think that makes the space safer, more honest, and more real.
Why do so many people keep repeating the same patterns, and what does it actually take to break the cycle?
Because patterns don't live in the mind. They live in the body, in the energy field, in the soul.
We can understand a pattern completely, know exactly where it came from, be able to articulate it with great clarity, and still repeat it. That is because intellectual understanding alone doesn't create change. The pattern has to be met at the level where it actually lives.
In Kabbalistic wisdom, there is a concept called tikkun, the soul's unique correction in this lifetime. The repeating patterns we experience aren't random. They are, in a very real sense, the soul's curriculum. The same dynamic surfaces again and again, not to punish us, but because the soul is asking us to meet it differently this time.
What it takes to break the cycle is threefold. First, the willingness to stop and look honestly at what is actually happening. Second, the courage to feel what has been avoided, because patterns are often held in place by emotions we have never allowed ourselves to fully experience. Third, soul-level work that addresses the root rather than the symptom.
When we approach our patterns not with shame or frustration but with genuine curiosity, asking what this is here to teach us, everything shifts. That is the work and it changes everything.
What would you like readers to understand about taking the first step toward their true self?
That it doesn't require you to have it all figured out.
So many people wait until they are ready, until the timing is right, until they understand exactly what they need, until things are calm enough to look inward. But in my experience, the moment you feel called is the moment you are ready. The soul doesn't send that quiet nudge by accident.
The first step is simply a conversation. No commitment, no pressure, no expectation. Just a gentle, honest exploration of where you are and whether this path feels right for you. That is what the Free Discovery Call is for.
I want readers to know that whatever has brought them to this moment, the exhaustion, the anxiety, the sense that something needs to change, that is not a weakness. That is the soul speaking. It is asking to be heard. If you are willing to listen, the journey home has already begun.
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