My path
When my daughter was one year old, her mother died of cancer.
This is the sentence I want to start with. Because after it, everything changed. And before it, everything looked like it was normal.
Before, I functioned.
At fifteen I dropped out of school. I was good at numbing myself. Video games until four in the morning. Cannabis after that, to switch off my head. Then something more, to forget my body.
I thought this is what life feels like. This dull hum behind the eyes. This nothing in my belly, right where a fire should have been.
At fourteen I had started writing hip hop lyrics. My father gave me a sentence to keep: "Write about something that only you can tell." I did. I listened to my voice thousands of times in headphones, every recording, every take. I heard where I scratch, where I sink, where I lie. I heard where I build back doors because I lack the courage. The album is called Leuchtturm. Lighthouse. It is on Spotify. Conscious hip hop, completely unfiltered me.
"There is a curse on us. We start everything and finish nothing."
My father, on a walk
I believed that sentence for a long time. I was angry at myself when I let the piano sit for weeks, when I put the organic garden aside. Today I feel: the curse is being half in the thing. My door is called embodiment. To be so deep in what I do that everything carries the same frequency. Whoever is fully in what they do already lives in the goal. The question of finishing dissolves.
Then she died.
Then my daughter's mother died. Aylin was one year old. Suddenly there was no room left for numbing, because a small human needed me. Whole. Unfiltered.
Until then I had not really lived. I had functioned.
I started to feel. First it was uncomfortable. Then it hurt. Then I became calmer.
What if I only have six months left to live?
I asked myself this question, and it changed everything. With this answer I left Vienna.
South Tyrol, India, Corfu, Peru.
South Tyrol came next. I was at the end. And I felt: if I stay in this city, with these memories and habits, I will suffocate.
The Katzensteig. Paths covered in pine needles. Air so pure it made me dizzy to breathe. In the mornings I ran before Aylin woke up. In the evenings I looked at the mountains and felt something in me settle that had been in turmoil for years.
In South Tyrol I fell asleep without substances for the first time. I woke up in the morning with the feeling that I am alive. Really alive.
On a visit to my mother I asked Aylin if I should read something to her. She ran off and brought me, to my big surprise, The Art of Qi Gong. She was bored by it. I was touched. In that moment I felt: there is more than body, emotions and thoughts. There is energy flowing through me.
I met Sadhguru and took one course after another, Inner Engineering, Surya Kriya, Bhava Spandana, until I sat in India, in his ashram. I spent hours in absolute silence in the temple. The stone under me was cool. I heard my own breath and felt the noise of the world fall away from me.
On Corfu I traveled through the unconscious images of my soul, in a training as a reincarnation therapist. I met one shadow after another and let the emotions I had suppressed for so long flow through my body. In the last session I saw my fulfilled life: a stage in front of thousands, my orchestra playing my songs, a wife at my side, Aylin next to her. The taste of that fulfilled life stayed on my lips long after the journey. And I knew: I will do everything to live this dream.
Last year, in the mountains of Peru, at 5000 meters at Apu Ausangate, I learned from the descendants of the Inka what a pure form of prayer is. When the middleman is myself instead of the church. I learned to trust my body before my head agrees. To believe first and see later. That I find my wings while falling. And that I am here for me.
In Belgium they called me Klaus.
Belgium was a new start from zero. Aylin and I moved in with Anja Goebels. I gave up the financial safety of unemployment benefits.
In the call center they called me Klaus, until I reached my sales quota. Then I had a name. After a sick leave they let me go. Then a kitchen with a French chef who took his frustration out on me. I learned to stay silent and to cut.
"If you want more room for your business, you have to give it more room."
Karoline LaFleur, at a birth chart reading
I quit. I took my self-employment from part-time to full time. Energetic guidance. Single sessions. Reincarnation therapy weeks. Some resonance, too little to live on.
Then the first web design requests came in. At first I was bored. Then I asked myself a question: What if I widen my horizon with every project? And then the next one: What if every web design session carries coaching elements?
Everything I do today grew out of these two questions.
This page is me.
When I started building websites, I wanted to coach. People found out that I can also build websites, and they came for that. It frustrated me. Until I discovered something: on the way into visibility, so many fears come up, so many questions, that the coaching simply happens.
Today I say it in the first conversation: You come for a website. What you meet is your own essence.
I listen for hours before I write a single word. Voice messages, conversations, recordings. I read what lives between the lines, and I distill. I want every word to carry your essence, with as little as possible coming from me.
An afternoon in March. I send Manja two links on WhatsApp. She opens her new website for the first time. In the evening her answer arrives: "It is sooooooo magnificent what you conjure out of yourself. This page is me. I can identify with it one hundred percent."
There is an old word for this: alchemy. Raw material becomes gold. And the gold is hers. It was there all along. I distilled it, she recognized herself in it.
What I do is genius. Nobody else can do this. I say this in calm certainty. I have walked through enough failure to know what is true.
Web design, sparring, guiding people back into their bodies. The same alchemy. Different material.
Today I cook risotto and listen to voices.
Today I live in Belgium with Aylin and our cat. At six in the morning the world is still. Aylin sleeps. The cat has settled on the chair as if it belongs to her. It belongs to her.
I sit on my zabuton and breathe. Nothing else. Just breathing. And watching the noise of the last days fall away from me, layer by layer.
Sometimes something comes up. A sentence somebody said. An image from the past. A sadness that feels like an old friend stopping by. I let all of it be there. I ask nothing. I want nothing. I am simply here.
Some mornings my head has already laid out all fifty-six steps to where I want to go. Three years as my own boss have taught me one thing: stress is an addiction, a movement of my mind that I can feed or interrupt. I know a sentence that interrupts it: If my life were a book, its title would be Genuss. Delight. With this sentence I bring myself back. The tea tastes delicious again. Warmth pulses through my body.
When Aylin wakes up and patters into the kitchen, I am ready. Fully here. For her. For this day.
During the day I listen to voices and distill them into gold. And I coach in every conversation where I truly listen.
In the evening I cook risotto. Broth, ladle by ladle. Stirring, waiting, stirring. Aylin sits at the table and draws. She once asked me why I cook so slowly. I said: because the rice tells me when it is ready. She laughed and kept drawing.
Sometimes I walk into the forest. Barefoot when the weather allows it. My head is loud when I set out. After twenty minutes everything is still. In the forest I tidy myself up, step by step.
On my birthday in April I practice elbow landings on the balance board and forget the ninja roll. A shock runs from my shoulder to the tips of my toes. Nine hours in the emergency room. I lie in bed and it feels unfair, as if the delivery man got the package wrong. Then I become calmer. The hamster wheel stands still, hours pass in silence. In the space that opens, it becomes clear to me: this package is an invitation into stillness, made for me. The universe delivers no wrong packages.
I can feel pain without suffering. I practiced this for a long time.
I love this life. I am the main actor in it.
If something in you answers
If you have read this and something in you answered, then you are in the right place.
I make tea. We sit together. Maybe we talk. Maybe it is quiet at first.