Tag: life journeys

  • Enjoy the Ride

    My birthday started as a beautiful summer day.

    I woke up from a dream about a family reunion where all our dogs were there – including the ones who are no longer alive. There was a breeze outside that immediately took me back to childhood.

    After soaking up the sun until noon, we set off on a road trip. We had recently watched a TV show that inspired the drive, so the mountains were calling.

    As we climbed higher, clouds began appearing one by one. A little rain. The sun still shining.

    I remember thinking: “Where is my rainbow?”

    We reached the lake a character from the show had drunk from – which, by all means, he absolutely should not have. After immersing ourselves in every possible shade of green and blue, we got back on the road.

    By then it was raining and sunny at the same time, and I found myself thinking how fitting the weather was for my personality. The perfect mixture.

    Then came the rainbow.

    A big one stretching across the valley. It stayed for nearly two hours. “Got my wish,” I thought.

    If you have read my short stories, you may know that the main character is obsessed with painting the sky with rainbows and shooting flying dolphins into the clouds with a ray gun her hologram coded for her.

    No flying dolphins appeared on my birthday. We’re still following the rules. The rainbow was enough.

    We spotted the statue from the TV show and eventually reached a mountain town which, to my surprise, turned out to be full of wealthy tourists. After a short walk, we decided to head back down.

    Dinner was at a small restaurant where I was unexpectedly brought a birthday lava cake. The candle on top turned out to be one of those candles that relights itself after being blown out.

    We were all completely mind-blown. It took six attempts before it finally stayed out.

    Naturally, I immediately found symbolism in it. The flame that refuses to go out. Pretty on point for my life, honestly.

    By the time we got home, the grey clouds had fully rolled in. A thunderstorm. Lightning, thunder, wind, and rain pouring down in sheets.

    Throughout the day, the temperature had swung up and down by nearly ten degrees several times. Hot. Cool. Hot again. Cool again.

    Honestly, I could not have asked for a better weather forecast on my birthday.

    The only thing missing was snow. And flying dolphins. And maybe spotting a stag in the woods. But who is complaining?

    As a Virgo, and apparently crying on our birthdays is a tradition many of us share, I did not cry this year.

    I was simply happy to have made it to 28. If you know about the “27 curse,” you’ll understand why that felt like an important milestone. Mostly, I just enjoyed being alive.

    Alongside a feeling I have carried for as long as I can remember: that nothing feels entirely real. But things do not need to feel real to be enjoyed.

    There are dreams I have at night that I enjoy even while knowing they are not real. Sometimes I wonder if life is something similar: a long dream we wake up from only when we are no longer breathing through a body.

    And yes, we had those deep conversations later that evening, sitting on the terrace while the storm moved across the sky.

    I am not sure the point is ever to figure out why we are here. Perhaps some questions are not meant to be solved.

    But one can always wonder. And one can choose to believe that maybe we are here simply to feel. To experience emotions. To experience sensations. To experience what it means to be alive in a physical world.

    And, for a little while, enjoy the ride.

  • Accepting Reality

    Acceptance has never exactly been my strongest skill.

    Give me a problem and I’ll find ten solutions. Give me a closed door and I’ll start looking for windows. If that doesn’t work, I’ll build a ladder.

    I’ve always been the type of person who believes things can change. If something isn’t working, fix it. If fixing it doesn’t work, try another approach. If that doesn’t work, love it into submission. If life doesn’t fit, create a different one.

    Not necessarily because reality is wrong, but because my imagination has always been louder than reality.

    Then came the knee injury. And then another. And then another. (Yes, seriously.)

    Three injuries in ten months. At some point even I had to stop and ask: “Alright. What exactly are we doing here?”

    The answer was annoyingly simple. I wasn’t accepting reality. Not the spiritual reality. Not the cosmic reality. The physical one.

    The very boring reality that a damaged ligament has limitations. The reality that healing takes time. The reality that my body doesn’t care about my plans. The reality that optimism is not a substitute for recovery.

    Humbling. Very humbling.

    The funny thing is that during the same period I had done more inner work than ever before. I learned how to soften. How to stop controlling everything. How to surrender. How to let my walls come down. How to choose myself. How to speak honestly. How to love myself. How to hold boundaries without closing my heart. How to stop abandoning myself. How to sit in peace.

    At times I even touched states of consciousness I genuinely don’t know how to describe any other way than enlightenment, whilst getting my baseline up to profound peace, without getting bored. Because it was absolutely boring at first. If you know, you know.

    And yet. A re-torn ligament still didn’t care.

    Life has a remarkable ability to keep us honest. You can have mystical experiences on Tuesday and still be heartbroken by your knee on Wednesday.

