About the Cycle of Healing – Empowerment – Connectedness – Movement – Balance – and Joy

We are creating my new website and the question arose: Who am I? How do I want people to see me? I felt tempted to put specific parts of myself into focus, and frustrated because I had to choose words and labels that would communicate something so profound and important to me.

So, who am I?

I am

• a psychologist,
• a therapist,
• a life/career/health/relationship coach,
• a healer,
• an intuitive,
• an energy psychology specialist and trainer. I am also
• an NLP Master,
• an EFT Practitioner, and
• a Reiki, EFT and Kinesiology practitioner.

Those are the categories I started out with – and they don’t even include important experiences, character traits or beliefs about life and helping others. But which one most correctly represents me and my work? Which one will say what is important to me?

Moreover, even if I could choose any of these words to represent me – wouldn’t my readers and people getting to know me have different concepts and ideas for the same word? A psychologist, for example, may be someone well-educated, with knowledge about science and a systematic concept about life and overcoming its challenges. For someone else, it might me the person that they talk to weekly, who makes them feel better because of the attention and understanding, but who hasn’t really helped them to create real change. A third person may think it is someone who always turns around emotions and analyzes them self and others, and who is far away from practical solutions and what might actually help. Do you see my point?

So how am I supposed to chose any of those descriptions, knowing full well that they will never be able to communicate what is really important about me to my readers? Then it came to me: The real answer about who I am lies within what I do, what I feel is my contribution to the world, how I express it – and how I help you to do the same. So I want to talk to you about the key concepts of my work and my support for those who chose it.

Healing – Empowerment – Connectedness – Movement – Balance – and Joy

All of these concepts are interconnected and if developed and strengthened, strengthen each other in turn.

 

Healing and Joy

Healing for me means to feel, as a person, whole and complete, and to be in alignment with what we’re here to do on this earth.

Healing of physical ailments is, as I see it, something that automatically happens when we experience a rebalancing, and a resolution to a previous disconnection as a person. If we approach physical pains or disease not as a problem in and of itself, but as a sign for a deeper imbalance, we get a chance to grow in a very organic way.

Healing arises when we are re-connecting, when we move, and when we attain balance – and it brings about a lot of joy. Joy is so important for us because it is the real, powerful motor for reaching change, reaching goals, and having a meaningful life. Joy is the innate quality and the result of all of the other aspects I will describe:  empowerment, re-connection, movement, and balance. And when we experience it, it nurtures us and brings us more. More meaning in life, more healing in ourselves, more empowerment and belief in ourselves, more energy to move, more connectedness and balance.

 

Connectedness

Whenever people want to change, there is a profound disconnection within their life experience that they are not willing to experience anymore. Our natural state is one of connectedness, but over the course of our lives we disconnect on many levels:

• We disconnect from our own emotions, because they are too painful or simply in the way of “functioning” as we should – or so it seems.
• We disconnect from other people, because they confront us with negative sensations that we cannot bear, or with parts of our reality and the world surrounding us that cause us pain even to think about.
• We disconnect from our past and our roots – because we want something better.
• We disconnect from our bodies and from the knowledge they provide us with – because it may be inconvenient at times or hard to prioritize.
• We disconnect from our deepest dreams – because we falsely believe that we are asking for too much if we want them to become true. Thereby, we can disconnect from success, from joy, from movement, from feeling alive, healthy and happy.

On many occasions, finding and using your own power means re-connecting. Letting something that was originally very painful be a part of your experience. Allowing ourselves to feel it. When we feel, things start moving. When we feel, burdens resolve, knowledge arises, solutions show up. And we get to realize that everything we’ve been looking for has long been within us.

Maybe you have had the experience that when you allow a negative emotion to be there, and when you stop resisting it, you can actually move through it – and reconnect with your own strength and power in the process. It is amazing how our strongest resources are to be found under and within a heap of painful experiences and pain. I have never been stronger than in the middle of my deepest sensation of sadness and loss. Does that sound strange? You have to experience it to know that it’s true. And when you do, you will recognize that you have so much power over how you feel and experience your life.

 

Empowerment

For a long time, I helped people to let go of their old emotional and mental burdens and repetitive structures in a fast and incredibly impacting way. But now, that is not enough for me. I want my clients to do it themselves, to recognize and realize their own power. I want them to see that what I do for them, they can learn to do for themselves.

No one can heal anyone else, no one can fix a problem for you. They can just open the door, but then you decide, whether you go through or not. This is true whether or not you actively participate in your process of getting well and getting better. Subconsciously, something has to have decided that it is time for you to move on and progress – otherwise you would still be stuck repeating your old patterns, without even an idea that there could be “more”. I don’t want my clients to only feel and experience that “my methods work” – I want them to use them, to make them a part of their everyday life and their way of being.

