How I see spirituality
I think I’ve always considered myself a spiritual person (without knowing the word). As a child, I would carry ants out of the camping tent, explaining to them in earnest “How lucky you are to have met me, go free now”. At 13, I interviewed a local professor to quench my thirst for more knowledge about the history of the witch hunts in my local town. Shortly afterwards at the age of 14, I started practicing yoga beginning with chakra work. Looking back, it is really amazing to see how free whilst simultaneously settled I was in my spirituality, unaware of the term or conceptualizations. It was very natural to me. There then followed a void of a couple of years before I returned to my spiritual practice of yoga seven years later. Living spirituality for me is living in my Being. It comes with a feeling of peace, contentment, safety, belonging and connectedness to something that is in all of us, in all things and in the spaces in between.
A snapshot of the journey
My professional life used to involve a great deal of traveling and living in hotels that were often located abroad, far away from my familiar social context. On top of this, I worked 12-hour days in a challenging environment. During this time, my daily haṭha and japa practice acted as an anchor that provided me with orientation for making sound decisions, to consciously handle situations and to actively create learning moments.
I understand the purpose of the many expressions of yoga to prepare the body and mind for meditation. There’s plenty to be discovered in meditation’s precursor “concentration”: for example your own behavioral patterns, peaceful satisfaction or tranquility. By accompanying you on your journey towards editation, yoga helps you to get to know your Self.
In 2017, I started my first haṭha yoga teacher training and to this day I have obtained certificates in haṭha yoga as well as yoga nidra and a mantra meditation certification in progress. I continue learning, practicing and teaching as a naturally evolving cycle. In my yoga classes, I propose one possible way to access the path of yoga, to work with your body and mind and maybe even to experience your Soul. By teaching yoga practices, I try to share the tools needed to discover oneself independently.
I have been very fortunate to learn most of what I know now of yoga from where it originated. The blessing to have sat with babajis and matajis by the dhuni during morning meditation; the smell of the incense in the temple when extending my offering to the Supreme; the sound-bath of the morning aratis of the neighbouring ashrams overlapping and melting into one collective awakening upon sunrise. These and many more lived experiences have strengthened my intention to create a life in the western context in which I could continue these or similar practices. I wanted to make a sattvic life possible, also away from the Indian Ashram. I am still creating such a life. But meanwhile, apart from my daily sadhana, I found mother Ganga in my local river, the purification of the dhuni in the heat of the sun and the church bells to be symbols of a lived spirituality. I sing to my food to appreciate the supreme being – vocally at home and mentally in other environments. And life has blessed me with communities where I can join a Kirtan, a Satsang or explore my ideas on spirituality in business.
Merging personal with professional
Having been socialized in business while deepening my spiritual practice, there was a time when my spirituality made a big difference in my professional life. I increasingly started to look at the interactions I had and observed in my surroundings through the lens of What if…? What if the majority of people at work managed to watch their thoughts and emotions while acting, like some of us manage to do after or at a yoga retreat? What if we were allowed to re-balance and anchor ourselves at work, feeling that post-yoga class peace, before a major decision was made? What if we all meditated more and acted from this sense of connectedness at work?
From this What if… paired with my existing dream to do my PhD and become a researcher, I set out to invite that dream into reality in 2019.
About my Research-Profession
In 2019 I started my own business integrating yoga & organizational development in order to practice and embody knowledge that I wanted to research as my PhD. Unlike perhaps the more common approach of external PhD students to research in order to validate one’s own consulting, I consulted in order to enrich my future research.
In February 2021, my dream of becoming a researcher became true with the start of my PhD journey. I thank life for having navigated me to Prof. Nandram and Prof. Bindlish research group
About my Business-Profession
I work as a trained organizational developer for self-organization and agile ways of working and as a certified yoga teacher. My service focuses on co-creation and process-oriented consulting to help people to help themselves. I continuously explore how to combine systemic organizational development with ‘new’ working approaches and with yogic practices and philosophy.
With both my research and business endeavors I try to enable us to “bring” Soul to work. I continue to travel on the path of an increasingly connected life, and I am unbelievably grateful for the journey and for the spiritual teachers and healers of different traditions who have supported me along the way.
I now live my spirituality openly and share it with whomever asks or expresses interest, whether it’s family, friends or within my working life.
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