    Both can be true.

    One thing I know for sure for myself is that life keeps teaching the same lesson through different classrooms. For me, acceptance wasn’t only showing up through my body.

    It was showing up through my emotions too. Especially love.

    Now, whether you frame that through spirituality, psychology, attachment theory, destiny, a twin flame journey, or pure coincidence is entirely up to you.

    I don’t care what label people use, because I do not use one, it is what is. Literally. A label does not change the experience of the observer.

    What I know is that for years I tried running from certain feelings. And every time I did, life seemed to have an absolutely incredible ability to sit me back down.

    Sometimes literally. Started with a hip injury. Back injury. Knee injury. Knee injury again, and then again.

    At some point the universe wasn’t sending subtle hints anymore. It was practically throwing folding chairs at my body. Maybe I have just run out of WD-40 though, who knows?

    Run where exactly? The feelings came with me. The lessons came with me. The work I wanted to avoid, feelings I did not want to process came with me. Reality came with me.

    So eventually I stopped trying to outrun them. Not because I suddenly became enlightened. Trust me, if enlightenment were that easy, I would have taken that shortcut years ago. The problem is that you don’t go floating into timeless bliss while hauling around twenty-eight years of emotional luggage. At some point, the baggage starts opening itself. Life kindly – and by kindly I mean by absolutely dragging me by my hair – humbled me until fighting it felt more exhausting than feeling it.

    And that’s probably one of the biggest misconceptions about Instagrammable growth and healing. They treat acceptance as feeling good about something, and detaching completely.

    It doesn’t. You don’t suddenly become a hard rock, it’s the opposite. Acceptance simply means seeing something clearly, and sitting with it without tweaking it into an alternate reality.

    You can accept something and still dislike it. You can accept reality and still wish it were different. You can accept your injury and still be scared. You can accept your feelings and still cry about them. Acceptance isn’t agreement. It’s letting go of control, especially when things do not look the way you want them to.

    And honestly? Some days I’m incredibly peaceful. Some days I feel like sunshine wrapped in human form. Some days I look at my life and think: “Everything really is unfolding exactly how it needs to, it really is what is.” Some days I successfully separate myself from my thoughts – and if you have ADHD level association and mind chatter, Virgo level overthinking, you know how blissfully quiet this could be.

    And then there are days when my knee hurts, and I have to accept now my full healing will take a year, which ultimately reminds me something someone said about how short a year actually was (sir, it has been more than a year in that context, and I still don’t find a year short), and suddenly my mind is taking over things I thought I’d already mastered.

    Enlightenment who?

    The older I get, the more I think real growth looks less like becoming some perfectly calm spiritual master and more like shortening the distance between reaction and awareness.

    You still get triggered. You just don’t react.

    You still get scared. You just don’t build a house there.

    Your mind still takes over. You just have awareness to realize what is going on and know how to process what is coming out. 

    You still have emotions that belong to the lower frequencies. The difference is that you stop treating them like a crisis. You let yourself feel them, process them, and move through them instead of building a summer home in them. Then, when you’re ready, you consciously return to the state you want to live from. Apparently that’s called emotional mastery. My exes are probably laughing somewhere. Sorry guys, I didn’t have that skill installed at the time. Turns out you were right about a few things. Don’t let it go to your heads.

    And oh, accepting that I am human has turned out to be a surprisingly important lesson. You’d think after twenty-eight years I’d have that one figured out by now, right? Apparently not.

    Intellectually, I know I’m human. Experientially? That’s a different story. Most of the time I feel more like the wind than the person standing in it. Like the clouds drifting overhead, a bird crossing the sky, water deep in the ocean, a grain of sand on a distant beach, a sea star, a wandering spirit, consciousness itself.

    What I rarely felt was human.

    Human with limitations. Human with needs. Human with emotions. Human with a body that gets injured, tired, overwhelmed, heartbroken, and occasionally has absolutely no idea what it’s doing.

    There is a strange kind of bittersweet peace in finally accepting that.

    And maybe that’s the point in this day and age. Not becoming immune to being human. Not transcending humanity. But becoming more compassionate and aware with the human experience.

    Because no matter how much peace we cultivate, life will eventually hand us something difficult. A loss. A disappointment. A heartbreak. A diagnosis. A torn ligament that apparently has strong opinions about our life choices.

    And then we get another opportunity to practice. Not perfection. Acceptance.

    Again. And again.

    And again.

    Until one day we stop fighting reality long enough to realize that reality was never the enemy in the first place.

