About taking on responsibility adventures within
let me
tell you the story why
it is any of my business for you
to put and feel your feet
on the ground because i literally
fell from the sky and i’m very
appreciative and grateful to be standing
here on my own two
feet today and because it is
empowering and beautifully human
for you to feel your feet in the ground
and it brings you
immediately into the here
and now my story begins in march 1993
at the age of when i was moving to new
york city at the age of 19.
i just finished my diploma in hotel and
tourism management
started as a supervisor in housekeeping
chasing after chamber mates making sure
that hotel rooms were cleaned and
properly staged for the next
check-in i moved up that managerial
ladder
and found myself amongst the pretty cool
gang
of hotel industry movers and shakers as
the hotel company i worked for
truly redesigned reinterpreted and
reinvented
the hotel guest experience
and with that i was part of that new
hotel boutique hotel and design
movement from its infancy
there’s no star designer model
of the 90s i did not meet
you named them and i met them wrote the
mahogany elevator and
walked that blue ghost imprinted lobby
carpet with madonna zahadi
johnny depp just to name a few and there
are rumors
that i might have actually been the one
who hired bradley
cooper as a bellboy but what do i know i
was so busy
managing new york city’s hippest hotels
and being
euro cool and he was not the bradley
cooper if a star is born yet
so i was too snobbish to even notice
i was a busy new york city career
girl i had a lot of going out and
partying to do
i always say back then i owned
that city or i was hers and she
was mine i lived that heartbeat and had
my fingertips on that pulse of the city
that never sleeps
and rarely ever slept myself
i love the fast paced numbers oriented
goal
focused competitive nature of that world
fast forward by the age i was 30
i was breaking the six figure income
mark
and had transitioned from hotel
management into
the corporate events world
and how did i all do that
with a three-step process i didn’t even
know i was following yet
visualize feel act
step one visualize is
in simple terms the moment when you
start thinking about something
putting a feeling to it step two is
as you start visualizing something
you actually automatically put a feeling
and emotion with that in my case
it was visualizing myself living in new
york city
as choice of my career path and with
that i
felt the emotion of success and
belonging there
step three putting it into action this
is where you get
mind and body working together
you embody your vision
dr chody spencer calls it mind is
praying in action
and says when you start planning your
action
your brain naturally starts to fire
in my case or in my experience it
started walking me into
that direction so here i was
i had built myself a pretty good new
york city
living and i had dedicated my life to my
career in
sales and marketing and when i wasn’t
flying from sales call to site
inspection
to conference in airplanes i
was jumping out of them as i guess
an even more adrenal activation
and fight or flight practice
my feet were literally coming off
the ground a little bit
flying might be in my genes almost
my entire family is trying to
grow wings of some sort i love the
excitement of
pretending to fly like a flock of birds
the excitement the thrill the seeing the
world from a different perspective the
dance
in the sky the opening of the parachute
the slowing of things down the flying
yourself back to home base
and embracing that safe landing putting
my feet
back on the ground highly
and joyful moments
so on saturday october 11th
on my 601st skydive
i literally broke myself
in half
we had to land out away from the drop
zone
my canopy was slightly malfunctioning
and i crashed that landing
i slid in on my left ankle ouch
open fracture foot off to the side
talus bone sticking out at the bottom of
it with dirt
and grass on it too i pounded my coccyx
on mother earth
jackknifed forward lifted myself my
torso
up and back and was very aware
that i just had injured myself pretty
badly
or did i wish i could turn back time
10 seconds would have corrected the
mistake
people always think i face death
in that accident but that i actually
knew that it wasn’t about life or death
what i was really scared of was never
walking again
so that first that 600 in the first
landing
made me promise to the gods that i would
keep my
feet on the ground
i woke up after my first surgery
in the hospital to the news that my
ankle might need multiple foot ankle
surgeries and
most likely will need to get fused made
immobile
as in 85 of the cases that talus bone
doesn’t know how to get its own blood
supply after an injury
like that dries out
eventually dies hence the fusion and
then making it immobile
that tallest bone down there was
millions of miles and
worlds away from me i had no
connection or relationship with it
and to make a long story short i also
did not
know what to expect yet in terms of my
spine
which later on got fused in a nine hour
extensive surgery
from l2 to t11
i was scared i was all caught up in my
brain i was all
thoughts angst fear and
disconnection so in that very moment
that same day beautiful
inga show from belgium shows up on my
bedside in
intensive care offering to help
we were more like acquaintance not close
friends yet
she spent the summer jumping out of
airplanes at the same drop zone in new
york state as i was
an amazing character loving
caring pretty wild and free
because you know when you fall out of
the sky
you need to get your feet back on the
ground
and inga was amongst the ones who helped
me
do so by pointing out
that i had 15 to work with remember
85 were against my bone ever healing
and that that talisbone down there
needed blood
and that i could actively partake in
trying
to get some blood there and that i was
