We’ve become remarkably good at pretending we’re fine while carrying things we were never meant to carry alone: anxiety that follows us into the office, fear disguised as procrastination, self-doubt dressed up as perfectionism and old wounds we have learned to function around rather than heal. We keep moving, keep achieving, keep showing up – and somewhere along the way, mental health becomes the thing we postpone until there is nothing left to postpone.
Perhaps that is why hypnotherapy and Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT) are finding their way into a wider conversation about well-being: not simply how to survive what hurts, but how to understand the patterns beneath it…and whether we can change them.
For Umar Sheikh, the answer begins beneath the surface. A clinical hypnotherapist and transformational therapist based in Cambridge, United Kingdom, with postgraduate training in the Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health at King’s College London, Umar works at the convergence of hypnosis, neuroscience, RTT and Reiki energy healing. But his approach is as much about the person as the practice – nurturing, empathetic and based in understanding the why behind the patterns that shape us.
Perhaps that comes from knowing something about those patterns himself. His parents separated when he was three, splitting Umar and his brother between two countries. At 17, he left for London alone; by 21, he had bought his first flat with money he had earned himself. What began as survival taught him to read people and rooms, to understand vulnerability, and eventually, he says, transformed a scar into a superpower.
Today, he brings that understanding to people struggling with anxiety, fear, self-doubt and deeply ingrained emotional patterns, helping them look beneath the symptoms to the beliefs that may have been shaping their lives for years. In a culture that often tells us to silence the mind, Umar is interested in listening to it.
This week, in conversation with FLWL, Umar talks about childhood, healing, the subconscious mind, the science and spirituality behind his work, fatherhood, love, and what it really means to transform your life from the inside out…
Take us back to the beginning. What was your childhood like Umar, and how did those early experiences shape the person you became? Also, at what point did you realise your path might look very different from the one you had originally imagined?
I was three-years-old the first time my world split in two. My parents separated, and my brother and I were separated with them. He went with my father, I stayed with my mother, two lives, two countries, held apart by an ego war neither of them ever had the honesty to name. Years later they tried again. It didn’t take. My father drank his way into alcoholism and diabetes and died at forty-four. I watched that from a distance my mother built, because she was busy drowning in her own life, throwing money at problems instead of questions, shuffling me from school to school every time I failed, never once sitting down and asking why. Nobody asked ‘why.’ That was the family I grew up in.
So, at 17, I stopped waiting for someone to ask. I moved to London alone and started working eighteen-hour days. By 21 I owned my first flat, bought with money nobody gave me, built on a foundation nobody else laid.
Here’s the part I want to be honest about; I don’t tell you this for sympathy. I tell you because of what it built in me. It made me result-driven before I owned a suit or had a job title. It made me fluent in reading people before I was fluent in much else…and it did something else, something I only understood much later, it stripped away my ability to be impressed or intimidated by anyone. I’ve since sat across from the desperately poor and the obscenely wealthy, from people who’d failed at everything and people the world calls untouchable, from the powerless and from politicians who hold real power, and I’ve never once felt smaller or larger in front of any of them. That’s not a skill I studied for. It’s a scar that turned into a superpower. And one day, I realised I could hand that superpower to someone else. That’s the whole reason I do this work.
Hypnotherapy was once dismissed by many as something unconventional or even ‘woo-woo.’ Today, it’s increasingly recognised as a powerful tool for healing and personal growth. What do you think has driven this shift in perception?
For years, people pictured a swinging pocket watch and a stage act. Now they picture a scan of the brain, and that’s exactly the shift. Two things did it. First, the science finally caught up with what practitioners had been claiming on instinct for decades: imaging and research into suggestibility, now show that state change is real and measurable, not mystical, not a parlour trick. Second, the whole wellness conversation quietly changed its question from ‘how do I fix what’s broken’ to ‘how do I optimise a life that’s already fine’, and hypnotherapy answers that second question far better than years on a therapist’s couch does. People don’t want to understand their pain for a decade. They want to be free of it by next month.
How did you discover Marissa Peer’s work, and what made you realize that this was something you’d love to pursue as a career?
I found her voice on a radio show in 2019, and I remember thinking: ‘there she is again.’ By then I’d already been circling this world for years. Vishen Lakhiani and Mindvalley, Joe Dispenza, and long before either of them, Paul McKenna. I kept digging into hypnotherapy on my own, and her name kept surfacing, again and again, in the way a name does when the universe has stopped being subtle. Eventually I stopped calling it coincidence and started calling it a sign. I trained in RTT because I believed, and still believe, it’s the only genuinely result-driven modality in this entire field. I say, most results in the least time.