  • The Reset

    For as long as I can remember, I carried a tremendous weight in my heart. My heart used to break easily over everything: a dead bee, a fallen tree, leaving a place that felt like home, opening myself to someone and allowing myself to love them. Every little scratch stayed with me. Every disappointment, every loss, every goodbye.

    Over time, those drops filled the dam. When the dam began overflowing, the tiny construction workers in my heart got busy. They built the walls higher. Stronger. Thicker.

    I became more guarded. I preferred casual connections. I kept people at arm’s length. It felt safer that way. If nobody got too close, nobody could hurt me.

    The problem is, I am not built for that. I don’t think any of us really are.

    Humans are built for connection. We are built to care for one another, to nurture ourselves and the people we love, to offer kindness even when it isn’t immediately returned. Living behind walls may feel safe, but it isn’t the life I wanted to live long-term.

    Ever since I learned about the connection between my knee injury and my heart, about how deeply that injury affected me emotionally, I knew I had work to do. It wasn’t just my ligament that had been hurt. The injury broke my heart in ways I hadn’t fully acknowledged.

    This time, I knew I had to go all in. I wasn’t falling apart, but I had finally become strong enough to hold what was there without collapsing under it.

    People often say acceptance is the key to healing. What I’ve learned is that acceptance isn’t something you declare. You can’t simply say, “I accept this,” and move on.

    That’s only the beginning. You have to feel it.

    You have to let yourself feel the emotions you’ve been avoiding, the grief you’ve been outrunning, the disappointment you’ve been carrying, the pain you’ve been trying to outthink. You have to stop resisting what already exists.

    Only then can release happen. Real release arrives when acceptance moves from the mind into the body.

    Last night, sitting in a hot spring pool inside a dimly lit cave spa, I finally allowed myself to feel things I had been avoiding for a long time. One by one, they surfaced. One by one, they left. Then came the cold plunge. System reset. Later, floating beneath the stars in the outdoor pool, another layer came up. This one arrived with tears.

    Turns out spas aren’t only for physical healing. Sometimes they become a place where the heart gets a chance to catch up too.

    For me, much of this journey has involved healing my inner child. I think many of us eventually find ourselves there.

    Children are incredibly resilient, but they are also incredibly fragile. Like butterfly wings, they can be marked by experiences that seem small at the time but leave lasting impressions.

    That doesn’t mean we all had terrible childhoods. I certainly didn’t. In many ways, I had a beautiful childhood, and I’m deeply grateful for it.

    But gratitude and hurt can coexist. You can have loving parents and still carry wounds. You can have wonderful memories and still have parts of yourself that need healing.

    For a long time, I never considered healing my inner child because I assumed there was nothing to heal. Then life started bringing old themes back to the surface. Memories appeared. Patterns became visible.

    And slowly, I began tending to the parts of me that had been quietly waiting for attention all along.

    Little by little, the younger version of me got what she needed.

    A bandage here. A hug there. A little more understanding. A little more compassion. A little more love. 

    And eventually, she got to go back to being what she was always meant to be: A child. Playful. Curious. Free.

    Since this reset, something feels different. I no longer feel the need to close myself off to stay safe. I can remain open while still having boundaries. Soft without being weak. Loving without abandoning myself. Accepting that life is largely outside my control. Accepting that not everything will go the way I hoped. Accepting that people and circumstances often arrive not to punish me, but to teach me something.

    And most importantly, I’ve learned to trust myself, and stop fighting love. 

    Or perhaps more accurately, I’ve learned to trust the version of me that can already see further down the road. Whether you call it intuition, higher self, future self, or something else entirely doesn’t really matter.

    I’ve gathered enough evidence in my own life to know that some deeper part of me has been guiding the way all along.

    And if time isn’t quite as linear as we experience it, perhaps the future version of me is helping the present version in the same way I now help the younger version of myself. Perhaps we’re all leaving breadcrumbs for ourselves across time, and calling it the “universe” guiding us. Well, babe, we are the universe, apparently. 

    And am I done healing? Nope. Now an entirely different layer I am ready to work on have arrived: deep ancestral healing at the root. Things that began long before I arrived here.

    The work continues. There was a time when that realization would have devastated me. Now it doesn’t. Now I simply accept it.

    Healing isn’t a destination you arrive at one day. It’s a relationship. And for the first time, I think I’m at peace with that.

    With love. 

  • Your Life is Rigged (by You) 

    At the end of The Matrix Revolutions, the Architect tells the Oracle, “You’ve played a dangerous game.” And she responds with, “Change always is.”

    If you know the movies by heart, you know the Architect is referring to the game the Oracle played: the orchestrated sequence of events that ultimately broke the machines’ cycle. The illusion of the One. The destruction of each version of Zion. The rebuilding of it with the people the One chooses. And ultimately, getting Neo to the Machine City by introducing Trinity into the equation.

