Today it's getting personal again: as it's not so easy to explain what my work is about, as it is a combination of seemingly contradictory things, I thought I'd just show you the many seemingly contradictory stages that run through my CV. And of course I'll explain how these stages came about (if I can explain them 😉). So here's a wild ride through the many different careers I've thought about pursuing in the past and (in many cases also) did pursue. My not-so-easy “discovery path” was of course also an expression of the fact that I didn't know myself at all. You can find out why I think it's so important to get to know yourself here So I simply experimented a lot and followed little intuitive nudges, which I may not have understood at the time, but which all were puzzle pieces of a bigger picture that makes much more sense to me now. And I would advise anyone who feels the same way and doesn't really know what it is that actually fulfills them, what their purpose is, or what they want to do in life - and what they perhaps have to give: follow the many small puzzle pieces and “coincidences” of life, trust your inner guidance (even if you don't understand it), walk through the world with open eyes and ears and take small steps (or sometimes bigger ones), but take the steps. Because you will always be guided to where you need to go.

Other children want to become Indian chiefs, firemen or princesses...

...I wanted to be a dentist as a child. Yes, indeed. Family legend has it that I was so enthusiastic after a visit to the dentist at the age of 4 that I announced that I wanted to be a dentist too. And that lasted an amazingly long time. At some point in elementary school, I even voluntarily enrolled in a Latin club because someone had told me that you need Latin to be a dentist. Somehow I wasn't normal. At some point, however, it occurred to me that I could change my career choice. And that's exactly what I did...

Hobbies that were allowed to remain hobbies

As a child, I was one of those horse lovers. And so the desire to do “something with horses”, to become a master of equine management with a focus on riding or breeding or something like that, wafted through my childhood and youth from time to time. However, I never learned to ride properly because we moved around a lot, living abroad. So the wish was probably pretty unrealistic from the start.

At one point I heard that the Spanish Riding School in Vienna is now also training women. And that they are even explicitly looking for candidates who are not experienced riders, so that they can still “shape” them, and because with more experience one can of course have already acquired deficiencies in one's posture or aid-giving. That's when - for a short while - I sensed my opportunity. Fortunately, this phase did not last long. Years later, I visited the Spanish Riding School during a guided tour when I was in Vienna. The perfectionism and strict discipline with the exhausting routines the riders need to follow as well as the highly controlled and "unfree" riding style are impressive, but would not have suited my desire for freedom.

I resorted to taking riding lessons during my studies instead and was happy with that. Later, I briefly went through another phase when I heard that you can also offer equine-assisted therapy, coaching or leadership training. I still love these approaches, but making the leap from hobby rider to such a career goal seemed too big for me at that point.

Another hobby that I occasionally thought would be a great career goal was acting. But “I like playing theater” and “I'm going to be an actress” are of course two different things. So instead I pursued this further during my studies: there was a project by actors from the Hessian State Theater at my university in Marburg who wanted to try out the role of director and set up student groups for this purpose. So we were allowed to use the stage and equipment of a professional theatre to put on various performances. It was great fun - we rehearsed several times a week, especially before performances, with acting training, lighting, costume, individual and monologue rehearsals, often late into the night. In monologue rehearsals, I had to play a nervous breakdown including a rant, among other things. Besides the fun factor, that really does the trick of clearing a blocked throat chakra 😉.

Psychology can somehow be everything...

As I was obviously not one of those people I used to envy because they simply knew what they wanted to do from the start, I decided to study psychology: It seemed obvious to me because I found people exciting, and you don't need to commit to a career goal right away when you start studying. At the time, I also had the idea floating around in my head that I could become an intercultural trainer. I had partly grown up in Asia, so I could relate to the subject. I also found the idea of being something of a “bridge of understanding” between cultures exciting (I can still identify with this bridge concept today, but more on that later). I had read somewhere that you could become an intercultural trainer by studying psychology, among other things. Bingo. Later, however, I did an internship in the field of intercultural training and decided to drop the idea. It wasn't quite what I was looking for. However, I had also done internships in the other major areas of psychology - in a behavioral therapy practice and in the field of research. None of this brought me any closer to a decision or career goal.

Nevertheless, the topic of training and personnel development stayed with me for a while and I initially focused on work and organizational psychology. Later on, I conducted training courses for managers for a while and applied for internships in personnel development. But somehow a career in business wasn't quite "it" either. Nevertheless, I learned an invaluable amount - working with groups, speaking in front of people, being a bridge between soft psychology topics such as “emotional competence” or “dealing with stress” and the hard facts of business. Plus, I learned a lot about the personal issues that people have in a wide variety of areas.

At the end of my studies, I had to prepare "specialty topics" for various final exams, i.e. topics that you would delve into more deeply in a discussion with the examiners. Looking back now, I find it almost absurd, how I unknowingly picked topics that would become relevant for me in the future: in one of the exams, I chose the topic of hypnosis without knowing anything about it. At the time, I learned that the effectiveness of hypnosis is actually scientifically well-founded (“Oh? I thought it was just a show or esoteric?”), and was furious that no one had ever talked about it. However, I wasn't quite ready to make it a career goal right away. For another exam, I chose the topic of ADHD, which I also knew nothing about at the time. Today I seem to attract a growing number of clients with the issue - in my opinion people who are often extremely talented, who also have huge potential in the spiritual area, but who find it difficult to focus their energy on grounding their purpose.

One has to start somewhere...in research!