The early years of any pioneering career can be challenging. What were those first years as a hypnotherapist like, and how did you deal with skepticism from people who didn’t understand the work?
Disorienting, genuinely. I’m the type of person who, once I commit to learning something, doesn’t dip a toe, I dive. So general wellness pulled me toward the body, the body pulled me toward the mind, the mind pulled me toward hypnotherapy, then RTT, then energy healing. Each step made sense on its own. But daisy chained together. They led me somewhere I didn’t recognise, a place where I genuinely didn’t know what I’d become, professionally speaking.
Everyone had the same advice: ‘find a niche’. And I kept asking the same question back: why would I narrow myself, when so many different kinds of suffering respond to the very same door? That question, ‘who am I’, professionally, and how do I want to walk into a room, sat unresolved in me for a long time. There was trial and error. There was real self-doubt, and I’ll tell you a secret: I still carry a version of it. It’s not a weakness I’ve cured. It’s the thing that keeps me honest, keeps me sharp, stops me from ever coasting.
But I’m built to chase a result, so I went looking for one the way I always do. And the answer, when it came, was almost insultingly simple: keep moving. That was the first time in my life something didn’t feel like work. It felt like breathing. It still does.
Looking back over your career, what are some of the milestones or moments that make you feel most proud? Are there any particular transformations you’ve witnessed that reaffirmed your belief in the work you do?
Before wellness found me, I loved kitchens; The heat, the chaos, the hours that would break most people. I did a stint in finance too, corporate life, suits, none of it fitting quite right. And underneath all of it, if I’m honest, I was someone I wouldn’t have liked very much back then. I know now, my environment moulded me in to a lone survivor, and I believed, that to survive alone, I had to be ruthless.
The proudest moment of my career isn’t a certificate or a client win. It’s a phone call. About five years ago, I sat down and rang people I’d worked with, old friends too, one by one, and I apologised for things I remembered saying, for ways I now know I’d mistreated people who never deserved it. Some were moved to tears and forgave me on the spot. Others simply said ‘thank you for saying it.’ That was the moment. Not a milestone in the way people usually mean it, but the moment I stopped carrying my past as a weight and started carrying it as proof. Whatever was blocking me, those phone calls cleared it. Everything since has moved.
Many people know you as a therapist, but fewer know about your love of cooking and dancing. What role do creativity, movement, and joy play in your life, and what have these passions taught you about well-being?
People assume the man in the therapy chair and the man in the kitchen or the one dancing must be two different people. They’re not. They never were the same act performed in different rooms; it’s the same nervous system, the same work, just spoken through the body instead of the mouth. Movement and creativity teach you what safety and pleasure actually feel like, and that’s often the exact piece missing in someone who has spent years trying to ‘think’ their way well.
So yes, before any of this, I was a chef and a restaurateur, hopelessly devoted to Italian cooking. And yes, put music on and I will dance, no persuasion required. Some people run a separate account, a separate profile, for “personal” and “professional.” I’ve never once understood how that’s even possible when there’s only ever been one of me in the room. No masks here. I am me. That’s who you get, in the kitchen, on the dance floor, in the chair across from you.
You’ve spoken about your youngest son and the journey of raising a child with Down’s Syndrome. How has he changed your understanding of life, and what are some of the greatest lessons he has taught you?
There is a moment every parent of a child like mine remembers precisely, the moment a doctor hands you a statistic instead of a future. I was told, when Qeis was born, that the life expectancy I should prepare for was somewhere around forty-five. I made a decision in that room that I have never once revisited: I would outlive my son, so that he would never spend a single day of his life alone, or dependent on someone who didn’t love him the way I do.
That decision has quietly built everything I am. Every early morning, every choice about my own health, every reason I take my own wellbeing seriously rather than as an afterthought. Qeis is eighteen now. Strong. Capable. Wonderfully, unapologetically opinionated. He has a whole life of possibility still ahead of him, and my only job, the only one that has ever really mattered, is to stay well enough, in body and mind, to walk every one of those steps beside him.
After a lifetime of helping others, what do you believe is the true meaning of a well-lived life? What matters most when you strip everything else away?
