A life spent remembering

At eighteen, near the end of high school, I got sick. One night I woke with severe pain around my left armpit. The next morning I walked to my GP in Berlin-Pankow. She looked at me and said: “How do you have shingles? You are eighteen years old. This is a disease of elderly people with a compromised immune system.” She prescribed fourteen days of antibiotics and a zinc cream.

I went home and told my mother. She put the newspaper down, looked at me strangely, and said something I had never heard her say: “You are not taking those antibiotics.” She told me about an elderly woman from her childhood village who people visited when they had certain diseases. Shingles was one of them. She called it healing of hands.

We searched on Google — this was 2012 — found a healer nearby, and I had an appointment the following day. I walked into a room with a Buddha statue, incense burning, everything gentle and calm and mysterious. She invited me to sit, placed her hands on my left shoulder, and began to mumble quietly. Within minutes I entered a state I had never experienced: not awake, not asleep, somewhere in between. When she brought me back, I could not drive home on my scooter. I sat with her for twenty minutes before I could move.

Two years later, sitting at a crackling bonfire under an amazing starry sky, I got talking to an older woman. I asked what she did for work. She said she was a Reiki healer — people come to her with pain, restlessness, exhaustion, and she sends energy with her hands. The moment she described it, something clicked. That is what I received back then. That is what healed me. I had never stopped wondering how it worked, and now it had a name.

I came home and called the original healer. Can I learn this myself? She said yes. On the second of January 2016 I attended my first Reiki course, arriving straight from a night in Prague with no sleep at all — and still something pulled me to show up. Something that would not let me cancel, even exhausted.

I was twenty-one, studying engineering and building design at university. Two paths at once: the conventional academic path, and the path of energy healing. Both were real to me. Both had their place.

Friends started bringing their friends. My parents told their neighbours. People with chronic pain, fatigue, illness — they came, they received sessions, and they got better. A practice built organically around me while I finished my Master’s degree. By my mid-twenties I was a Reiki master, studying everything I could reach: shamanism, Tibetan practices, yoga, Ayurveda, breathwork, sacred symbols.

But I was also becoming more sensitive to the energy of others, and that sensitivity had a shadow side. On the S-Bahn in Berlin. In my parents’ home when they went through a hard time. And most acutely in my apartment, where my neighbour was battling addiction. His accumulated frustration and inner pain was living in my flat through the wall between us. I could feel when he came home. My thoughts became heavy. The moment he left, I could breathe again.

This is when I felt the urgency to make my home a temple — a sanctuary where my soul could breathe, protected from lower vibrational energy.

I felt a great deal in my own first session. I will not try to describe it precisely in words, because some experiences resist that kind of translation. But I will say this: I left that hotel room in Berlin a different person than the one who had walked in.

The real shift, though, came in the week that followed. The first thing that happened was this: I ended a relationship.

I want to be careful and honest about what that means. The relationship I ended was one I had not realised was no longer uplifting me. I had been in it for a long time. Before the activation, I had been rationalising — telling myself there was a way through, a way to make it work. I might have stayed in that pattern for months more. Possibly for years.

But within days of my Life Activation, I saw it clearly. There was no drama, no anger, no scene. Just a quiet, undeniable recognition: this is finished.

Two months later, I received the Empower Thyself initiation into the lineage of King Salomon. From that point onward, the manifestations in my life accelerated by what felt like an order of magnitude.

Within weeks I was invited to host my first energy-healing event. Nineteen people came. I want you to feel the strangeness of that number for a moment — at that point in my life I genuinely knew perhaps ten people who I thought might be interested. Nineteen showed up. I had no idea who half of them were. They had found their way to me, as people do when the right work is being offered in the right way.

I began teaching Reiki — a dream of mine came true. Then I was invited to co-host a Yoga, Ayurveda and Meditation retreat in Hungary. I started travelling. I started teaching, from one week to the next, things I had spent years quietly preparing for without realising. My whole life pivoted — out of an unfulfilled job that was crushing my soul, into the work I had actually come here to do.

But I was thinking: how can I even make a living from this? I have rent, bills, food, insurance.

While we were hosting the retreat in Hungary, COVID began. When we returned, the German government was supporting small businesses through the crisis. I applied with my healing business — which I had luckily set up legally three years earlier — and was granted €9,000 to sustain it. I remember it still today: when I clicked send on the online form, it was 11:11. I knew in myself, this is going to happen. Two weeks later the money was in my account.

That was three to four months after my Empower Thyself initiation, and six months after my Life Activation. Doors began to open that I had not known existed.

The Mystery School describes the Life Activation as bringing forth unrevealed talents and abilities. I want to tell you specifically what came forward in me, because abstractions don’t help anyone.

My voice came forward. Not just my speaking voice, though that too — but the energetic quality it carries when I guide meditation, when I lecture, when I teach. People began telling me that something specific about the way I spoke helped them heal, helped them rest, helped them reset deeply. Today my voice is one of the primary tools of my work. That gift was always inside me. It was simply waiting for the activation to bring it online.

My writing came forward. I have now written two books. Before the activation this would not have been possible — not because I lacked vocabulary, but because I lacked access to the source from which a real book is actually written. The activation opened that source.

My intuition came forward. This is the gift that has changed my daily life most quietly and most profoundly. The connection to my Higher Self strengthened to the point where I can feel guidance arriving — sometimes as a clear inner voice, sometimes as a knowing in the body, sometimes as an unmistakable nudge toward or away from a person, a place, a decision. I trust this guidance now. I act on it. And it has not steered me wrong since the connection came online.

These are not unique to me. They are the kinds of gifts that come forward in people who receive this activation. Yours will be different. Yours will be yours. But they are there. They are encoded in you already. They are waiting.

Once I was certified to give the Life Activation to others, the first thing I did was activate my own family. My mother. My grandfather.

My parents had had genuinely tough years — a financial crisis lasting several years, arguments under pressure, old patterns I had watched them carry my whole life. Within a few years they became more peaceful, more harmonious, more abundant. My mother was offered a better job with a significant pay increase. My father found a role with a CEO who genuinely supports him. They began to co-create — cooking together as a team, buying an outdoor kitchen for the garden, travelling and seeing the world together. The texture of their marriage changed.

My grandfather had not really created anything in the years since my grandmother died. After his session, he began carving wooden eagles in his garage. By hand. Eagles half the height of a grown person, with a vitality I had not seen in him for a long time. He remembered, late in life, that he was a creator being. And I watched him carry his grief with more stability, and find some hope in his days again.