Meet Danielle Izaak Lewis: A Leader Turning Trauma Into Transformation

Read time: 5.2 minutes

Welcome to Spotlight Hustle, a weekly newsletter celebrating Black women making bold strides in life and business.

Quick One: Your Ticket Is On Us! 🎉

We’re thrilled to announce that tickets to the Top 100 Most Powerful Women Summit are FREE this year!

This is your moment to connect with powerhouse women, hear inspiring stories like Danielle’s, and walk away with strategies that can transform your business and life.

👉 Reserve your free spot now — and don’t come alone. 

What’s Inside Today’s Newsletter:

• Feature Story → Danielle’s journey: from volcanic eruption to wellness revolutionary

• Wisdom & Advice → Myths to bust, lessons for women in business, and what she’d tell her younger self

• Daily Practices → Nervous system resets, cultural foods, and joyful movement

• Looking Ahead → Danielle’s mission to create generational healing and scalable wellness programs

• Rapid-Fire Round → Rituals, reads, mantras, and what keeps her grounded

• Summit Spotlight → Why we can’t wait to hear Lola live at the Top 100 Most Powerful Women Summit.

Feature Story: Danielle’s Transformation

Danielle’s journey begins on the small Caribbean island of Montserrat, where resilience became a lesson long before she even knew the word. When the Soufrière Hills volcano erupted, her family lost everything—home, community, and the life they had always known. What could have ended in despair became a story of constant rebuilding, as they evacuated to England, returned to the Caribbean, and eventually began again in the United States in 2010.

That kind of upheaval might have broken some families, but Danielle’s mother, an educator, nutritionist, chef, and world traveller, refused to let adversity define them. She defied racism, rejected limitation, and transformed the kitchen into a classroom of creativity, culture, and connection. Under her influence, Danielle learned that food is far more than fuel—it is healing, heritage, and storytelling.

Like many immigrant children, Danielle followed the blueprint of “success”: study hard, earn the degrees, secure the career. She collected not just one but multiple undergraduate degrees in Chemistry, Health Science, and Physics, followed by a Master’s in Applied Clinical Nutrition. She entered the world of healthcare compliance, but despite her accomplishments, the reality of that path felt like suffocation—an endless hamster wheel of red tape that drained her joy and muted her voice.

When the COVID lockdowns forced the world to pause, Danielle could no longer ignore the truth. She was stuck in a stagnant relationship, unfulfilled in her career, and disconnected from herself. Yet in that silence, she began to listen. She started asking bigger questions—questions about the patterns that kept her and so many women like her in cycles of burnout, self-sacrifice, and overwork.

Through her study of epigenetics, Danielle uncovered something profound: as descendants of enslaved and colonised people, survival patterns—hypervigilance, relentless labour, self-neglect, had been passed down through generations. But survival is not the same as thriving, and those patterns no longer served her or the women who would come after her. Her declaration was simple but powerful: the cycle stops with me.

From that decision, Danielle began to rebuild her life. Not just for herself, but for her community. She launched Noyan Worldwide, a wellness company that integrates cultural wisdom, nervous system healing, and nutrition rooted in heritage. Unlike conventional wellness programs that strip food and health of their cultural context, Danielle insists on weaving them back together—because true healing does not ask us to abandon who we are.

Today, her mission is clear: to help high-achieving women of colour break the cycles of burnout, reclaim joy, and thrive without apology.

Danielle’s story is not just about overcoming displacement or escaping burnout. It is about rewriting generational narratives, honouring heritage, and building a future where healing is not survival, but liberation.

 Wisdom & Advice from Danielle

• Advice to younger self: “Stop trying to fit into systems that weren’t designed for you. Create your own path.

• Myth to bust: You don’t have to choose between authenticity and success.

• For women in business: Your healing journey isn’t separate from your success; it’s the foundation of it.

Daily Practices & Hustle

Danielle integrates healing into her daily rhythm:

• Morning grounding rituals before external demands

• Nervous system check-ins throughout the day

• Nourishing with cultural foods that bring joy

• Movement as celebration, not punishment

Her toolkit: 

1. Asana + Notion for planning,
2. Buffer for social media,
3. Zapier for automation, 
4. Flodesk for nurturing community with culturally resonant content.

Looking Ahead

Danielle is dreaming of:

• Building partnerships with diverse health practitioners

• Developing scalable wellness programs to reach more women globally

• Creating a world where Black, Indigenous, and women of colour no longer choose between honouring heritage and optimising health

Her legacy?

Generations of women who thrive without shrinking, who rest without guilt, and who pass down wholeness instead of survival.

🔥 Rapid-Fire Round

Coffee or tea? → Herbal tea

Morning or night? → Morning grounding

Current read? → Books on epigenetics and cultural healing
Mantra? 

“Your healing isn’t just personal, it’s generational.”

Favourite ritual? → Dancing while cooking cultural meals

Discipline hack? → Automating processes so energy flows where impact matters

Summit Spotlight

Danielle isn’t just a wellness entrepreneur; she’s a revolutionary rewriting what healing looks like for women of colour.

And she’ll be sharing her wisdom live at the Top 100 Most Powerful Women Summit 2.0.

👉 Save your spot now.

Tickets are FREE, but seats are limited.

Here’s to breaking cycles, building legacies, and blooming into the women we’re meant to be.