Let’s correct something first, it hasn’t been a lifetime of helping others. It’s been 10 years. But I will tell you, without any exaggeration, that those ten years have outweighed everything that came before them combined. Strip away the money, the noise, the opinions of people who were never going to be pleased anyway, and what’s left is one simple discipline: know what you actually ‘need,’ not what you merely ‘want,’ and have the nerve to go and build it. That’s it. That’s the whole secret, dressed up in a much smaller sentence than people expect. I’ve managed to live by it. And I can tell you honestly, life, done that way, is extraordinary.
There are moments in every life when things fall apart — whether it’s grief, disappointment, illness, heartbreak, or simply feeling lost. During your own most difficult periods, what helped you keep going, and what advice would you give to someone struggling to find their footing today?
One name: Tania. If you want the image, she has been my roots buried in the ground and my branch reaching into the sky at the very same time. Grounding me when I was falling, stretching me toward more when I was ready to grow. And I have fallen, more than once, hard enough that a lesser marriage wouldn’t have survived it. She never flinched. She absorbed it, and that steadiness rolled straight into me until it became mine too. When I rose back up, she was the one who made sure I stayed humble, stayed recognisable to myself. She is my constant. She is still the first person I call, whether the news is enormous, or I just need somewhere honest to think out loud.
You meet people from all walks of life, many carrying invisible burdens. What are some of the simplest but most powerful things people can do every day to stay mentally strong, emotionally healthy, and connected to joy, even when life feels overwhelming?
Forget the grand gesture. Nobody is saved by one big breakthrough. They’re saved by small, boring rituals repeated until they become armour. A wind-down you actually keep. Naming the feeling before it names you. Moving your body every single day, not just when you’re punishing yourself for the days you didn’t. Make your own life easier, not harder. that’s a discipline, not a luxury. And whatever keeps dragging you back toward the dark, however familiar it feels, let it go. Familiar isn’t the same as good for you.
You went on to study the Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health at King’s College London, but your work today draws on a fascinating blend of science, hypnotherapy, RTT, and energy healing. How did those different paths come together?
Think of the science as the map, and everything else as the vehicle. My background gives me the diagnostic frame, the ‘why’ behind a belief, the origin story of a pattern someone’s been carrying for decades. RTT and energy healing are how I actually move someone from that origin story to a different ending. I don’t believe, and never have, that any single method works alone in a vacuum. I’ve spent years testing, discarding, refining. And what I’ve learned, the hard way, is this: it’s the integration, done by someone who actually knows what they’re doing, that produces the result. Not the label on the method. The result. That’s all I’ve ever cared about.
Your work focuses on helping people release limiting beliefs and create lasting change. What are some of the most common emotional patterns you see people struggling with today?
Relational trauma, more than anything. A spouse, an in-law, a boss, a parent, doesn’t matter which, the shape is always the same. People bending themselves smaller to earn approval instead of simply trusting their own judgment. Swallowing what they actually feel until, quietly, without any single dramatic moment, it drowns them from the inside. And underneath almost all of it, the same forgotten truth: putting yourself first isn’t selfishness, it’s the only thing that makes you capable of showing up properly for anyone else. Endless self-sacrifice has never once saved a single person. Not one.
What are your top 3 favourite books of all times?
- Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
- The Spiritual Poems of Rumi
What’s the trippiest thing that has ever happened to you during your own path of healing and self-awareness?
Until Reiki, everything in my world had an explanation. Every discipline I’d trained in was methodical, evidence-backed, provable on a chart. Reiki broke that. It’s free-willed, spiritual, and it doesn’t respect the boundaries the rest of my training taught me to trust. It doesn’t stay in the room. It doesn’t even stay on the call.
If you want proof, don’t take my word for it, ask anyone who’s joined one of my free weekly online channellings. I run something called ‘Energy Release.’ A technique in Reiki which takes about twenty minutes, can be done entirely online, entirely at a distance, and people tell me, again and again, that whatever was sitting heavy in them, a weight, a tightness, a feeling they couldn’t name, started to lift before the session even ended. Explain that to me…I can’t. And I stopped needing to. That’s the trip. Reiki has no borders. Not the ones science draws, not the ones religion draws either. Nearly every time I work this way with someone, what they describe afterward still gives me goosebumps, and I’ve done this hundreds of times now. The one honest caveat I’ll give you, none of it opens for you unless you’re willing to actually believe it might.