Stephi Burgess is an entrepreneur, philosopher, artist, and transformational practitioner. Today, she lives in Costa Rica with her husband, Dmytro, and their young son, and together they lead Pure Signal.

 

Her work brings together questions she has explored through philosophy, immersive technology, consciousness, healing, sport, movement, grief, and family life.

 

Who are we? Why are we here? How can we experience life as fully as possible? What causes pain and suffering, and how can we live a life free from them?

 

How do we meet pain, experience freedom, and learn to live the love we seek? How do we move beyond generational patterns and live as who we are truly meant to be? How do we live freely and in love, while building the capacity to remain centred, loving, and kind towards ourselves, whatever life brings?

 

Stephi works with people facing burnout, pregnancy and motherhood, grief, and major life transitions, as well as men and couples who want to deepen their relationship with themselves and each other.

 

She also works with those who have achieved outward success yet feel a hollowness inside and long for a life that feels full. Others feel they have tried everything, yet still sense something within them holding them back. Some simply know they want something different, but aren’t yet sure what that is or how to begin.

 

Behind that work is a life of immersion, searching, starting again, and discovering what remains when an identity falls away.

 

The questions that came first

 

As a child, Stephi remembers wondering why she was here, what any of it meant, and whether there was more to reality than what could be seen. By her teens, those questions had become more personal. Depression, anxiety, and loneliness sat alongside a life that appeared perfectly fine from the outside.

 

There was little language for that inner experience around her growing up. Both her parents were financial advisers and worked full time, and she was in full-time childcare from three months old. With half-siblings roughly thirty years older, she grew up largely as an only child. Business was familiar early; understanding her own inner life was something she would have to find her way into.

 

Sport and music gave her some of the first experiences of a quiet mind. She was a serious competitive tennis player, and on court there were moments when everything became simple: the ball, the movement, the next point.

 

Music offered something similar. Her mother and grandfather both sang professionally. Stephi studied piano and viola, played in a symphony orchestra, and continues to sing and play guitar. At around nine, she recited a poem before an audience of roughly 30,000 people.

 

At primary school, achievement came easily. She sang, performed, competed, and led. Moving to secondary school unsettled that familiar sense of who she was. Meanwhile, tennis became increasingly tangled with pressure, injury, and the feeling that she needed to do more to be enough.

 

By sixteen, belonging had become just as urgent as achievement. She wanted friends, relationships, and the social life she had often missed while competing. Looking back, she can see the same longing underneath both pursuits: to feel chosen, loved, and at ease within herself.

 

Grief and the discovery of presence

 

Before university, travel opened up other ways of living. Time volunteering at an orphanage school in Ja-Ela, Sri Lanka, remains one of the most nourishing periods she remembers, at least in the moments when she was fully present there, with some space from her chattering mind.

 

Then her father was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. University began against the backdrop of his illness, and the questions she was studying became inseparable from what she was living.

 

During that period, she was driving from Birmingham to Nottingham in bad weather when another car cut across her lane. She swerved, lost control, and eventually reached a moment when there was nothing left to correct.

 

Her hands came off the wheel. The thought arrived: this is it.

 

Then, unexpectedly, the fear gave way to acceptance.

 

The car struck the central barrier and came to rest facing oncoming traffic. A driver behind her slowed the traffic and stopped to help. She walked away with whiplash and a written-off car. The experience stayed with her, open to more than one interpretation.

 

A few months later, her father died. She was twenty.

 

During her philosophy studies, a lecturer assigned Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. Reading it brought an experience she had been searching for: a sense of being completely okay within herself, even though her circumstances remained the same. For the first time, she also felt deeply connected to her womb and ovaries as her attention was drawn to that part of her body.

 

It gave her a different place from which to ask her questions. Peace could be experienced from within. She wanted to understand how, and why no one had shown her this was even possible.

 

The creator

 

At the University of Nottingham, Stephi’s studies included metaphysics, advanced logic, phenomenology, ethics, Buddhist philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. She graduated with a First.

 

Art continued alongside her academic work. Researching artists she admired led her to Parsons in New York, where she won a scholarship for a Master’s in Design and Technology. She turned down a place at the Royal College of Art and moved to Manhattan.

 

There, philosophical questions became things she could build. Her studies brought together programming, physical computing, wearable technology, and interactive experiences. She had also begun practising Vedic Meditation, maintaining a daily practice through those years.

 

Her thesis, Harmony, brought together virtual reality, chakra meditations, and live heart-rate biofeedback. Developed with a neuroscience company, it was designed to guide attention inward, deepen presence, and support healing and opening through chakra meditation.

