In the larger, spiritual sense, sure: I deeply trust that I can have love, abundance, joy, purpose, community, and health in my life… all at the same.

But in the practical, day-to-day sense…

No. I cannot. Some things in life are just mutually exclusive, they can never co-exist.

Like: If I want to feel truly at home somewhere, have a tight-knit community and a routine, I cannot continue to live a nomadic life. If I want to live out my purpose, and start a business where I share my truth about health and healing, I can’t keep hiding myself and stay small. And if I want a safe and healthy partnership, I can’t keep going for my kryptonite.

In my twenties and even in my early thirties I’ve always chosen adventure, fun, freedom and excitement over safety, peace and calm.

At first, out of necessity. To break free from the shackles I felt had kept me hostage during my school years. To prove that I didn’t have to succumb to society. To show that I was going to live a different life.

Then, out of youthful excitement and recklessness. Endless nights out, faraway travels and chasing sunrises and irresistable, but emotionally unavailable, men. It’s safe to say that the high-adrenaline life became addictive.

Somewhere along the journey, I could feel that this way of living wasn’t working for me anymore. I was burning out, and I started craving stability, safety and peace. But I couldn’t just stop, and I think there were three reasons for that:

1. The good old FOMO. I feel like the age of 35 forms an invisible threshold in my mind. The official expiry date of my youth. I’ve always known that long term I want to have the “boring” thing: The house with the garden, the dog, the husband and the kids. So while I can, shouldn’t I just squeeze out every ounce of opportunity to f*ck around, literally and figuratively?

2. Familiarity. With everything that I am currently learning about the brain and the way we learn (neuroplasticity), it is crystal clear to me that my neural pathways for excitement and adrenaline are much more developed than those for calm and safety. It physically feels almost uncomfortable for me to be in a state of peace. For example, I have noticed that my craving for caffeine spikes whenever I feel calm and peaceful.

3. Subconsciously I knew that when I stopped running, I would have to confront the shadows that were lurking in the dark… The very things that ignited my desire to rebel in the first place.

So I kept going until my body literally forced me to stop. And even then, unconsciously I preferred the physical suffering over actually facing what was there, and kept myself sick until I was ready to truly feel.

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I think it is only in these past few weeks that I have truly found the intrinsic motivation to change. Not out of necessity —“I get sick if I don’t”— but out of desire: I just genuinely feel better when my life is more quiet and peaceful.

So, I stopped running. Quite literally even.

After feeling the excitement of being healthy again, I slipped back into my old ways of being. One of those things is going a little overboard with exercise, like training for a marathon.

While my runs were initially something that supported me in the process to heal (it helped me see that physically there was nothing wrong with me), it quickly became a new source of stress and pressure as soon as I attached a goal to it (and not just any goal, no, of course it had to be a marathon).

And it wasn’t just the running. I picked back up the life I felt like I’d been missing out on, and possibly lived even harder than before I got sick. I did my regular training, hikes, acro-yoga, swimming, I did an all-nighter party again. For a while I felt invincible.

Until I caught the flu—and with it, a terrifying fear of my health relapsing and what that would mean: failure. Having shared my healing story so openly, I felt immense pressure to be fully okay from now on, and shame at what it might say about me if I wasn’t. And the fact that I’d already started working with clients obviously didn’t help.

Although I luckily didn’t develop any physical symptoms, that deep sense of shame and fear turned into the most debilitating anxiety that I have experienced in my entire life.

I knew by now that this anxiety was just my body’s way of communicating to me that there was something I needed to look at. And that as long as I didn’t do that, my brain was going to keep me “safe”, which meant: stuck in bed.

It took me a couple of days to find the key. Wasn’t I already doing all the right things? Didn’t I resolve all of my “trauma”? How the f*ck did I end up back in bed? WHY me?

And it turned out that it were these exact thoughts that were keeping me stuck: Negative thoughts, self-doubt, and resisting what was. All of the things that signal to your body that it’s unsafe to be there, and dangerous to be you.

So I surrendered, I truly accepted where I was. I started feeling into the physical experience of the anxiety, giving my body the message that it was safe to be in my body. And I started speaking to myself from a place of love.

And as a result of that, the anxiety quickly faded. But what stayed was the experience of how it felt to really be there for myself. To soften up and to hold myself in a way that is unconditional and that doesn’t ask me to change, or prove anything.

I realized that in many ways, I was still trying to prove my strength in life. Like by signing up for a marathon. Or by choosing to date men that needed me to be strong.

I think that, for the first time in my life, I let myself fall apart within my own safe arms. Allowed the brokenness, the weakness… and loved myself despite all of that.

And from that place I could feel my craving for excitement and adventure slowly shrivel. In a matter of days a sense of calmness and peace came over me that I have rarely experienced in my life, other than a handful of times during meditation. My FOMO turned in to JOMO (Joy of missing out) and I start to wonder if I am actually much more introverted than I thought.

However, change comes with grief of the old. And on one of my walks this week I cried. I cried because I am saying goodbye to someone. A person who represented the old me.

She who would not know her needs and honour her sensitivity because she believed it made her weak. She who confused cortisol with the feeling of being alive. She who held on to her freedom for dear life, because she was afraid of the emotional depth that comes with choice, and the responsibility that follows from commitment. She who would prefer the excitement of adventure over the safety of something that truly feels like home.

I am grieving. The life I have to let go of to make room for the new. The options that I leave aside, even when they look so damn good. And all the little pieces of me that have to die, or that maybe will continue to live inside of me, forever unsatisfied.

Love,

Hannah

I have been procrastinating on this post for weeks now. Actually, probably months at this point.

I think it is because this post will mark the start of the next chapter in my life. A chapter that marks the end of my healing journey, and the start of a “new” direction of work and purpose.

“New” because it’s a path I’ve walked before: something I’ve been wanting to pick back up at some point, whenever I felt ready.

And although in a way I don’t actually feel ready (hence the resistance), I know it’s time.

It’s time because I have arrived at a point where I feel stable enough in my physical and mental health, and in my answers as to how to get (and stay) there, that I feel ready to help others on this journey.

But before I can do that, I want to share my full healing story, one more time—where I started and how I got to where I am right now: healthier and happier than ever.

If you’ve been here for a while you’ve probably heard me nag about my health for the past three years… I don’t know about you but I was so sick (no pun intended) of hearing myself go on and on about the symptoms I was experiencing, and everything I tried to get better (which is, I now realize, partly what kept me stuck). But I need to go into it one more time, not for me, but for other people. To have something to share with those who struggle and are looking for ways to heal.

I realize I wrote a similar article in March. So if you’re wondering what’s going to be different about this one I will say: it’s much more complete — hence a lot longer, so brace yourself, or if you’re not interested, scroll to the end, or simply tune out.

A little bit of history

From a very young age, I’ve seen myself as “weak”, at least when it came down to my health.

The image I had of myself was that of a pale, frail little child. Too sensitive for what seemed to be a “normal” life to others (going to school, working, having hobbies and friends).

Although this self-image was likely aggravated by my mom’s recurrent story of how the only fail I got in life was the 4 out of 10 health score I got as a newborn baby (I was born blue because of a lack of oxygen and didn’t cry immediately), I think it truly started in my first year of school when I was 6 years old and I got double pneumonia.

From then on I got sick every autumn, just a few weeks into the new school year. It was my body’s way of saying “I don’t like other people deciding where I have to be and what I have to do”. Being ill became my strategy to drop out of life when I felt overstretched and stressed.

And although flus and cold sores became a regular part of my teens and twenties, I luckily didn’t experience any other chronic symptoms until I hit my thirties. I just thought I had a weak immune system and, even though I’ve always had a deep sense that life could be better and healthier, I had largely accepted that this was just how it was.

On top of that I was a bit of a hypochondriac. I vividly remember the moment I discovered a little lump on my chest and was convinced I had breast cancer, while in truth it was the start of my boob growth, lol.

I also feared strokes, heart attacks and whatever worst case scenario I could come up with as a kid. It’s safe to say that anxiety was a lingering thing throughout my youth, and it was mostly fixated around my health — which, as I will explain later, has probably contributed to or at least aggravated many health issues I’ve experienced since.

That, and a tendency towards perfectionism, which although it definitely showed up in school as well, also centered mostly around my health and my body.

I think that at some point in my life I could probably have been put into the category of orthorexic, albeit a mild version. But it’s definitely safe to say that I obsessed over my health, which in my teens and early twenties mostly meant my weight. I would go to the gym 5 days a week, worry about calories and always have some restrictions on what I ate.

In the second half of my twenties, the focus shifted a little bit. I was living a pretty intense life: alternating between periods of full-time work and backpacking, working out as much as I could, and partying being a solid constant. Not surprisingly, I was ill a little more often, catching viruses and stomach bugs in pretty much every new country I visited — with India being my absolute shit peak when I caught pneumonia and dengue fever at the same time, a few days after I’d healed from a nasty stomach parasite that had kept me stuck on the toilet for a week.

So, as any naive young person would do: I started looking at ways to improve my health with things like (intermittent) fasting, (juice) cleanses, plant based and clean eating, and supplements. Yes, I also jumped on the celery juice bandwagon, pressing my own green gold with a cheesecloth because I was too nomadic for a juicer. Fun times.

Of course I could’ve just decided to tone down on my lifestyle, and that might have helped, but I think there was also a part of me that didn’t believe that the life I was living was what was causing all of this. Because if it was, why were my peers, who lived very similar lives and often drank much more alcohol and slept much less (two things I’ve always tried to keep “under control”), seem to be handling things fine? It just didn’t seem right.

Looking back I am happy I never gave up on living the life I wanted, because in a way that part of me was onto something. I just didn’t know yet that I wouldn’t find the answer in my 8AM celery juice.'

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When the chronic issues started

I kept going like this for most of my twenties. Until I actually got sick, and didn’t get better. Twice.

I had just gone through an intense break up, I was grieving a loss, and I had an unexpected, profound spiritual experience that changed my view on life forever. It was day one of no-contact with my ex (yes this detail matters), and I was in Guatemala. I was always very careful with where and what I ate but still, that night I got a stomach bug. It wasn’t even a bad one. My stomach just felt a little off and I decided to fast until the next day. After which I started to eat normally again. Only it felt as if I couldn’t really digest my food well. And as the days passed I started to have more and more pain and bloating. Up until a point where I could only eat a few bites of food before feeling like I’d had three meals.

I got my stool tested (fun!) and I tested positive for H. pylori. For which they gave me some antibiotics. After doing some research on H. pylori and finding lots of controversy on the issues of this bacteria that apparently lives in roughly half of us, I decided not to take those (yet), also because I knew it would mess with my microbiome and make me even more prone to food poisoning afterward. Knowing I still had weeks to go in Guatemala and Mexico that didn’t seem like a good idea.

I tried to deal with it alternatively, which was the start of a two-year journey…

I changed my diet; I cut out gluten, raw fruits and vegetables, everything fried, sugar and coffee. I took probiotics. I even managed to find celery sticks and press juice through a sieve. I lost a ton of weight.

I ultimately did take the antibiotics, once I got home. And as I had somehow predicted: it didn’t help. If anything it made it worse.

I kept trying to adjust my diet by figuring out what made me bloated, but it seemed that the more I focused on it, the less I could eat. At my worst the only things that I could eat without getting painfully bloated were (sweet) potatoes, eggs, avocado, banana, papaya and meat (I had been a vegetarian for years). I even tried the carnivore diet for two weeks. Safe to say I was desperate for answers.

One of the more “scientific” approaches was the work I did with an integrative medicine practitioner who did very detailed tests of my microbiome, finding all sorts of imbalances (”gut dysbiosis”) that needed to be fixed with a very precise (and very expensive) supplement protocol. Good eating and sleeping hygiene and trying to avoid stress were also part of the protocol, but I wouldn’t say they were the main focus.

In those two years I also saw therapists that worked on the “energy body” and, in one way or another, did things to rebalance and unblock energetic blockages in the system (which they said could’ve been caused by emotional life events or traumas). Under this category I would place the bio-resonance therapist I visited, biomagnetism, acupuncture, acupressure massage, and crystal healing. I experienced some (temporary) relief from most of them but ultimately didn’t feel like they really made a difference.

During all this time I felt more and more resistance to spending hundreds of dollars on supplements and having someone put wires, magnets or needles on or into my body without much change.

I kept wondering: When nature is SO intelligent and wise: how can a simple thing like health be so complex that it takes things like mixing rare exotic herbs, super expensive blood tests, complex isolated supplements, and placing needles in specific places all over your body?

My integrative health therapist had told me that it would be almost impossible to heal from my gut problems without a strict protocol… Even then I found that hard to believe. What happens to animals when they eat something they shouldn’t have? I am sure animals are more in touch with intuitive ways of eating, but they definitely don’t need to eat a bunch of isolated and concentrated micro food components. Or magnets and needles for that matter.

I also felt that many therapists, even when they admitted that the cause of my illness might be stress- or emotion-related, still kept focusing on fixing and manipulating the physical. The osteopath... the acupressure therapist, the biomagnetism therapist… Every one of them said that I probably had a blockage in my energy system because of an emotional event or trauma, and that they could get it away by removing the blockage energetically. I remember asking my bio-magnetism guy: “So what if I haven’t solved this emotional blockage or this trauma? Will the imbalance come back?” And without blinking he said “Yes”.

I was a bit stunned: so why then, was I spending hundreds of dollars on “physical” therapy? And why weren’t those therapists helping me with the actual cause of my symptoms?

Even though I had a hunch that the emotional system work was the key somehow, I didn’t really know what I should do differently than what I already did. I felt like I was already very aware of my emotions. I was a yoga teacher, I meditated, I journaled… I never thought of myself as someone who was emotionally stuck: I’ve always been able to cry quite easily, I wrote to process my feelings, I had gone to therapy, I even did somatic therapy… all of that and I didn’t even have any major childhood traumas. How could this be the issue?

Besides, by that point my digestive issues were under control. I had found a course on Chinese Nutrition and that way of eating had proven to be most helpful to solve my issues. However, I was still dependent on that diet in order to feel good. If I’d skip a day or two I would feel my symptoms coming back.

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Part 2 - Long COVID

And then I got a flu last summer, for the 6th or 7th time that year. Likely COVID, but it really doesn’t matter. It happened after a particularly stressful few weeks (probably caused by me getting back into dating, and the fact that I was planning to move to Antwerp and looking to buy an apartment — but then did a last-minute 180 because I got super overstimulated from the big city, and I realized that this wasn’t what I wanted... I didn’t sleep well for weeks).

That flu had me out for a week, then another, and then another… I didn’t really get better. At the beginning I would have a few good days where I thought I was okay, but then the fever came back, and a deep, deep kind of fatigue that I had never felt before. I spent weeks between the couch and the bed. I tried to work a little but I couldn’t work for longer than 30 minutes without feeling exhausted. I tried to go for short walks and do some slow yoga, but most of the time I had to stop because I started to feel feverish and weak.

When I flew back to Ibiza in October, I felt really good for two weeks. I thought that maybe getting out of the city was what I had needed. But then I crashed hard again.

By that time I kept seeing more and more ads on my Instagram for nervous system work (of course my algorithm knew…) for people suffering from chronic things like digestive issues, fatigue and other vague symptoms. All throughout my journey people had told me that my nervous system was fired up and that I needed to do more calming stuff like Yin Yoga, breathwork and swimming. I had a friend give me her login for the Wim Hof Method and started doing this for a few weeks. I would feel better for 10 minutes after completing the breathwork, after which the fatigue came rushing back in. Less intense (yogic) breathing exercises didn’t really help either, it just made me feel calmer for a little bit, but didn’t give me my energy back.

