My name is Aryanisha (Aah-ree-ah-neesha).

My driving license and other legal documents still have Charlotte on them.

How did that happen? And what brought me to life coaching leaders?

I was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order in 2021, after seven years of dedicated training.

I first came across the Order in 2011. I had just graduated from the University of Cambridge and was working at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) (back when it was CPSL). While things looked good from the outside, I was feeling lost and anxious.

I don’t know why it occurred to me to google “retreats UK”. Perhaps it came from reading the free Sunday papers we used to get during brunch at Pembroke College. I had tried some meditation sessions through Inner Space, opposite Kings College, but the atmosphere wasn’t for me. Everyone had to dress in white on a retreat day, for a start.

I didn’t have any friends or family who practised meditation or Buddhism. I grew up in a small town in Wiltshire. At 17, my hairdresser described me as a Plain Jane (thanks, love). There wasn’t anything particularly alternative about me, let alone “woo” or “spiritual”. The only thing that set me apart was working really hard to get good grades and escape the small-mindedness of the area. And for that, I became the first student from my school to go to Cambridge.

My family had never been on an exotic trip somewhere like Thailand, where I might have encountered temples or monasteries — we couldn’t afford it. The only Buddhist I knew was my Philosophy and Ethics teacher from sixth form. When he and his wife got married, they took the name Abhaya, meaning fearlessness.

The other Buddhist I met — a monk visiting the UK — didn’t say anything that moved me. I was simply told what to believe about life after death — not that different from Sunday School when I was younger. I didn’t have time or energy for dogma. That was reinforced at university, where I was encouraged to keep an open mind, look for evidence and actively consider counter-arguments.

But when I started searching for a meditation retreat, one of the first sites that popped up turned out to be run by Buddhists. I found a week for hillwalking and meditation in Scotland. So I packed up my new Berghaus backpack, which I still have, and headed up to the hills.

That week completely changed my life. And no it wasn’t blissful. That’s a common misconception of meditation.  It was as if I’d been numb to my feelings for years, and everything was coming back on line. It hurt. I cried every night in the shrine room. I didn’t understand why, but chanting beautiful mantras in the shrine room just unlocked something in me.

In the group sessions, the silence on the hills and peace of the retreat centre, I realised just how difficult I was finding my life.

Alongside that, I found an amazing community:  people, each in their own way, trying to work out how to live a meaningful, ethical and fulfilling life. It wasn’t really about being happy. Many arrived carrying grief and loss, like the retired armed-forces leader whose wife had died of cancer. They were looking for answers but not expecting anyone else to provide them.

I met intelligent, thoughtful Buddhists who never tried to tell me what to think. I’m indebted to the Chair of the centre — Nayaka — for recommending poetry from the library instead of more philosophy. My intellectual mind was well trained enough. What I needed was to learn how to listen to my heart and body.

I knew from that retreat that I was a Buddhist. It felt like coming home.

When I returned from Dhanakosa, I opened up to a colleague at CISL. I’d told everyone I’d gone on a hillwalking week and missed out the meditation and Buddhist bit. I didn’t want to seem odd. My life was entirely surrounded by “normal” people, and I only knew one or two vegetarians.

Chatting to her (an anthropologist by training), I discovered the Cambridge Buddhist Centre was part of the same international community as the people I’d met on retreat. So off I hopped, joining an Introduction to Buddhism course and going to Young Buddhist events.

Through my connections at CISL, I then spent a year living and volunteering in India. I’d always wanted to see what living abroad might be like. Rati Forbes was completing the MSt in Sustainable Leadership, and her family company in Pune — Forbes Marshall — worked with a women’s rights charity called Equal Community Foundation. She put me in touch and I moved over for a life-changing experience. I listened to Buddhist talks and practised meditation in the evenings, on and off.

When I returned to the UK, I moved to London, began working at Verisk Maplecroft as a consultant in Ethical Supply Chains, and started attending the London Buddhist Centre.

That was the first time I used tarot cards to help me make a decision.

I’d been in the city a few months and was feeling lost again — a recurring theme — when I unpacked a deck my Aunty Sue had given me. I asked myself, “What do I need?” and drew a card: The Garden. The description simply told me what I already knew on a deeper level — I needed to go to Bethnal Green and start spending time with Buddhists again.