 

She recorded the meditations herself. Participants often commented on her voice and the quality of the experience, describing a sense that something had changed deep within them.

 

She also noticed an unusual pattern: the technology would sometimes glitch, while the sessions in which she maintained her attention on the experience seemed to run smoothly. She experienced this as a relationship between her own presence and the technology, and it deepened her curiosity about how the two might interact. Looking back, she connects those observations with what she later came to understand as frequency work.

 

Her creative path included artist residencies at The Met in New York and the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro, where she staged Latin America’s first live VR painting performance. Movement became part of the work itself, bringing the body, technology, and perception into the same experience. She also presented her work at The Met, South by Southwest (SXSW), the Quantified Self Conference, and the Transformative Technology Conference.

 

A thread was becoming visible: Stephi was a designer of experiences. Sometimes the materials were technology and art; other times, music, movement, meditation, or conversation. Frequency and intuitive work emerged naturally through these different forms, shaping how she listened, created, and held space.

 

Whatever the medium, she kept returning to the person inside the experience and the conditions that might allow something in them to open.

 

The search for what heals

 

After completing her thesis, Stephi was offered jobs in the VR field in both India and San Francisco. She turned both down, choosing to pursue her own application.

 

She was then invited to show her work at a Consciousness Hacking talk in San Francisco and at the Quantified Self Conference. Those invitations brought her to San Francisco, where she met people bringing spirituality, consciousness, and technology into the same conversation. At the time, she felt she had found her people.

 

Her application did not succeed as she had hoped. Alongside the disappointment was a deeper pressure that she was only beginning to recognise: the need to earn money, to make her work financially successful, and to justify the path she had taken. Even when something excited or nourished her, the question of how it would earn money could quickly take over. There was exhaustion underneath it, too, and a familiar feeling that she had to achieve something before she could rest.

 

She went to Burning Man with the community she had met, staying together in the Consciousness Hacking camp. The experience opened up a whole new perspective. She saw that life could take forms she had scarcely imagined.

 

It also brought her academic upbringing into focus. She began to recognise how deeply she had been conditioned to achieve, progress, and follow a path towards a recognisable kind of success. Now she could see that she had a choice about how she wanted to live. With that freedom came a question she found much harder to answer: what did she actually want?

 

There were things that excited and nourished her, but the pressure to earn money kept returning. She was learning to hear her own desires beneath the expectation that whatever she chose needed to become a way to make a living. That pressure would remain a thread through many of the chapters that followed.

 

After Burning Man, she and others from that community went on to live together in a mansion in San Mateo. She became a founding member of the house, where eight people lived around a shared interest in awareness and human development. Authentic relating and conscious communication became part of daily life. She worked alongside Decker Cunov and helped facilitate gatherings combining circling and movement.

 

During this period, she also explored workshops and studied with the Luminous Awareness Institute, encountering approaches to consciousness and energy that drew her further into the question of healing.

 

Her search took her through yoga, Reiki, Amanae, qigong, Theta Healing, sound healing, meditation, somatic practices, shamanic traditions, art therapy, ayahuasca, tantra, and frequency work. Singing, music, and dance were part of that exploration too. Across more than 45 countries, she encountered very different ways of organising family, community, and meaning.

 

Some of her most significant discoveries happened privately, simply being with herself, often in nature.

 

Living near Baker Beach with persistent pain in her back, she began connecting with her hands and allowing them to move freely. It sounds simple, but letting her own energy move through her body in this way was unfamiliar to her. It became a kind of dance: stretching, breathing, massaging, following sensation.

 

This became something she came back to, over and over, to feel and heal herself.

 

Ecstatic dance, including experiences through Samantha Sweetwater’s Dancing Freedom work, deepened that exploration. Movement gave her access to something she had spent years approaching through thought. She could follow an experience through her body before she knew how to explain it.

 

Before leaving for Brazil, she brought circling, dance, movement, and play together in a workshop at the house. Different parts of her life were beginning to belong in the same room.

 

Then another loss changed the direction of her search.

 

Her former partner, Peter, died unexpectedly while she was back in England. She had been planning to return to Brazil to be with him.

 

She travelled there for his memorial and later trained with his Amanae teacher. The work began through grief and grew into a serious practice. Her teacher recognised a capacity in her early, inviting her to help lead workshops before she had formally completed her training.

 

In 2016, moving between San Francisco and Brazil, she began her own consultancy, Star Sister Support. That was the beginning of her coaching work.

 

Grief remained an open question. What became clearer was her desire to understand change deeply enough that it could become something lived and sustained.

