We were lucky to catch up with Dr. Jamil Sayegh recently and have shared our conversation below.
Dr. Jamil , we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
Let me share a story with you that has deeply impacted people all around the world.
Life Can Change In An Instant
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
~ Mary Oliver
This story may be the wake-up call you didn’t know you needed.
When I was 19-years-old and in the sophomore year of my undergraduate degree in New York City, our pre-med group went to Albany to fight to keep funding for the program. The faculty asked me to attend to share my experience of how I had benefited from the program. Planning to leave Friday morning and return Sunday evening, on Wednesday while preparing for my trip, this thought crossed my mind, “Something’s not right. Don’t go.” It seemed to come out of nowhere so, as most of us do when we receive a message such as this, I ignored it.
The following day the thought continued, and it became stronger and stronger. By Thursday evening this urge, intuition, gut feeling, whatever you’d like to call it, had become so strong that I finally listened. I sent an email stating something to the effect of, “I’m sorry I can’t make it. Something came up.”
Friday came around, a regular day. Saturday… another regular day. But Sunday morning changed my whole life. Moments after I woke up, my father had a brain aneurysm. Imagine a blood vessel, like a tube, in your brain that balloons outward. If you’re fortunate, you have one of the worst headaches of your life, you go to the hospital, they take care of you, and hopefully you get to go home.
My father wasn’t as fortunate. His aneurysm ruptured.
He was in a locked room at the time, and I broke the door to get him out. If I wasn’t home, he would have died right then and there. We rushed to the hospital where he underwent a four-hour brain surgery. We were told his chance of survival was less than 5% given how severe it was, and if he did survive, he’d very likely never wake up from the coma. As you can imagine, the four hours felt like forty years. After the surgery, we found out it was the worst brain aneurysm the neurosurgeon had ever seen, but miraculously, my father survived.
My family and I entered the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU) to see my father in the most vulnerable position I’ve ever seen a human being. The hospital staff told us that he was in an extremely critical state, that they weren’t sure if he would survive, and that he could die at any moment. To give you some context, my father was 49-years-old, a family-practice physician, and one of the top Elvis impersonators in the world. He toured with Elvis’ band, performed sold-out international shows, and created beautiful impact through charitable performances for hospitals. He was known around the world as such a beacon of life, light, and love, and everyone adored him. His energy and presence were immense, yet here he was lying in this hospital bed in a coma.
In that moment I had two primary experiences. The first was a sense of helplessness. It felt like I couldn’t do anything. I was being told he could die at any moment, and I felt like I was simply waiting for it to happen. The second was a profound sense of regret. I felt that I had taken my father for granted; that I didn’t know him the way that I could have. This really bothered me because it felt like I had bought into the illusion that I have time. My thought process had been, “I’m 19, he’s 49; I’ve got 20, 30, even 50 more years. I don’t have to get to know this man right now.” Until that point, my priorities in life were running (I was a track athlete), spending time with my friends, watching movies, and playing video games. I didn’t ever think, “Let me really get to know my dad man to man and soul to soul. Let me see what this guy’s all about. Let me see what I can learn from him.” For whatever reason, none of this had been in my awareness. I felt like I’d blown it, and I wasn’t going to have that opportunity again.
I was immensely blessed to have three more years with my father before his passing. In those three years, we helped him make an almost full recovery. So much of who I am today was forged through the challenges and adversity of that time. After college, I took several years off to be one of his primary caregivers. For the first eighteen months after his aneurysm, I went to bed every night wondering if that was the last time I would ever see my dad, and I woke up every morning in a bit of a fog wondering if it was all a dream.
This experience taught me the value of every day; the miracle that is right now, this very moment.
Did you know that every day ~150,000 people don’t wake up? The fact that you’re reading this right now means that you weren’t one of those people. It means that you still have the opportunity to create all of your goals and dreams. In addition, if some, or all, of the people you care about woke up too, then you hit the life jackpot right from the get-go. Your day is already extraordinary; it’s already a miracle. Yet so many of us think something out of the ordinary has to happen in order for us to feel happy, excited, and grateful. I lived most of my life in this unconscious and unintentional way. I now know with every fiber of my being that:
There are no ordinary moments. The ordinary is the extraordinary.