Following the nervous system approach and ‘pacing’ (managing your energy, sometimes called “spoons”, throughout the day) made me slow down on everything, without really improving: I just felt like I was living the life of an 80-year-old instead of a fit 33-year-old.

Toward the end of December, I knew that something needed to change. I was slightly better, but I still had trouble working. And physically I couldn’t handle more than a little yoga. My anxiety around my health spiked and I just felt like my body was broken. Every time I tried to get more active again, I would crash or injure myself.

Until then I thought that the problem was that I lacked discipline. That I just wasn’t trying hard enough, or that I gave up on methods before they had a chance to work.

But looking back at everything I’d already learned on this path of healing, I wondered: what if this mentality is part of the problem, rather than the solution? Shouldn’t health be our natural state? Something the body returns to the moment we stop fighting — like a floaty bobbing back up to the surface the second you let go of it? Maybe I was still holding something under water.

I had an instinct that the people talking about the nervous system were on the right track, but still weren’t getting to the core issue: because WHY was it that I had to keep calming down my nervous system? What made me so on edge all the time?

So, I turned toward the one thing that kept resurfacing as the core reason behind all of these types of issues: my unresolved emotions. Perhaps I hadn’t worked through as much as I believed. Maybe the tools I had been using hadn’t made it into the deeper layers of my unconscious…

It was worth a try.

And so I started looking for answers, joined a community for people dealing with ME/CFS or Long COVID and then found this book: The Great Pain Deception: Faulty Medical Advice Is Making Us Worse. And finally, somewhere in the first chapters, things started to click and fall into place. FINALLY.

“TMS” (The Mind Body Syndrome) or Neuroplastic Pain

The thing is, many of my therapists, and a few friends who have a more holistic way of looking at health, had told me before that maybe the cause of all of this was emotional. Some would ask me: “Do you know what emotion is underneath?” Even regular doctors would say things like “It’s stress related”.

The problem is that this is f***ing vague (pardon my language, but it represents the frustration I felt when people made it seem like my issues were all in my head).

Because for one: why am I stressed and how do I fix it? Two: how do I know what emotion is underneath…? I don’t feel emotional (and by the way, why is everyone trying to fix my body and not helping me find the emotion?). And three: how exactly can this emotion be the cause of my symptoms?

You know, I am quite open minded when it comes to “alternative” healing (as you might have noticed), but if you can’t give me an explanation that somehow makes sense to my rational brain I will remain quite skeptical.

I needed the theory behind it. And enough “proof” in the form of stories of people who have healed from similar (or preferably worse) things.

I found that in this book. (And later more in the book "Unlearn Your Pain" from MD H. Schubiner).

I highly recommend reading those but I will give you a summary here (I used AI to help me in this part, please forgive me).

TMS stands for Tension Myoneural Syndrome (or later, The Mind Body Syndrome), a term coined by Dr. John Sarno, a rehab medicine doctor at NYU who spent close to 50 years treating back pain. He noticed something that didn’t add up: he’d see patients with horrific MRIs, multiple herniated discs, who had zero pain... and patients with textbook-perfect spines who were in complete agony. He wondered: if the structural damage isn’t reliably causing the pain, then what is?

There were two other things he noticed that made him doubt the standard medical explanation for pain.

One: after “fixing” someone’s back (surgery, physical therapy, whatever), the pain would often go away… until they came back to him with pain in a totally different spot. A different location on the back, a bad shoulder, a migraine. He started calling it symptom substitution: a “ping-pong” pattern where the pain just moves house instead of actually leaving.

Two: he noticed a pattern in his patients, not physically, but in personality. Over and over he was seeing perfectionists. People-pleasers (he actually called them “Goodists”), the kind of person who’s really, really good at holding it together and really, really bad at admitting when something’s wrong. It wasn’t a coincidence.

So his answer, roughly: the brain generates real, physical pain (or fatigue, or gut issues, or whatever) as a distraction from emotions it has decided are too dangerous to feel. This doesn’t mean that the pain is fake, or that “it’s all in your head” (at least not less in your head than regular pain, since all of it is created in the brain). It’s actual pain, created by actual changes in the nervous system.

I suddenly realized that my digestive issues had disappeared around the time I got Long COVID. It had literally distracted me from what was going on in my gut, and I didn’t even realize I had gone back to eating gluten and lactose daily, without having any issues. My brain had ping-ponged my issues elsewhere.

Here’s the simplest way I can explain it: your brain has an alarm system whose whole job is deciding what counts as dangerous enough to create a feeling of pain. Normally that threshold is set sensibly, only real, physical damage will trigger it. But if that alarm gets triggered again and again (through stress, an old injury, an illness…), it can get stuck in the “on” position. The threshold drops, and the alarm starts going off over nothing (this is how people can suddenly throw out their backs doing something as simple as bending over), because the alarm itself has become oversensitive, not because something’s actually wrong at the site. Researchers call this central sensitization: the nervous system amplifying and generating pain signals on its own, independent of any ongoing injury.

This is where “neuroplastic” comes in. Neuroplasticity is just the brain’s ability to get better at whatever it repeats: amazing when you’re learning a language, less amazing when the thing it’s practicing is pain. Fire that circuit enough times (through an injury, an infection, a stretch of chronic stress) and it gets faster, more efficient, more sensitive. Eventually it doesn’t even need a real threat to go off at all.

And here’s the part that clicked everything into place for me: the brain doesn’t have a separate department for emotional pain versus physical pain. They run through a lot of the same real estate (the anterior cingulate cortex, the insula, the bits of your brain that register something as distressing). Brain scans literally show the same regions lighting up whether someone stubs their toe or gets dumped. So when you’re sitting on a pile of unprocessed stress, grief, anger, or shame, it’s not a metaphor to say it “hurts.” Your nervous system is running the same wiring either way. It’s not choosing between making you sad or making your back hurt. It’s the same alarm, just picking a channel.

Which is also, apparently, why it doesn’t stop at back pain. Sarno’s theory (now used way beyond just his original patients) shows up in Long COVID, ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, IBS, migraines... conditions where sometimes something real kicked things off (an infection, an injury), but the symptoms outlast the original event by months or years. The “injury” heals, or the virus clears, but the alarm system stays on because it’s found something else to do: protect you from feeling whatever’s underneath.

It’s also why anxiety and depression are often showing up simultaneously in people with chronic illness, aggravated by their symptoms, but often already present before anything physically was wrong. They’re often part of the same loop. Just a different expression.

It suddenly all made so much sense to me… I saw how my anxiety was part of the same problem and how it had perfectly distracted me from my emotions by obsessing over whatever was going on in my body. That caused more stress, which caused more symptoms, which then caused more anxiety again. It was the perfect loop.

None of this means the pain isn’t real, or that you’re “creating” it on purpose, or that you just need to think positive. It means the nervous system itself became part of the problem, and a learned response, unlike a herniated disc, can be unlearned.

What I also learned is that very often chronic illness starts after a period of stress or trauma: right when your system gets out of fight or flight. This is why people often get ill after a big work event, on the first day of a holiday, or in my case: after cutting contact with my ex.

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The Role of Placebo

One of the questions I still had was why some therapies had worked for me, even though only temporary, and others didn’t. And why for some people these things had helped them heal entirely. As I learned, it all comes down to belief.

When it comes down to neuroplastic conditions (conditions that DO NOT have a structural — physical — cause), you can rewire circuits of the brain with the belief that something will help. It is proven that the placebo effect for some neuroplastic chronic pain conditions is extremely strong and can account for about 75% of the improvement. This applies to both “alternative” therapies like acupuncture, and Western medicine.

The study that really made this click for me was one on “sham” surgery, where patients go through the full ritual — anesthesia, incisions, sometimes even the sounds and time in the OR — but the surgeon skips the actual therapeutic step (removing tissue, repairing the joint, whatever the “real” procedure would do). In several well-known trials for knee arthroscopy for arthritis and some spinal procedures, sham surgery has performed very close to or similar to the real thing.

That blows my mind. And it explains why some people are tremendously helped with whatever therapist they work with when they trust that person, and when what they do makes sense to them. The only issue with this is that, with treatment that only focuses on manipulating the physical (or the energetic) body, there’s a fair chance that physical manifestations of the root cause will come back at a later time, in a different way.

It also explains why so many people get stuck when navigating chronic illness within the standard medical model. By staying purely in the physical realm, they’re often given a label and told the best they can hope for is managing their symptoms or relying on long-term medication—left with the impression that they simply have to learn to live with their illness.

I want to be clear here that Western medicine is incredible when it comes to acute physical problems, but it hasn’t caught up yet with the new science of neuroplasticity and emotional health, although luckily it is being picked up by more and more doctors and researchers worldwide.

How I applied this to my health (and healed VERY quickly)

From the theories of Dr. Sarno (and Dr. Schubiner) I learned that there are two important elements to heal:

• Emotional Release or Somatic work (to release what’s causing the alarm system to go off)

• Brain retraining (understand and implement the knowledge of TMS/Neuroplasticity)

Under Emotional Release and Somatic work falls everything that helps you connect with and release your unconscious unprocessed feelings in your body. There’s a wide range of therapies and tools that can help you do that. Personally I did this through listening to guided (inner child) meditations, dance or movement therapy and a technique called “Journal Speak” —which is a method coined by Nichole Sachs where you express your feelings on paper as raw as possible, after which you burn or throw away what you wrote because they don’t tell a truth, just a feeling expressed in the moment. It was different from how I journaled before because I wasn’t trying to tell a story or understand my feelings… I was expressing them. Unfiltered. I would write things like: “I hate life, I hate my body, why can’t I have a normal life? I want my life to be over”. It quickly takes you to your rawest feelings.

Beyond these methods, tools like hypnosis, EFT tapping, EMDR, and somatic coaching offer similar pathways to help empty the bucket of stored emotions. Talk therapy is helpful, but it rarely goes far enough. It stays on the intellectual level, when what we truly need is a somatic release in the body.

On the emotional part, I had my first big AHA-moment when I did an inner child meditation after trying to focus on work and feeling exhausted after 20 minutes. After learning about the link between symptoms and emotions I realized that maybe work wasn’t just “too tiring” for my body, but that it was triggering something. Especially since I seemed to be less exhausted when doing other types of activities.

So I put on a meditation that guided me through the thoughts and feelings that were coming up. I don’t remember what came up. Probably a first layer of fear around the symptoms, of not being able to perform, of losing the life I have built for myself when I wasn’t able to work, and about what it would mean to “fail”.

What I do remember is that I cried a lot and that I felt some tension in my body release. And that, after finishing the meditation, I was able to work a block of 4 hours straight for the first time in months.

What followed was a period of several months where I sat with my feelings every day—even on the days I had no symptoms, which began happening more and more often as I healed. I didn’t expect the sheer volume, or the full spectrum, of emotions waiting for me. Shame, anger, grief… feelings I’d never truly allowed myself to touch, at least not at that depth. I cried at least once a day.

One of the things I realized in that period was the relationship between anxiety and physical symptoms. On one of the first mornings I woke up without feeling the usual deep fatigue, it was like it had been replaced with anxiety — resulting in the same outcome: me not wanting to get out of bed. It occurred to me that my brain was just doing whatever it could to keep me safe: replacing one thing with the other in the hope that it would distract me enough to not have to interact with the world (and feel things that I didn’t want to feel).

On the brain retraining part, I started challenging the signals my brain was giving to my body. Throughout my life, and especially in my healing journey, I had always learned to ‘listen to my body’, and to be kinder and softer towards myself. But in this case, it seemed like this was holding me back, and I had to start doing the opposite, which was quite challenging at first, as I was anxious to hurt myself. But I started experimenting.

There were three experiments that I did on different symptoms:

1. Fatigue and fever: Back in January, walks or stronger physical movement (basically anything apart from yin yoga) would often trigger extreme fatigue and a feverish feeling. Until then these symptoms would bring up feelings of fear and I would go back home, or go back to bed as quickly as possible, afraid to “overdo it” and get even more sick. Now I decided to challenge my brain and push through a little bit. When I felt myself becoming feverish and heavy, I told my body that nothing was wrong and that I could walk a little bit more without hurting myself or making it worse. To my surprise, after a while the fever and fatigue would just disappear.

2. Sugar: Although my gut issues pretty much “magically” disappeared when I got Long COVID, I still had a strong reaction to any foods with added sugar. Even with a piece of 95% dark chocolate, or when I would eat something I didn’t even consciously know had sugar in it, I would get this little iffy bloated feeling in my stomach. I thought that maybe I should challenge this reaction too. So like with the walks I forced myself to keep going instead of getting scared of hurting myself. I took a cookie, I felt the bloating, and then I ate a little more. And later I ate another cookie. And the next day I ate more cookies. The reaction completely vanished within two days. I had unlearned this neural pathway.

3. Knee-injury: I didn’t mention this earlier, because it doesn’t really fit in the image of chronic health issues (which is why back then I never connected it to the other things either), but both of my knees kept playing up after I had severely overtrained them a year earlier. I had seen a sports physiotherapist who had given me exercises, an osteopath and another physiotherapist who did dry needling and some magnetic therapy. It all helped, but only temporarily. I suddenly saw the same patterns here as with my other symptoms: an injury that had become chronic, no therapy that helped, and a fear to hurt myself by “overdoing” it. So I decided to try and see if my pain was neuroplastic by slowly implementing everything I thought I couldn’t do with my knees back into my routine: running, jumping and deep knee bends (90 degrees). After some initial protesting from my brain and having to push through a little bit of pain, my knees quickly returned to being absolutely fine. I even decided to sign up for a marathon as the ultimate test to prove to myself that I was healthy (I am on 15k now!!).

What it means to be “healed”

Even though I have felt incredibly desperate at times, I had this deep inner knowing that life could be better, and that there must be an answer to my health problems.

I remember that at my lowest point I emailed a therapist/medium I went to once. He never says much, but one thing he said touched something in me: that I would be able to live a normal life.

“Normal.” I remember reading that and feeling a combination of recognition and disbelief. Over the years I’d started to believe that my body was just weak and fragile and that I’d have to work very hard to stay in reasonable health, which meant avoiding travel as much as possible, keeping a strict diet, and not spending flu-season in a cold country. But hearing him say that did nourish that little voice inside of me that said: you can live a normal life. And it gave me hope. And motivation to keep going.

I never was completely bed bound, unlike some other people suffering from things like Long COVID, ME/CFS or other chronic issues, and from the outside it might have even looked like I lived a normal life. But I was suffering inside. I had to organize everything around my health which took a lot of my mind space and my happiness away from whatever fun thing I was doing. I didn’t feel normal, and I didn’t feel free to just live and not have to worry about how much sleep I was going to get, if I would have enough energy, if I was going to get sick again, or what food I was or wasn’t able to eat.

So now, it’s very hard for me to put into words what it feels like to trust my body again. Because ultimately, that’s what it is more than anything. I am not “healed” in a way of never (or rarely) experiencing any symptoms. My skin can still feel feverish every now and then, and sometimes I wake up feeling anxious… Even my knees play up on occasion. But I changed my perspective of what it means. Pain, in any form, doesn’t mean I am not healthy: it means my body is signaling to me that there’s something wrong - whether that’s a broken bone, or an unfelt emotion. 9 times out of 10 it vanishes within minutes by simply using any of the tools I learned to express my emotions and rewire my brain.

What’s next?

During my journey, there were a lot of moments where I looked up courses and trainings on whatever it was that I was trying out: Functional medicine, Chinese medicine (my parents still get flyers at home from a TCM training centre in The Netherlands), Psychosomatic Therapy… but I never pushed through. I always had this feeling that it wasn’t the full story - mainly because I didn’t feel like these things had fully helped me heal.

