From Corporate Burnout to High Ki Living – An Interview with Dinah Simpson

How can a high-stress corporate career morph into a fulfilling life of spirituality and personal development?

Join us for an enlightening conversation with Dinah as she opens up about her awakening that began with chronic pain and resulted in a life-changing shift toward meditation and stress management techniques. Her story takes a compelling turn as she faced severe burnout and multiple emergency room visits, underscoring the importance of work-life harmony and how her experiences with stress, health crises, and motherhood guided her toward a more balanced and fulfilling path. (Interview has been edited for readability.)

Tell us about your story of awakening to spirituality and personal development. How did this all unfold in your life?

Dinah Simpson: It’s always kind of been there, but we tend to lose track of those signs until it really hits you at a certain point. I was working in corporate, having a lot of fun, but it was super stressful. It started to manifest in pain. It was back pain, upper back pain, shoulder pain, sleepless nights. I felt like I just couldn’t get everything done, and I was outputting so much. I was living in a very masculine productivity and developing some lower back pain.

A friend of mine said, “You should go to an acupuncturist,” and I had heard about acupuncture before. I decided to try it, because nothing else is really working. I went to the acupuncturist and literally, it was the first session, and the pain subsided instantly. That night I went dancing, and I was so happy! Of course, I just kept going and going, because I knew it was working for me.

My acupuncturist taught me about meditation and how to deal with the stress at work and during calls. I would just like consciously breathe, and it really got me to a place where I could feel a little bit more in control of that stress. I learned to be more proactive instead of reactive, because I was living in a lot of reactivity.

Once you start meditating, everything else starts to fall into place. I like to work with energy, and truly that’s what happened. Once you start opening up to that energy, everything starts to align and things start to really come your way that help you. I think that’s where it all started.

The big magnification I would say happened, though, when I had kids. They’re a huge test of all of the things that are traumas in your life. Lots of patience! Instead of work life balance, I like to call it work life harmony, because it’s not just balancing one or the other. It’s the integration of work and life.

Corporate America was really good to me. I enjoyed working there for over a decade and learned a lot, but again it’s very fast paced. There is a lot of pressure, and I ended up in the hospital with burnout. It was a slow burn, but I just avoided it for the longest time. Actually, I was running away from it.

The first time I ended up in the emergency room, the doctors and the nurses said, “Everything is fine with you, but you’ve got to manage your stress.” And so I was like, “I’m going to the acupuncturist, I’m doing my meditations, I’m going to the gym!” I felt like I was managing my stress, but my body was telling me otherwise. My mind was also always thinking about work, managing deadlines, and soon came family and children.

I thought I had it under control, and then I ended up in the hospital two more times. I just started to take a look at what was going on, and I started to get more serious. When you have kids and you’re in the emergency room, you start to ask, “What is my priority?”

I actually ended up like leaving my job and then finding another corporate job, thinking that this would be better. The person who hired me was really wonderful about work-life balance, and I thought that this was going to be great. I ended up dealing with the same kind of thing, just a different place, different job title, but I was pretty much doing the same thing and living out my life in the same way.

I shifted the job, but I’d never shifted what was going on with me.

I started to have to go to the doctor, because my blood pressure was increasing. I did that for a couple of years, and then it was the third call back to the emergency room. As I drove myself, I started thinking something really needs to change. That’s when I decided that corporate America has been really great to me. I’ve given it my all, but now I need to take care of myself.

I did this deep dive into meditation and Reiki. Once you open up to that spiritual space, things start to come to you. I had a Reiki book on my bookcase, and I opened it up and I just started reading about it. Just like leafing through the pages, I realized this is just really calming. I wonder if this would work for me.

I’ve always loved the idea of holistic health, but I was buying time trying to figure out, “Do I need to be on these medications? How long do I need to be on on these medications?”

I just decided that when I’m with my kids, I wanted to be more present, and I was constantly thinking of work. I would have short temper, often snapping at them, because I was not really present. It was almost like Spirit came and grabbed me and said, “Look, you’ve got these kids. They want your attention. Who are you going to be?”

