Natalia Biyan

From designing spaces to creating a space where your story is welcome.

Official Bio

Born and raised in the former Soviet Union, Natalia Biyan has lived most of her adult life in New York, where she worked as a hotel designer before getting married and relocating to Japan and then Canada.

Today, in her second act, she is a writer, speaker, and life story guide specializing in Life Review methodology. Based in Montreal and serving clients globally, she supports human flourishing through neuroscience-informed storytelling. An affiliate member of Concordia University’s COHDS (Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling), Natalia brings to the table her training in linguistics and narrative studies, her multicultural background, and her own personal transformation.

The Beginning

It was November 2011. I was working at a top interior design firm in New York and had just completed a high-profile makeover of the Presidential Suite at the Hotel Bel Air in Los Angeles.

Too exhausted to plan out a vacation, I booked a stay at an ashram in upstate New York. I had no idea what to expect. I just wanted to get away from Manhattan and lay low for a week. Little did I know, it was the beginning of my own decade-long makeover—one I didn’t know I needed at thirty-two.

The Turning Point

Some seven years later, I found myself on a silent retreat in New Zealand. By then, I’d left my “successful” design career, gotten married, and moved to Japan. I’d gone on multiple retreats around the world, looking for what I then called my authentic self or higher purpose—and what I now call my voice.

On the final day of the retreat, I was walking alone on the beach. I stopped and looked back. I watched my footprints being washed away.

One day, I will be gone without a trace.

The thought filled me with a silent sorrow. I asked myself an unexpected question:

If I had my last wish, what would it be?

A faint voice inside answered:

I’d like to tell my whole life story to someone who’d listen.

Five years later, I found Life Review. Or it found me.

Claiming My Voice

From the time I first checked in at an ashram to the time I first heard my voice at the New Zealand retreat, I was actively trying to relinquish my story. My voice told me to do the opposite: own it. It was right.

Spiritual bypassing—transcending personal stuff without having to face it—didn’t work for me. Reclaiming my voice took opening up after decades of what I thought was introversion but was really self-suppression. Chronological storytelling helped me remember how outgoing and outspoken I was as a young child.

Looking back, my decade-long transformation journey was all about changing into... myself.

If you’d like to know how Life Review helped me find my voice underneath false introversion, please read this interview.

Why I Became a Life Review Listener

For several years, I wanted to act on my oddly specific instinct to speak my whole life story out loud. I found that, barring therapy, listeners were in very short supply. The moment I discovered that a non-clinical method existed was the moment I knew I wanted to train in it. I became the listener I couldn’t find.