 

Looking back, she sees how much the underlying pressure to earn money had shaped her choices. It could draw her away from what excited and nourished her, even as she was searching for a freer way to live. Recognising that pressure and becoming free of it have been a significant part of her life’s learning.

 

It is only now that she feels she has truly stepped out of it. Her understanding, learned through her own life, is that we are inherently abundant. She no longer feels she has to respond to the pressure of lack, sacrifice, or control. She is discovering what it means to choose from that sense of abundance and trust what nourishes her.

 

Apprenticeship, mastery, and learning to leap

 

Stephi’s encounter with Masati’s Xponential Intelligence began roughly seven years of deep involvement. Its exploration of consciousness, identity, perception, and inherited patterns became a central part of her life.

 

Around the same time, she returned to an unfinished ambition: tennis.

 

In her late twenties, she chose to pursue it professionally. Several years of serious training in Birmingham led to Soto Tennis Academy in Sotogrande, Spain. Life reorganised itself around court sessions, strength and conditioning, mobility, nutrition, and recovery.

 

This was a period of intense optimisation. She was working to become the best version of herself, paying close attention to training, food, recovery, and the patterns shaping her experience. She explored different ways of eating, first vegan, then ketogenic, alongside other dietary approaches. Her longstanding interest in technology also drew her towards biohacking and the possibilities of using emerging tools to support health and performance.

 

Her relationship with food made this deeply personal. Earlier in life, she had experienced disordered eating, including around a year of binge eating, as well as digestive problems. Understanding her own addictive patterns was part of her work on herself. Those eating patterns are no longer part of her life, though she continues to take care with her digestion.

 

Alongside the physical work, she was deeply immersed in Xponential Intelligence and frequency work, exploring what she understood as the core patterns beneath her experience. She thought of these as an underlying “programme”: the beliefs, conditioning, and habitual responses that could keep shaping her life even when her physical routines were carefully optimised. For her, addressing that level was an essential part of change.

 

Tennis gave her a setting in which to bring these explorations together, learning about herself through the relationship between physical discipline, awareness, and the deeper work she was doing.

 

COVID interrupted the tournament path she had hoped would help her build a ranking. By then, the experience had also become an inquiry into mastery: what commitment asks of a person, how attention shapes performance, and how to recognise the difference between devotion and pushing beyond what is sustainable.

 

Tennis and consciousness work ran alongside each other. Both revealed patterns that insight alone had left untouched.

 

When the tennis chapter ended in 2021, she shaved her head. It marked the closing of an identity and the beginning of another period of discovery.

 

Looking back, she recognises a rhythm in her life: entering something fully, learning through direct experience, stepping away, and discovering what had become her own. Tennis, music, movement, technology, and spiritual practice have each returned in new forms.

 

Astrology gives her another language for understanding this pattern. Born with her Sun at 29° Scorpio, the anaretic degree, she relates to it as a degree of mastery, with the symbolism of death and rebirth holding a deeply personal meaning. Her relationship with Peter, a master astrologer, deepened her understanding of this work. He regularly studied her chart with her, using it to explore what she was feeling. She is forever grateful for everything he taught her and the experiences they shared.

 

Stephi describes it as learning, again and again, to die to an old self and be born into a new one: releasing an identity, moving through the uncertainty between chapters, and discovering who she is becoming. Each transition has deepened her understanding of surrender and of the care it takes to find her footing again.

 

These experiences are behind what she calls her quantum leaps, periods when her sense of herself and the possibilities available to her changed profoundly.

 

She has made those leaps many times. The discoveries and learning experiences along the way have taught her to take the practical side of transformation seriously. A powerful realisation needs somewhere to live. The body, relationships, habits, and choices of everyday life all have a part in making change sustainable.

 

That understanding now informs how she supports others. She helps people recognise what is opening, discern their next step, and learn how to inhabit the change they are making.

 

At the end of 2024, Stephi and Dmytro stepped away from XI. She remains thankful for how deeply it shaped her. Leaving brought another question into focus: what happens when you begin trusting what has become your own?

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Love in everyday life

 

Stephi came to Costa Rica with a particular intention: to experience unconditional love as an everyday, physical reality.

 

Partnership, pregnancy, and motherhood brought that intention into a life she could touch.

 

Her son was born in Costa Rica in 2025. On his first birthday in July 2026, she and Dmytro married at Syrencot in Wiltshire. The evening before, they held a ceremony at sunset inside the Stonehenge Inner Circle, with handfasting, the Seven Sacred Steps, and a blessing for their son.

 

Their wedding brought together many of her creative languages: music, ritual, visual beauty, meaning, and the careful shaping of an experience around the people living it.

