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Yogain‘t a Choice anymore

Yogain‘t a Choice anymore

It’s a lifestyle I can’t Escape, even if my inner lazy self would love too, once in a while.

I think I’m totally lost (some would say), lost in the sense of being unable to live without Yoga.

This journey started when I was lost and down to earth.

I was literally down on my knees because I treated myself not in the way I should have.

I guess everybody reaches a time in his / her life where you are forced to change something; something profoundly.

For me this change happened in 2011 and it was just the starting point. I wasn’t sure if my way would bring me up on my feet again or if I had to seek professional help one day.

Books and Yoga was my way and on top a single vacation which was needed more than I was aware when I planned it.

The adventure of my vacation is also on the blog:

First holidays on my own in Italy – part 1 (Arrival)

Ever since the decision to change my life the term Yoga is a present part of my life. Some days more and some days less, like waves. On days which are exhausting the waves are stronger and the urge to dive into my yoga is more present than on peaceful days.

Yoga has been my therapy. No, yoga is my therapy!

My drug, my realm, my happy place, my hideaway…it is bigger than visible for outsiders because so much takes place inside of me.

I may not be a typical yogi which raises the question what a typical yogi is.

This picture of how a yogi should be is changing fortunately because a yoga lifestyle is as individual as human mankind is. Nothing is typical, there are no rules on what need to be fulfilled, the only important point is: be authentic and live in a way you are feeling comfortable with!

Every yogi out there is following an individual path and none is better than the other. To learn not to judge others is a big lesson because we all tend to judge others.

How can she call herself yogi if she never stepped into a yoga studio?

How can she write about Yoga without being able to do a handstand?

How can she tell others she’s leading a yoga lifestyle if she is not rolling out her mat daily?

I can and I do because of all of this.

Who is able to tell you who you are, if not you yourself?

The first person being sure about how your life is going along, what path you are on, how you feel about certain topics, how happy you are is: YOU YOURSELF!

One of the biggest lessons in life for me has been that nobody except of me can tell me how I feel or who I am or what I need. I am in charge of it and I decide what I need and what I don’t need. I decide what I want and what I don’t want.

I tell you who I am and nobody else is telling me who they think I am!

Trust your journey and walk your path. This is the best advice I have to give simply because this is what I do. I may be wrong on my way but that’s fine, only if you walk in the wrong direction once in a while you will be able to readjust and turn things upside down to find your right direction.

You are worth to live in a way you want and if this includes yoga, religion, music, literature, any interest you have to feel better, then DO IT!

My way is the yoga way and this includes many side ways as well and at the end of the day my theme is “Yogain’t a choice any more” because it lives within me. Yours may be “Vegain’t a choice any more”, “Shambalain’t a choice any more” or whatever you choose / have Chosen for your life to have a profound impact-

Trust your journey and live it. Lots of love <3

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A whole new year…

A whole new year lays ahead of us and I’m excited.

Excited and positive, anxious and scared.

Life is unpredictable which makes it interesting but scary at the same.

As a perfectionist you are going to hate it not to know what comes next but the truth is, we will never know what comes next. Neither planning nor wishing will bring us to the point that a life is going as smoothly as we would like.

I just need to look around our home and since we have a child it looks sometimes as if a bomb of Lego and toy animals exploded.

The wonderful part of these “explosions” is that there is life! I admit that I would sometimes which for this old home where you don’t have to clean 24/7 without an end in sight, the times where I just sat down on the couch with a book because nothing else needed to be done. Nowadays there is no “nothing else needs to be done”. This wishing back the old days are only short moments because reality quickly sets in and I’m so grateful for this reality.

Life is far far far away from perfect and this imperfection is so lovely. We are the happiest when we three are together (my son, my husband and I) because indeed, that’s life, that’s reality, that’s all to wish for.

The perfectionist in me is almost crying because I have no idea how this year will go along but what I know is that we can manage all as long as we are a family and love each other like we do.

Is it wisdom that comes with age? I don’t know. Is it what you learn through motherhood? Maybe.

I cannot tell you when exactly this thinking was setting in for me-The more I think about life and what matters most the more I realize that there are profound things like love, trust, emotions, feeling grounded, mindfulness, thankfulness for what is, appreciation of what we have. These are what matters most.

The NOW of our life.

Tomorrow can be anything but if we manage to be happy now we reached a lot!

I’m not a spiritual teacher nor a motivation guide but the more I read and the more I do some research the more I see that many seem to seek happiness and fulfillment.

Our life has far too many choices to reach this stage and we get lost. We lose focus due to the amount of possibilities we have.

Nobody can have it all! I think this is the first and most important step towards an inner satisfaction of what is.

We need to stop ourselves along the way, take a step back, and start to sort. What are our personal priorities, what makes us really happy.

Social media are great, if used properly, and at the same time our personal nightmare, if used as a comparator (in both directions).

