WHAT BROUGHT ME TO DO WHAT I DO NOW

I blew up my entire life while searching for my purpose.

And I don’t want you to do or feel the same. So I created a space where you can just listen to what is there, because if we suppress what is going on inside of us for too long, we might end up hurting ourselves and others.

That’s the short version I give people when they ask how I ended up here, creating a space for other people to listen to themselves.

It’s the version that fits in a sentence. But it leaves out a lot.

The emptiness under the golden cage

It started as a burning discomfort I couldn’t even locate, physically or mentally.

I would sit in meetings I used to be good at, closing deals, doing the job I’d spent years climbing toward to prove to myself and everyone else that I could actually make it. But underneath all of it, I felt empty, and no amount of money or promotion was going to fill that.

What do you do when you feel like that?

I did what I always do when something becomes unbearable. I quit. The job, tech sales, the ladder, the amazing salary.

Many people call it the golden cage, and it is one: you earn a lot, can find ways to not work THAT much, and just make a pretty good living. But I felt like I wasn’t fully playing to my strengths, even though I couldn’t have told you what those strengths were, or what I actually wanted to do.

What I needed was time and distance to finally go "find myself."

But on the way to finding myself, I actually lost myself instead.

Losing myself while looking for myself

One of the places that changed me most was Bali.

I went there for a meditation teacher training with Punnu Wasu (punnuwasu.com), and something genuinely beautiful happened. For the first time in my life, I learned what it felt like to simply be with myself.

Not achieving. Not becoming. Not following the next goal.

Just being.

Through meditation, silence, movement, and the teachings, I started to experience parts of myself that I had been disconnected from for a very long time. I learned that I could sit with what was there without immediately needing to fix it, understand it, or turn it into something productive.

That experience was real, and it remains one of the foundations of the work I do today.

But somewhere along the way, another question started to emerge.

Who am I when I have nothing to follow?

I had spent most of my life knowing what came next. School, university, career, promotions, relationships, the next thing to achieve. Even when I didn’t enjoy the process, I always had something ahead of me to move towards.

Now I had stepped away from all of that.

And instead of learning how to simply be without needing an answer, I started looking for one again.

Bali can be a beautiful place for that. But it can also be easy to get carried away there. Surrounded by spirituality, healing, meditation, and people reinventing themselves, you can start believing that you’ve finally figured something out. That you’ve awakened. That your old life was the problem, and a completely new one is waiting for you somewhere else.

I started interpreting my life in Europe as something that was making me small. My career, my home, my relationship, the structures I had built. I began believing that perhaps I needed to leave all of it behind to become who I was meant to be.

And without really realizing it, I was searching on the outside again.

I had simply swapped career goals and money targets for spiritual enlightenment and healing other people. Different currency, same transaction. Still looking for something outside myself to tell me who I was and what I should do next.

Because once I’d quit the job, I wanted to quit everything.

Quitting felt like relief, so quitting became the plan. I didn’t realize this was never really about the job. It was a pattern, the thing I always did the moment a situation got hard: leave before it could really touch me.

What I’ve learned since is that this is the flight response. Your nervous system gets so overwhelmed that it doesn’t know how else to react to conflict. In older, more literal terms, it meant running from a tiger. And sometimes, when you don’t know how to stay with what you’re feeling, the first response is to run.

I never expected that pattern to reach as far as my relationship, my home, my entire life, basically everything I loved. Instead of facing what I was actually feeling, I ran.

Walking that path caused more pain and more suffering. I retraumatized myself in the process, creating new wounds, mine and other people’s, that hadn’t been there before.

And it was only later, after all of that, that I began to understand what I had actually been looking for.

The moment everything changed

Walking from Munich to Rome is when that finally started to shift, because for the first time I was walking toward myself instead of away from something.

I learned that the peace I’d been chasing everywhere doesn’t arrive through motion. It shows up through presence. Through being kind, to yourself and to the people you’ve hurt along the way. Through making space for the truth, even the parts of it that are hard to look at.

Michael A. Singer writes about something close to this in The Untethered Soul:

Nature just gives and gives to whoever will receive. Should you choose not to receive, it doesn’t punish you. You punish yourself because you choose not to receive.

Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul

That’s what I understand now about that walk. The peace wasn’t something I had to build or chase into existence. It was already there, the way sunlight is always there, I just hadn’t been in a state to receive it.

For that, you don’t need to blow anything up. You don’t need to quit your job, your relationship, or your life.

What was waiting in the stillness

When I arrived in Rome, in that space of stillness, I worked through a lot of what I’d created along the way. Through movement, meditation, and breathing. Everything came up naturally, and I released a lot of emotions and blockages on the way.

Later, I trained in BBTRS, which became a strong pillar of the work I do now.

What I want you to know

I know that feeling well. The not knowing, and underneath it, the burning sense that there’s more.

There’s a gentler way to find out what that is than the way I found it. You don’t have to wait for it to become unbearable first.

Give yourself the space now.

Still have questions about any of this?