Monday nights were busy and overwhelming. I was socially anxious, despite looking confident in my Reiss winter coat and black Jones boots. I’m deeply grateful to Lizzie Guinness for saying hello to me each week and becoming my friend.

One of the things I love about the London Buddhist Centre is the range of people you meet. Yes, there’s ritual, Order Members with unfamiliar names, chanting, and more obviously “Buddhist” elements — but nothing is imposed and nothing feels fake. I was hooked.

I became a mitra — Sanskrit for “friend” — in February 2014, alongside 12 others.

Becoming a mitra is relatively straightforward but it does mark a significant turning point in one’s life. You’re declaring yourself a Buddhist, committing to practising the five ethical precepts as best you can, and locating yourself within the Triratna community, at least for now. You talk to the local mitra convenor about it, go on retreat if you can, and then you’re in.

Ordination is a serious spiritual commitment — a transformation of mind, heart, communication and behaviour — to this particular Order. You ask and then the process begins. It felt a little anti-climactic to be honest! (It is of course completely possible to keep deepening as a Buddhist without joining an Order).

The training, for want of a better word, looks different for everyone. It’s not about what you do, but about how you change  internally and how those shifts show up consistently in your behaviour. Triratna places particular emphasis on spiritual friendship and growing through the support and challenges of community. As ordination approaches, you receive a lot of direct feedback (or at least I did), so it’s not for the faint-hearted.

You’re encouraged to go on retreat regularly, depending on health, location and caring responsibilities. This isn’t just digital detox — though that helps. We meditate, reflect individually and in groups, take part in ritual, spend time together in silence, and immerse ourselves in nature. Even reading is minimised.

Retreats create supportive conditions to break free from unhelpful patterns in your mind, relationships and behaviour. Without the constant distractions of everyday life, those patterns become visible. When you can see them — and how they create difficulty for you and others — you can begin to choose something different. Meditation, mindfulness and reflection help create a gap between an internal reaction and acting it out. That takes a lot of effort, patience and humility.

So no, it’s not a holiday and it often wasn’t very relaxing, in the usual sense.

Because I could travel easily, my own process included around eight two-week retreats at a women’s retreat centre dedicated to ordination training, alongside many meditation-focused retreats — weekends to four weeks at a time. This included a month-long silent camping retreat in Devon in 2015, and time spent on solitary retreats: cabins around the UK, and walking and camping alone in New Zealand.

In 2016, I spent five months living at a retreat centre in Herefordshire, on an intensive study and practise course for women, while my boyfriend (now fiancé) was on his four-month ordination retreat.

I was part of a weekly study group for four years, and a peer-led group focused on ethics and a Buddhist approach to confession. No self-hatred, following rules for the sake of it or "doing what you're told" involved: our approach to confession is simply about recognising where you fall short of your values and exploring how to make amends and change. I also supported and led meditation and Buddhism classes, courses and retreats across London.

For my ordination retreat, I was meant to go up a mountain in Spain for three months. I’d been looking forward to it for years. My mind and heart were ready — I was dreaming about it regularly: following a red thread up a mountain, or shopping for a new dress and never finding quite the right one.

Then Covid happened.

Instead, I was ordained in Wales a year later, on a two-week retreat at Taraloka Retreat Centre, following a week-long solitary retreat. It was still magic.

Meditation. Ethical confession. Rituals to let go of an old version of myself. Silence. Community. Swishy blue robes. A moment in the shrine room, watching a hare bound across the field.

I was given my new name: Aryanisha. It comes from two Pali words — Arya and Nisha — from the language closest to what the Buddha would have spoken. Together, it means “She whose dream is of the Noble Ones.”

Your name is chosen and given by your Private Preceptor: someone who becomes particularly close to you during the ordination training process. You have no idea what it will be and you can only change it in the very rarest of circumstances (as in, it sounds offensive in another language).

During that retreat, it became clear to me that I needed to leave my life in London. I was working at Repowering London, tackling fuel poverty from local to international levels. Several evenings a week, I was supporting or leading classes at Brixton Buddhist Centre, where my partner was Chair.

So much was good about my life. The team at Repowering is full of great, interesting people.

But my life didn't quite fit me anymore. Although I didn’t know who that really was yet.

I sensed I could do more — help more — in a different shape. It was almost as if I knew I'd been uniquely placed on this earth for a particular reason and I needed to discover it.