And although I still have lots to learn, I finally feel like the puzzle is complete now, and that I have found the answers. Answers and knowledge that I want to share, because it changed my life, and I know it can change other people’s lives too.

I have so many people around me who suffer from things like migraines, ongoing injuries, chronic pains or symptoms they don’t find answers for… and I find it harder and harder to not give unsolicited advice, even though I know how annoying it is when someone pretends like they have the answer for you even though you’re already doing EVERYTHING you can to solve your health problems.

So my best alternative is to simply do this: share my story and hope that someone recognizes themselves in me, and see how they can apply it to their own lives. Because even though I don’t have the exact same symptoms as they do, I believe it’s all the same. I know it is…

But I also know that you can’t force someone’s healing process. Like I couldn’t have sped up mine. I don’t think I could’ve completed this puzzle if I hadn’t first tried all of the other things. It was the journey that helped me ultimately solve it.

That said, I know that there are some people who are at a point where they feel like they have tried it all, and are ready for a new approach. And it is those people that I want to start helping. After years of putting my coaching practice on pause it’s finally time for me to get back into it, albeit from a totally different angle.

I’ll be focusing on a combination of knowledge therapy (neuroplasticity & brain retraining) and somatic therapy to process unresolved emotions (something I’ve been training in for the past two years already).

So if there’s something in this story that sparks your interest, feel free to reach out. I am currently taking on some trial clients to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Lots of love,

Hannah

PS. I have tried to make this story as complete as possible, without getting too technical or theoretical. This means that I have simplified the explanation of neuroplasticity and everything around it. I would highly recommend reading one of the books on this topic if you want to understand more. I am in no way a medical professional or a scientist and this story is purely meant to describe my personal experience.

I saw myself in a country with grey skies, a terraced house with a beige interior, messy with the hideous plastic toys of my 2.1 kids. I am wearing a simple t-shirt and a pair of jeans that are just a little bit too small for my not fat, but definitely plus size body. I have an average husband (loving but not very adventurous or inspiring), a simple 9 to 5 job in a store or in an office, and a salary that’s just allows us to take a camping holiday every year. I don’t have many hobbies and I spend most of my free time at home, watching television…

Apparently, this is my worst case scenario…. Not extreme poverty, or living in a war zone, no: suburban mediocrity. (I am truly sorry if I just described your life, I swear it’s nothing personal…)

It says a lot about me. Firstly, it mostly exposes my privilege, really—the fact that I can afford to be terrified of a terraced house while so much of the world is just trying to find a roof over their heads.

But it also says a lot about my dire need to be exceptional. Better than average.

Perfectionism.

Do you know that until very recently I didn’t resonate with being a perfectionist? And that the reason I thought I wasn’t, exactly proved how much of a perfectionist I actually was?

I thought that perfectionism was for people with spotless houses, tidy bedrooms and ironed outfits — which is not me. But as it turns out, perfectionism is not so much about being perfect all the time and in all areas of your life (which is impossible, by the way), but more so about the disappointment in yourself when you aren’t. About just never being quite good enough.

Ironically, I realized that I’d thought I wasn’t perfect enough to qualify as a perfectionist.

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Part of me wants to blame my fear of averageness on the “manifest-your-best-life coaches” who tell you that if you’re still doing laundry your “frequency isn’t high enough”, and to which, unfortunately, I have paid a fair amount of money during my twenties.

But another part of me knows that these Abundance-Gurus just managed to tap into my already existing fear of becoming like everyone else.

Then again, there’s a side of me that wants nothing more than to be just like everyone else. To be loved, liked and accepted - which, as a kid meant to keep your head down, unless you were cool, which I wasn’t.

Throughout my youth I have heard comments like:

“But, you’re good at everything”

“She’s a goody two-shoes”

“Don’t tell me about your grades, you’re going to have a nine or a ten out of ten anyways”

“Don’t complain, you can eat what you want, you never get fat.” [I was always dieting]

“Oh her, the girl with the big ass and boobs”

Mostly, the tone of these comments wasn’t very mean.. but it was always said in a way that made it seem that whatever I did or was: it made other people uncomfortable.

I often feel like I am stuck between those two opposite internalized voices: Perform perfectly, but don’t be a show-off. Always do the best you can, but don’t be proud of it or talk about it. Don’t be fat, but don’t be too skinny. Make sure you have enough money, but don’t splurge and show people you have it.

The exhaustion of these contradictions reminded me of that famous monologue of America Ferrera in Barbie:

“Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong. You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean…” “ You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. But always stand out and always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.”

Maybe it’s just a women’s thing. I don’t know.

What I do know is that, more often than not, my head is not a super fun place to live.

Sometimes I wonder who I would be without these beliefs - and if it is even possible to know.

How much of me is shaped by my dance on the high-wire separating perfectionism from averageness?

What are the things I truly do for fun? And what is secretly driven by fear or shame? What would I do if nobody was watching? How average would my life become, or maybe, how much bigger?

If you look at my life now, I think it’s fair to say that the fear of being average is larger than the fear of being too much. Which makes me think that if I’d let go of perfectionism, I’d probably allow myself a simpler life. Something that was confirmed by the fact that I didn’t just feel fear and horror when imagining a life in terraced house…

I also felt a sense of calm. Relief even. A life under the radar. A life where I wouldn’t have to prove anything anymore, because I’d already “failed” the high standards I’d set for myself. I would feel like I could stop performing… No one to impress anymore, including —and mostly— myself.

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I am not saying that I don’t like my abundant life in Ibiza, my 800 hobbies, my monthly trips throughout Europe, my fit body… Or that I would want to exchange my sea-view apartment on Ibiza for a terraced-house in Belgium.

My inner child is also proud of me: in another meditation I did in the past week (yes, I am meditating a lot these days), I saw my younger self looking at me in awe: she’s built the life of which she always thought it was possible; free, playful and somewhere warm and close to the ocean.

I just wish it would be enough… That it would feel enough. I would feel enough. That, I could lose it all and know that I would be alright, so I wouldn’t have to live in fear every day.

You know, as I am writing this there’s something that dawns on me:

My problem has never been that I’ve always wanted more from life to feel good about myself… but that I’ve consistently felt undeserving of what I already had. I’ve always doubted that it could get any better, yet it did, and I’ve always been terrified that at some point someone was going to take it all away from me and laugh at me in my face while they say: How could you have been so naive thinking that life could be so good?

A great example is my fear to get fat. I have had very little moments that I would actually think of myself as too fat: I’ve just always been scared to become heavier than I was, especially in times where I put on some weight. It’s kind of like the struggle I used to have with money: I was always scared of running out of money and tended to be a bit stingy. That was until I actually ran out of money and realized that it wasn’t that bad and that I was still alive. From that moment on I have never once worried, I am spending freely and I still have more than ever. [After a particularly bad week with obsessive thoughts on food and calories, I’ve been seriously considering if I should just let myself get fat as an experiment… But the thought of it alone terrifies me so I think it’s a no.

In the end, maybe the problem isn’t the fear of averageness; but my lack of trust that life can always feel good and abundant, even when I am living a more ‘standard’ life.

I think I was born with an innate capacity to see the immense beauty and abundance of life, and the will to enjoy everything it had to offer. Which I’ve always done. And which has probably led to a life that is not so “average” (whatever that actually means).

I just happened to come across a few absolute spoilers of grown ups who’ve consciously or unconsciously given me the message that life wasn’t supposed to be fun - and I started to believe it.

“Wait until you… [have to start working, are over thirty, are over fifty, have kids, ….]”

Well, I am turning 34 this year and I am still waiting.

I just genuinely like life. I guess that makes me an optimist.

Yes it’s hard sometimes. Yes maybe I haven’t gone through enough shit to feel differently… Yes I am extremely privileged, I know that.

However - What’s the point of worrying about hard times coming when 1. They might never come and 2, and this is more likely: they will ultimately teach you to appreciate life even more?

I will say it now: there is no point.

So off I go, back to appreciating everything that is good in my life - hopefully with a little bit more trust that I’ll always have plenty to be grateful for - perfect or not.

Love,

Hannah

But I guess this is one of these things in life that falls under the category of ‘You had to be there’. Probably nothing truly meaningful in life can be experienced outside the time and the place in which it takes place.

In this case the time is the perfect moment where years of struggle, studying, searching are coming together, and the place is my body.

I just scrolled back through my last two posts to see what I had written about this (I am always afraid to repeat myself, which I probably still do). I then realized that it was only one month ago that I wrote that “I wished I could say that everything was falling into place”…

Well… Right now, everything is falling into place - and when I wrote that post it had actually just started.

It’s like everything is coming together and I am in a continuous flow of “AHA-moments”.

Funnily enough, I apparently had to let go of my attachment to enlightenment (see said blogpost) in order to feel more enlightened than ever.

Although this is not the spiritual self-realized kind of enlightenment - but the kind where it feels as if after years of trying to find my way in a dark room - finding clues here and there but never seeing the full picture - someone has finally turned on the light and I can finally see the whole room.

(I also realize that I’ve written about “breakthroughs” before when it comes to my health (like in this post) but it never truly helped solve my issues, probably because it was nothing more than a piece of the puzzle.)

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So what changed?

The short answer is what I told a friend today.

He asked how I was doing and I told him I felt completely healthy again, after which he asked: “What’s the biggest change you made?”

My simple answer was: I started sitting with and releasing my emotions every single day.

But the whole truth goes a lot further than that.

Because I’ve not just found another method to feel “better” - like one of the many temporary (or partially integrated) fixes I got from doctors or (alternative) therapists.

Before, healing always felt like throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what would stick. It was like that dark room I was talking about - A room where I’d find plenty of info, therapist and modalities, of which some of them were touching on the effects of stress, trauma and emotions on physical health, but no one was explaining how this exactly worked. And most would still focus on fixing the body with physical ‘manipulations’.

I just couldn’t connect the dots.

This time it feels different.

And I know it’s different because with everything I’ve tried over the past years I’ve always had this deep intuitive knowing that ‘this couldn’t be it’ and that they were missing the root cause. Something always felt… off.

This time, it’s is healing and truly understanding why - and what caused me to get sick in the first place.

A bit of Theory - John Sarno

That understanding is the theory of what’s called “The Mind Body Syndrome or “TMS” (TMS originally stands for Tension Myoneural Syndrome), developed by Dr. John Sarno.

Dr. John Sarno was a Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University School of Medicine. His core discovery was that chronic pain (especially back pain, neck pain, and fibromyalgia) is often not caused by structural “defects” like herniated discs or pinched nerves. Instead, it is a physical manifestation of repressed psychological stress.

His discovery came from a place of frustration and observation. He noticed two things in his practice:

• Inconsistency: He saw patients with “terrible” X-rays and MRIs who had no pain, and patients with “perfect” spines who were in agony. This suggested that the structural abnormalities weren’t the actual cause of the pain.

• The Pattern: He noticed a high correlation between chronic pain and certain personality types—specifically “perfectionists” and “people-pleasers” (what he called “Goodists”) who tended to repress their internal tension.

He began experimenting by telling his patients that their backs were actually fine and that their pain was a result of repressed stress. To his surprise, when patients accepted the psychological cause and stopped fearing the physical movement, their pain often vanished.

How TMS Works:

1. The Trigger: You have repressed emotions—usually “unacceptable” feelings like rage, anxiety, or resentment.

2. The Strategy: The brain wants to protect you from feeling these overwhelming emotions.

3. The Diversion: To keep your mind off the emotions, the brain creates a “distraction” in the form of physical pain.

4. The Mechanism: It does this by slightly reducing blood flow to specific muscles or nerves, causing mild oxygen deprivation (hypoxia), which results in genuine, physical pain.

Nowadays, Sarno’s theory is used and applied for a large variety of chronic diseases like long-covid, ME/CFS, IBS, migraines etc.

You know, I’ve always believed that many physical problems have a psychological cause, but not in the extent and the depth as I came to understand it now. And the moment this theory truly clicked for me was when I had found the proof in my own body.

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The proof

If you remember, I suffered from digestive issues ever since a mild food poisoning in Guatemala 3 years ago. My journey of finding answers began in regular health care where I got diagnosed with H. Pylori. I had to take antibiotics - The doctors told me that I couldn’t get rid of this bacteria without it… but the antibiotics didn’t work.

Then I turned to functional medicine, where I was diagnosed with all sorts of gut dysbiosis that had to be fixed with a strict supplement protocol. Again, I was told that it would not be possible to get better without taking a bunch of (very expensive) supplements.

The supplements also didn’t work.

Then I turned to Chinese Nutrition Therapy - which helped tremendously - but only as long as I kept following this diet for most of my meals. The moment I dared eating bread and cheese for more than a day in a row, I’d get issues again.

In the meantime I’d also tried crystal healing, chiropractors, biomagnetism and acupuncture. Some of those worked temporarily, most didn’t work at all.

Then this summer I got long-covid or some other sort of post-viral fatigue syndrome - and somewhere in those first few weeks I realized my digestive issues were gone. I could eat everything again without any issues.

I didn’t give it any thought until I started reading a book on TMS. The writer, who’d suffered from almost every physical ailment you can imagine, explained that the brain was using physical symptoms as a distraction mechanism from emotions that are perceived as too dangerous to feel. And that because of this, symptoms would often succeed each other.

This is when my mouth dropped to the floor the first time. This is why my digestive issues had magically disappeared: My brain had found something else to focus on. And the ‘abnormalities’ that were found in my digestive system (beyond the initial food poisoning) were never the cause of my issues - similarly like herniated discs that are rarely the cause of back pain.

The second big AHA-moment that made it click, and made me fully believe in TMS, was when I started experimenting with my symptoms and stopped fearing them. If TMS was true, my fatigue wasn’t caused by ‘doing too much’ - and rest wasn’t a solution. So whenever I felt the fatigue come up I recognized it as a freeze response of my emotional state, and instead of going to bed I did (and am still doing) this:

I try to tune into my body, feel if there is an emotion that needs to come up, and I cry if possible (I am currently in a program with guided meditations to help me do this).

The first time I experienced the effects of having an emotional release was when I was feeling extremely fatigued while working on my computer (which was the most triggering activity for me). I sat down, did an inner child meditation, I cried, and then I worked for 4 hours straight without feeling any fatigue - something I hadn’t been able to do in months.

The second experiment I did was to get out of the freeze response by moving my body and go out for a walk or do yoga - going against what I thought my body was telling me: to rest.

Sometimes I’d feel really tired at the beginning - it was like my whole body was resisting because my brain had programmed that physical activity would make my fatigue worse. But I kept telling myself that there was nothing structurally wrong with my body and I kept going. Then it would get easier, and often my fatigue would just magically disappear.

In just a couple of weeks I feel completely like myself again. My swollen glands in my throat are finally back to normal, I am training almost daily, I am back doing handstands, I am going out, I am juggling 4 clients… and I am eating bread (with gluten!) every single day.

And the best thing is that I feel like I finally got out of the healing hamster wheel: Healing (or the fear of illness) had become the ultimate distraction mechanism from my emotions - keeping me stuck in a loop. With the knowledge I have now, it is almost impossible to keep myself (literally) sick with fear.

Now, of course I realize that I wasn’t a super bad case so that might have sped up my process... But by now - as I’ve become OBSESSED with this topic - I’ve also heard enough stories of people with very severe cases of long-covid, Lyme, CFS, ME, back pain… who have been bedridden for years and have been healed using the TMS theory.

