I went to Riyadh expecting to introduce women to wellness. What I found stopped me in my tracks. Their knowledge of wellbeing, their self-awareness, and their eagerness to simply live better, healthier, and happier were a surprise I had not anticipated and was not prepared for.
They knew that their sleep was broken, that their stress was chronic, that their cortisol levels and nervous systems were not fine, and that something in their lives needed to change. They had read the books, followed the accounts, and absorbed the language of wellbeing with the same hunger I see in women across Washington DC, New York, Beirut, and Europe. What they were missing was not information. It was permission and infrastructure, someone to stand in a room with them and say: begin here, begin now, this is what it looks like, and you do not have to do it alone.
That distinction between knowing and beginning is not unique to Saudi Arabia. It is the defining gap in women’s wellness everywhere.
I spent a month in Riyadh earlier this year. I led a workshop for approximately thirty women at a community organization, held private meditation and mindfulness sessions, and had conversations over coffee that became healing spaces in their own right, as much for me as for them.
What I witnessed aligned closely with what Saudi public health campaigns and Vision 2030’s quality of life initiatives have been naming openly: disrupted sleep patterns, chronic stress, and the emotional weight carried by women navigating rapid social change at both ends of the generational spectrum. Young women in their twenties running on overstimulation, late nights, and the relentless pace of a life that never fully powers down. Women in their fifties quietly navigating a new chapter, one that Saudi wellness and social health conversations are increasingly recognizing as a critical and underserved stage of life.
What struck me, sitting in that room and then sitting across from individual women in private sessions, was not how different their struggles were from the women I know elsewhere. It was how identical they were.
There was something else I noticed that first evening something that stayed with me. In Lebanon and in the United States, I have learned to open sessions with a careful framing: that what I practice is not spiritual, not a challenge to anyone’s faith, but a methodology grounded in the science of the nervous system and the body. I say it because people need to hear it. In Riyadh, I opened my mouth to begin that speech and realized, looking at the room, that I did not need to give it. They had already read me. They understood from the way I stood there — a Lebanese-American woman, a familiar world to them — that I was not arriving to replace anything. They knew my method would not interfere with their faith, just as it does not interfere with mine. That quiet, immediate discernment told me more about the sophistication of that room than anything said in the Q&A.
This is what I want to say clearly, because I think it matters: the women I met in Riyadh were not less informed, less conscious, or less capable of transformation than women anywhere else I have worked. In some ways they were more honest about what was happening to them, perhaps because the culture of performing fine had not yet become as consuming as it has in some other contexts, where admitting difficulty can feel like professional or social failure.
What they needed, what women everywhere need, is not more information. It is the specific, embodied experience of doing something differently. Of breathing consciously for the first time and feeling the nervous system actually respond. Of sitting in a room with other women and having the conversation out loud. Of discovering that the gap between knowing and living differently is smaller than it appeared, and that it closes not through willpower but through practice, held and supported by community.
That is what the workshop gave them. And the response, women speaking unprompted at the Q&A, not to say polite things but to say true ones, told me everything I needed to know about readiness. They were not waiting to be convinced. They were waiting for a starting point.
I built Sol by Luna from my own experience of needing exactly that. After surviving cancer, I understood in my body, not just intellectually, that the gap between knowing how to live well and actually living well required more than information. It required structure, practice, and someone to hold the space while you found your footing.
That is what I try to offer. Not answers, the women I work with already have most of those. But rather a beginning, a room, a breath. The permission to start.
And every time I enter that room, in Riyadh, in Washington, wherever the work takes me, I am reminded that the need is identical across all of it. The packaging differs. The hunger does not.
Women everywhere are carrying more than they were designed to carry alone. The ones who find their way back to themselves do not do it because they finally found the right article or the right app. They do it because something created the conditions for them to begin.
I hope Sol by Luna can be that for more women, in more rooms, in more cities.
That is the whole point.
Ninar Keyrouz is the founder of Sol by Luna, a Mediterranean wellness brand offering immersive retreats, transformational programs, and meditation and mindfulness practices. solbyluna.com