Empowerment has everything to do with feeling yourself and your needs, knowing them, recognizing them, taking care of them. Only when you nurture yourself and the parts of you that are hurt, immature or vulnerable, you can also release your strength and potential in a consistent way. Empowerment has to do with putting your own inner knowledge about what is right for you first. Thereby it helps you move out of dependent relationships and limited situations, step by step, every day a little more.

When you feel empowered and you can see all your possibilities and strengths, you will know: It has all been there all along. Because real empowerment is realizing that everything you need and want is already within you, and that you know how to access and use it.

 

Movement

I often say to my clients: “As long as there is movement, as long as you come every time with a different problem and not always with the same, you’re ok!” Lately I have discovered and re-discovered the power of movement on so many levels. I realized when we feel stuck, in a deeper sense, it is because we avoid moving. Because when we move, we feel. When we are in movement, physically, practically, emotionally, spiritually, we interact with our surroundings and the things creating experiences for us. And as we become aware of them, they can shift and change and transform. As we move and do and act, we feel. And doing that, transforms.

But how many times do we catch ourselves holding the movement off? Sometimes we just “can’t breathe”. Or we just don’t breathe. On other occasions we simply don’t have the energy to do sports. We don’t move our body. As inside, as outside. So if you catch yourself unable to move physically, chances are you are trying not to have certain experiences, not to move in a much broader sense. And we can’t blame ourselves: It seems the safer choice, to just be still within the space that we know, and wait for things to blow over. The interesting thing is that any movement in any area of your life can bring about movement in general. So if you are trying to improve your job situation, and you feel stuck, you can start dancing or running, and bring movement into your experience in other areas of your life – and I promise, it will have an effect on the area in your life where you felt stuck. After all, everything is connected. You connect everything in your life.

Isn’t it interesting that kids have so much fun moving and moving and moving? They can tirelessly jump into the pool, trying different ways and different movements, exploring how it feels and how it turns out if they do it in just this other way next. Moving creates joy for them! And so it does for us. Just many of us have forgotten this simple and powerful resource. For me, one of the intense moments of feeling connected is dancing – and it helps us to be in sync with ourselves, our bodies, the music, the current moment, our partner or generally the people we dance with.

We can also make a deliberate movement. Sometimes, we are in a place where we feel stuck because we don’t know “how to get out”, and we want to “have a plan or an idea” before we move into any direction we might regret. Is this path better, or that one? Most of us think like this. But what if it is not about choosing the right path, just about moving? What if we always get a chance to correct our decision and adjust our movement towards our goal in life? What if the simple fact of moving – in which ever direction, allows us to have the experiences we need in order to take the next step, grow, and get closer to what we really want and need in life?

 

Balance

If we experience a rough patch in life, we are usually stuck in some kind of dichotomy: We experience something as really good and desirable – and something else that has to be avoided, both in conflict with each other. Here’s an example: You want to be successful, but in your mind, being successful means not having time for your family and loved ones. Then, why would you become successful, if at the same time you believe that it would create a disconnection, loss and pain for you?

Life is all about balance. And in order to find balance, we have to recognize, that there is nothing in this world that is innately good or bad. Moreover, nothing is only good. And nothing is only bad. Everything we experience can be both good and bad, depending on how we contextualize and perceive it. In the above example, as you search for balance, you have to dissolve our inner conflicts and find out in which way you can be both successful and close to our family. More and more you will move out of a clear black and white, right and wrong kind of thinking, and into a more subjective and colorful reality. Juggling all these processes and experiences, that is what we learn to do. And the more successful and creative we allow ourselves to be, the more joy we can bring about for ourselves and for others. It is hard to find a reliable source of joy in something that is very extreme. Sometimes we do – but as life progresses, the extremes tend to show us both sides of the coin.

So, we need balance between the extremes in all areas of our lives. It brings us a kind of serenity and stability and strength that makes us more able to contribute and enjoy. When we reconnect and move, we can find balance, but also when we create balance within ourselves and our lives, we raise our potential of re-connecting, moving, and feeling joy.

 

So, back to my big question:

Who am I?

In my professional and personal life, I dedicate my attention, knowledge, experience, intuition and energy to recognizing where the nurturing relationship of these elements – healing, empowerment, connectedness, movement and balance with their innate quality of joy – is blocked, stuck or interrupted. And I help people overcome these states of interruption, and to move into a place of empowerment, meaning, connectedness, and balance. It creates joy for me to help this process, because with every person who creates that shift in their own life, with their work, relationship, self-esteem or inner purpose, I get to experience a little more connection, power, connectedness and balance in my own life.

• Do you feel powerless, exhausted or frustrated?
• Do you feel isolated, separate, disconnected, or meaningless?
• Are you unable to move?
• Is your life out of balance? Are you?

If you answer any of those questions with yes, chances are, I may have something valuable to share with you.  🙂

I would love to read about your thoughts and experiences, and your own process of defining who you are – so please leave a comment below!