I could go on and on about insights I’ve had, and emotions I’ve felt through, but for now, I just wanted to share my biggest epiphany with you. Mostly because I have people around me who are suffering from what I now believe to be TMS problems, and maybe this article can help.

And also partly to have something more extensively to share with people on my recovery process - rather than just saying: "I’ve been sitting with my emotions every day”.

So bye for now - if you’re looking for me: you’ll likely find me with my nose buried in one of the books on TMS I am reading because the mind-body is so fucking fascinating… I just can’t.

Love,

Hannah

I’d just told him I was on the way to the airport to fly back to Ibiza, where I lived, and that I was self-employed - after which his friend mumbled that I’d probably have to work around the clock - clearly thinking that there was no way you could have a good life while also working little.

When I told them I worked about 20 to 25 hours a week, and that that was enough to live off, he asked me that question. The conversation had started from a youthful (and probably slightly drunk) mischief (’Hellooooo where are you traveling to?’), but at this point he’d become genuinely interested.

A memory flashed in front of my eyes of me as a little girl at the end of a long summer holiday - the happiness and calm I had felt - and when it ended: the total indignation I felt about the fact that “real” life wasn’t supposed to be that way.

I hated going back to school, not because I disliked school per se, but because I didn’t want to give up my freedom and having someone else decide my how, where and when. And so every year in September my body said what I couldn’t express in words by picking up a heavy flu.

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The more I am diving into the history of my body and my emotional life, which seems to be pretty much all I am doing right now, the more I realize the link between those things, and any sort of symptom and disease I’ve experienced over the years. I wish I had seen more clearly that my body was speaking to me… Or, rather: I wish I would’ve understood what it was actually saying.

Because like most people, I knew that I would get sick if I asked too much of myself - physically and/or mentally, and that maybe I was a bit more prone to stress and illness than most people.

But my toolbox didn’t go much deeper than “I need to slow down a little”.

Besides, I didn’t feel like I could control the amount of stress I had… I hated it when people gave me the utterly useless advice of “just try and relax”. As if it were a switch I could just turn on and off… If it was that simple, obviously there was no problem in the first place.

The thing is that I had a very limited idea of what stress was and what caused it. I thought that all my stress and anxiety was a direct result of external expectations like exams, a busy social life, and work.

Now I am learning that most of my fear is actually a secondary emotion - covering up a more intense and deeper emotion that is connected to a belief system, that gets triggered by external circumstances and situations.

For example: work can bring up a deeply held belief that if I don’t do it perfectly, I fail, and if I fail I am not good enough. Underneath that is a grave sense of unworthiness and thus: Shame - an emotion that’s much more difficult to allow than fear.

I am also learning that “stress” isn’t simply caused by being busy. And that it isn’t just a bad thing, even though most people only talk about the negative consequences of (long-term) stress — a knowledge that made me more and more fearful of stress - which clearly only made it worse.

Quite recently this fear reached its peak when I got long-covid (a label I actually don’t believe in but that’s for another time). Every type of activity (like making a meal, working, going for a walk or meeting a friend) would cause an extreme feeling of fatigue, something that doesn’t compare to regular tiredness in its intensity. I started fearing this so much that I spent weeks on the couch.

Over the last months I’ve slowly crawled myself out of that place, partly by taking lots of rest, but most importantly by learning to face my fears and all the underlying emotions. I slowly started to realize that there was no direct relation to activity and my symptoms: It was the fear, all the other emotions underneath that, and the weight that resisting these emotions pressed into my nervous system that was triggering my illness. Activity was nothing more than an addition of pressure - tipping my body over the edge into a state of freeze.

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In that recovery process (which I am still in the midst of), I had to change my relationship to stress and fear - fully surrendering to it rather than resisting it. And the more I partake in normal life again, the harder that seems to get.

A dear friend reminded me of this recently when I told her I was afraid to get thrown out of my centre - the calm and steady place I’d been creating for myself, and felt comfortable in.

She said: Remember that it’s not about avoiding stress altogether, but about learning how to be resilient: how quickly can you bounce back after?

In the end, life isn’t meant to be completely free from fear. There is a reason we have a parasympathetic and a sympathetic nervous system - and even though we rarely actually need to run for our lives - there’s still plenty of situations that will trigger our primal survival mechanisms and I believe that that is actually a good thing.

I journaled about it the other day:

“Fear marks the edges of my comfort zone - and points to where I still get to grow. Also, fear shows me what matters - if I didn’t care, it wouldn’t scare me. It shows me what’s worth risking”

—

So that summer holiday feeling I wanted to keep forever?

It wasn’t entirely realistic. Life isn’t always calm and peaceful. I don’t think you can live a truly fulfilling life without facing fear every now and then.

Nevertheless, I believe that there was some truth to what I felt back then: a strong sense that life could be so much more free than most people around me told me it could be.

Prompted by the guy in the carnival outfit (I couldn’t quite tell what or who he was dressed up as) I saw my life again through someone else’s eyes. Someone who lived an entirely different life from me, likely surrounded by friends he’d known from childhood, on the way to the yearly festivities of the town he grew up in, a life that I sometimes wish I had (the community that is, not the carnival).

But also a life where Ibiza is a holiday destination - a place with lots of sun where you come to relax, go wild or both. Like the couple I sat next to later in the plane - which I almost missed, by the way - who were discussing their itinerary while frantically flicking through a bundle of papers they printed with tourists highlights and maps.

I smiled at my fellow train passenger.

“Yes, it actually does” I answered him in truth - thinking of that little girl and realizing that even with its hardships, my life does often feel like a never ending summer holiday.

Love,

Hannah

Sort of though. In many ways I am still very much deep in there, trying to dig myself out. And I can tell you: it’s very dark and muddy in here.

Writing this down I notice that I wish I had another story to tell. A story about joy and confidence. On how everything in my life started falling into place the moment I finally chose a home…

Instead, it’s like everything I’ve been running away from is catching up with me - leaving me to deal with the shit that has piled up throughout the years.

“Oh, you’re finally sitting down? Perfect. Here’s 3,780 unprocessed emotions we’ve been holding for you. And don’t bother trying to run — this time, we’re adding physical symptoms that won’t leave until you face it all. You’re welcome.”

And with that my life secretary left me with a stack of unsorted binders on my lap.

You know, on many levels I know that this is necessary. And that in the end, I will be grateful. But also… Does it ever fucking stop?

I feel like I’ve been doing “the work” for so long and the only “reward” I seem to get is more stuff to deal with. Fuck that shit. (Sorry, needed to get that out).

Anyhow, it’s safe to say I felt a good amount of resistance.

But what I didn’t realize, was that most of that resistance wasn’t because I was fed up with doing the work…

It was coming from an unconscious belief that what I call “the work” (journaling, therapy, spiritual support etc.) was actually useless. And that it would move me further away from truth.

Only after seeing a highly recommended healer on the island did I realize this hidden belief which was holding me back. And where it had come from.

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The Trip that Changed my World

About 3 years ago I had a spiritual experience that changed my view on life forever. I wrote about this before, but the short version is: I accidentally took too much acid — only the amount was accidental — and I experienced a full blown ego-death. For a brief moment I understood what life was about, what all world religions were trying to make us understand before it got transcribed and translated, that time and free will was an illusion, and that my identity was just a story. A classical example of an experiences of wholeness and oneness.

That experience ignited my interest in Advaita (or non-duality), which is the philosophy or “method” that comes closest to what I have understood during that trip.

And although my dedication and focus on the topic has been fluctuating over these last 3 years, it’s had a profound impact on my life and my way of thinking. Partly great, but also —as I realized— not entirely. As it was keeping me stuck in my (spiritual) growth.

Not because of Advaita, or the teachers, but because of my attempt to reach enlightenment by doing the impossible: bypassing my ego with my ego.

My mom, who I can talk to about this kind of stuff, has always said that she thought there were no shortcuts to enlightenment. And although I’ve always felt she was right, I also thought that she was missing out on something by not having experienced psychedelics.

However, the more I learn about psychedelics, the more I realize that— although they can be helpful in some context— without a proper physical and spiritual development and preparation before, and decent integration after, it can be useless, counterproductive and sometimes even dangerous.

I tried to explain this to a friend the other day. About what had happened to me after getting back from an experience that might have been “too much too soon” - and that possibly triggered most of the health issues that I started experiencing shortly after.

Example: 2D to 3D

Imagine living in a 2D world, and you see two lines on a surface that are the same height. Then suddenly you experience 3D and you realize that depth exists, and that the lines being identical in length is an optical illusion. In the new perspective, you can see that one line is further away in space, which means that in reality the furthest line is actually much longer.

Then, after your 3D experience, you get back to your 2D world and you try to reconstruct your view on life with nothing more than a memory of the depth you experienced. You’re trying to apply 3D rules in a world (and in a brain) that works in 2D, convincing other people (and mostly yourself) that the world is not what it looks like, because it felt so much more “true” on the other side.

I can tell you that that doesn’t work. I was denying my own reality.

In actuality, we’re living in a 4D world, and what I experienced might have been 5D— or whatever higher dimension that exists after.

And my optical illusion wasn’t the two lines, but the illusion of separateness, and thus the illusion of the Ego; that what makes us believe we are individuals with a free will. (If we’re not separate, how can one ever move individually?)

The problem is that although these things might be “True”, it doesn’t change the “other” Truth: that in the world we live in, the two lines are in fact identical. And that we build our lives around that reality.

For a while I forgot about that. Unconsciously, my black-and-white mind had convinced me that only one image could be true. And not surprisingly I chose the reality that had felt better - thereby embracing a truth that I didn’t embody.

The result of that was that I started rejecting words and stories, because I knew that language made everything per definition dual - making it impossible for me to journal or to write (hence the lack of articles), even though I felt like I needed it.

I also lost my interest in spirituality, therapy and lots of healing modalities because I found it was distracting me from what I thought it really was about.

Lastly, my lack of belief in a free will left me feeling unmotivated and passive — outsourcing my trust in a God of which I forgot I was an active part of.

Meanwhile, my physical and mental health declined, and I didn’t have anything to fall back on, simply because I rejected everything that could probably help me.

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My (oh-so-real) human ego finds it hard to admit but I was deeply caught in the trap of spiritual bypassing - trying to “get” non-duality with a mind that can never understand. And even though I knew all of that from having listened to plenty of Advaita teachings, I was still trying.

And ironically enough, by dismissing story and language, I rejected the most important part of myself: my humanness. And with that, I only removed myself further away from the thing that I was trying to find: wholeness.

And this healer, she made me see all of that with —funnily enough— the help of a few crystals. Without knowing me our my story she was able to find the sore spot and with that, she didn’t just hand me a permission slip to be human again (which honestly felt like such a relief), but also opened a door to the kind of support I truly need in order to heal.

Love,

Hannah

PS. I’m hoping to write more regularly in the coming time, so I can share a bit more about the somatic/emotional work I am currently doing, and how it’s already been helpful in my journey of trying to heal long-covid/chronic fatigue or whatever has been plaguing me since summer :)

PPS. This piece doesn’t feel as well rounded as usual, and I haven’t triple checked it for errors but hey, one of the things I am working through is perfectionism, so here I am, trying to show up imperfectly.

Let’s start proper journal style this time. I don’t want to make this a long one.

The idea of having to produce a whole essay has caused me to not write anything at all — or, in all fairness, I wrote 2 unfinished articles, after which I got distracted or, more likely, too tired.

My energy levels are still a problem. I am getting tired of hearing myself say how tired I am. Even though I am taking it really slow. Grandma-level slow.

Nevertheless, for the past 2 weeks I’ve felt the urge to write almost daily. A mix of creative energy that seeks an outlet, a desire to share because I’ve felt lonely, and a dire need to process this phase that feels so messy, transformative, chaotic, and yet incredibly slow and boring. Oh, and probably main character syndrome, which is a concept I really resonate with but don’t we all? (In the end, we are all experiencing our lives from our individual point of view, which always makes us the main character in the movie of our lives, whether we act like it or we don’t).

At some point today I got sucked into an Instagram advertisement for a nervous system healing method (right after an ad for a rug, a TV cabinet, and a couch blanket — as always, kudos to Instagram for knowing my ChatGPT conversation topics and my Amazon orders).

“The Healthiest People Have This ONE Habit in Common…” — I didn’t watch long enough to know what they were selling but, of course, I watched until I knew the answer to their hook. Apparently, they did a study and compared the habits of chronically ill people to those who rarely or never got sick, and they found out that the healthy people were all talking to themselves. Out loud.

Supposedly, their habit of processing their feelings out loud made their immune systems stronger than the people who bottled them up.

And that, my friend, is why I decided to write today after ignoring the urge for days. And even though I am not entirely sure if writing counts — nor if this was a legitimate, peer-reviewed study, I know for a fact that giving words to my feelings helps me process. And that even when my words appear into thin air, or are never read by anyone, they have meant something to me.

Which, funnily enough, I was also reminded of today by the book I was reading, in which the protagonist had written a 30,000-word book in a matter of days to process a breakup. I once did exactly the same thing, after going through one of the darkest periods of my life. I wrote for hours every day. Thinking that I was writing a book while I was, in fact, just healing myself. With every page I wrote, I felt a little lighter, and at some point I had dug (or more correctly; written) myself out of my hole, and at that moment I stopped writing. I was done. And it took me some time to realize, and mostly to accept, that the book was never the point.

It hardly ever is, to be fair.

Which is something I’ve learned over the past years. And it has made me incapable of doing things just for the end result. Or at least, after doing so much work on healing my patterns of pushing and forcing myself through life, I really thought I was…

My body, however, is currently telling me a different story, and is showing me all the ways in which I am (or was) still subtly trying to control, push, and force — and to be honest, it’s been quite confronting to realize how deep it is ingrained in every part of me to override my physical cues with mental strength.

But this time, there is just no way to cheat anymore.

I force? I lay in bed the next day.

Simple as that.

And as “simple” as it is, it is extremely frustrating and hard.

It’s like I am a little kid in front of the cookie jar with everything in it I enjoy about life (sports, parties, and the list of the one million ongoing and unfinished projects on my list), and the moment I lift a finger towards it, I get a slap on the wrist.

Whipped into obedience.

And although it feels ruthless, I know it’s the only way to get me to change. Drastically, and hopefully permanently. So maybe I can feel actually healthy again.

In the meantime though, I am going through a full-on identity crisis.

Not knowing who I am anymore if I can’t do what I usually do.

Letting go of the attachments I have to certain habits, hobbies, and personality traits.

And that, while I’ve also changed my entire nomadic lifestyle and settled down in a new country (which is partly exactly what I needed and gives me the space to heal, but is also not (yet) helping me feel less rootless…).

Let’s say that if I were to write a post about this phase of my life on LinkedIn (which I won’t), I’d say this was very “interesting” and “character-building”.

Go figure what I actually think most of the time.

Love,

Hannah

As a journal.

“Should”, not because I called this ‘Hannah’s Journal’ and it’s what I think other people expect…

But “should” because I truly need an outlet like this.

I. just. need. to. write.

To give words to feelings…

To understand myself better…

And to move some of that life force energy that turns into restlessness when it has nowhere to go.

I think that, without realizing, I slipped back into my old habits of my time as a life coach, where creating content was an act of self-promotion, and everything had to fit in my ‘personal brand’.

‘Never write about the your process you’re still in the midst of’, was the marketing advice I got.

Which kinda makes sense if you’re trying to get people to pay you for life advice… You need to at least pretend you have it all together.

Do I think that’s a questionable sales technique?

Possibly.

But more importantly: I stopped coaching, and I made a clear decision that the only way I’ll ever get back into it would be because it happens naturally.

