This morning I woke up with the overwhelming feeling that I’ve been putting my life on pause for the past 2.5 years.
That feeling was triggered by a recent family incident. My aunt has been in a coma for over a week. When I was little, she was essentially my second mother. I lived with her and my grandparents in Croatia for almost eleven years – my parents worked in Germany.
I visit her almost daily – in the intensive care unit. In the very same hospital where my parents died 2.5 years ago. The first time I visited her, I felt really sick. And ever since then my stomach is making problems. The stress – every part of me is resisting. It feels as if no time has passed between then and now. As if those 2.5 years were nothing but a long pause between one feeling of helplessness and the next. 2.5 years during which I was knocked out by chronic health issues and everything was put on hold.
There are some things you simply never want to go through again.
To stare once more into the abyss of my trauma. Into the loss of what I hold dear. To drive the very same road to the hospital that I drove almost every day for two months while my parents were both admitted there, sometimes at the same time, until they died. Why now, just as I was finally beginning to find my footing again?
And yet the quiet hope remains that this might be a hidden opportunity. A chance to finally bring something to a close. To leave this horror behind me once and for all. To make peace with the loss of my parents. To free the hospital from the blame I’ve placed upon it.
My Teta (Aunt) Tonka, my father’s youngest sister, is so to speak the last living connection to my childhood. From my own subjective perspective, she wasn’t only kind to me. A rough-edged character, opinionated. She always seemed to have a cheeky, slightly lecturing piece of advice or a many times fear-inducing opinion readily available.
But four days before her coma she called me and, seemingly out of nowhere, said these words:
‘ You shouldn’t always worry about other people. It’s not good for you. Don’t dwell on the past or the future. Live in the present. I’ve lived my life, but you still have so much ahead of you. Above all, take care of yourself. Find joy in life. I was never able to have children, but you have a wonderful son. Our whole family has always had a tendency to worry too much. And that makes people ill. ’
Was this meant to be her last message for me? Her final gift?
I hope not. I would love to continue our conversations and have her tell me more about my early childhood. To draw further important conclusions for myself and transform this „family history of worry loops“ into something new.
Let’s return to the aforementioned 2.5-year pause in my life. This pause, this state of physically no longer being able to shape my life the way I was used to, basically forced me into the NOW. But this NOW was deeply uncomfortable, demanding, painful, and paralyzing.
Of course, it can then even seem like a way out to escape from such a NOW. Often with even more worries directed toward the past and the future.
So, worrying is also just another form of escape.
An escape from an unbearable now.
We rarely want to escape from a beautiful now. That is something we want to savor, expand, and hold on to. Yet sometimes even that is deeply distorted. Namely when our nervous system is so dysregulated that we even want to escape from a beautiful moment because we cannot bear it. Because we become afraid of losing it.
Therefore, it is about learning to carry and embody beautiful moments more and more.
Over the past month, things have clearly been improving physically for me. I am fitter, my neck is more stable, and I am increasingly finding my way back into joy. Admittedly, I sometimes find the biomechanical alignment exercises boring and demanding. But fortunately, I can now integrate much of them directly into my everyday life. And I love that. It is practical and supports my body exactly where it needs it most urgently – in its daily movement and action.
I sit differently. I walk differently. I stand differently. I sleep differently.
More consciously.
Where deeper and greater body awareness returns to me, a more mature awareness of my own thoughts and feelings returns as well. And of course, it works the other way around too.
At the moment, however, I am simply exploring the effects of my physical realignment and recalibration on my mind-soul-state a little more intensely. And that is a good thing. My body is happy.
During my acting training, we spent a great deal of time exploring our own body language. We developed characters by deliberately exaggerating certain bodily patterns and then observing what that did to the character’s personality and emotions.
The more I learn about the biomechanics of the body and its secrets, the more a whole new world opens up to me. I watch how people move, how they stand and walk, and I read them like an open book.
It’s a catastrophe. So many people are not doing well.
Many of them don’t even realize it. It is still too subtle. Quietly unfolding in the background.
The way we live today is so far away from our natural urge to move. And already in childhood, we begin to gradually destroy our natural movement patterns. Eventually, we become so twisted, crooked, restricted, and dysfunctional in our movement that we no longer know how we could ever find our way out of it.
But there are ways. Biomechanics is just one of them.
If you haven’t yet begun exploring your own body, perhaps now is the time?!
Set out on the journey to discover your body’s own path.
Awaken your body awareness!
… and how you can begin this journey yourself, which newly emerging ideas and next steps are leading me ever more deeply back into my body awareness and my doing – whether biomechanics has anything to do with it, and how the story of my dear Aunt Tonka and our „family history of worry loops“ continues – you’ll find out in the upcoming blog post …