As long as we are realistic enough to know that we never ever see the whole picture on social media the usage may be utterly inspiring, we can learn lots and get input. There are some influencers out there who are really showing lots, their raw authentic self, but careful, for the majority we will never grasp the full picture and this is completely OK. We ourselves would also not expose our most vulnerable moments or dark sides to strangers. Just be sure that everyone has these sides (just not visible). The trick is to get inspired by the exposed good stories but don’t feel less worth because of our own failures.

The same goes for news – I barely read them nowadays because I feel more and more depressed, it seems as if there is no peace on earth at all but that’s wrong. Nobody will write a headline about a country at peace. We are responsible to filter all of this for ourselves because no news agency and no influencer and no person besides you is able to see what you need or what you can take at this moment.

You are the first responsibility for yourself and afterwards you decide what you watch, listen to, hear, read, where you step in, help, work, etc. This sounds selfish but it isn’t. Only if you feel at ease with yourself you will be capable of taking the rest.

My husband’s country is in a war state since we met. It won’t help if we start to site here each day and cry and complain and talk about how blessed we are to live here and what an injustice it is that his family is there and and and – it simply won’t help! We need to make sure that we are fine, we are parents, we have a responsibility. And when we are fine we can work, we can try to support, we can be the realistic part on the outside as we are not within, we can be the uplifting part when things go wrong again and try to soothe, we can only give our best in these moments. It is hard but that’s life – unfortunately – we cannot change the world but we can change our approach to our “small” circle in this world and try to be good examples. If everyone would be the best version of him or herself we would make a step in the right direction.

And at teh end of the day my biggest mantra for this year will be nobody is perfect and new ways are always possible – these sentences from a perfectionist are a big step.

My lessons learned from the past years. They may be an inspiration or just a small hint in which direction to think.

Being grateful for what we have and never taking anything for granted is one of the biggest epiphanies ever.

Living in a country without knowing war is not my achievement, it was simply luck of being born here at that time. Thanks!

Having met my husband was such a coincidence, this could never have been planned. Thanks!

Having a really full fridge is a blessing. Thanks!

You could go on like this but you know what, waking up each morning, feeling my heart beating should be reasonenough to be grateful for this life.

A whole new year…lays in front of us.

Let’s focus on the good.

Let’s try to ease the pain.

Let’s help where we can.

Let’s do what we can to make this a better place for all of us.

This year, next year and as long as we are here.

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Christmas is near…

…and as always we are asking the same old questions. What do you wish for? Is there anything I can buy? Which gifts would be on your wish list?

Isn’t it ridiculous in a way? We beg to give something even though we had a whole year of making our loved ones happy.

What I realize more each year is why my parents tell us since so long that they have all they need. It is indeed true that the time spend together and the memories we make throughout the years are more than we could ever wish for.

Time is the greatest gift. Time well spend with your family.

Even though we know this now we surely will run on last minute and get things wrapped up, an empty floor around the christmas tree is not much appealing, but deep within us we know that nobody will be disappointed when we unwrap the little presents because all we need is already there.

I wish you a merry christmas and lots of time to be spend with your loved ones.

One gift for myself is that I want to revive my page – it seems as if a lifetime passed since I posted the last time.

Stay healthy and happy and soon more.

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Where are we heading to?

This question popped up just this morning when I opened Instagram.

I must confess, I like Instagram and I often go in and check and find inspiration and ideas how to live more sustainable, I see great campaigns against many injustices on this planet, I follow people I adore like Deepak Chopra or Ram Dass and this is great.

But what I also see is that there are thousands of women who call themselves influencer, mom blogger, whatever name you want to give them, who expose their whole families, grandparents and neighbors of neighbors to the world wide web. They literally “sell” their life and feel like kind of a celebrity.

I mean, seriously, I show my home, my sacred place and start to tag everything from the lamp on the ceiling to the rug on the floor, I give away shopping codes and link web pages while hoping that people love me and follow my life and at the end of the day BUY.

This kind of commercializing products is not only weird, it’s also going into a direction where being unique seems to be outdated.

Every mom blogger account has the same brands (at least for what I can see in Germany), the wear the same jewelry, call themselves even designer because they put their name on products they designed? To be a designer for you normally need to attend classes in a design school, university, whatever, but hey, this is the easy way, right? They eat the same, the drink the same tea, they own the same coffee machines in their stylish mainly white colored new built homes and their kids have the same toys and clothes and prams. All for the price of inviting people into their life on a daily basis, day in and day out, from morning to bedtime routine, being healthy or not feeling fine.

I’m honest and especially the ones who build up their life like this will not agree on it, but filling the washing machine with the camera in my hand or making a time-lapse of how I clean the kitchen is NOT real life and is far away from what we should do with our time.

As wonderful as all these technologies are, as careful they need to be handled. What do we teach our children when we document every step we take, inside and outside? What do we teach them if mommy is putting on her make up each day in front of the phone while she’s talking to the phone instead of talking to her child?

Did you ever check your screen time per day? I know that it hits you once you start to focus on it, at least it hit me when I checked it, because this screen time means that you spent the time with a phone in your hand instead of being in the real NOW.

Eckhart Tolle wrote this wonderful book “the power of NOW” and I can recommend this to everyone – we are all right now here and we should spend our time wisely.