Yesterday, on my evening walk I realized this; I was holding myself back from writing because I felt like I wasn’t “ready” to journal about this chapter in my life. I told myself that once I’d made it through this “phase” — or whatever the hell this is — I would write a piece that I could end on a positive note. Or with a clear conclusion…. As if my essays need to be these perfectly wrapped gifts, presented with a little bow and a tie…

I suddenly remembered (once again) that the whole point of this public journal was that I could write whenever I need it. Which is probably mostly from that messy middle — as a way to make sense of it, or sometimes even to get to the other side of it — that is, until the next challenge comes along.

I also reminded myself of why this isn’t the same as the scribbles I make in my paper diary… And why I need this public place possibly even more than my private journal.

Even though I am writing into a void —rarely knowing who reads this, and how it is received on the other end—it feels like I am somehow less alone. Like I don’t have to carry life all by myself.

And especially in times like these, that’s exactly what I need.

“Times like these”

Some days I feel like I am going to explode. On others I feel like I want to hide under the covers of my bed and cease to exist.

Not in a serious ‘I-want-to-kill-myself’ kind of way but just… remove myself, temporarily, from all the overwhelming responsibilities that come with life.

Like needing a place to live. And then also earning enough money to pay for that place to live. And hoping that the place you choose gives you the life that you hope.

—

If you’ve been following along here you will know that I’ve been struggling to choose where I want to live. I kept going back and forth between Antwerp and Ibiza, never fully daring to commit to any of them.

It turned out that in order to know what I truly wanted I needed to make a choice first - so I could feel if it was the right one.

When I chose Antwerp, it turned out it wasn’t. And I learned that you can’t force a decision from the mind and that I had to let life decide for me.

More specifically: my body chose for me.

I remember writing the ending of my last post on the airport on my way to Ibiza; still having that achy, feverish feeling that had been stuck in my body for almost 2 months by then.

When I looked out of the plane window, 10 minutes before landing, and I saw the island bathing in golden sunset light… my body started to shake and I couldn’t hold back my tears. It was as if the tension I had been holding all summer just literally left my body. I haven’t felt feverish ever since.

I guess home had chosen me.

And as it goes when something is aligned it all started flowing from there.

Before I knew it I was buying a car and signing a 2-year lease for a beautiful sea-view apartment.

And right when I started to worry about how I was going to pay for it all, I got a new client.

It was like the island was showing me that I had nothing to fear.

And yet, I’ve felt more scared then ever. Over the past 3 weeks I’ve called my mom and a good friend in total panic - feeling like I couldn’t handle it all.

A combination of:

“I don’t know if I can do this”

“Am I insane for doing this?”

and

“This is too good to be true”

I think because everything is happening so quickly and my mind has been on the backseat (which is a good thing by the way), it’s now trying to catch up with life and grasp to what feels or felt safe.

I didn’t expect it was going to be this hard. I’ve travelled the world, left home a hundred times, and spent months and even years apart from friends and family, often much further away than I’ll be doing now.

Yet, since moving to Antwerp when I was 19 —which by the way also came with a pretty heavy aftershock around age 21 — I never actually chose a different place, or truly committed to a new kind of life.

On top of that, even though I’ve been doing great professionally, I haven’t felt what it is to have the responsibility of fixed living expenses as a freelancer. Like a rental lease, or a mortgage. Shit that normal people do, but that is new, and apparently very scary, to me.

And then there’s all these decisions. Like where and how am I going to insure my car? Finding a roommate. Moving my stuff from the Netherlands to Ibiza. Do I become a resident here and move all my admin here and how? How do I fix wifi and water in Spanish?

Total decision fatigue I can tell you. Which means that the easy things, like choosing what to eat for dinner, what to wear, or when to do laundry, get incredibly hard.

“This is too good to be true”

Interestingly enough I’ve realized that part of the fear (and the tendency to want to hide) is because I am scared to step into this new, bigger version of myself. Classic upper limit syndrome once again.

Because it’s not just the (financial) responsibility, or the commitment that makes it hard;

It’s the thought that I don’t deserve, and therefore cannot carry, this kind of abundance.

When things seem “Too good to be true” it’s because a part of me doesn’t believe she deserves something that is this level of good.

On the phone with my mom she recommended having a conversation with the part of me that felt like she wanted to stay small.

What I found there was a lot of shame and judgement. A little girl that didn’t want to stand out too much because she learned that performing too well, or having too much money was looked down upon.

So I sat with her, I took her hand, and I wrote out a visualization of who we needed to become in order to embrace this bigger life.

That person… Well… She won’t be touched by judgement, even if there is… because her confidence doesn’t come from pride but from the trust that life will take care of her, because it always has.

She can allow herself to enjoy the fruits she’s been given, and she’s just along for the ride.

It helps.

Love,

Hannah

Apparently, it’s been going around. One of my clients sent me an email saying ‘she’d been in a little dance with a persistent flu this past month’… which I thought was an awfully adorable way of describing something that I have trouble seeing the beauty of.

Although I’ve gotten quite good at surrendering to illness, after a week— a week and a half at most—I lose my patience. Conditional surrender I guess - a bit of an oxymoron really - but hey, I am only human.

It seems to be that finding meaning and ‘beauty’ in illness is kind of a thing in my generation, especially among the more ‘conscious’ people. Which apparently includes most of my friends as they’ve all said similar things to me after voicing my frustration:

‘What is you’re body trying to tell you?’

‘I am wondering what needs to die in you’

‘Something needs purging, your body is upgrading’

Part of me rolled her eyes and thought ‘Can y’all just let me bathe in my misery?’

Another part of me also rolled her eyes - but more in a teenager-kind-of-way as if to say: ‘I-know-you’re-right-but-I-don’t-want-to-hear-it’.

I’ve been asking myself these questions for years.

‘Why do I get sick so often?’

‘Why is my immune system so weak?’

‘What’s wrong with my health?’

And: ‘How can I get better?’

These past years I’ve tried to answer these questions by going down the healing-rabbit hole, spending (probably) way too much money on holistic and alternative health therapies and supplements.

Nothing really seems to have worked sustainably and despite an intuitive feeling that this wasn’t the answer, I didn’t really understand why not. Until now.

—

You know, a better question to ask yourself is ‘Why am I suffering’?

I have mentioned this before but every time I get sick there is a mind-story that makes the general discomfort of being sick worse: The belief that I am weak.

It tried to get rid of that belief, thinking that maybe it caused my bad health, but then again, it’s hard to fight a self-image like that when you keep getting sick objectively more often than the people around you.

So this time, after the x-th day of being a miserable, feverish bundle of frustration I thought: ‘I am stuck in a loop and I am done with it. The suffering, the frustration, the being sick… there has to be something I am missing’.

I started contemplating. And journaling. And everything that I’d learned over the past few years finally started making sense.

Hans Laurentius: What does health mean to you?

That week I was planning to go to a live meeting (Satsang) with my favourite Advaita teacher, Hans Laurentius. The point of a Satsang is to come together and ask questions to the “enlightened master” or “guru”. A good opportunity for me to ask him about this topic.

My question to him was:

“How can I improve my health without falling (back) into a healing trap? And if not through frustration, how would I be motivated to get better at all? Or, do I just have to accept that I have a sensitive immune system and that I get sick often?”

To give you a bit of context: Hans smokes, which — to some people— makes him less credible as a spiritual teacher. They doubt whether he’s actually even “self-realized”. But to him, smoking is the most honest, pure thing that he can do because he simply loves it. And he is in total acceptance of the fact that it causes a potential danger to his health.

So it didn’t surprise me that part of his answer was about the often overrated value we give to health as identified beings. And although that’s definitely an interesting route to discover… (are we worth more when we are “healthy”? Does life mean less when we’re sick?)… it was what he said afterwards that stuck with me:

“Maybe it’s a good idea to dissect all the thoughts and beliefs that come with what you call “health”, what does that really mean to you? For example.. does getting sick often mean that you’re not healthy?”

Cassie Huckaby: Your body always speaks the truth.

I immediately thought about something I’d learned from Cassie Huckaby— a holistic doctor / online coach say who I was a little obsessed with about a year ago.

Cassie’s way of approaching health is the most holistic I’ve seen and experienced in the healing space. And everything she says just makes sense because it’s not only logical - backed by her studies in Western medicine —but also simple, and intuitively and spiritually aligned.

Her view on illness is not that the body is never wrong. Being sick isn’t is a “mistake” that needs to be fixed, but it is a body responding healthily to external circumstances. She shifts the focus to the incredible healing power that is inherent to the body, even without (and often despite) us meddling. Like a scab on our skin that starts growing almost immediately after we cut ourselves (and how when we start scratching it off, we do nothing but delaying the already perfect healing process).

She says: your body is always telling the truth.

I thought about this and I realized: Maybe Cassie, and Hans, are right… Maybe my body is working perfectly fine and healthy. Maybe, getting ill is my body’s natural response to the kind of life I live... And maybe - although I thought I was listening — if I keep getting ill, it means that my body is still trying to send me a message… One that I apparently haven’t truly uncovered yet.

Eckart Tolle: Give up the fight.

When I can’t sleep I listen to the audiobook version of ‘A new earth’ of Eckhart Tolle. He narrates his books himself and I find his voice incredibly sleep-inducing (something I discovered almost 10 years ago when I was going through an extremely anxious episode in my life while being on exchange in Australia). I’ve probably finished the book at least 5 times now but since I fall asleep throughout the book during different parts, I keep hearing paragraphs that are new to me, or at least to my conscious mind.

Lately, a part that stuck with me before drifting off was one where he speaks about our fighting attitude when it comes to solving problems, “The war on drugs”, “The war on crime” “The war on cancer”. And how this fight can never lead to a sustainable solution because we are ultimately fighting against ourselves - and thus fighting against the solution as well as the problem.

I was thinking about the war on drugs, for example - which is of course closely related to the war on crime. We’re criminalizing producers and dealers. We’re saying “this is wrong”, and “you are wrong”, instead of recognizing a societal problem that lands people in these kind of jobs in the first place. We’re putting people behind bars, in often dangerous places, together with other delinquents, instead of offering them an environment and opportunities to actually start living a better life.

A holistic view would be one where we see everything and everyone as part of the whole, rather than as separate, individualist objects - in which case we deny the broader context in which we all live.

I recognized that, when it comes to my health, I’ve had a similar kind of fighting attitude. Even though at some point in my healing journey I thought that I had taken the higher road by becoming good at “surrendering” and being less hard on myself and my body. And although that might have been a good first step, I was still using it as a trick to ultimately keep pushing myself and ignoring a larger problem: an immune system that kept disappointing me, and a growing frustration with my body.

I finally realized why I was stuck in a loop:

I had never questioned what being strong or healthy meant to me. I suddenly saw that what I believed was “healthy” was a mental construct I’d fabricated by comparing myself with the average person around me. I had just always looked at other people, and the kind of life they were living, and thought: I have to be able to do all of these things and stay healthy, and if I can’t, it means I am too weak.

Never did I truly question the kind of high-speed, incredibly overstimulating life that we think is normal. Maybe because — having escaped the career rat race a long time ago— I felt I wasn’t a part of it. Or maybe just because a part of me loves that kind of life. Give me a strong coffee and a day full of work and plans and I will run on adrenaline like a junky.

But until this moment, I still thought that my body was the problem. That, if I only worked hard enough to improve my health, and if I somehow got rid of this limiting belief that ‘I am weak’, I could live the busy life which I thought I was supposed to be able to live.

It finally made sense.

Why I’d always felt like I had to work harder than others to stay healthy (which never worked out, by the way)

Why all the holistic therapies seemed to lead to nothing.

And why I kept being frustrated and feeling like something was missing.

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The thing is: I know exactly why I got sick. This time, and most of the other times.

It happens when I plan too much in too little time, sleep too little, travel too much, and eat and/or drink things my body doesn’t like (aka sugar, coffee, alcohol).

I knew all these things already: What is, and what isn’t good for me. That we shouldn’t fight the body but listen to it. Yadayadayada.

I just kept secretly hoping that listening to my body, temporarily, would ultimately lead me to that false gold standard of health.

When this all sank in I heard myself think: I can finally allow myself to live a different kind of life.

And I immediately felt a sense of calm wash over me.

And my fever dropped, literally.

A different kind of life

So what does it look like to live a different kind of life?

Honestly, I am not sure yet. Something with planning more time to rest in between plans, trying to learn to slow down, and create habits to down-regulate my nervous system. Systematically, not as a fixing method.

It will probably take time to create new neural pathways. I can feel myself slip into an ‘ON’ mode quite easily, and it’s hard to get out.

Nevertheless I think there is one thing that will make a world of difference: choosing a place to live. And not just ‘a’ place…

You know how I decided I was moving back to the city at the beginning of this year - and how I quickly started doubting that decision as soon as I got back to Antwerp?

Well, I guess this was kind of the last push I needed to make up my mind:

I can’t do city life. My body is just not having it. Period.

And without really officially making a decision, it seems like I am officially moving to Ibiza.

I sold my campervan, packed all of my stuff in boxes, and I’m currently on Charleroi Airport waiting for my flight, with 2 suitcases to get me going for the first 2 months.

I’ll keep you posted.

Much Love,

Hannah

“Don’t let the outside world influence your inside world.”

Or:

“Change what you can, accept what you cannot, and have the wisdom to know the difference.”

It’s one of the basic concepts of spirituality — I think we’ve all heard it before.

At least that was what I was thinking when I heard him speak about it:

‘I already know this, next please.’

But just because the weather doesn’t really influence my mood anymore, that doesn’t mean I’ve evolved beyond this message entirely.

Since, of course it’s not just about surrendering to things like rain, heat or humidity…

It’s about everything that happens to you in life.

Like that person who gives you the finger in traffic (which happened to me this week), your second parking ticket in a month (also me), or catching a virus in summer which has you cancel those fun plans you had (again, me).

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But it goes further than that... We think the battle is with the outside world, but becoming equanimous toward the “external” is just level 1…

Level 2 is to not get caught up and identified with what is happening inside of us - which I used to believe was what I had control over.

I can find it ridiculous to be mad when it’s raining, but how often do I resist what’s happening closer to me than anything else: My Self?

Like the feeling of shame that rises in my stomach when someone gives me the finger, even when I know I didn’t do anything wrong. And the thoughts that follow of why I shouldn’t feel that way.

Or the thoughts that attack my mind when I get sick telling me how weak I am for catching a summer virus, topped with more thoughts on how I am not supposed to think that way.

How often do I judge the person inside for a thought or a feeling I have, or an action I take?

This is where I still have work to do — And what I believe isn’t talked about enough by most spiritual teachers.

Because I believe that our thoughts and emotions are not different from the weather, and other people’s behaviours: we watch them happen. That what we perceive as “internal” is external to us as well.

Even though in mindfulness you learn to see your thoughts and emotions as clouds passing by, often, there still is a belief that there is some “doer” behind it all who is (or hopefully some day will be) able to control the meditation — which, if you’ve ever tried to meditate, doesn’t make sense at all - It seems like the harder you try, the harder it gets.

Yet many teachers and especially psychologists pretend that we have control over our inner world — if it’s not our thoughts, than at least we’re in control over observing our thoughts. They tell us that we’re not in charge of what happens to us, but we choose how to respond… And I believe that this is what causes more suffering than the weather ever will.

Because if we could truly choose, why aren’t we all perfectly healed by now? Why would we ever even suffer from anything at all?

Tell someone to stop being sad, or don’t think about a white elephant: We don’t choose what we feel or think, how long we’re thinking or feeling it, and what will be the next thought or feeling.

