JOURNAL

HOW AURA BECAME WHAT IT IS NOW

Monika

I blew up my entire life while searching for my purpose.

And I don’t want you to do or feel the same. So I created a space where you can just listen to what is there, because if we suppress what is going on inside of us for too long, we might end up hurting ourselves and others.

That’s the short version I give people when they ask how I ended up here, creating a space for other people to listen to themselves.

It’s the version that fits in a sentence. But it leaves out a lot.

The emptiness under the golden cage

It started as a burning discomfort I couldn’t even locate, physically or mentally.

I would sit in meetings I used to be good at, closing deals, doing the job I’d spent years climbing toward to prove to myself and everyone else that I could actually make it. But underneath all of it, I felt empty, and no amount of money or promotion was going to fill that.

What do you do when you feel like that?

I did what I always do when something becomes unbearable. I quit. The job, tech sales, the ladder, the amazing salary.

Many people call it the golden cage, and it is one: you earn a lot, can find ways to not work THAT much, and just make a pretty good living. But I felt like I wasn’t fully playing to my strengths, even though I couldn’t have told you what those strengths were, or what I actually wanted to do.

What I needed was time and distance to finally go "find myself."

But on the way to finding myself, I actually lost myself instead.

Losing myself while looking for myself

One of the places that changed me most was Bali.

I went there for a meditation teacher training with Punnu Wasu (punnuwasu.com), and something genuinely beautiful happened. For the first time in my life, I learned what it felt like to simply be with myself.

Not achieving. Not becoming. Not following the next goal.

Just being.

Through meditation, silence, movement, and the teachings, I started to experience parts of myself that I had been disconnected from for a very long time. I learned that I could sit with what was there without immediately needing to fix it, understand it, or turn it into something productive.

These experiences remain one of the foundations of the work I do today.

But somewhere along the way, another question started to emerge.

Who am I when I have nothing to follow?

I had spent most of my life knowing what came next. School, university, career, promotions, relationships, the next thing to achieve. Even when I didn’t enjoy the process, I always had something ahead of me to move towards.

Now I had stepped away from all of that.

And instead of learning how to simply be without needing an answer, I started looking for one again.

Bali can be a beautiful place for that. But it can also be easy to get carried away there. Surrounded by spirituality, healing, meditation, and people reinventing themselves, you can start believing that you’ve finally figured something out. That you’ve awakened. That your old life was the problem, and a completely new one is waiting for you somewhere else.

I started interpreting my life in Europe as something that was making me small. My career, my home, my relationship, the structures I had built. I began believing that perhaps I needed to leave all of it behind to become who I was meant to be.

And without really realizing it, I was searching on the outside again.

I had simply swapped career goals and money targets for spiritual enlightenment and healing other people. Different currency, same transaction. Still looking for something outside myself to tell me who I was and what I should do next.

Because once I’d quit the job, I wanted to quit everything.

Quitting felt like relief, so quitting became the plan. I didn’t realize this was never really about the job. It was a pattern, the thing I always did the moment a situation got hard: leave before it could really touch me.

What I’ve learned since is that this is the flight response. Your nervous system gets so overwhelmed that it doesn’t know how else to react to conflict. In older, more literal terms, it meant running from a tiger. And sometimes, when you don’t know how to stay with what you’re feeling, the first response is to run.

I never expected that pattern to reach as far as my relationship, my home, my entire life, basically everything I loved. Instead of facing what I was actually feeling, I ran.

Walking that path caused more pain and more suffering. I retraumatized myself in the process, creating new wounds, mine and other people’s, that hadn’t been there before.

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And it was only later, after all of that, that I began to understand what I had actually been looking for.

The moment everything changed

Walking from Munich to Rome is when that finally started to shift, because for the first time I was walking toward myself instead of away from something.

I learned that the peace I’d been chasing everywhere doesn’t arrive through motion. It shows up through presence. Through being kind, to yourself and to the people you’ve hurt along the way. Through making space for the truth, even the parts of it that are hard to look at.

Michael A. Singer writes about something close to this in The Untethered Soul:

Nature just gives and gives to whoever will receive. Should you choose not to receive, it doesn’t punish you. You punish yourself because you choose not to receive.

Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul

That’s what I understand now about that walk. The peace wasn’t something I had to build or chase into existence. It was already there, the way sunlight is always there, I just hadn’t been in a state to receive it.

For that, you don’t need to blow anything up. You don’t need to quit your job, your relationship, or your life.

What was waiting in the stillness

When I arrived in Rome, I was in a space of stillness. Nothing to do but look at what had just happened to me: the quitting everything, the long walk, the full exhaustion. That was when I worked through a lot of what I’d created along the way, and beyond. Through movement, meditation, and breathing, all led by intuition, old traumas surfaced, and I was able to link them to the patterns I’d been running on for years, almost immediately and very intuitively. During that time I released a lot of what was holding me back from becoming the whole version of myself. It felt like shedding skins, but in a releasing, gentle, and good way.

I became more intuitive, and learned to listen to what my body needs. That experience made me realize how much we actually store inside our bodies without even noticing, and how we create the dramas in our lives ourselves. Later, I trained in BBTRS, which became a strong pillar of the work I do now.

Realizing what I am here for

In the void of being no one and having nothing, I surrendered fully to my intuition and trusted that the right things would show up at the right time.

In that, I realized something I had actually known all along: I love being there for people, and people often choose to tell me their pain. I can see people clearly, sometimes more than through what is actually being said. I am here to hold space for people. That was clear to me, and from there it started translating into what I do now.

Little detour. When I left everything behind, I went back to Bali, only to realize I hadn’t understood anything about life yet. I felt useless, so I started reading chakras at a friend’s crystal shop in Ubud (a wonderful place). Isn’t it almost funny: going from a woman climbing the corporate ladder to a woman sitting in a crystal shop, reading people’s chakras. But it felt so natural and aligned. Back in Europe I started doubting it again, but luckily I found my mentor, Arsalan Tosifi, who helped me believe in it. Reading chakras is part of the work I do today.

What I want you to know

I know that feeling well. The not knowing, and underneath it, the burning sense that there’s more.

But if that feeling is there, there is no way around following it. This feeling is there for a reason, maybe to remind you of your true path. And if we don’t listen, we might end up creating dramas for nothing. But here is what I can say, after doing this work with so many souls:

There’s a gentler way to find out what that is than the way I found it. You don’t need to blow up your entire life. Don’t wait for it to become unbearable first.

Give yourself the space now.

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