A story about the name

LEONORA

A Name of Strength, Light and Truth

“Our name carries an invitation: to decipher something of the code of our existence, imprinted within its letters, sounds and vibration.”

A name is more than a label. It is one of the first sounds through which we are recognised and called into relationship with the world.

Over time, I have come to experience a name as a kind of inner code. Its letters and sounds may become mirrors through which we contemplate our identity, our qualities and the deeper questions accompanying our lives.

When we listen closely to the resonance of our name, we may begin to hear a hidden personal language. Certain sounds evoke strength, others tenderness, clarity, movement or light. In this way, a name can become a quiet companion: not something that determines our destiny, but something that invites us to explore who we are becoming.

The name Leonora holds this significance for me.

A small but important note: my given name is Leonora, not Eleonora. Although Eleonora is a beautiful and familiar variation in Greece and Italy, my father chose my name through his connection with Beethoven’s Fidelio and its courageous heroine, Leonore.

The heroine’s devotion, courage and unwavering pursuit of truth have always resonated with me. She crosses boundaries, confronts fear and acts in service of freedom and love. These qualities have become symbolic companions in my own journey — as a woman, an artist and, later, a practitioner walking a therapeutic path.

Within my personal reading of the name, Leo evokes the lion: strength, resilience, courage and determination.

These qualities have shaped my artistic life. The stage asked me to develop discipline, endurance and the courage to be seen. Opera invited me to enter the emotional worlds of its heroines and to search beneath their roles for something profoundly human and true.

Nora, for me, carries an association with clarity and light: the light through which we recognise what has remained hidden, listen more deeply and return to what is essential.

Ora also evokes time — the present moment, the hour in which transformation becomes possible. It reminds me that our path does not unfold somewhere in the distance, but through the way we meet the life that is here now.

Together, these sounds have become a symbolic compass:

Strength. Light. Presence. Truth.

For many years, I explored these qualities through performance. Today, they continue to guide me as my work moves from the stage toward a more direct encounter with the human soul.

The artist and the healer are not separate identities within me. Both listen for what exists beneath the surface. Both seek a voice that is authentic. Both invite transformation.

Onstage, I gave voice to the inner worlds of the characters I embodied. In therapeutic work, I listen for the voice of the person before me — the voice beneath the words, beneath the roles and beneath everything that has learned to remain silent.

My name has therefore become a quiet thread connecting the different chapters of my life. It reminds me to remain courageous in the face of change, to seek clarity rather than appearance and to follow the deeper truth of the path as it continues to unfold.

From artistic expression to healing presence, Leonora remains both my name and an invitation:

To live with courage.

To bring what is hidden into the light.

To listen for truth.

And to become more fully who I am.

A story about the name

CHRISTINA

The Path of a Return

Our name is more than a label. It can be understood as an invitation to listen more deeply — to discover the qualities, lessons and possibilities carried within its letters and sounds.

Each name has its own resonance. When we listen closely, it may reveal something of our inner nature: the strengths we are called to embody, the challenges through which we are asked to grow and the deeper direction of our journey.

For me, Christina carries a quiet spiritual resonance. Derived from the Greek word Christos, meaning “the anointed one,” the name evokes devotion, compassion, humility and service. I do not experience this meaning through religious dogma, but as an invitation to remember the essence shared by the great spiritual teachers: love, healing, wisdom and the possibility of transforming suffering into consciousness.

They did not come simply to be admired or worshipped. They embodied a path that the human being is also invited to walk — a movement from fear towards love, from separation towards unity and from the limitations of the ego towards a deeper awareness of the soul.

In this sense, the journey of Christina mirrors Odysseus’ return to Ithaca. It is the long inner voyage home: the personality returning to the soul, passing through trials, losing familiar identities and gradually remembering its true essence.

While Leonora expresses the artist who brings her voice into the world, Christina represents the inward movement — the one who listens, serves and holds space for another human being.

The name reminds me that healing is not about becoming someone new. It is a process of remembering and returning: to our truth, to our heart and to the wisdom that has always lived within us.

Christina is therefore not a separate identity, but another expression of the same path — the movement from performance to presence, from being heard to listening, and from personal transformation to service.