Thinking we do control or “own” it, means resisting who we are, resisting life.

Does that mean that I believe that we can’t change or get better? That all therapy is futile? Or that we are not responsible for anything we do?

No. Mostly no.

I believe we can learn. A therapy session might teach you how to be kinder towards yourself, or how to reframe some of your thoughts. You reading this text might shift something in you.

But whether that happens or not is not something you choose. It happens or it doesn’t happen. And whether it will or won’t; it will be the result of billions of micro happenings of life that has brought you to exactly where you are right now - a universal orchestration that goes so far beyond you as an individual that there’s just no way you could have thought or planned this out.

You are life happening. And you’re watching it unfold.

Love,

Hannah

I have asked myself that question.

And the answer is probably ‘less’, as writing is a processing tool for me, and when I feel good there’s just not as much of a need to unpack why I feel the way I do. (Which, is interesting if you think about it. We care so much about the stories when we feel down, but do you ever sit down and wonder why you feel so happy?)

But these days I feel good. Really good actually, I cried happy tears on the highway yesterday as I was driving home in my campervan from a weekend full of dance, music, and spending time with old and new friends.

I often think about how good my life is, but I don’t always truly feel it. But these days I do, and I want to share that too.

3 articles ago I wrote about how I made a list of everything I hated about life. Now I thought it was time to do the opposite —in part because I don’t know what else I would write about as I currently don’t experience any “friction”.

Here’s what I learned from writing this list:

• What I love about life is way less deep and fundamental than what I hate about life (Read: ’Heart break and people dying’ vs. ‘dog cuddles & lighting candles’)

• Joy seems to be found in the senses. The list of things I hate was mostly thought- and fear-based while what I love is mostly sensual: life experienced through touch, smell, taste, sound and sight

• The list of things I love is much longer than the list of things I hate

• It’s cliché but happiness is truly found in the mundane

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In case you’re wondering, here’s the list — I hope this makes you smile today 🙂

1. The smell of spring in the air

2. The first sip of my morning Matcha/Chocolate/Cacao

3. Exchanging a glance of shared amusement with a stranger

4. Bike rides on hot summer nights

5. A sudden hit of creative inspiration

6. When I manage to solve a complex problem at work

7. A hot shower when it’s cold, and a cold one when it’s hot - So I guess showers in general

8. Getting a massage

9. Waking up with excitement on the day you’ve been looking forward to

10. Aperitif time with my parents

11. Forest walks

12. Deep breaths of fresh ocean- or mountain air

13. Skinny dipping

14. The smell of coffee and freshly baked bread in the morning

15. Spontaneous and unexpected late night adventures

16. Falling asleep to the sound of the rain and thunder when camping

17. Spooning — Anyone?

18. Deep & philosophical chats over a tea or a glass of wine

19. The feel and look of figs, pomegranates and soft peaches

20. Dancing like nobody’s watching

21. Lighting candles and palo santo

22. Fresh bed sheets

23. Stomach flutters — the good ones

24. Laughing uncontrollably

25. The smell of rain on warm pavement

26. Holding a perfect handstand

27. Surfing all the way to the beach

28. The feeling you get after successfully having done something scary

29. A new journal

30. The dance of shadows on the wall

31. Having time to read a book

32. Close Harmony — goosebumps, every time

33. Sunsets

34. Being high - on life, on love, or on things that we’re not supposed to write about

35. When a friend is in need and you’re the one they call

36. Little rainbow reflections in your house

37. Dog cuddles

38. A baby smiling at you

39. Dreamy music at a live concert

40. The ruffling sound of the wind blowing through the leaves

41. A great kiss(er)

42. When my intuition was right

43. When I look at myself in the mirror and I think ‘Damn girl’

44. Harmonizing with my favourite songs in the car. Loud.

45. When Shazam catches the track that just dropped — knowing I can listen to it again

46. Unexpected roller coaster dips in the road that give me butterflies

47. Seeing someone help a stranger on the street

48. Feeling the bass in my body

49. Being on the back of a motorbike (just fast enough to feel free but slow enough to keep my inner control freak in place)

50. Flowers

Love,

Hannah

Still, I think it’s better now. And it also, once again, proves that this blog truly functions as a journal for me. I write from a stream of thoughts, processing what’s happening in my life, and ultimately arriving at some kind of momentary conclusion.

This time, the conclusion just turned out to be a little different than I thought it would be… Anyways—

The Laundromat

I was listening to a podcast interview between Trevor Noah and Esther Perel last week, and they touched on a theme that had been lingering in my mind for the past few weeks.

They called it “The Laundromat” — symbolizing the places we go or the things we do that are inconvenient, but that push us out of our comfort zones — or literally out of our homes — and into encounters with strangers.

Things like asking for directions because there’s no Google Maps. Or asking someone for the time.

These moments rarely happen anymore. And when they do, it’s often with an ulterior motive — which happened to me last week. Twice.

Even though laundromats still exist, only a handful of people need them now. Most things happen in-house and online.

Banking, shopping, eating.

If we really don’t want to leave the house, we don’t have to. We can get nearly anything delivered to our doorstep — and by “we,” I mean people like me: privileged, relatively wealthy, living in the West.

It made me think about my own life. How I’ve made it increasingly “convenient” — and maybe, in that process, more meaningless in some way.

I don’t have to leave my house to work. And while, as a so-called “digital nomad,” I’ve certainly spent a lot of time outside my house, it’s still a life built around the idea of removing friction in order to feel happier or more fulfilled.

I’m just not sure it’s worked.

I remember when the life I have now was my dream. I’d meet people living like this and feel envious, bombarding them with questions about how they made it happen.

Now I’m that person, and people tell me how envious they are. And while I am content with my life, I’m not sure it’s made me significantly happier or more fulfilled. I usually tell them: this lifestyle comes with its own set of challenges.

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When I first got back to Antwerp, overstimulated and wanting to hide from the world, I binge-watched a Netflix series. The woman in the show lived a life that seemed hard to me — single mom, two teenage daughters, full-time job at a child protection agency.

And yet, for maybe the first time ever, I found myself longing for a job like that. Something meaningful. In service to others. With colleagues. A sense of being part of something.

If you look at human evolution, the way I live is deeply unnatural. We’ve always lived in tight-knit communities. This life of constant movement, without roots, without needing others to survive — it might feel “free” and convenient, but it’s also lonely. And stripped of meaning.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that loneliness is my number one mental struggle. I’ve written before about how it ties into my lifestyle.

I’ve also written about my struggle to choose a place to live — it’s part of the same paradox: the pull between my need for community and stability, and my deep craving for freedom.

And so lately, I started to feel that my fear of commitment was becoming a problem. That it might be the cause of why I feel unhappy when I do — which is far from often, but always feels quite dramatic in the moment and feels like I am doing something terribly “wrong”.

So when it comes up, my mind goes straight into fixing mode:

“Just choose a place — you’ll be happier in the end.”

“Maybe give yourself a challenge to do one scary thing a week.”

“Set time limits on social media so you spend more time offline.”

There’s nothing wrong with these thoughts. But they’re all born from the same flawed belief: that if I do x, y, or z, I’ll finally feel happy and fulfilled.

It’s the same mindset that led me to live a location-independent life in the first place.

And again — the choice itself isn’t wrong. But the belief that I can avoid discomfort, pain, or suffering is exactly what creates the most suffering.

Like installing a washing machine to avoid two hours at the laundromat — sure, you’re more efficient. But are you happier?

Or AirPods. I remember the first time I had an MP3 player and could carry my favorite music everywhere — it felt like heaven. But with that convenience, spontaneous interactions declined. Social anxiety and depression rose. So did we actually become happier?

For me, avoiding the discomfort of limitation meant never staying anywhere long enough to feel stuck. I wanted all the options open.

But that didn’t increase my happiness — it just shifted my suffering. From feeling stuck to feeling lonely.

And instead of seeing that as a problem to be solved, maybe it’s a paradox to be managed.

—

Someone asked me this on a date recently: “Do you also have a fear of commitment when it comes to relationships? Like, would you prefer an open relationship?”

The thing is — I don’t. And his question made me pause.

Isn’t it strange that someone who struggles to commit to a place or a path doesn’t seem to fear commitment in relationships?

That’s when it hit me — mid-microdose — I’d once again been identifying with a story:

“I have a fear of commitment.”

But actually, I don’t think I do. At least not in the way people assume.

It takes a pretty serious level of commitment to create the life I live now. I just haven’t committed to a place (or a partner, for that matter) because none of it has ever felt entirely right. And I know when things do.

I chose this life — and even though it hasn’t made me more fulfilled, the freedom to live and work wherever I want has been the experience I wanted to have. The loneliness, the constant moving, the lack of stuff in one place — those are just the burdens I chose to carry.

Ultimately, it comes down to this:

What is the experience you want to have?

Or said differently: Choose your hard.

I told this to my best friend on the phone this weekend:

Whatever I choose, life will come with hard things. I either face the loneliness of constant movement, or the feeling of being stuck that can come from settling down or taking a non-remote job.

And knowing myself — at least right now — feeling limited frustrates me more than loneliness makes me sad.

So that’s the hard I choose. For now.

As for the larger loss of community and connection — the vanishing laundromats — like Esther says: there’s no simple fix. We can’t go back to paper maps and a headphone-free world. That’s just not how the world works.

But we can become more conscious of it. And realize that “progress” or “development” doesn’t necessarily equal more happiness. That fulfillment isn’t found in comfort or convenience.

And maybe that realization opens us up to discomfort — makes us more willing to embrace friction as something fundamental, rather than something we’re endlessly, and hopelessly, trying to eliminate.

Love,

Hannah

I actually don’t know how I learned this word—as I wasn’t in Belgium at that time and I didn’t have the problem of knaldrang because I was able to party all through COVID in a country that was relatively COVID-free—but it’s a feeling I know. Like I am going to explode from the inside. Roaring energy that needs to go somewhere.

I have it almost every month during my ovulation days. And when I have it outside of that, well… it usually means that I want to escape something I am feeling. Which is what I think is going on now—considering I am writing this with a strong Belgian beer next to me to calm myself down a little (rare, I can tell you).

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However, something has changed in the way I approach these ‘episodes’.

I used to go into full fixing mode. Or before that, I wasn’t even conscious that it happened—I just went out and partied.

I feel like now it’s somewhere in between those two approaches. Which is funny, because I always thought that the end goal of my self-development journey was that I would immediately be able to get out of it and “fix myself”—or even better: I wouldn’t even get knaldrang at all.

I wrote a short note about this on Substack this week:

Externally, it might not look so different from what I used to do. Sometimes I give in to the itch to go out and party, and sometimes I do things that are maybe more helpful to feel and process my inner restlessness.

But internally, it’s an entirely different experience because I stopped resisting.

I have come to realize that I can’t control what comes up. I don’t blame or judge myself anymore for anything I am feeling. I don’t make it wrong.

And because I don’t make it wrong, I don’t need to ‘fix’ it.

I notice it.

And I observe my way of dealing with it—and sometimes that happens to be more explosive than other times. And I deal with the consequence of either of what happens.

And surprisingly, I have become aware that what I used to think was ‘a bad way of dealing with things’ sometimes is the exact right thing to do.

Like going out for drinks.

Binge-watching a Netflix series.

Or going to a festival last minute—even when it’s raining and I don’t know anyone who’s going.

Or downloading that dating app again to swipe my feelings away.

Every single one of those so-called coping mechanisms has brought me something—whether it was creative inspiration, meeting new and old friends, wild adventures, or funny stories. And sometimes all together.

It slowly starts to feel like I can’t do anything ‘wrong’.

Partly because I don’t believe there’s anything I can control. Partly because everything I “choose” turns out to be a part of my life I would never want to have missed. And partly - and most importantly - because it’s ultimately not about what I do - but about what I allow myself to feel.

“Healthy” coping mechanisms like Yoga or forest walks mean nothing if you use them to distract yourself from what you’re feeling. Which is why - sometimes - going out for (alcoholic) drinks with friends where you have space to cry and put your heart on the table is actually the more healthy thing to do. Or dancing your ass off on a festival to move stuck emotions through and out of your body.

Or watching a sentimental Netflix series and having a good cry.

Or, while scrolling on Instagram, finding a meme that has you belly laughing like a mad person for 15 minutes - which has happened to me this week.

One of the non-duality teachers I listen to said something that stuck with me, about people who are obsessed with living healthy.

He said: “What’s the point of trying to die as healthy as possible?”

Of course, he didn’t mean that there’s no point in trying to be healthy to be able to live a long and comfortable life. But what he meant was the obsession that people have with trying to win a race that you will never win: life.

When I catch myself obsessing over my health—like now, when I feel like the high-adrenaline state I am in isn’t doing me any good—I ask myself two questions:

1. Is there any way I could force myself to not feel like this? — to which the answer is always no, because if I could there wouldn’t be a problem.

2. Am I conscious of what is happening (yes, otherwise I wouldn’t be answering these questions), and am I doing the best I can? — to which the answer is always yes, because I believe we’re always doing the best we can.

Then whatever is happening just becomes surrendering to life, which is per definition a life-shortening experience.

Is it better for your physical health to live a stress-free life? Yes. But it’s also inevitable to be in fight-or-flight sometimes, and my body won’t survive this life anyhow.

So then… You might wonder. What is it actually that I am running from?

Honestly? I’ve stopped trying to dig for reasons because ultimately it doesn’t really matter. The chaos might not even be mine - Maybe I am taking on the city’s vibe.

God knows what. It can be anything.

Childhood “trauma”, feelings of loneliness, confusion, deep-rooted generational patterns…

All that matters is that whatever it is I am feeling needs to move, brought to the surface, and felt —at least at some point.

Love,

Hannah

I hear myself asking this question a lot these days.

By “this” I mean the up and the down. The feeling of never being quite there. Temporary happiness. Always looking and never finding — or finding and then losing it again…

Today I realized that the actual question wasn’t that. But the hidden question underneath it:

‘Can I accept that “this” is what life is?’

Which is a much scarier question because what if the answer is ‘I can’t’?

However, lately I’ve learned that thoughts are like phantom cages: spinning up a prison out of air, keeping you bound in fear when there’s not a single lock holding you hostage.

So I look at my thoughts — especially the ones that make me fearful and that I apparently take seriously — and I test them for their validity.

I took a piece of paper and I wrote down:

Can I live with the hardest truths about life?

And then I wrote down a page full of things about life I think really suck.

The most painful things.

Like the fact that we only grow older and we will never be young again.

That we will never be able to get everything we want, and that some desires will be forever unsatisfied.

That everything you love in life, and get attached to, will sooner or later disappear.

That there will always be days like these, where you feel like you can’t get out of the house because everything seems too scary or senseless.

That your most happy memories are gone forever.

And that I might be forever trapped in this ego.

And a bunch of other things that make you want to hide from life altogether.

It was a long list.

But strangely enough — although it didn’t make me any less sad — it didn’t make me feel more fearful either.

In fact, the opposite was true: my fear disappeared.

It’s like I broke the spell by looking it right in the eye, writing down the worst of the worst, and realizing that I’ve already been able to live with this.

There was nothing to accept because it’s what I’ve always known life to be.

I am already doing it.

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Speaking of dissecting thoughts… I had another one of these silly thoughts last week that kept me up at night — one that turned out to not even make sense.

The fearful thought said:

You’ll miss out on the love of your life — either because you keep moving around, or because you choose the wrong place to live.

That thought had been lingering for a while, holding me hostage in one of those fear cages. Make it impossible to make any decision in my life, especially on the topic of “home”.