Living alone in a flat in South London, I practised my new sadhana daily — a self-visualisation practice of White Tara. She's an archetypal figure of white light, strongly associated with the full moon, healing and wisdom. I also used The Wild Unknown tarot deck as a self-coaching tool. The imagery helped me access my intuition.

Over weeks of deep reflection and vivid, meaningful dreams, I knew I wanted to be a coach. Buddhism runs through me, but I wanted my work to be accessible regardless of belief system.

Parallel to this, Viryanaga (Vi-ree-uh-nah-guh) and I were deciding whether to move in together. We had bought a van during Covid, originally meant as a weekend escape. At some point, one of us suggested moving into it full-time. We decided to try it for a year.

Spring 2022, we were out of London and into #vanlife.

The van was far from finished. We had insulation, wood flooring covered in cardboard — and not much else. Sometimes you just have to go for it and work it out as you go along.

Over the next few years, I applied my coaching and training skills creatively. I ran programmes on public speaking, wellbeing and line management; coached leaders 1:1; and consulted on team development and communication. I also reconnected with my Cambridge college and began coaching undergraduates on the Leadership, Enterprise and Adventure Programme.

While I was still exploring my direction, my dad was diagnosed with cancer in August 2024. The following six months were an absolute shit show. He died in February 2025, sooner than expected.

It was the most painful period of my life, but I was also in contact with a vast sense of love, confidence in my practice and faith in the Buddha’s teachings. The difficulty, the heart-bursting love and the relentless message of impermanence, changed me completely.

I wrote and led his funeral. Many people said that it was the best they had ever been to. What they really saw was the product of a dedicated Buddhist life, supported and shaped by many friends and teachers.

The months afterwards were about recovery. I was exhausted but I also needed someone to care for, intensely, to get me out of a hole.

So we got Pedro, our spaniel puppy.

In December, we returned to a place in Wales we’d visited the year before, when my life had been unravelling. Driving through that landscape again, I started crying without warning. I hadn’t realised how much the year would catch up with me, and how much a place could hold memory and loss.

The turn of this year was powerful. I spent Christmas in Kent with my stepmum, sleeping in my dad’s room.

Through a series of dreams and signs from the universe in January, I knew I needed to focus on coaching leaders who are damaging their relationships at work or home without meaning to.

There’s a lot I can do. But if I could only do one thing — this would be it.

Many of the most transformative conversations I’ve had with leaders over the last 15 years have come when they've reached a tipping point.

Acting out of character by getting snappy, irritable or short is one of those. It's a humbling time and a clear warning sign that something is bubbling up from below.

I know because I've been through this more times than I can count.

It feels shit, doesn't it? A kind of icky feeling in your stomach, when you've come down from the frustration or anger.

At first, you don't want to admit you've done anything wrong. But then you can see it and it sucks. You might feel anxiety, even dread, about what comes next.

My Dad's death taught me that the most important thing is to live without regret.

And one of the things we clearly regret most is reacting and hurting others.

Wouldn't you hate it if the last thing they heard from you was the frustration, anger or resentment in your voice? Or the short or snappy tone in your email or message?

I wouldn't describe my approach to helping you through this as “spiritual coaching”.

I don’t experience myself as particularly spiritual — even if that sounds odd, given everything you’ve just read.

Most leaders and business owners I meet tell me that I’m very much NOT your stereotypical spiritual type. A bit different, yes, but down-to-earth. Practical. And I swear. Quite a bit to be honest.

I don’t tell you what to believe. I would never claim that what's really going on for you underneath all this is something in the stars, your chakras, past lives or energy fields. Because I really hate it when someone does that to me.

Not because they’re necessarily wrong, but because it shows a breakdown in communication. When a stranger asserts something with certainty, without meeting you where you are, they’re not really seeing you. They're caught up in their thing, themselves, even if they're trying to be helpful.

That’s the opposite of coaching.

The other reason I’ve been hesitant to market my services as life coaching for the spiritually curious is that it’s not the main focus of how I work with leaders, at least not to begin with. Like me, they’re focused on being a good person, leading a meaningful life and helping others. Some people call that spirituality, but we don’t really see it like that.

Instead, we're mainly focused on not being a dick.

So there you go. Why I’m called Aryanisha and how I came to coaching leaders who need to stop snapping and sort themselves out.