Founded 2026
Born from two worlds meeting.
Ilkka had spent thirty years studying how people change. Krista had built a career in finance and MedTech while studying the body and the nervous system. They turned out to be asking the same question.
Our story
It started with twenty photographs.
Years ago, during one of his training courses, Ilkka ran a small experiment. He photographed the participants and then took them through a deep hypnosis in which they went back, in mind and body, to who they had been twenty years earlier. The instruction was simple: feel what it feels like to be twenty years younger. Then he let the experience deepen.
Twenty minutes later he took the second photographs. Same camera, same settings, same light. The difference was easy to see. People looked more awake. Their eyes were clearer, and their faces had a fullness the first pictures didn’t show.
That afternoon left Ilkka with a question he kept coming back to. Could something like this work outside a training room? Could a person do it alone, at home, whenever they needed it?
He had years to test it, in thousands of sessions and courses with executives, athletes, soldiers and people who were simply searching. The pattern kept showing up.
“Inner states produce visible outer results. The body reflects what the mind holds.”
Ilkka Rajala
Krista, meanwhile, was working in finance and MedTech, in leadership roles where precision and accountability come first. Underneath that ran a lifelong curiosity about how mind, body, emotion and intuition affect each other.
For years she studied wellbeing, nervous system regulation and emotional awareness, and how inner balance keeps a person going over the long run. For her it was a way of understanding ordinary life better.
When the two of them met, they realised they had been looking at the same thing from different sides: the inner life, and how it shows on the outside.
Sparrow Ritual is what they built from that.
The founders
The people behind Sparrow Ritual
Ilkka Rajala
Co-founder · Expert on how people think · Walks his talk · Strange by design
At thirteen, Ilkka wrote down who he wanted to be. It was an honour code: be honest, be brave, keep growing, treat people with respect. He has kept to it and kept refining it ever since. That sounds simple until you notice how few people actually do it.
He is one of Europe’s most prolific trainers of the human mind, and he works in real time with real people, often people who have already tried everything else. He has been a Licensed Master Trainer of NLP™ since 2012 and has trained in psychotherapy, hypnosis, neuroscience and a few approaches that don’t have tidy names yet. He is loyal to results, whatever method gets them.
More than 50,000 people have taken part in his trainings, among them corporate executives, elite athletes, special forces soldiers and artists. He has studied the mind since 1993 and worked with it professionally for more than twenty years. His particular gift is noticing what is actually going on underneath what seems to be going on, and working across many disciplines has given him a wide, systemic view of people and how they change.
For a long time Ilkka has believed that a woman, at her core, is extraordinary, and that most women have never had the conditions to really feel that about themselves.
He also knew that building something for women probably needed a woman. Then he met Krista.
Krista Soltin
Co-founder · Modern leadership · Human depth · Intuition
Krista moves easily between worlds that many people keep apart, such as business and intuition, or structure and sensitivity. To her they are the same intelligence, showing up in different ways.
Alongside her career she has studied embodiment, and the link between inner balance and how long a person can keep performing well.
She believes good leadership depends on the state of the whole person. She can hold structure and depth at the same time, and she brings calm into rooms that have gone cold.
She is the mother of three, and that has taught her most of what she knows about presence.
“Ilkka sees beauty in everything,” Krista says. “I start from the person, and from there beauty finds its way into everything else.”
A note from Ilkka
On seeing the soul of things
What we ask of you, we first ask of ourselves.
Every photograph on this site is mine, taken on my own travels. None of them is AI-generated. I want you to feel our spirit when you arrive here. Photography is a small side quest for me, a way of pausing long enough for things to show their soul. I have been practicing that kind of seeing my whole life.
Years ago, this quote stopped me:
“If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.”
More than a decade ago I went to a local landfill many times and found the ugliest spot I could. I would sit there and practice seeing beauty in that place. It might sound strange. Maybe it was. I know I am strange. But if I am going to teach that beauty is everywhere, I have to be able to see it everywhere myself. Walk your talk. I hold that close, and it asks a lot of me. If I talk about changing reactions within minutes and then turn around and yell at someone, something is wrong. The hardest road is actually becoming what you teach. I haven’t found another one worth taking.
Whatever matters to you, be present for it. Let people feel your spirit.
Ilkka Rajala
A note from Krista
On the beauty that was always there
Beauty has always been there.
I have known this since I was a child. Not as a thought. As a bodily knowing. A way of seeing the world. I used to rearrange our childhood home before I could explain why. I wanted the space to feel calm and beautiful. My mother would look at what I had done. Not always with delight. But she let me continue.
For as long as I can remember, I have thought of the body as our home. It is where I have always found beauty, in myself and in others. The body knows things before the mind is ready to accept them. Its signals are quiet. Worth learning to hear.
Beauty doesn’t need permission to emerge. Sometimes it just needs someone to see it first. I have been that set of eyes my whole life. For people, spaces, gardens, everywhere I have been. I don’t look for what’s missing. I look for what’s already there.
I am 49, a mother of three. Life has taught me tenderness toward myself in ways I didn’t expect. I have sat with my anger. With grief too. I have looked at things that were not easy to look at. All of it has led me here.
The most lasting change doesn’t come from what you do on the outside. It comes from the moment you find your own place of stillness, and begin to see the world from there.
Krista Soltin
Begin here
For people who sense there is more to them.
We built Sparrow Ritual for them, and our first ritual is the place to start.