We recently connected with Ester Budek Robbins and have shared our conversation below.

Ester, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

My mother was a rebel.

She had me at 38 in Soviet-era Kyrgyzstan — an age when women in that world were already becoming grandmothers. Then she did something truly unthinkable for that time and system: she quit her job as a translator at a military training school and stayed home with my brother and me.

In the Soviet Union, everyone worked. Everyone was equal. Everyone sent their children to government daycare. That was the system, and the system was not optional. But my brother kept getting sick, and my mother made a decision that defied everything her world told her was correct. She came home.

It wasn’t a comfortable life. The four of us lived in a one-room apartment. My father was an engineer — a Holocaust survivor who had his children late in life, nearly 50 when I was born — and the weight of his own unhealed traumas made generosity difficult. My mother made money on the side doing translations, selling clothes our relatives sent from America. Looking back it sounds hard. Living it, it simply felt normal.

What I didn’t understand until much later was the extraordinary gift hidden inside that ordinary life.

Not part of any system

Because my mother stayed home, I didn’t enter any school or education system until I was 7 years old. Developmental psychology tells us that the core of a person’s conditioning — their beliefs about who they are and what the world expects of them — is largely formed by that age. I slipped through that window unconditioned.
I had no system telling me what was right, who to be, or what parts of myself needed to be hidden to be accepted. So I was simply myself. I assumed everyone else was simply themselves too.

I found out — in a very painful way — that most people are not. Most people are living inside personas they constructed in childhood to earn love, approval and safety. They learned early which parts of themselves were acceptable and which needed to be hidden. And they have been hiding ever since.

I never built that mask. Not because I was exceptional, but because no system ever asked me to.

Nature as a classroom

I grew up instead in nature. Kyrgyzstan is one of the most breathtaking places on earth — landlocked by the Tian Shan mountains, scattered with lakes, staggeringly beautiful. Back then even people within the USSR barely knew it existed. My parents had been evacuated there by Stalin as a refuge from the Holocaust. And it became, without anyone intending it, the most formative classroom I could have had.

I climbed trees. I spent entire days on an oak, apple or walnut tree that became my place. I was guided by my body, by the seasons, by something I couldn’t name then but recognize now — inner wisdom. The kind that only develops when no one is telling you what to think or who to be.

Now, having studied indigenous traditions, ancient wisdom, traditional Yoga, Kabbalah and the deeper currents that run beneath all of them, I realize I was already living those principles before I had words for them. Guided by nature, by the body, by the heart, by an inner voice that systems and institutions spend enormous energy teaching people to distrust.

Figuring things out, not performing

What my parents couldn’t give me in material things or lavish experiences, they gave me in something far more valuable: the ability to figure things out on my own.

I was never a good student in the Soviet system — partly because my parents never demanded performance from me, and partly because being Jewish in that system meant being invisible. Academic achievement wasn’t a meaningful path for us, so I never learned to perform for approval or do things for external validation. What I learned instead was how to navigate the world through my own resourcefulness.

I became a competitive swimmer at 5. In a city where most people relied on public transportation, I was taking buses alone to practice at 7 years old, then transferring to get to school. I packed my own bags for two-week summer camps at that same age. I was self-sufficient not because anyone sat me down and taught me to be, but because there was simply no other option — and no one treated that as a hardship.

I didn’t learn grades. I didn’t learn to perform. I learned processes. How to figure things out. How to move through obstacles. How to trust myself when no external support was available.

That distinction matters enormously to me now, especially as a parent. I co-parent with someone who believes that doing more, giving more, ‘”being the hero”, engineering every outcome — good grades, the right schools, the right opportunities handed over — is love. What I watch instead are children who wait for someone else to solve things for them, they wait for tutors, private coaches, private counselors to pull them because they feel helpless and believe they can’t do it on their own. That is foreign to everything I was built from. Because I know what self-sufficiency gives a person. I know, intimately, what it can save.

What it built

When I arrived in the United States at 15, I didn’t speak English. My elderly parents couldn’t guide me through an American school system they didn’t understand themselves. I had nothing but the inner compass I had been quietly developing since childhood and the processes I had learned for figuring things out on my own.

Within three years I moved from ESL 1 to Advanced English. I became MVP and captain of my swim team. I graduated with two academic medals. I went on to earn five degrees. Nobody cared that I was Jewish here. I could simply be who I was.

None of that came from being told I was exceptional. It came from never having been told I couldn’t figure it out myself. It came from doing things from the inside out — not for grades, not for applause, not for anyone’s approval.

The through-line

That inner compass has been the through-line of my entire life. It is, I believe, the only reason I am alive today. After nearly two decades of an emotional abuse that led me to a stage 3 cancer diagnosis, it was that same voice — the one that had been speaking to me from an oak tree in Kyrgyzstan since childhood — that guided me back to myself. When I did hypnosis to work through the trauma of betrayal, the safe place my subconscious returned me to was that tree. I hope it is still standing.