And because I was scared of the possibility of my thought being true, I’d avoided to seriously look at it.

Until I did question it, and I realized exactly how stupid it was.

Because either you believe in destiny: that there is one person meant for you walking the earth and it’s written in the stars you’re going to meet them — which means you can’t miss them…

Or: you believe there are multiple people you could spend your life with, and it’s you who creates the opportunity, and in that case, you also can’t miss them.

It’s like how, as a child, I used to believe that I could avoid getting wet by running from the rain.

In this case, I guess it’s raining men, hallelujah.

Conclusion of the story: truly look at the thoughts that scare you. Dissect them. Test their validity. Because if I’m learning anything these days, it’s that most of what I think and feel has nothing to do with what’s true.

And not just because of our subjective lens from programming, life experiences, and childhood trauma…

But also simply because what we feel and what we think — which fuel each other — is a physical process influenced by a cocktail of body chemicals like neurotransmitters and hormones.

I am sure that any woman, or man who lives with a woman, can confirm that depending on where we are in our cycle, we can be entirely different people.

I started thinking about this after an especially bad case of PMS last month — and a generally emotionally unstable few weeks — which, for a number of reasons, I think might have a (mostly) hormonal cause.

Knowing that it might just be a physical problem doesn’t make it go away, but it does make me feel slightly better — as I don’t have to start digging for unresolved traumas or start questioning my entire life.

But it also makes me wonder about all the times we do start questioning our whole lives, go into therapy, or think that we’re broken — when maybe we’re just not eating right. Or not getting enough sunlight. Or have a toxin overload in our liver.

It also makes me ponder the question once again of where to find ‘the real me’ — if something like that even exists. I tend to think that I am most myself when I feel good — but logically that doesn’t make any sense. It’s just the version of me I like most — and maybe the one that makes slightly better choices than my cranky hormonal self. But it’s all me.

All this to say that I think we should be careful attaching too much value and gravity to our thoughts and feelings — they’re just too fleeting, temporary, ephemeral.

Like yesterday, I felt sad and anxious and didn’t want to leave the house. And although it feels like the end of the world when you’re in it, I know I have to get my ass moving to get out of it.

I pushed myself to get out of the house and do some grocery shopping, which instantly made me feel better. Just by focusing on something else.

When I got home, I felt like making myself a warm matcha, opened up my laptop, and started writing down the first bits of this post.

I quietly played some meditation music, through which I could still hear the wind ruffling through the leaves of the trees outside my new place. (I moved into my friend’s rooftop apartment, which has been so helpful to calm my system. I feel like I am slightly above the hustle of the city, rather than in it. And I am also on tree height, so I look straight into the leaves.)

Everything is well again. Just like that.

The day before, I played loud drum and bass and started dancing. Got me straight out of it as well.

I have learned that movement is key.

It makes sense. Emotions are energy. So are thoughts. Everything, really. And whatever the cause is of our anxiety, our sadness, or even our depression — energy has to move to transform.

So keep moving. Literally. It changes your biochemistry, and most importantly, it gets you out of your head.

Love,
Hannah

When we say “I” like that, we don’t mean the physical body or the organism at a certain point in time—definitely not when we ask ourselves the big life questions.

These kinds of “I” questions include a whole set of assumptions. The “I” that entails a story of a person in time. An identity. A set of characteristics. A history.

What does this person want?

But that person is a story, a set of beliefs. It’s not tangible, not real—and because of that, this “I” cannot want or decide anything.

And that’s why it often gets confusing when we ask these kinds of life questions.

Take the question of wanting kids.

I have felt deeply that I want kids—or rather, a family. And so I tend to say, “Yes, I want kids.”

But often when I see (young) parents and how having a family takes up so much of your life, I think, “Hell no.” And then I get confused.

Do I want kids, or do I not want kids?

Or the question of where I want to live… Last summer, it felt like it should be Ibiza. Then, when it got to finding a longer-term apartment, it didn’t feel aligned. Then I thought I wanted to live in Antwerp. But then I came back to Antwerp and thought: this isn’t it. Maybe it is Ibiza.

So what is it: do I want to live in Ibiza or in Antwerp?

And I think the answer to both questions is not this or that.

It’s that there is no I.

And so sometimes there’s a desire to have kids. And sometimes there’s not.

Sometimes I want to live in Ibiza, and sometimes in Antwerp.

And at some point, a decision will be made by the organism, when a desire to choose one or the other is strong enough. And then “I” will live with the consequences of that moment. But there was never a person who decided that.

So I tend to stop asking myself the “I” questions.

Where do “I” want to live?

What do “I” want to do?

Do “I” want to have a family?

Without these questions, all confusion about life disappears, as all that’s left is the present moment. And in the “Now” there are no problems or questions—only life itself.

Like now: there’s a desire to write, so that’s what I am doing. I’ll probably get hungry in two hours and then I’ll eat. I have a meeting scheduled, so I’ll probably show up because I like my job and it’s practical to make money. It’s 35 degrees today and I have no air conditioning, so I might take a cold shower when I get too hot.

Things still happen. Desires pop up. Questions appear. Things need to be done.

But it seems like actually there’s no one doing these things. No overruling “I” who makes sovereign decisions.

And how could there be?

Because all that “I” that I think I am… What is it made up of?

It’s based on where and when I was born.

It’s made up of a mix of genes and how I was raised.

It’s made up of my experiences and the people I’ve met.

And “I” didn’t choose any of that.

It’s impossible to separate me from the world around me. I am one with it, made of it. I own nothing of what I think is “mine.”

Even the things I say I choose seem to arise out of everything I’ve lived—my childhood, my culture, my wiring. It feels like I’m more of a witness than a decider.

Thoughts, urges, feelings… they arise like waves on shore: I notice them, maybe ride them, but I don’t control the tide.

Love,

Hannah

PS. The tide is low. I need some water.

But also, the story of how they got together has been on my mind a lot lately — especially whenever I catch myself feeling “too desperate” for thinking up a plan to get someone’s attention, or even just for wanting to find someone.

The groom once told me that he deliberately posted an Instagram story of himself drinking a beer somewhere, hoping she’d see it, figure out where he was, and message him so she could join. And it worked.

Until that moment, I thought only girls did things like that — more specifically teenage girls who have a crush. This was 14-year-old me to a tee - although we didn’t have Instagram at that time. And honestly, I’d still be like that if I didn’t believe that grown-ups weren’t supposed to do those things.

Then I heard this story — about a 32-year-old man thoughtfully plotting how to get the woman of his dreams — and it changed the way I looked at the search for love.

Now, to be fair, I believe these two would have found each other regardless of that plan. But still, it shifted something in me...

I let go of the judgment I held about being strategic when trying to talk to someone I liked — and I stopped holding myself back because of it (which has already paid off more than once, by the way ;-)).

More importantly, I let go of a limiting belief: that meeting ‘the one’ (as far as I believe such a thing exists) should happen ‘naturally’ and ‘effortlessly,’ and that it was something you could just outsource to the universe.

Lately, I think about this idea a lot — not just in love: the belief that what’s meant for you will find you, and that anything that doesn’t ‘flow’ or come ‘naturally’ isn’t meant to be. - Which I believe is only true if you include yourself in the universe’s equation.

Take this for example: I know I’m not the most attentive person. I forget birthdays, don’t always check in with friends going through hard times, and often miss big moments in the lives of the people I care about.

I’m sure I make up for it in other ways, but I still feel a little crappy when I realize I forgot to say “good luck” or ask “how did it go?” when someone had something important going on.

I used to think this was just a personality trait. That some friends were just naturally thoughtful. But when I talked to them, they told me they don’t remember these things either — they just write them in their calendar.

Which, of course, is a thoughtful thing to do — and may come more easily to some — but it’s also a habit. A skill. Something you can learn. Not just an innate trait.

Same with making new friends. Over the past few years, I’ve felt more introverted and found it harder to connect with people. It’s made me feel insecure and lonely at times.

I think part of that is because I go out less and rarely drink — things that used to help me soften the awkward edge (that, and other things). Another part is not having a high-EQ partner beside me anymore, plus moving around a lot as a digital nomad and not having in-person colleagues.

All of that, mixed with an unconscious belief that relationships should come “naturally” — that you shouldn’t have to try to make friends or meet lovers — obviously made things harder.

It wasn’t until I realized that talking to and connecting with people is just a skill — something I could learn — that things started to change.

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“Being Yourself”

I think all of this also touches on self-worth. And what it really means to “be yourself.”

For a long time, I believed in a kind of magical worldview — that we shouldn’t have to change anything about ourselves because we’re already perfect. That if we just “are ourselves,” everything will be fine.

And while I do believe we’re already whole and worthy — I’ve come to see that the idea of some fixed “natural self” we’re supposed to find and then “be” is flawed. It suggests that who we are is somehow separate from the world around us — as if our character exists in a vacuum. Yes, we all have tendencies and traits that come more naturally. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn, grow, or change — or that we shouldn’t.

Like creating a habit of putting my loved ones’ life events in my calendar — not from a place of guilt (“I’m a bad person if I don’t”) but from love. Simply because I want to give that to the people I care about.

Or like learning about body language to improve how I communicate and carry myself (highly recommend this podcast episode by the way — absolutely fascinating!). Or learning how to talk to men — sober.

I used to change out of unworthiness. Then I thought, to be worthy, I shouldn’t have to change at all. Now, I simply get excited about learning life skills — because my worth doesn’t depend on any of it.

For instance, I used to dress a certain way just to fit in and be “cool” — but inside, I still felt like I didn’t belong. That feeling stayed with me well into my twenties. I’d feel awkward at weddings or corporate events. And I started feeling resentful, like, “I shouldn’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not.” Even though no one was asking me to.

Now I realize: it doesn’t matter what I wear. Whether I try to aesthetically fit in or not — if I feel unworthy, I won’t feel accepted.

These days, I have no problem to adapt — like at this wedding weekend, when a friend kindly suggested I wear nipple covers because “we’re not in Ibiza,” and I happily agreed.

I’ve come to see that my identity is just a set of masks — and my life, a kind of theater where I get to choose which character to play. I don’t cling to a “true self” because the essence of who I am can’t be touched by clothes or words. It’s a kind of confidence — one that isn’t tied to identity.

Of course, I’ll always gravitate toward people who bring out my most natural self. And I’ll probably never want to climb the corporate ladder or live a high-society life. But I’ve learned that the ability to learn, adapt, and fit into any room can take you very far in life. And that there’s nothing wrong with wanting that — or with being strategic about finding love for that matter. Whether that’s by taking a course on flirting or posting a well-planned Instagram story to get someone’s attention.

Love,

Hannah

I imagine that this is what people do when they talk to God—something that I’ve recently been thinking of doing - which is strange, feeling this urge to talk to something I don’t quite believe in, at least not in the bearded sky-God-kind of way.

And yet, I can see how it can be helpful. In the sense of imagining God as a presence, or a quiet witness.

Imagine talking to a very good friend when you’re going through something. She just sits there and looks at you. She doesn’t interrupt or ask questions; all she does is truly listen.

You can’t read from her face what she thinks. She doesn’t get caught up in your drama, but her face says, “I care,” and “I am here.”

When you have a friend like that—and I hope you do, or a good therapist—you’ll know what happens: your friend becomes a mirror.

Without her saying a thing, you start to hear through your own bullshit, because out loud it’s always easier to hear how ridiculous some of your thoughts sound. You automatically start self-reflecting.

You also realize your needs in the situation. Maybe you thought you came to your friend to vent or complain, but when she doesn’t say anything, you realize you actually want and need her advice. Which means now you can ask for help—and actually receive it, because it isn’t the unsolicited kind of advice so often given in friendships.

Or, when your friend doesn’t give her opinion, or doesn’t agree with you, you realize that maybe you were looking to be right. That perhaps you were unsure if what you were feeling or thinking was valid.

I imagine “God” to be that friend. An all-seeing, all-knowing, nonjudgmental presence. Loving—not because it gives you anything, but because it’s unconditionally there.

It’s kind of how I use the white space in which I write—reflecting back at me the words that apparently make up my mind. The difference is that “paper” feels safer, as I am more comfortable there. I feel like I can find ways to poetically avoid saying what I really mean.

So maybe, in addition to my written conversations (I admit; often with AI as my therapist), I should try to talk to that imaginary friend. Out loud.

Because—especially because—it feels uncomfortable. I am scared of how crazy I will sound when I vocalize some of my deepest and darkest thoughts.

So. I just created a shortcut to my phone’s voice recorder. I’ll let you know how it goes.

At some point, the woman in the Netflix series talks about her drama with a guy she’s in love with, and how she thinks her sister would tell her she’s right to ignore him. A moment of silence as she hears herself say that. And then she says:

“No, that’s not what you would say. You’d say, ‘You idiot,’” after which she starts the car to drive to make up with the love of her life.

Love,
Hannah

What would I do if I knew I only had one year left to live?

I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s fairly easy to answer that question. Like it suddenly becomes crystal clear what life is about:

I’d spend time with my loved ones.

I’d surf and be in and around the ocean as often as I could.

I’d go to live concerts and music festivals to feel the bass in my body — alone if I had to.

And I’d want to fall in love and have the best sex of my life.

Better said: I’d go fearlessly all-in on life.

I might worry about my nearing death and what would happen after, but the question and search for meaning and purpose would fall away.

I wouldn’t spend time searching for God on a mountain, or in a meditation retreat… because I know I would find him soon — or not.

But the question wouldn’t matter. Because life is what I came to live.

And this is not some silly imagination. Because in reality, we might not even have another year. We just don’t know. Our future is nothing more than a projection. A hope.

So why look for “God,” or purpose, when deep down, we know what it’s all about?

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I also thought about the things I wouldn’t do:

Like trying to get a hold on my chocolate addiction.

Going to museums.

And, surprisingly, I wouldn’t stop working out and let myself get fat.

My first thought was that maybe if I only had one year left, I’d stop caring about what other people (or what I, myself, mostly) think, and that I would just eat whatever I’d like and stop working out…

But then I realized: it wasn’t that I’d stop caring — I’d just stop caring about what I was told to care about.

Like, I tend to care about my body and the way it looks. Body positivity my ass. And I LOVE working out. Plus, I hate how I feel when I eat like shit.

I also would stop trying to pretend like sustainability is a core value of mine, because I will always choose my family and friends over not taking a flight, or my health above not eating meat.

And oh: I lately realized that I have pretended to like museums my whole life because I thought that I should — but paintings or modern art rarely makes me feel anything.

I asked myself another question today during my walk in the park, which I now realize has a very similar outcome:

If I’d just let myself “be”? If nothing had to go or be any certain way… What would be left?

If I didn’t have to care what other people think, but were allowed to care because it’s how I was programmed…

If I didn’t have to be a good girl, but was 90% of the time because I just hate the stress I get from breaking the rules…

If I didn’t have to be pretty, but allowed myself to dress up and wear makeup every day because I just like the way it looks…

If I didn’t have to be a good person, but allowed myself to do things that make me and other people happy…

If I didn’t have to feel a certain way about anything, but allowed anything that comes up, even when it doesn’t make “sense”…

If I didn’t have to change anything about myself, but were allowed to become whoever I want to be…

I think I’d be more “me” and less of anyone — as I wouldn’t have to wear a mask and pretend to be some kind of person.

I would be inconsistent, capricious, unstable, incoherent, and likely a little unhinged.

But also real. Outside of the box. Unfiltered.

I wonder: Would it become easier to be our true selves and get rid of the mask when faced with death?

Is the question of the meaning of life attached to the question of who we are, or who we are supposed to be?

