“So suddenly I’m hearing songs being sung to these water goddesses and feeling like I have been literally plucked and transported back into some sort of historical remembering or moment that was beyond me.” — Remi Olajoyegbe
Resonant World #140
If you’ve ever wandered from ceremonial fire to sacred glade at Medicine Festival, then you’ll know that the gathering honours a rather different set of values to those ruling institutions such as Goldman Sachs.
Yet Remi Olajoyegbe — who once spent her days raising billions of dollars in equity capital while working for the European wing of the New York-based investment bank — counts herself among the gathering’s eight co-founders.
I love stories of people who saw through the illusions of the ‘power-over’ hierarchy in the huge organisations they once served to pursue a path more aligned with their essential self. (For a few recent examples I’ve written about, see Lindsey Gulden and Kritee (Kanko), and my own struggles in this domain documented here, here, here, here and indeed here and here).
But I’ll confess that I wasn’t anticipating how deep a journey Remi and I would embark upon during our conversation — which we held to celebrate the launch of Isumataq Collective, her new esoteric mentoring platform, or ‘modern-day mystery school for women shaping our future’, as Remi also calls it.
Naturally, I wanted to know what had led Remi to forsake the upper echelons of global finance for the earthier, and certainly more enchanted ground of Medicine Festival, which unfolds over four days in August in the wooded surrounds of the Wasing Estate in Berkshire. (Resonant World#2: Notes from Medicine Festival) (Resonant Parenting Project#28: Parenting Wisdom from Medicine Festival).
The festival aims to serve as a platform for Indigenous elders from around the world to share their messages — and raise money to support projects in their communities. Last year, Genevieve, our then six-year-old daughter Matilda, and I were delighted to meet Aunty Puna Kalama Dawson, a Hawaiian elder and friend of Resonant World, who had travelled to the festival with her entourage to share the wisdom encoded in her islands’ ceremony and music. (Aunty Puna’s contribution was featured on an episode of Al Jazeera’s Earthrise series partly filmed at the festival).
More than just a late summer highlight — our shared memories of Medicine Festival (or simply ‘Medicine’, as Matilda calls it) have assumed quasi-mythopoetic proportions since the three of us attended for the first time five years ago. We’ve since watched the festival grow from a few hundred participants to more than 8,000 last year, when Remi and I met for the first time — not far from the stages where artists such as Sam Garrett and Nessi Gomes, YAIMA Music Project and Poranguí, Afriquoi and Omer Gonen-Haela transport us through dimensions that seem to cast our entire life journeys in a new light.
There’s something about the combination of almost non-stop Indigenous-led ceremony, the benevolent embrace of the trees, and the heartfelt intention held by the festival-goers that opens a kind of portal into a more sacred, possibility-infused and participatory version of the world — and I can’t wait for the gathering to resume in 2026, after this year’s pause.
Initiation Through Grief
That much I knew about Medicine Festival. What I didn’t know about Remi was the profound role that grief had played in catalysing her decision to leave banking and search for the contribution that was truly hers to make.
Remi had already begun to recognise the “void of success” she felt from excelling in a career that had left her disconnected from herself, her friends and her intimate relationships. But the losses she experienced — while almost unbearably painful — served to initiate her into her true calling to nurture and heal.
I was also fascinated to hear how plant medicine ceremonies in Peru had served to reconnect Remi with the Yoruba pantheon of her Nigerian father’s lineage.
“So suddenly I’m hearing songs being sung to these water goddesses and feeling like I have been literally plucked and transported back into some sort of historical remembering or moment that was beyond me,” Remi told me. “And it became a really beautiful part of my life and studies and desire to know this incredibly deep cosmology.”
She has since kindled a relationship with Oṣun, goddess of the sweet waters, and her fellow deities — Yemoja, goddess of the seas, moon and motherhood; Ṣango, god of thunder and fire; and Ogun, a warrior god, to name a few from Yorubaland’s cast of courageous, wise, tricksterish and capricious spirit guides.