and always
am in a place of being able to take
responsibility for the outcome
of my life and situation
she also suggested that the healing
needed to not just be in the hands of
amazing doctors
and statistics but that it had to become
a responsibility of my own
so i learned to build connections
in my body that i can have a
relationship
with that body and navigate in it
all the way to the soles of my feet
i also took on
great humility and awe
for that situation and life i was living
and in
and realized that the very moment
is the one that can affect my
future and
i decided to take on
that adventure within together
with inge as my guide
and she guided me through a process
that only later on i realized
i was a work already working with before
visualize feel act
visualize healthy bone hiking
biking snowboarding dancing running and
with that
activating muscle memory
putting a feeling with it happy healthy
mobile and putting it into action
visualize inhale visualize
oxygen rich nutritious
red dark red blood
bring it down all the way to the sole of
my foot squish it around
that bone visualize that bone
sucking up all the needed blood and
nutrition
exhale all the dirt bacteria out
let go repeat
inhale visualize dark red nutritional
oxygen rich blood
we did that process over and over and
over
again inga also put her hands on me in
order to share the
essence of human touch feeling safe
and trust putting mind
and body to work together
embodying your vision
she didn’t necessarily have a name
for that process it just kind of came
naturally to her
today i understand
that such processes have roots in many
teachings of well-being as well as in
the
yoga tradition where you integrate
mind and body in the present moment
to initiate transformation and change
the talus bone took on blood it healed
it never needed another surgery and
it’s pretty mobile today
i also underwent that nine hour
extensive spinal surgery spent about two
months in hospitals and
rehabilitation and recovered in a way
that
still makes doctors today quite
spellbound
i knew i experienced something
that needed to be shared i also knew
that i couldn’t have done it
with modern without modern medicine on
my side
i had to go back into my business career
because i didn’t know any better
and i also built a lifestyle that needed
a certain
income to be supported
everyone who get who remembers me from
back then
or got to watch me back then remembers
me in my
cow print cast crutches
pins sticking out at the bottom of my
leg hobbling
up and down the 80 or so stairs to my
williamsburg brooklyn loft
up and down stairs to subways in and
around
new york city my defined upper arms
still tell the story
today and to this day
i’m left with nerve damage
and incomplete paralyzation
that make my life a little bit more
interesting to care for
and reminds me on a daily basis how
close i’ve come
upon that issue of never walking
again i wanted to share
also the journey is still ongoing
and even back then i still had a long
way
ahead of me in building the pieces and
pathways
back together in my body mechanically
emotionally and neurologically
i wanted to share that experience of
recovery
but i also understood i didn’t have
the tools the knowledge the explanation
for it yet so i began
to study to integrate
to practice to observe
and i found that the yoga that i had
been doing
until then only because the sex and the
city girls were doing yoga too
held a lot of my answers
my going to yoga slowly transformed
into practicing yoga and i started
to not just show up for the fancy
warrior and handstand poses
but also all of the sudden for the
philosophy
for the mind-body integration for the
breathing
for the whole approach
meditation became a daily habit
to start bringing my mind a little bit
more into presence
i also took on trainings in all kinds of
bodywork modalities went to india to
study with great
masters and spend weeks
and months sitting and listening to
teachers and innovative thinkers of
mind-body integration work
but most importantly i implemented a
practice
into my daily life that seemed to
strengthen me from the
inside out and that made me take on
responsibility
in getting well and
learning how to manage my newly acquired
handicaps
so in order
to enter that new phase of my life
i left the us and moved
to my mother country austria i found
myself
refusing attractive jobs in hotel
management and the international
corporate events
industry just because i knew i already
had taken
too many detours
to say the least it wasn’t quite easy to
transform under the careful observing
eyes of friends
family and business colleagues but
throughout all of it
i made sure the practice to feel
my feet on the ground and with that
come into my own presence
today i’m a yoga teacher
a meditation instructor i
you can call me a self-empowerment guide
i dabble in arts
and producing and hosting my own little
yogic community radio show called venus
frequency like the second planet from
the sun
called shukra in sanskrit veda
vedantic or yoga terms
meaning bright lucid and clear
and i have made it my business
for you to put and feel
your feet on the ground
and i’ve taken away a few more learnings
from that transition
i’ve learned that i can leave the victim
behind
and that i can take on that great
vulnerable and joyful responsibility
of taking responsibility for the
outcome of my life i’ve also learned
that coming into your own presence is
the key
to transformation and that you have to
allow
that transformation to take some time
it’s a journey but if you keep on
feeling and
acting upon it you eventually will
find yourself living
your own way into that vision
and last but not least i’ve learned
that you can fall even
out of the sky you just have to put and
feel
your feet back on the ground
visualize feel
act here i am
feeling my feet on the ground
are you doing the same
thank you
you