Imagine you are told you only have one more day to live. Walking around your hometown, you experience the warm sun shining on your skin, a cool breeze on your body, birds singing, a loved one’s smile, children laughing, a breathtaking sunrise, the smell of delicious food as you sit down to eat, and anything else you’d like to imagine. Knowing that you will never have these experiences again, would these moments seem mundane? Or would you slow down and take in the miracles all around you? You and I both know the answer. So imagine how wonderful your life could be if you slowed down and savored every moment as if it’s the last one? Why? Because it might be.
I realized that my father is here now, and he might not be here tomorrow, or even later today. He’s here right now, so let me make the most of it. My awareness started to expand as I understood that this also applied to my mother, my sister, myself, and everyone I knew and would ever meet – they could all be gone in the next moment; but they’re here now, so make each moment count.
I have a couple of questions for you:
• In what ways are you taking the people you love for granted?
• Where are the people who are closest to you not feeling your love?
It’s so easy for us to say or think, “Of course I love that person.” But are you being loving? Think of love as a verb. Are you being the expression of love? Most of the time, the answer is, “Not as much as I would like.” My invitation to you is to check in with yourself every day and find ways to embody and express love at deeper levels to yourself and others.
In those three years, I experienced some of my highest highs and lowest lows. On the one hand, my prayers were answered. I spent 10-15 hours per day with my dad. We sang together, played music, went for walks and to physical therapy together. We explored deep conversations, watched movies, and so much more. I really got to know him, and he became one of my best friends. I am truly blessed to have had that experience.
On the other hand, after the aneurysm my father was prone to seizures and short-term memory-loss (at times even long-term memory loss). I remember when, after taking care of him for two to three days in a row, he forgot who I was, and we argued about whether I was his nephew. He had seizures in my arms that lasted between 40 seconds and five minutes. Imagine what it was like to have a 200lb+ man seizing in your arms for five minutes while the phone is across the room, you don’t have any medical knowledge, and you don’t know what to do. These moments were terrifying. It felt like my family and I experienced his death hundreds of times, and yet these experiences made all the other moments, when he and everyone I cared about were alive and well, so much richer and all the more special. Because I never knew when that last moment might be, I did everything I could to bring my love, gratitude, presence, humor, and perspective to each moment. I’m reminded of a Steve Job’s quote from a commencement speech he gave at Stanford University, “If you live every day like it’s your last, one day you will surely be right.”
My father passed away shortly after his 52nd birthday. His wake was five hours in duration, and over 7,000 people attended. I shook every single person’s hand, and nearly everyone said, “Your dad saved my life.” It was so beautiful to see people from all walks of life: different cultures, religions, race, dress, everything, and every one of them had the same reason for being there. They wanted to pay their respects to a man they cared deeply about, who made them feel seen, loved, and heard. I was immensely humbled to see the impact he had, and I experienced a profound realization:
Up until that point in my life, I had been playing small. I cared way too much about what other people thought about me. I was afraid of rejection, and because of that, I was robbing the world of my light.
One of my favorite words is “enthusiasm,” which comes from the Greek word “en-theos,” meaning “the God within.” When you radiate enthusiastically, you’re shining that light, that divine spark, that uniqueness that is you, into the world. What most of us do, however, and what I was doing for most of my life, is wear a mask that says, “Who do I need to be for you to love me? Who do I need to be in order to be normal, special, validated, popular, part of the group, etc.?” We wear that mask trying to perform for approval and validation. The key is this:
Even when you do that and think you won that game, you lose.
This is because you never get your own approval and validation. You always have this knowing in the back of your mind that, “Something’s not right; something feels off with who I’m being and what I’m doing.” In addition, all those people who you believe love you – they don’t actually know you. They know your mask, who you’ve been pretending to be; deep down, you already know this.