    And if you’ve seen The Matrix Resurrections, you already know why Trinity matters. Or, if you’re like me and understood her significance before the fourth movie ever came out, then you probably didn’t need the fourth movie to confirm it.

    But I’m not here to nerd out about The Matrix. I’m here to tell you that your life is a game. You’re Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, the Oracle, Smith, the machines… all of it.

    You’re playing a game designed by you, for you.

    The Oracle also said something equally important: “You’ve already made the choice. You’re here to understand why you made it.”

    That’s it. Our consciousness makes choices, and then continues orchestrating events in our lives that eventually lead us toward the destination it already chose.

    Did Neo know exactly what he was doing while going to work? No. But he went anyway.

    Change is difficult. So if you’ve found yourself on a path that’s dismantling your ego so that who you truly are can emerge. Whether you call it a twin flame journey, a spiritual awakening, a healing journey, or simply growth, you’re not alone. You were never alone.

    Now, how does knowing any of this help when your payment is late, your tax deadline is approaching, your retirement contributions are due, and your neighbor’s bathroom fan has apparently been running continuously since the Jurassic Period?

    Well, you continue doing the work. You continue shifting your internal state toward emotions that serve you, rather than automatically surrendering to anxiety, frustration, fear, and annoyance.

    It’s not easy. But it can be trained.

    Once you’ve felt a state enough times: peace, gratitude, trust, safety, joy, you can find your way back to it. Your system remembers. Sometimes all it takes is recalling what that state felt like, and your system begins responding again.

    Because nervous system safety is priority number one. If we don’t cultivate it consciously, we fall back into survival mode, the very place we worked so hard to leave behind.

    Eventually, the goal becomes non-attachment and allowance.

    Allowing reality to organize itself around your internal state rather than trying to force specific outcomes.

    Some call it visualization. Some call it imagination. Some call it observation.

    Whatever label you prefer, the point remains the same: stop gripping so tightly to one particular outcome.

    Because what the ego wants isn’t always what actually fits.

    If your internal state is dominated by scarcity, lack, fear, self-doubt, and unworthiness, then those are the patterns you’ll continue noticing reflected around you.

    But if your internal state begins vibrating with trust, love, abundance, safety, and self-worth…

    Well. Isn’t that a much nicer reality to live in?

    You don’t need to “manifest” your dream life. You need to become the version of yourself that naturally reflects it.

    Then allow reality to rearrange itself accordingly, without desperately clinging to how, when, or through whom it arrives.

    Because you’ll be okay regardless. You’ve got you. Your “future self” is looking out for you, as there is no such a thing as the future. And if you’re conscious enough, you know you’ve been looking out for your “past self” just as much. 

    And if you’re desperately gripping onto something? Well… Let’s just say the “Universe” tends to find desperation about as attractive as most people do.

  • I Stopped Waiting for the Universe to Text Me Back (And Other Revelations)

    I’ve spent the better part of the last few years deep in the “Spiritual Olympics.” You know the one where every heartbreak is a “Karmic Lesson,” every strange coincidence is a “Portal Activation,” and your “Twin Flame” is basically a cosmic mirror sent to dismantle your ego for whatever reason you may see fit. 

    I’ve been there. I’ve done the “Energy Hospital.” I’ve had the “Ego Death by Ligament Injury.” I’ve navigated the telepathic hangouts and the Kundalini rollercoasters. It was intense, it was poetic, and honestly? It was the most elaborate piece of creative writing my brain has ever produced.

    But lately, I’ve had a realization that feels like waking up from a very long, very dramatic nap: It’s all just perception.

    We are such incredible architects of our own suffering, and our own liberation. We look at a series of random, high-intensity life events and we weave them into this sprawling, divine “Ascension” narrative because the alternative that life is just… life. And that we somehow had many things to learn. And we chose to learn. 

    I see people online these days, frantic about their “Soul Contracts” and the energetic alignment of their star systems, how “chosen ones” are just “special.” And I just want to hand them a glass of water and say: “Hey, it’s okay. You’re the one holding the remote.” 

    You are the one who installed the software. You are the one choosing the resolution. You are the one deciding that the “Tectonic Shift” is a spiritual tragedy rather than just a, well, series of events that helped you grow as part of this whole mysterious experience as being humans who do grow. It’s in our DNA. 

    And once you realize you’re the admin of your own consciousness, the “Spiritual Hustle” loses its luster. I don’t want to spend my life decoding the hidden meaning of a cryptic text message from a “Soul Mate” that I received in a dream. I’d much rather spend it decoding the geological history of the Jura mountains.