And if so, could we, by letting go of the question of “why,” be left with nothing but life itself — always exactly as it is, imperfect, unhinged, incredibly hard but simultaneously an experience that we don’t want to miss out on?

I think so.

I think there never was anything else.

Love,
Hannah

To have more freedom to write.

Or at least, that’s what I tell myself.

I suspect it’s tied to a quiet hope — that maybe this time I’ll finally be consistent. Like all the other times I’ve started something new, hoping it would suddenly change my life. Make me a different person.

Like when I used to buy fresh journals, convinced they would help me start over. That I’d write differently, live differently. I'd begin with neat handwriting on those first few pages… before slipping back into my usual script - hardly readable to anyone but me.

Or when I started a new Instagram account, thinking it would fix my relationship with social media.

This time, I told myself, I’ll write for me. I won’t care about likes or followers.

Or the recurring fantasy of moving to a new city or country, hoping I could leave my shadows behind.

Of course, it doesn’t work like that. I don’t live in that illusion. And yet — I keep wanting to start over.

I’ve always preferred beginnings to endings. Always loved the freedom of possibility more than the security of commitment.

Thinking I wanted the steadiness of commitment, I moved back to the city I know and love. I thought I wanted to be here.

I’m starting to wonder if I was wrong.

There’s so much brick. So little green. I’m overstimulated.
I hide in parks.
The thought “What am I doing here?” creeps in more often than I’d like to admit.

I feel a little lost.

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Yesterday I cycled through the city for an hour. Aimless, yet purposeful — because I couldn’t think of anything better than gliding through the thick, hot air to soothe my chaotic mind.

My body guided me to all the places that carry memory — and this city is full of them.

The quays where I spent endless summer nights with friends or lovers and a bottle of wine.
The park where I used to work summers, marking the end of my good-girl era.
The bench where a relationship began.
The club where that same one ended.
The squares where we gathered for pre-drinks — and sometimes, for the afters.
My old homes…

I cried.

I realized I’d been holding on to the memory of a place that once gave me a feeling of home. I’d made a concept out of a dot on the map that means nothing without the stories.

And as the wind dried my tears, leaving behind thin layers of salt on my skin, I let myself mourn.

Mourn the person I used to be.
The memories that will eventually turn to dust.
And the truth that no matter how far I search, I’ll never find what I thought I’d lost in the outside world.

Sometimes, it feels like I’ll never find it at all.
But more and more, there’s a quiet flicker of something — a presence that feels eternal and unconditional.

A sense of home I’m starting to carry with me.

And that gives me just enough faith to keep choosing the uncertainty of a transient life that seems to still suit me better.

Or at least until I am brave enough to fully give myself to a new home.

Love,
Hannah

PS.

My colleague — a manager at one of my clients who’s starting to feel like a mentor — caught me in a moment of utter lostness. I told her that what felt even harder than the search for home was the judgment I carried about being someone who’s unstable. Flaky.

Through her reflective look at me I realized something important.
Maybe what I’ve labeled as instability is really just the other side of the coin of the freedom I’ve worked so hard for. Something so many people in my life say they wished they had.

Like the CEO I work with — husband, three kids, a dog — who always shakes his head in wistful disbelief when I tell stories from my life.

Or my current roommate, who co-parents two children and told me she feels stuck in Antwerp — and would leave as soon as she could.

I guess I have to stop hoping that it’s ever going to be perfect. Like my handwriting.

But also: see that with every new journal I start, or shiny object I chase, things don’t get back to where they started, even when I don’t follow through - because I’ve evolved in the process. My handwriting might still look like shit but the stories actually do change.

And overall - they get better. Life gets better.

More.

Deeper.

"How far can I go in trying to better myself, and when do I need to accept that this is simply who I am?"

I didn’t realize it at the time, but as I started jotting down some bullet points for this blog post this weekend — inspired as always by what’s alive for me right now — I noticed it touches the core of these past few weeks' theme:

Finding the fine line between self-betterment and self-rejection.

—

To-Do Lists, and what they tell us about our deepest patterns

Last week, I posted an Instagram reel on “The Person I’d Like to Be Sometimes,” listing traits, skills, and habits I'd like to have — like regularly defrosting my freezer, cleaning out my cupboards before they really get dirty, and never putting delicate clothes in the dryer so they last longer. And oh yes: never forgetting a friend’s birthday, and never losing anything.

Basically, it would just be very nice to be a perfect human being.

Luckily, over the years, I have learned to sit with the uncomfortable truth that I am not (As opposed to desperately trying to control, force, and push my life into a time-blocked, project-planned dashboard.)

And letting go of the need to be perfect has made me increasingly incapable of doing things from an unaligned place. Meaning: when I feel like I have to do something because of some internal story — rather than true desire or real urgency — I just can’t make myself. It feels almost physically impossible to do things that aren't rooted in honest motivation.

Less ideal is the fact that I often still judge myself for postponing things that, evidently, have low priority (like writing a weekly Substack post or practicing Spanish), and feel ashamed for the things that never even make it onto my to-do list (like texting back that friend I haven’t spoken to in ages).

What I’ve noticed is that most of the time, my feelings of stress and overwhelm have little to do with how much is actually going on — and everything to do with how much of life I put onto my plate.

The problem isn’t that we have too few hours in a day — or that we aren't productive enough (equally untrue). The real problem is that we aren’t honest with ourselves about what truly matters, and we keep putting things on our lists that carry a negative charge: "I should do this because I don't want to be x, y, or z." or “I shouldn’t do this because I want to be the kind of person who is… x,y,z”. Those are the tasks that tend to be postponed the most — because they're not internally motivated — after which we feel worse because we are confirming the self-image we desperately trying to avoid, or failing to be person we really would like to be, and keep the vicious circle alive.

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I often listen to a podcast that coaches people through seemingly insignificant, minor life problems like a pimple-squeezing addiction, dealing with a husband who speaks too loudly, or the shame a vegetarian feels around his secret habit of eating Frikandelbroodjes (a Dutch sausage sandwich — which to be honest, if I were vegetarian, would be the last thing I'd make an exception for but hey - there's no accounting for taste).

It almost always turns out that the initial question is just one of the ways in which a deeper pattern or a (false) belief plays out in their lives.

To-do lists are like that. Or more generally: what we do, or don't do, and most importantly, what we feel like we should or shouldn’t do on any random day can tell us everything about the ways we are truly bettering, and quietly rejecting, ourselves.

The Fear of What Happens When We Let Go

It was Saturday. I had nothing planned, and I had a tiny hangover from a party the night before (in order to protect my image I feel the need to clarify that I drank the wildly luxurious amount of two glasses of wine — apparently, I have less trouble being perceived as old than irresponsible).

Anyways: it was the perfect day to allow myself to do NOTHING I didn’t feel like doing — and observe the should’s and shouldn’ts feelings that would undoubtedly pop up.

—

I think that many of us high achievers have this belief that when we don’t push ourselves, nothing good will happen. That the driving force behind everything we do is our sheer willpower and the reason of our self-improvement.

When we stop forcing ourselves, we don't stop growing. But the efforts to better ourselves that were rooted in ego will fall away.

I’ve known this for a while, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen it more clearly than on this “lazy” Saturday, observing myself doing a fair amount of things that required zero effort, and still were generally healthy or helpful for me as a person.

• I woke up and did some yoga.

• I wanted a hot cacao, so I made one.

• I felt an urge to journal and started writing - which turned into pages and pages of insights

• Which I then wrote out on my laptop because I felt a new Substack post coming

• I listened to a YouTube video from my favorite Advaita teacher.

• I got hungry, so I made myself some food — actually listening to my body and cooking something my body was craving.

• I listened to some music and felt like dancing, so I danced. (I put a camera on and the motivation disappeared.)

• I took a long walk after dinner during sunset without taking my phone.

It was a very good day: I moved my body, I was present, I spent time in nature, I learned something, I spent time creating, and apart from the leftover crisps, I ate very healthy balanced meals.

All of these things happened without any need to push myself. Furthermore, the moment I brought in external motivation by wanting to tape myself while dancing, my internal drive disappeared. It almost feels like magic if I look at how I used to think I had to control my day to get anything done.

However, as expected, there were definitely thoughts about what I should or shouldn’t be doing. To do’s and not-do’s that I’d have failed had I written them down. And it were those particular thoughts that I decided to analyze, journal, and now write about - as I had the hinge that these seemingly insignificant thoughts were the pimple addictions and the secret sausage sandwiches of my life - covering up a much larger story about unworthiness and self-rejection.

I should write a new Substack post

Some people have Sunday brunch, I have compulsive writing disorder. Every weekend, I feel I must publish a new Substack post. And - as you can see from the date of my last post - most weekends it just doesn’t happen.

And when it doesn’t, it’s because it feels like a "should" — there’s no real, living internal motivation behind it. I'd have to force myself...

Force myself to be seen as ‘consistent,’

to prove to myself that I’m a ‘real’ writer,

to gain followers,

or to feel like I’m doing something meaningful — "being significant," hopefully changing lives.

It's not enough of a reason. But it still often leaves me feeling like I’m failing. And then I fear that I might never write again — which, of course, is part of the same mental trap. Because really: what would be so bad if I just didn’t want to write anymore?

Anyhow, my worries almost always turn out to be unfounded. Because yesterday, I felt it coming. I was genuinely inspired. Opening my laptop and jotting down my thoughts just happened. And today, as I'm writing this post, I don't have to force myself — even though I’m getting a little impatient toward the end (as usual) and it's now way past bedtime (like right now).

So, writing - when motivated by reasons coming from outside - wanting to be seen a certain way: consistent, real, successful, significant… can be self-rejection.

But when writing happens from a place of inspiration and effortless force - even when it causes me to lose some sleep - it is self-love.

I shouldn’t work so much

Speaking of discomfort... let’s talk about work.

The past two weeks have been pretty challenging. I started working with a client as Chief of Staff — a new role for me, requiring a whole new level of ownership and responsibility.

On top of that, a lot of exciting projects have been coming my way. Which is wonderful, especially since I just decided I want to become a homeowner.

But I know myself. I have a tendency to work too hard, to burn myself out. And even though working feels effortless right now — I love what I do, and I don’t feel any immediate pressure — I still worry. What if there’s a problem I'm not seeing yet? What if I'm running too fast without realizing it?

Or… What if - Wild idea : working hard can actually be a self-loving act?

What if sometimes, working hard is aligned? What if the key is simply trusting that what feels natural now, even if it wouldn’t have felt natural in the past, is actually okay?

It struck me that one reason it’s so hard to know what’s aligned (healthy, self-loving) and what isn’t (self-rejecting) is because it’s not a fixed answer. It’s not about what you do — it’s about why you do it.

Side note: That’s why I’m not a huge fan of discipline, as it clouds the discernment of what’s truly right for you in the moment. Sometimes, the healthy choice is a piece of chocolate. Sometimes it's a session at the gym. Sometimes it's neither.

I Should Practice Spanish

I love languages. And when I am in it, I love it. But apparently there’s currently not enough internal energy or motivation that drives me to practice outside of my bi-weekly Spanish lesson with my tutor. And it’s been challenging to not judge myself for being a bad student - because if there’s anything I have been avoiding my whole life, it is getting anything less than an A+.

But that’s not a good enough reason to practice. Nor is the idea I have of myself as "someone who loves languages," or the goal I once set for myself to speak five languages fluently.

Those rigid ideas of who I thought I should be, and what I wanted a decade ago, can only get in the way of being authentically myself today: Someone who, it turns out, spends most of her time watching Satsang videos, dancing, and working.

I Shouldn’t Drink Cacao

Buckle up, this is going to be a longer one. Because, it turns out, my cacao habit uncovered the whole issue behind my health journey — and the true reason for my digestive struggles.

I’ve written before about my minor coffee addiction — which seems to have been replaced by the more spiritually acceptable “ceremonial” cacao. Great news, you’d think, given that cacao doesn’t give me jitters or anxiety, and seems gentler on my digestive system — which was the reason I wanted to quit coffee, or so I thought.

I feel like it’s been a while since I last spoke about my health journey, probably because I got used to having digestive issues — and maybe a little sick of hearing myself talk about it.

Internally though, it’s been a consistent battle over the past two years. I kept searching for methods, diets, supplements, and therapies that would finally heal me — ultimately leading me to a course on Chinese nutrition in January that actually has helped me heal.

I know — Yay!

And also... why am I not screaming this from the rooftops?

Because strangely enough, it hasn’t felt like I healed. Where I should feel ecstatic, I (still) feel like I am failing. And it wasn’t until I journaled about my cacao struggle that I realized why.

A small side story:
This week I went swimming with my good friend Eline. I gave her advice I later realized I badly needed myself.

After 20 lanes, she complained her body was tired, but she felt like she was failing because she hadn’t done her usual 40.

I told her to shift her perspective: instead of focusing on what she didn’t do, look at what she did.

I said: "In spite of being tired and busy, you showed up today. You didn’t not swim 40 lanes — you came, and you swam 20."

Yesterday, I realized I was doing the exact same thing with my nutrition course.
Even though I invested in it, shifted my whole diet, learned the basic principles of Chinese nutrition, and followed the program about 75% of the time, I kept winding myself up over the fact that I hadn’t watched every video, hadn’t followed the strict 2-week diet perfectly, and hadn’t let go of my daily cacao (or coffee) — which isn’t exactly ideal for balancing my “Chi.”

And even worse: I was completely overlooking the fact that my digestive issues had actually healed — even without doing it perfectly.

Apparently, my desire to be perfect had completely clouded the real results of my effort — leaving me feeling just as frustrated as before.

Which made me realize: maybe the physical discomfort was never the true problem.
Maybe it was the belief that I was doing life “wrong.”

Every cramp, every bloating, every reflux episode... they all became symptoms of my self-judgment. Proof that if only I had been better — more careful, more disciplined — none of it would have happened.

As it turned out, when the physical problem went away, what remained was my own self-rejection.

The suffering was never physical. It was mental.

Back to the cacao. Why was I drinking cacao even though I felt like I shouldn’t?

Because it was a self-loving act. Not drinking the cacao wouldn’t have been an honest attempt to self-betterment as the only motivation would have been the hope to be ‘perfect’.

Coming Back to Our Starting Point

Where is the line between self-rejection and self-acceptance?

It’s in the why of what we do.

• Self-acceptance — or feeling worthy — is when we act from intrinsic motivation. When things feel expansive, exciting, when we are curious and eager to grow.

• Self-rejection is when we are driven by extrinsic motivation. When we act in order to achieve or avoid something, to prove ourselves, or to become (or not become) a certain kind of person.

In my view, the moment we need discipline just to get something done, it’s often a sign that it isn’t aligned.

And just to be clear — this is not a call to laziness. This is not an essay about leading a hedonistic life where we only ever do what feels good.

And if you think it was, I believe this is exactly the mental error many of us make: The assumption that if we follow what comes naturally — if we surrender to what arises — we’ll become careless, lazy, and selfish. And that we need an inner “authority” to keep ourselves in check.

We don’t. Even when our natural tendencies seem to lead us toward addiction or self-harm.

Why?

Because sometimes, the most aligned path is not doing what’s “best” for us in the long term — at least not immediately. Sometimes, we need to fully burn through the energy that’s pulling us in the "wrong" direction first. Suppressing a desire that is still alive, even if it feels unwanted, only prolongs the struggle.

Internal motivation can’t be forced.
It can’t be willed into existence.
It can’t be controlled.

That’s why many of us need to hit rock bottom in order to turn their life around.

And why, looking back, we are often grateful that it happened.

Love,
Hannah

P.S. You should never change yourself — but you definitely can.