So, there I was at my father’s wake where, as a result of this epiphany, I made a promise to myself,
Never again will I rob the world of who I could be.
I will live from love, not fear. In doing so, I have found that creating a meaningful difference for so many people when I shine bright is not only what I’m here to do, but my experience of life is so much better and more enjoyable when I let who I truly am out to play. Have you also found that your experience of life is so much richer when you’re being your authentic self?
In the three years that I took care of my dad, two of my cousins passed away; one was 20-years-old, the other 21. If you asked either of these men when they were 18 what they envisioned for their life, I promise you neither guy would have said they’d be dead in two to three years. The problem is that we think we have time, and as a result, we live our life procrastinating on our dreams. We consistently say, “I’ll do it tomorrow.” What I’ve seen, over and over again, is that most of the time, tomorrow never comes. This is because when tomorrow comes, you call it today, and then you say, “I’ll do it tomorrow” once again. Think of it like this:
Today is the tomorrow you said you’d begin yesterday.
My sincere prayer is that you have several more decades to live, to experience, and to love. Consider the following question, “How much time do I have left?” Every one of us has the same answer to that question, “I don’t know.” And yet, far too often we act as if we’re never going to die, we play smaller than we’re capable of, we allow fear to run our life, and we buy into stories of limitation about ourselves that aren’t true. All these create the likelihood of immense regret;
but the good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Remember:
The future is created by what you decide to do right now. You can start to shift how you’re living, how you’re showing up, and the actions you take today.
Ask yourself:
• Where is my life not what I want it to be?
• What would I love to create and experience instead?
• What’s the one action, the one step, I can take now to move my life forward in my desired direction?
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said, “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.” So often we want to see the whole staircase before we even begin. We want to have certainty about the entire journey before we allow ourselves to take the first step. That’s not how life works. What you can see from where you are is your next step. When that next step feels expansive, exciting, interesting, and when it seems like your intuition is pulling you forward, take the leap! If some hesitation or fear is present as well, all the better.
When you expand beyond your comfort zone, things may feel unfamiliar. Unfamiliar isn’t bad, it’s simply not what you’re used to. Like everything and everyone else in your life, it will be unfamiliar until it isn’t.
Keep going.
Ultimately it comes down to this – what is calling to you is calling to you for a reason. Pay attention and explore it. Once you take that step, the next step reveals itself. If you reflect on your life experience thus far, I’m sure you’ll see this has been true for you all along. Follow your heart, passion, and excitement to create the impact you know you’re here to make. And if you aren’t sure what to do, ask yourself, “What would my future-self thank me for?” “Since my future-self is created by what I do right now, which choice leads me closer to where, and who, I want to be?” Do that consistently, and the rest of your life will take care of itself.
I trust that this story served as a wake-up call for you, and I hope that you take this opportunity to make your life a masterpiece.
It has been my privilege to serve you.
Create a meaningful and blessed life!
All my love,
Dr. Jamil Sayegh N.M.D.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I’m Dr. Jamil Sayegh, and I operate at the intersection of high performance and deep healing. As a transformational coach, energy healer, and integrative naturopathic physician, I serve as a trusted advisor to high-performing leaders, entrepreneurs, and visionaries who are ready to break through the invisible barriers holding them back from their next evolution.
My work is for those who have already achieved outward success—but internally, something still feels off. They may be experiencing emotional heaviness, chronic stress, physical symptoms, or an unshakable sense that they’re meant for something greater. My job is to help them release the mental, emotional, energetic, and physical blocks that are silently capping their potential—so they can collapse time and experience their 10-year goals in 10 months.
What makes my work special is the depth. This isn’t just mindset coaching. It’s identity alchemy, subconscious rewiring, energetic mastery, and soul-level transformation. Clients come to me when traditional methods have plateaued, and they’re ready for real, lasting change.