I booked a session with a Reiki healer, and I cried for most of my session. That softening and that vulnerability really started to wake me up. Those are the little things that you start to notice. That in itself took me into the spiritual space of, “I want to take a class. I can do self Reiki. I can do Reiki for my kids.”

The meditation practice is so wonderful. It really gives me a sense of calm and peace. I spent the next five years really focusing on my kids and the quality of life that I wanted for myself, and I just started to become a seeker of this space.

What do you do as a Reiki Master and Energetic Lifestyle Coach to help people?

Dinah Simpson: When you go through your own healing, you really want to share everything with others. So, I help nurture people who are dealing with very stressful lifestyles. I live in the Washington DC area, and there’s a lot of stress here. As a matter of fact, anywhere in the world, stress hits us in different ways. My mission is to be a beacon of light for people where they can come to me, and I nourish them through the power of Reiki, through the stillness of meditation, and raising their frequency.

I help people curate a toolkit, so when they have palpitations in the heart and in the body, they know that it’s telling them something. Take that pause to fully breathe and be present. Usually in the present moment, everything is okay.

The name of your business is High Ki Living. What does that mean? How does that name express your way of helping people?

Dinah Simpson: Borrowing from Reiki, ‘ki’ is a Japanese term. Ki is energy, so it’s a high energy lifestyle. To me, that energy is raising your vibration and living your fullest. It’s eating really well. It’s taking care of your body. It’s creating boundaries for yourself so that you’re nourishing yourself. You’re taking those pauses, because you know that nobody is going to take care of you the way you can take care of yourself.

We have to take care of ourselves. I lived very much in that moment of distress when I wasn’t taking care of myself. Nobody’s going to tell me slow down. Everyone is going to say keep going in order to increase the bottom line.

What are the biggest stresses that people face these days, and how is that negatively impacting our lives?

Dinah Simpson: I would say it’s not so much the work that we do, but the distractions of life. We are so distracted. We are pulled away constantly. I see it in my kids being on their phone with social media. All of the technology is fantastic, but we have to harness it and learn how to use these distractions in ways that are productive, but then create more time in between.

I like to work with time blocking a lot. I set aside an hour to work, set a timer, and get to work. You answer your calls, you do emails, and then you can schedule 15 minutes to check your phone or go onto YouTube if you want to learn something.

If you honestly put in half an hour on something, you will get so much done when you just focus on that one thing. Focus is difficult these days, because our phone pings, our alarms go off. It just comes back to being present and utilizing tools that are really going to help support us.

We always have so much to do. We think there’s not enough time, but truly there is. Everybody has the same amount of time, but I think it’s just learning how to manage that time by prioritizing it. We just overbook ourselves. There’s always something to do, and I think that’s where the stressors come from.

If someone isn’t familiar, what is Reiki, and how can be it helpful?

Dinah Simpson: It’s kind of hard to conceptualize Reiki, because it’s the unseen. I often get questions like, “Is it religious?” It’s all just the energetics of the body. We have energy centers, the chakras within the body, and Reiki helps align the body so that the body moves from ‘fight or flight’ into ‘rest and digest.’ It reminds the body that it has the capacity to heal, and that’s a wonderful thing. It is a holistic modality. It can help with inflammation, it boosts the immune system, it helps us sleep better. I would just say that if you’re skeptical about it, allow yourself to try it, because there are so many benefits.

I see that you also offer something called Access Bars Consciousness. What is this and how is this helpful for someone?

Dinah Simpson: Access Bar Consciousness deals with energy as well. However, we work with energy points within the body, meridians, which are access points. We have 32 of them on our head, and I apply some pressure to those points one by one. It’s a little bit like reflexology or acupressure, where you apply some pressure in these sequences, and it helps alleviate trauma. It helps alleviate pain. That sequence on the full body really helps release stored trauma within the body.

Once we start to understand that the traumatic things that happen to us are stored within the body, all the energy work I do is like clearing out to the trash in our computer system. When our computer starts to slow down, it’s because the storage space is full. So, we go in the trash, and we start to clear it all out. We put in an antivirus software, and it clears things up. Energy healing is the same thing.