Once the life I had built was shattered, I was able to pivot — not without suffering, but completely — to a different purpose entirely. One the universe, that inner wisdom, had been quietly preparing me for all along. I am grateful, surprised, and in awe of that.

My mother is 86 now and living in a nursing home. My father passed during COVID at 91. I never thanked them for this — not in the way I want to. But I understand now what they gave me. Not through grand gestures or perfect parenting. Not through comfort or security or the things parents are supposed to provide.

Through one stubborn woman’s refusal to be part of the herd. Through a childhood spent in mountains and on lake shores and up in the branches of trees. Through the quiet, unspoken message that I was capable of figuring it out.

I fully trust myself today. I stand in my light today.

It all started on that oak tree.

What you do and how you ended up doing it.

I did not choose coaching.

Coaching chose me — through the most painful passage of my life.

After nearly two decades in a relationship defined by emotional abuse, I found myself completely unrecognizable. I had been slowly, methodically told who I was until I believed it. Until the person I had always been — the girl on the oak tree in Kyrgyzstan who trusted herself completely — had gone silent. When the relationship finally ended, I wasn’t left with grief. I was left with an empty shell where a person used to be.

For four years, every single day was a battle to stay. I knew I had to — I had children who needed me, and I had witnessed firsthand what a parent’s suicide does to a child, watching my childhood friend spend decades destroying himself after losing his father that way at 16. That knowledge kept me here. But staying and living are not the same thing. I spent those years counting minutes, waiting for sleep to bring relief, searching desperately for something — anything — that could show me a way through.

So I searched. Relentlessly.

It started with Dr. Joe Dispenza — his work on the brain, on breaking the habit of being yourself, on the science of how we can literally rewire who we are. That cracked something open. From there I went deeper and wider — shamanic practices and plant medicine traditions, traditional yoga and meditation in their full depth, not as fitness but as a complete philosophy of being. Breathwork. Somatic healing. Hypnosis. Energy work. Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. The Tony Robbins methodology. Indigenous wisdom traditions from across the world. Ancient practices and modern neuroscience sitting side by side.

I was not collecting modalities. I was trying to survive. And somewhere inside all of it, I found something I had not expected to find: the ability to surrender. To stop fighting the pain and instead ask what it was here to teach me. To trust that the light — the Creator, the Universe, whatever name resonates — was not punishing me but guiding me. That there was an intelligence in the suffering I could not yet see.

Learning to love again — myself first, then life itself — was the longest and most important part of the journey. Not romantic love. The deeper kind. The kind that says: I am worthy of being here. I am not what was done to me. I am something the Universe is actively moving toward its own expression through.

That is not something I arrived at quickly. But I arrived.

Today I am a certified iPEC coach with ICF accreditation, a 500-hour certified yoga and meditation teacher, a Tony Robbins Senior Leader, a devoted yoga and meditation practitioner, a student of Kabbalah. I bring all of it — every framework, every tradition, every hard-won insight — into my work with clients.

What I do and who I serve

I want to be clear about something: I do not only work with people who have hit rock bottom.

Because here is the truth — most people never do. Most people have enough escape tactics available to keep the pain at a manageable distance. The wine at the end of the day. The endless scrolling. The busyness that never stops. The relationship that is fine. The career that is fine. The life that looks, from the outside, completely fine.

And yet something is missing. Something has always been missing. A quiet knowing that you are living on the surface of yourself rather than from the depth of who you actually are.

I work with those people too. The ones who haven’t collapsed but who sense, somewhere underneath the functioning and the achieving and the performing, that they have been living someone else’s version of their life. Often for a very long time.

Pain does not have to be catastrophic to be worth examining. And awakening does not require devastation as its entry point — though for many of us, that is how it arrives.

My background spans multiple disciplines — I do not separate life from work, or emotional healing from professional rebuilding. I work with the whole person. Health, mental and emotional state, relationships, purpose, financial abundance — these are not separate categories. They are one life. We work on each dimension, drawing on breathwork, traditional yoga and meditation, shamanic practices, neuroscience-based tools, Kabbalistic frameworks and wealth mastery principles, and integrate them all into what I believe we are here for: living in full abundance — not in spite of what we have been through, but because of it.

What makes my approach different is that I am not teaching theories I studied. I am sharing a map I drew while lost in the dark. There is a difference between a guide who has read about the terrain and one who has walked it barefoot. I know what it is to want to disappear. I know what it is to rebuild from absolute zero. And I know — equally — what it is to be the high-functioning person who has everything and still feels hollow at 2am.

We are not victims of our suffering. We are being shaped by it, if we choose to be. We are the divine itself, and we are the creators of our own lives.

What I am most proud of–Not the degrees. Not the credentials, though I value them.

What I am most proud of is that I did not let the pain make me smaller.

I came through stage 3 cancer. I came through years of wanting to disappear. I came through having the life I built dismantled piece by piece. I learned to surrender, to trust the light that was guiding me even when I could not see it. And on the other side of all of it, I found something I never expected: myself. More fully, more completely, more unapologetically than ever before.

That is what I want for every person who finds their way to my work.

Not just survival. Not just recovery.