 

Guests described the weekend as incredible and shared the blessings they felt it had opened in their own lives. Stephi designed the wedding to celebrate their marriage and offer guests an opportunity for a quantum leap of their own.

 

Both ceremonies were recorded in immersive 3D for viewing on Apple Vision Pro. Technology had returned to her life through a deeply personal purpose: preserving the sense of being inside a moment with the people she loved.

 

She and Dmytro are also exploring how to bring the Sacred Codex, one of their signature works with clients, into an immersive form through Apple Vision Pro. This extends her longstanding interest in the relationship between technology, consciousness, and personal experience.

 

Today, the family lives in Playas del Coco, within walking distance of the ocean.

 

The love she had hoped to experience is there in daily life. So are exhaustion, uncertainty, old expectations, and the habits that become visible when people live closely together and find their way as parents.

 

Marriage and motherhood have deepened her understanding of the work. Years of experience with consciousness still leave room for ordinary human difficulty. What matters increasingly is how she meets herself within it, takes responsibility, and finds her way back into connection.

 

How do you listen when you are tired? How do you see the person in front of you clearly? How do you care for yourself while caring for a child? How do you allow love to become something you practise?

 

These remain living questions.

 

As old patterns and ways of living fall away, Stephi feels her strength and power returning after childbirth and growing beyond what she has known before. She is learning how life can feel smooth and deeply fulfilling.

 

Motherhood has opened new questions for Stephi about belonging, shared care, and the support families need. She feels a growing pull to return to *The Conscious Pioneer*, with these among the conversations she wants to explore. As she finds her flow with family life and her work, she is choosing which ideas to bring to life first.

 

She is especially excited to explore leading experiences through an Apple Vision Pro avatar, bringing her work with presence, intuition, and frequency into a new creative form. It connects her early exploration of immersive technology with what she is developing today, opening possibilities for how people might meet, connect, and experience her work.

 

Sensua and coming home to the body

 

The movement practice that began near Baker Beach continued through the years, shaped by dance, strength training, tennis, tantra, pregnancy, birth, and the experience of becoming a mother.

 

She now calls it Sensua.

 

Its origins lie in the feeling that her body needed healing, and the discovery that even meaningful support from others could only take her part of the way. Her own relationship with her body and spirit needed her participation.

 

She describes Sensua as mapping spirit into body: developing a more intimate awareness of sensation, tension, movement, and the places within herself asking for attention.

 

In practice, it can involve music, intuitive movement, breath, stretching, self-touch, massage, stillness, and reflection. Sometimes it becomes dance. Sometimes it is simply staying with one part of the body and listening.

 

Frequency and intuitive work are woven into this practice, as they are throughout her other modalities. They emerge through her presence, her attention, and the way she responds to what is unfolding.

 

At its centre is a growing sense of belonging within herself:

 

This is my body. I live here. I can meet what is here. I can change.

 

Sensua is an emerging practice that she continues to live and develop. She is beginning to explore sharing it with other women, with space for journaling, drawing, and discovering what nourishment feels like from within.

 

It gathers together parts of her life that once seemed separate: movement, music, meditation, creativity, and the wish to feel safe and alive in her own body.

 

The work now, and the longer vision

 

Through Pure Signal, Stephi and Dmytro bring their experience into work with individuals, couples, and families.

 

Stephi’s own focus includes people who have become used to pushing through: women experiencing burnout, pregnant women and mothers navigating changing needs and identities, and men who want to slow down and reconnect with themselves. She also works with couples and with people approaching a major transition or living through grief and loss.

 

The thread is a willingness to listen more deeply and discover what their lives are asking for now.

 

Her work draws on the different practices she has studied and experienced, alongside astrology, Gene Keys, creativity, and intuitive inquiry. Frequency and intuitive work flow naturally throughout, shaping how she listens, guides, and creates space for each person.

 

Behind this work sits a longer vision: Condora, an institute of higher awareness in Costa Rica where family life, personal development, creativity, community, and the natural world can grow together.

 

She imagines a place where children encounter different generations and ways of living, where parents have meaningful support, and where music, movement, learning, food, and care belong to the fabric of everyday life.

 

The picture includes water, spaces for restoration and bodywork, food grown nearby, and relationships with local Costa Rican families, growers, and businesses.

 

For now, it begins close to home: exploring gatherings for mothers and children, movement and meditation, conversations with neighbours, and the daily experience of learning to be a family.

 

The scale may change. The underlying interest remains: what are the conditions that help a person open, a relationship deepen, a family flourish, and a community become somewhere people belong?

 

The question that has followed her through all these chapters is still alive:

 

What is a human being truly capable of becoming?

 

Today, she explores it through the life she is building, the people she works with, and the love she is learning to live.