Remi’s impulse to share the hard-won wisdom and practices she has acquired with other women felt like a beautiful ripening of her long process of initiation and integration. I hope we’ll have a chance to connect again before too long and hear how Isumataq Collective is flourishing.
In the meantime, it’s not too early to start making plans to attend next year’s Medicine Festival.
And remember, as I, Genevieve, Matilda, Remi and many other Medicine Festival-lovers can attest — the medicine you seek, is seeking you.
If you feel inspired to support Remi to empower more women by democratising elite leadership coaching and growing the Isumataq Collective, then please do sign up to her newsletter and share it far and wide. Thank you!
This episode aims to:
Explore Remi’s transformation from investment banker to esoteric mentor
Convey some of the back story and essence of Medicine Festival
Illuminate how grief can serve as an initiation into a deeper calling
Ideas that intrigued me:
Remi’s role as a bridge between the spiritual and corporate worlds
The possibility of regaining a felt-sense of ancestral connection
The role of plant medicines in activating cultural change agents
Questions I was left with:
How could I learn more about Yoruba cosmology?
What other stories might Medicine Festival yield?
How might such transformational gatherings exert systemic influence?
Transcript:
Related Resources:
Isumataq Collective on Instagram
Isumataq Collective on LinkedIn
Earthrise: The Call to Remember
About Remi Olajoyegbe:
Of mixed Indian and African heritage, Remi Olajoyegbe is a former Goldman Sachs executive turned strategic coach to C-suite and senior leaders, who blends corporate expertise and leading-edge coaching techniques with esoteric modalities and ancient wisdom - which she calls ‘new old ways’) — offering a transformative approach to leadership and personal growth. With over a decade of experience coaching and mentoring CEOs and senior women leaders worldwide, in her one-to-one practice and in groups, she deeply understands the challenges women face in demanding professional environments. Her own journey through profound personal loss and transformation informs her powerful and authentic approach. She is also a co-founder of Medicine Festival, a frontier spiritual wellbeing event and multicultural celebration which shares the wisdom of Indigenous elders from across the globe.
Show Notes:
00:50 — What is collective healing?
01:53 — In Western paradigm, we’re met as the “problem that needs solving”
04:04 — Community role in supporting individual well-being
07:04 — Encountering the “void of success” while working at Goldman Sachs
11:10 — Lacking somatic intelligence to recognise impending burn-out
12:42 — The intense, extraordinary grief of losing still-born daughter Eloise
13:05 — Grief as initiation
14:15 — How Eloise presenced Remi’s desire to nurture and heal
14:49 — Loss of second child
15:15 — Retraining as a coach; 10-day Vipassana retreat
16:35 — Integrating esoteric and mystical principles into mentoring work
17:19 — Leaning into practices such as yoga, breathwork to cope with grief
19:14 — Death of mother two months before daughter Ruby born
20:20 — Resonance of Remi’s name, which means “God consoles your tears”
24:09 — Connection to Yoruba and Assamese, Shakti-worshipping lineages
24:50 — Yoruba heritage activated during plant medicine ceremonies in Peru
27:23 — Retraining in systemic work, constellations, organisational constellations
28:40 — Reconnecting with ancestral resources
35:12 — Rediscovering Yoruba cosmology
40:49 — Origins of Medicine Festival
44:31 — Intention to support Indigenous communities to preserve their culture
48:37 — Medicine Festival as a hub for wisdom carriers to share their message
52:28 — Creating opportunities for children to connect with nature
55:42 — Launch of Isumataq Collective to offer deep mentoring to women
57:00 — Grief of women leaders at sacrifice of feminine wisdom in corporate world
57:55 — Introducing deeper somatic, inner work to support women leaders
01:01:14 — Working with collective feminine wounds
01:03:02 — Launch of 13-month coaching journey
01:06:36 — Summary and concluding remarks
If you found value in this interview, I warmly invite you to subscribe to Resonant World to receive more dialogues — and join the Resonance Council, a community comprised of more than 60 paid subscribers who form the energetic foundation of this initiative to build a trauma-integrating media system. Thank you. 🙏
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