Currently, my brand—The Alchemical Architect—offers three core paths for transformation:
1. The Healing Circle – A group coherence healing experience where we enter a quantum field of stillness and energetic alignment. This is where emotional pain, chronic stress, and even physical symptoms often begin to unwind in real-time. Sessions are held 3x/month, and the first session is free to the public.
2. The Soul Forge – A private alchemical immersion for leaders who want to become the person who effortlessly achieves what once felt impossible. It’s deep, accelerated, and completely customized for the individual.
3. The Healing Sanctum – A sacred experience of in-person or remote energetic healing using multidimensional tools, including scalar field coherence, quantum recalibration, and deep soul restoration.
I also host the Transformation Starts Today podcast, where I interview powerful visionaries and share teachings on how to create a deeply fulfilling life from the inside out.
What excites me most is watching people come home to themselves. When someone remembers who they really are—beyond the conditioning, the trauma, the performance masks—their entire life changes. They lead with love, move with clarity, and create with power.
I’m expanding now into live retreats, corporate facilitation, and high-level mastermind experiences for mission-driven leaders who are here not just to succeed, but to embody their greatness and elevate the world.
You can learn more about my work or apply to experience it for yourself at https://jamilsayegh.com.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Looking back, the three most impactful elements in my journey have been:
1. Radical Self-Honesty – The willingness to face myself fully. To look in the mirror and tell the truth—not just about what’s working, but about what’s not. Growth doesn’t come from bypassing pain or performing perfection—it comes from radical responsibility. When you can see clearly, you can choose powerfully.
2. Mastery of Energy and Belief – As a healer and coach, I’ve seen this time and again: what’s driving your life isn’t what’s conscious—it’s the invisible scripts running underneath. Learning how to work with energy, shift beliefs at the root, and clear internal blockages has changed everything. Without this, I might still be “doing all the right things” and wondering why things weren’t working.
3. Devotion to Being, Not Just Doing – Early in the journey, I thought success was about hustle and strategy. Over time, I learned that who I am being determines what I create. The more I aligned with truth, integrity, and presence—the more effortlessly results came. It’s not about doing more. It’s about being the version of you that no longer sabotages, hides, or plays small.
Advice for Those Early in Their Journey
Start with presence. The best strategy is useless if you’re building it on top of unhealed wounds, unresolved fear, or borrowed definitions of success. Invest in your inner world. Learn to listen deeply—to yourself, to life, to the stillness beneath the noise. And most of all, be courageous enough to walk your own path, even when it looks different than everyone else’s.
The life that’s calling you will require all of you. Answer it fully.
How would you describe your ideal client?
I work best with leaders, champions, and high-performers—the kind of people who are already doing well by most standards, but know deep down they’re only operating at a fraction of what they’re truly capable of. They’re committed to mastery—not just in business, but in who they are as a human, partner, and creator.
My ideal clients have already achieved in the outer world. But they’ve hit a ceiling they can’t quite explain—whether it’s in their health, relationships, fulfillment, or performance. They sense that the next level isn’t just about doing more. It’s about becoming more aligned, more liberated, more fully themselves.
That’s where my work comes in.
Some clients come to me for elite coaching—deep mindset, energetic rewiring, and life design. Others come for my healing work—clearing emotional and energetic blockages, subconscious limitations, and patterns that have kept them sick and stuck for years. Many experience the most powerful results when we integrate both.
My ideal client is ready to go beyond strategy and into the root. They’ve outgrown quick fixes, hype, and surface-level solutions. They want real, lasting transformation—mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and energetically. They’re not afraid to look in the mirror and do the inner work most avoid.
If that’s you—if you’ve built a good life, but you know in your bones that there’s a greater version of you waiting to be unleashed—then I invite you to reach out.
You can connect with me at www.jamilsayegh.com or on Instagram @DrJamilSayegh
This work isn’t for everyone.
But for the right person, it changes everything.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jamilsayegh.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drjamilsayegh/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jamil.sayegh
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-jamil-sayegh-402aa416b/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@drjamilsayegh
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