The realization that what broke you open — or what has been quietly hollowing you out — was always meant to reveal what was inside. And what is inside you is the light of the divine itself.

What I want you to know

Whether you are in the middle of the darkness right now, or simply standing in a life that no longer fits — I am here.
I am not standing at a comfortable distance offering advice. I am someone who has been in both places and found the way through.

The pain you are carrying — whether it is unbearable or just quietly persistent — is not punishment.
It is initiation.

And on the other side of it, if you are willing to do the work, is the most alive, most luminous version of yourself you have ever met.

That is what I am here to help you find.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The lesson I had to unlearn was one I never chose to learn in the first place.

I learned to hide.

Growing up Jewish in the Soviet Union meant one thing above all else: do not be too visible. Every time I excelled at something, the system reminded me that excellence had a ceiling — and that ceiling had my name on it. I was bullied not only by other children but by teachers. When competitions came around, Jewish children did not travel. Jewish children stayed back. The message was consistent and it was clear: you are too much, and too much is not welcome here.

So I dimmed.

Not all at once. Gradually. The way you adjust to a room getting darker — you don’t notice it happening until you can barely see.

When I entered the system and shined, the system told me the light was too bright. And I believed it. I learned to make myself smaller so others could feel comfortable. I learned to help others shine instead. I told myself this was generosity. Looking back, it was survival that had long overstayed its welcome and quietly become self-betrayal.

By the time I entered my marriage, the conditioning was already deeply set. I stayed home. I helped him build. I made myself the support structure for someone else’s visibility and growth. I now understand why I was the perfect match for someone with the particular wounds he carried — I had already been trained, long before I met him, to betray my own light in order to keep the peace.

That is the thing about our deepest patterns. They don’t announce themselves. They just keep finding new stages to play out on.

The unlearning did not happen gently. It happened through devastation — through losing everything I had built and being left with nothing but the question of who I actually was underneath all the accommodating and shrinking and disappearing.

And what I found, when I finally stopped running from that question, was someone who was never too much.
Someone who was exactly enough — and had been all along.

Today I do not dim my light because someone else finds it uncomfortable. That discomfort is their work, not mine. I spent too many years making myself smaller so others could feel bigger. I will not do it anymore — not for a system, not for a relationship, not for anyone.

If my light is too bright for the room, that is information about the room.

It is not a reason to turn down the switch.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

I want to give you the honest answer, not the MBA answer.

Although I hold two MBAs and a former CFA charter and spent years in the corporate world where strategy, metrics and acquisition funnels are the language of growth — that is not how I build my practice. And I want to explain why, because I think it points to something the business world at large is only beginning to understand.

Our thoughts create emotions. Emotions drive actions. And those actions collectively create the world as it exists right now. Look at the world — it is running almost entirely on action. On doing, acquiring, hunting, conquering. This is masculine energy in its unbalanced form, and it has been the dominant operating system of Western civilization since the Roman empire systematically drove out the divine feminine — known in Judaism as the Shekhinah, and in Hinduism as Shakti, two of the oldest wisdom traditions on earth.

The exile of the divine feminine was not accidental. It was strategic.

To build armies, to conquer land, to erase the uniqueness and the richness of each individual culture and people — you first have to exile the energy that honors difference, that listens, that nurtures, that knows. The two great empires that between them conquered half the known world did not just take land. They took the Shekhinah. They took the Shakti. They replaced the colorful, diverse, spiritually rooted wisdom of individual peoples with a single dominant system in one part of the world and another in the other — and these systems run entirely on masculine force.

What was lost was not just a spiritual concept. It was the inner compass of humanity itself.

The world has been running on half its intelligence ever since. And that was by design.

The feminine is not about women. It is an energy that lives within every human being — the seat of inner wisdom, intuition, receptivity and spiritual knowing. Just as the masculine lives within every woman. We are, each of us, the balance of both. When we suppress one, we cause ourselves pain. I find that most men fear their own feminine — the sensitivity, the emotional depth, the capacity for love without agenda. And many women fear their own masculine — the inner power, the decisive action, the sovereignty.

So when people ask me how I grow my clientele, my answer is this: I work on my inner state. I work on being, genuinely and fully, the light I am here to be. And what I have found — in a way that continues to surprise and humble me — is that when I let go of the idea of “getting” clients, that is precisely when they arrive.

They find me at events. They find me on social media. They are referred by someone who sensed something in a conversation. They show up when I am most aligned with who I truly am — not when I am strategizing about how to reach them.

This is not magic. It is law. You cannot share light you do not first carry. The income, the clients, the growth — they are outputs of inner alignment, not inputs you can manufacture through tactics.

I know this is not the answer expected from someone with my background. It is exactly why I do what I do. I have lived on both sides — the world of spreadsheets and strategy and the world of surrender and inner wisdom — and I can tell you with certainty that the only way forward, for individuals and for the world, is through love. Through remembering who we are. Through restoring the balance between the energy that acts and the energy that knows.

The divine feminine has been exiled long enough.

It is time to come home.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: awaken2greatness