    There’s something deeply, radically rebellious about deciding to just be a person again.

    I’m talking about “person” in the most mundane, glorious sense. I’m talking about a life where my biggest concern is whether the construction in Bern is on schedule. A life where my daily “alignment” involves singing Mundart until I’m breathless, obsessing over the architecture of a city that isn’t my birthplace, and getting interested in rocks, geology, evolution, and absolutely zero psychic intervention.

    I’ve realized that I don’t need a “Twin” to feel whole. I can just enjoy my life the way I enjoy it.

    “Living life to fullest” means Bali hang outs, endless raves, jumping out of a plane for some. For me, right now, means I’m focused on my life. I’m getting to know myself. My own brain. My own interests, even if they may look strange to some people. And more importantly, it looks like I feel good and energetic every single day. Healthy. Nervous system: safe, stable, thriving. 

    I’ve stopped drinking, because my system is a refined instrument now, and two beers is a total system crash, thank you very much. I’ve stopped eating meat because at some point, what I used to love and crave, tasted horrible. And I’ve stopped waiting for the Universe to tell me who I am, when I am who I am.

    So, if you’re still in the middle of your own “Ascension” saga, I see you. I love the drama for you. Truly. But when you’re ready to hang up the cape and just be a human who likes specific things in specific places?

    The world is still there, thankfully. The people you get along with are there. The places you love are there. And the music sounds significantly better when you aren’t tuned into a telepathic frequency.

    Turns out, the view is much better when you’re standing on solid ground. It will get better. It will get less crazy. Have compassion for yourself when you’re navigating storms. 

    After all, this journey is our own lives.

  • Why Some Flow Naturally, and Why Some of Us Had to Engineer It

    There is an unspoken assumption in both spiritual and self-development circles: that there is a “right” way to arrive at wholeness. We are told to meditate until we dissolve, or to study until we understand. But if you observe the spectrum of human behavior, you realize that the path to a healthy individual is far more diverse, and often, far more mechanical than we are led to believe.

    At our core, the default human mode is a remarkable feat of systemic design. We are built to be self-loving yet selfless, deeply connected yet fundamentally sovereign, and capable of total surrender while maintaining an unwavering sense of direction. It is a state where “flow” is not a chore; it is an operating system.

    Yet, for many of us, this wasn’t our starting point. We didn’t enter the world with this software pre-installed.

    Humanity seems to be divided by a “calibration gap.”

    On one side are the Naturalists. These individuals possess an inherent, somatic intelligence. They understand “flow” without needing a definition. They don’t need to study the double-slit experiment to understand that their observation shifts the field, they feel it in their nervous system. They move through life with a natural permeability that allows them to be connected to everything, yet they never lose the boundary of their own existence.

    On the other side are the Engineers. These are the individuals for whom this flow was not a birthright, but a problem to be solved. Perhaps they started as “rocks:” rigid, guarded, unable to surrender to the flow because their nervous system couldn’t perceive it as safe. Or perhaps they started as “sponges:” so open and unified that they lost their own physical presence, becoming unintentional “energetic hospitals” for the chaos around them. Or possessed a strange combination of both.

    If you are an Engineer, your path to health looks different. You cannot simply be told to “surrender” or “love yourself,” because your system doesn’t have the files for it.

    You had to learn it.

    Some of us learned it through the lens of spiritual experience: a radical, often overwhelming data download that forced us to recognize that separation is a structural illusion. Others, perhaps those who needed the cold, hard logic of matter to feel safe, learned it through theoretical physics, or some of us by both. By understanding the quantum reality that matter is largely energy, and that entanglement does not mean loss of self, the logic of “sovereignty” finally clicked into place.

    These journeys are diverse because the “corrupt files” were different for everyone. But the destination remains identical: the healthy, sovereign individual.

    If you had to consciously build your own bridge to this state, do not view it as a disadvantage. You are now an architect of your own consciousness.

    Those who flowed naturally may not be able to articulate the mechanics of how they arrived here, but you, having had to reverse-engineer the human operating system from the ground up, now have the capacity to teach it. 

    You can explain the “woo” to the materialist, and you can ground the “woo-seeker” into the physics of reality.

    It does not matter if you were born with the ability to surrender to the current, or if you had to spend years studying the physics of the water to understand why you were sinking. 

    The outcome is the same: the moment you realize that sovereignty and connection are not opposing forces, but two sides of the same equation. You are no longer “learning” to be whole: you are simply returning to the default mode that was there all along.

    Are you someone who naturally floats with the current, or are you an engineer who had to learn the physics of the water to find your own way to shore?