Why I Teach What I Once Needed

I did not become a teacher because I had healing figured out. I teach the same thing I spent thirteen years failing to give myself: permission to stop.

Thirteen years before I taught anyone

I trained as a Reiki practitioner in Aachen in 2006. Two years later, at the same school, I trained as a meditation teacher. The year after that came a qualification in naturopathy for psychotherapy and life coaching. In 2015 I did a 200 hour yoga teacher training in Chiang Mai. It was not until 2019, first in Chiang Mai and then with Vonny Stella in Ubud, that I trained as a Reiki Master Teacher, the level that let me start teaching Usui Shiki Ryoho myself.

Written out like that, it reads as ambition, a woman building a set of skills one course at a time. That is not what it was. It was a woman who did not know how to sit still for longer than a course lasted, so she kept booking the next one.

What I was actually collecting

Every one of those trainings taught me something I still use. The meditation training gave me a way to sit with my own mind instead of arguing with it. The naturopathy course gave me language for what a strained nervous system actually looks like. The yoga training gave me a body I could feel again. None of it was wasted.

But I was not collecting qualifications because I lacked skills. I had plenty of those by the second or third course. I was collecting them because a qualification is a reason to keep going, and going was easier than stopping. Stopping meant sitting in a room with nothing left to achieve that day, and finding out what was actually there.

The permission nobody handed me

Nobody told me to stop. I had to notice, slowly and without much grace, that the pattern I kept training other people out of was the same one running underneath my own life. I was tired in the specific way that looks like busyness from the outside. I could not have told you that at the time. I could only have told you about the next course.

What changed things was not a single moment I can point to. It was a slow accumulation of hours spent doing nothing that produced a certificate, hours that turned out to be where the actual work happened. Nobody had given me permission for those hours to count. I had to give it to myself, later than I would have liked.

Why the room stays small

That is what shapes my classes now, more than the manual does. I keep groups to six people at most, often it is one person at a time, in Canggu or live online, in English or German. Training is always live. Never a recording, never an automated attunement, because permission to stop is not something you can hand someone through a screen they are not actually in the room for.

I tell every student, before we start, that feeling nothing during an attunement is normal. I wish someone had told me that in Aachen, rather than leaving me alone to wonder what I had done wrong. I would rather a student arrive at a training with accurate expectations than romantic ones. Romantic ones are just another version of the certificate chase I know too well.

Most people who come to me for a first session are not looking for someone who has it all worked out. The ones who come back years later for a Master Teacher training are not either. They are looking for someone who will not perform certainty at them while they are exhausted. That is the whole of what I am trying to be in the room.

I still catch the old pattern in myself some weeks, the pull to add one more thing rather than sit with what is already there. I do not always win that argument. But I know what it is now, and recognising it is most of what I actually hand my students, not a technique so much as a way of noticing the pattern before it costs them thirteen years.