We could have a sense of fear, because of something that happened to us when we’re eight years old. It’s a reaction that we might’ve had to it, but then the mind forgets about it. It is still stored in our subconscious, and then we repeat the pattern of fear and it can paralyze us.

I’ve seen it so many times with clients.  I’ll do Access Bars or Reiki, and then all of a sudden, a memory comes up. “I haven’t thought of that in years. This happened when I was a child.” Then, the fear goes away, and it’s really fantastic. Our bodies are amazing. Things are held within our bodies, and so it’s just a good practice to continuously clear our system, reboot it, so that we’re optimizing our productivity and living our life fully.

Can this work for clients just as well on Zoom as it does in person?

Dinah Simpson: We’re talking about energy, and energy holds a frequency. My intention can channel out into the cosmos, and you just receive it. So, when I’m working with somebody, it’s like the cloud. I send up the frequency and on the receiving side, they just download that frequency. When we work with meditation, for example, it’s just like this. We’re on Zoom. I go through some breathwork, and then we close our eyes and begin meditating together.

When I guide my clients through a meditation practice, it’s really just teaching them that this is a tool they can use at any time. A lot of time with breathwork, it’s a 30 second breath in and then an exhale. We do that as a pattern of five, and you can do it on the Metro. You can do it in the car, and it really shifts your energy.

My mission is to provide that support and space to be heard. Time with my clients is an opportunity to express, to feel, to release, and then to learn how to build energy. I really believe strongly that we can build that energy within ourselves, and it really is empowering.

With all the different modalities that you offer, how do you customize what you offer to your clients?

Dinah Simpson: That’s the importance of the discovery call, because I want to hear. I want to listen. I want to know what you’re going through. Based on that, I have so many modalities to choose from. Maybe it is Reiki, so that the body can just fully relax, or maybe it is a going into meditation. Meditation may not work for somebody, so we’ll do some Kundalini yoga to move the body. There is a modality that’s going to fit to your need.

Because I’ve been studying this for so long, I’ve also needed so many different things to support me as I was moving through life…being in corporate America, being a mom and then an entrepreneur. I’ve been able to do all of this work, and now it just comes natural to me.

So, I’ll take a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and package it together and make sure that you have a customized program that’s going to bring you through everything that you need to go through.

The first step for me is becoming conscious of what you’re experiencing. Then, I move through it, feeling everything and healing through that. Then, we move forward with all of the actions, so that you can become that better version of yourself and really feel good and build that energy.

I have a client who is a partner in a law firm, and he was getting ready to retire. He really wanted to approach it mindfully because he had been in this position for over 30 years. How is that going to impact you, right? So, we started to work together a year before the retirement by doing meditation, so that he really could be present and really start to move through the feelings of “this is something I’ve done all of my life and now I’m shifting.” It’s really tied to our identity, right, and so, reprogramming the mind and and knowing that the unknown parts of it are going to be okay.

Sometimes, we have certain blockages within the body, and it might take a little bit longer for those blockages to to open up. Just like some medicines take two to three, four days before you feel the effect…the same thing with the energy healing as well.

When people are ready to work with you, what’s the best way for them to connect?

Dinah Simpson: You can book a discovery call with me, and that’s about a 15 to 20 minute call where we can chat about your specific situation. You can also go to www.dinahsimpson.com to take a look at my services. I’m also on Instagram @highkiliving, so you can see what I’m doing over there. I’m really trying to create community, because this work can be hard to do on your own.

If someone is just getting started on their spiritual or healing journey, what advice would you share with them?

Dinah Simpson: I’ve been there. I understand it is very overwhelming. There’s so much information, but I think it’s just that conscious shift and the commitment that you make for yourself that you want to feel better. Come back to the breath. The breath is your life energy. All you need to do is breathe. Be patient with yourself, and feel free to contact me for support. It’s your commitment to yourself, and you’re the best investment.