Where Rest, Imagination and Healing Meet
Kassamira Carter-Howard creates spaces where people are invited to soften, breathe, and remember themselves.
Based in Washington, DC, she is a visual artist, sound alchemist, Reiki master and healing justice practitioner whose work centers rest, imagination, and collective care as essential practices for individual and community wellbeing.
Through Dream Within, Kassamira curates experiences that invite compassionate curiosity.
Her work blends artistic, somatic, and contemplative practices offering people a way back into their inner worlds, where healing, agency and connection can unfold naturally.
At the heart of everything she creates is safety.
Physical safety.
Emotional safety.
Spiritual safety.
She designs her work to be accessible, trauma-informed and rooted in collective care, so participants can engage joy, creativity and rest in ways that feel sustainable and affirming.
Kassamira believes that when people are supported in their wholeness when all emotions, identities, and experiences are welcomed, they gain more choice in how they move through life.
And with that choice comes resilience.
A Legacy of Courage and Self-Determination
Kassamira’s path into entrepreneurship is guided by lineage.
Her grandmother was the first Black female barber in Portland, Oregon: a woman who built a successful business through skill, courage, and self-trust.
From her, Kassamira learned that talent can be a means of survival, sovereignty, and care.
From a young age, Kassamira recognized her own gifts: creativity, witnessing, holding space, and healing through art.
Still, like many, she followed a more traditional path first.
She spent years working in nonprofit and corporate environments.
But the longer she stayed, the more misaligned she felt.
Her body knew early on that these spaces were not right for her but she didn’t yet have the language to understand the signals.
Fresh out of college, hyper-productivity was normalized.
Burnout was praised.
Rest was denied.
No one taught her how to care for herself.
And when she tried, the answer was often no.
When the Body Speaks Louder Than the System
The misalignment didn’t stay subtle.
It showed up as illness.
As pain.
As depression.
Eventually, as hospitalization.
That was the moment of reckoning.
Kassamira realized that no institution, no matter how mission-driven would truly protect her wellbeing.
So amount of devotion or life force energy could make a system care for her body the way she needed.
So she chose differently.
She left.
And in reclaiming her time, she returned to what nourished her: art-making, daydreaming, rest, and imagination.
She realigned with her passion for curating healing spaces for marginalized communities and survivors of violence.
Along the way, other modalities found her, sound healing, Reiki, and deeper somatic practices, all of which now shape her work.
Today, Kassamira leads with intuition.
She includes her body in decision-making.
And she builds her business as a sacred, sustainable practice, not a site of sacrifice.
Rest as Practice, Not Reward
One of Kassamira’s ongoing challenges is remembering to rest.
Entrepreneurship doesn’t always make space for stillness and turning off the mind can be difficult when your work is also your calling.
She leans into the wisdom of thinkers like Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry, who teaches that rest is not indulgent, it is resistance.
Rest, dreaming and being are not separate from the work.
They are the work.
Another layer of growth has been unlearning survival habits.
Hyper-independence.
Over-productivity.
The belief that worth must be proven through constant output.
Kassamira is actively choosing a different way: one rooted in community, collaboration, reciprocity and collective care.
She’s allowing herself to be supported, to play, to enjoy the journey, and to build something that nourishes her as much as it serves others.
Building a World That Holds Us All
Kassamira’s work is an invitation.
To rest.
To imagine.
To listen to the body the first time it speaks.
To remember that healing doesn’t happen in isolation but in relationship with ourselves, with community, and with what makes us feel alive.
Through Dream Within, she is not just building a business.
She is building conditions where people can exist more fully, gently, and freely.
At Reignelle, we honour women like Kassamira, those who choose alignment over extraction, rest over burnout, and who dare to dream within a world that desperately needs more care.