At the end of my studies, the moment of truth somehow came: what am I going to do with my degree? At the time, I still had this idea in my head that I wanted to go into business and already had a place on a career-integrated international management master's program. I still found the idea appealing to be able to work internationally with different cultures and to be able to shape things. But things turned out differently. I stumbled across a call for applications for a doctoral project in Heidelberg. A research career hadn't really been on my radar until then. The project was about climate change and climate policy in a broader sense and you were supposed to work closely with several disciplines. Doctoral projects like this don't normally exist. I knew straight away that I wanted to do it, even though it didn't really fit in with my plans at the time - but it was in line with my idealism and somehow it was also about building bridges - between different disciplines, for example, which can see the world in surprisingly different ways. That's how I somehow ended up in research.

This was also the time of my “spiritual awakening”, which turned my world view upside down. If you want, you can also read more about this here .

What do you become after a spiritual awakening? Finding your “purpose”

There is this beautiful book title by the meditation teacher Jack Kornfield: “After the ecstasy, the laundry”, by which he probably meant that after spiritual experiences, the work only now begins: namely to integrate the new insights into mundane and sometimes painful everyday life. For me, there was also the inner feeling of wanting to find my “mission”, of wanting to achieve something, which is also a common phenomenon on a spiritual path. But in what area? The search was only just beginning for me.

At that time, I was considering learning an energy healing method. The spiritual teacher and healer with whom I spoke about it at the time and with whom I was able to have some exciting initial experiences (e.g. how it feels when the heart opens - you can actually feel it!) initially accepted me as a student, but then changed his mind: during a meditation, he came to the conclusion that my background as an “analytical head person” were not ideal for the training. Ouch. I guess that's how it is when you want to combine two worlds - somehow you don't really fit into either of them.

Instead, I now worked in the field of pain and attachment (therapy) research. And because I was again working in an interdisciplinary team made up of doctors, psychologists, physiotherapists and occupational therapists, I was absolutely fascinated by how medicine and psychology work together - there are few specialist areas where this is as clear as in the field of pain. I remember working with a patient at the time where one half of the team was convinced that there was a physical cause for the pain, while the other saw a psychosomatic cause - there had to be a trauma somewhere. Again, I found myself somewhere between two worlds. This ultimately led me to apply for a second degree in medicine - I wanted to be able to really assess and help such cases. Or would I prefer to train as a psychotherapist? At least I had already completed all the interviews with the training managers, drawn up a plan and had the contract at home. But I never signed it - I got accepted into medical school and went back to university.

Becoming a „Bridge of Consciousness”

I'll try to shorten this here so as not to bore you any further with my back and forth jumps. So the short version is this: I dropped out of medical school after 1 ½ years without ever having regretted the original choice of trying it out. I finished my doctoral thesis and went to England for a research project on doctor-patient communication and the early diagnosis of cancer. In the meantime, I continued to work on spiritual topics. Here in England, however, I began to think more seriously about how I could live my purpose - which I didn't really know what it was at the time. Something with people. It should be helpful. Helping, healing, something along those lines, and it should also somehow integrate my new spiritual insights or, let's say, pieces of the puzzle. What followed were various training courses What followed were various training courses in hypnosis on both the evidence-based side of clinical hypnotherapy and the less evidence-based side, in which we can explore the limits of our consciousness with the help of our consciousness itself (there's no other way, of course 😉) and which can also involve past and parallel lifetimes and timelines (hello, bridge between the worlds!).

After my return to Germany, where I continued to work as a researcher, I trained in systemic constellations and added further pieces of the puzzle that combine hypnosis and constellations. But there was also the personal work with my spiritual teacher and the many soul growth experiences on a spiritual path, which you inevitably have to make when your own soul opens the door, and which I will report on another time, because that would simply go beyond the scope here. Since it was and is always important to me to know both worlds - that which is officially recognized and scientific, and that which goes far beyond it, I went to learn more about the diagnosis of mental disorders and had myself licensed as a non-medical practitioner for psychotherapy. After all, reality is not at all interested in whether my client, who is going through a so-called “dark night of the soul” of a spiritual awakening or wants to find their spiritual purpose, also happens to have a “therapy-relevant” problem (e.g. something that a clinician would call depression) - Hello again, bridge between the worlds!

What comes next?

A spiritual path never leads to any kind of an “end point”, as our potential is endless and, as mentioned above, life somehow continues even after enlightening “samadhi experiences”. So I am sure that my life will also take further leaps and bounds that my very limited ego-consciousness cannot yet foresee. And that's a good thing. At the moment, I am in the process of developing my methods and approaches so that, ideally, everyone - no matter at what point in the awakening process and no matter how cerebral - can easily explore the limits of their own consciousness, go beyond their own limiting belief systems and thus find healing change. And this will likely include further training and education, which I will report on here on my blog.

But you can certainly say the following, because it runs through my life: I love building bridges between seemingly incompatible things: between spirituality and the academic research world, for example. Because boundaries and pigeonholes are man-made and often don't do justice to reality. I only recently came across the term “Bridge of Consciousness” and I think I can relate to it a lot. I personally believe that we need these bridges everywhere in order to overcome artificial boundaries and separation. Because magic is also just science that we don't understand yet. If you want to experience this magic (regardless of whether you identify more with "Team Science” or more with "Team Spirituality” or, like me, don't really know what to do with the concept of teams and are more of a “Bridge of Consciousness”), then consider working with me, e.g. via Trance-, Constellation work or personal mentoring.