If it’s your job and your income to advertise and to sell, that’s great, but do it need the 24/7 exposure to the whole world? Isn’t it enough to create good selling content and pictures and tutorials?

I may never understand but wanted to share as I feel we are heading to a time where personal contact starts to be rare and real life exists only in form of a hashtag.

Go out, meet friends, take your children to the playground and just sit there, watching the leaves dancing in the wind with the sound of children laughing and playing, that’s real life, at least for me.

Take care

misssfaith <3

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Do we lose sight of what really counts?

Recently I have the feeling as if nothing seems to be important anymore except of “standing out of the crowd” or “being exceptional” or also “being utterly successful”.

Is this really all that matters? Why are we live through our jobs instead of bringing our personality into work? Counted as numbers and cherished only when achievements are visible.

Corporate life is seriously making me tired and let me wonder what I can change to be more mindful and more human in what I’m doing.

My recent job is project manager in a quite big research company, but the truth is, it doesn’t matter if I’m a manager or a worker, I need to fulfill my job obligations like everyone else. The only difference is that I wonder if I’m in a position to change things profoundly, because this is what it would need to make me happy with what I’m doing.

I work with a team, several teams on different projects, and I’m supposed to manage the project which also means to manage the team. It’s getting harder to do this recently because we are put under pressure from so many different angles that I already struggle and I’m in this position quite a while and know how to distinguish between important and not important. The trend is to focus on the not important because a few upper management people sat together and thought they need more oversight and so they set goals for them internally and to meet these metrics we need to report.

Of course there is a need of oversight and I fully understand this need, but what I don’t understand is how the priority setting can drift so far away from our job?

If I should give you an example – you are working with animals and the utmost importance lays on the health of these animals then what would you rather do? Go to the office and calculate how much you paid for food for the past 6 months in order to be prepared to justify in case someone would ask you in a couple of months OR take care of the current situation where an animal is sick and urgently needs a vet to check on its health?

You see what I’m talking about?

We run reports, we fill in excel sheets, we sit in conference calls almost 60% of our time, we ensure that all metrics look awesome but at the end of the day we forgot what we are actually working on.

The worst time eaters are meetings, and again, of course there are meetings that make a change but be honest, in most meeting we have throughout a week we aren’t productive. We talk about work that has been completed (which obviously could be shared in an email), we talk about where we are on this day (which is OK in meeting one of a week) and we talk about what we need to do to reach goals. But instead of staring to work on these goals we jump right into the next meeting, and the next, and the next, and then it’s 2 pm and we completely forgot to have lunch but cannot go anyway because we have to use the one-hour time-slot before the next meeting to actually work.

I have many colleagues with families and children, and also those without, one thing is equal for all of us at the end of the day when we are exhausted in our own home falling asleep early because we know what awaits us the next day at work: We start to wonder if we work for a living or live to work.

The answer is clear for me. I work for a living, this is not a question at all, but I also realize more and more that I want to see a change – be it a major shift of my personal work life or be it a major shift of valuing employees in the company I’m working for.

We all know these workaholics and we will never change their perception, that’s fine, but we need a change for the rest. I want to be able to focus on priorities and I want these priorities to be the humans, the clients who pay in the end and the purpose of each project I’m working on. I don’t want internal administration to take all this away from me for the sake of having vice presidents eating salmon tartes at a meeting somewhere to praise themselves.

I want colleagues who love their job and not colleagues who struggle to get their work done because its simply too much.

I want also healthy people around me and not people who drag themselves sick into offices because they are scared to lose their job.

I want to have working hours flexible but respected, I don’t want to receive meeting invites for 8 pm my time just because others are too ignorant to realize that they are in a different time zone.

I want managers who care about their people and wish them a well-deserved weekend instead of asking them on a Friday noon for some extra work.

Do I want far too much? I don’t think so because it’s known that happy people are more productive than unhappy people. So hey, companies out there, what are you waiting for?

It’s not really too complicate to make employees happy.

Provide them with a proper workplace

Ensure they have coffee, tea and water supply

Offer them a time to have lunch

Allow them to take their work home when needed

Be as flexible as you expect it from your employee

Ensure they can handle the amount of work within their scheduled work time

Show them that you support families

Give them a bonus work good work

This list could go on but I hope you realize what I mean – I did not even add the high salary because not everything is about money. Of course we want to be paid properly for our work (and it would be nice if women finally can be paid equally rather sooner than later) but what we want is a work place that appreciates US and is not treating us like a number in the system. We can only be good at work if we feel good, if we are healthy, if we are supported when needed.

I see people quitting to go into lower paid jobs to stay mentally sane – honestly, this is where we need a shift! It can’t be that companies lose good people because they don’t care about their people.

I’m furious if I hear these stories and then I realize that one day I may be the one who quits because I cannot handle the amount of stress anymore. Recently a 6 months vacation sounds like paradise for me and I bet I wouldn’t miss a day at work. That’s sad because it’s well known that people who love their job are doing them better than people who don’t.

Change to more humanity, change and make all of us happy because I promise you will see results after a short time – not because we run like hamsters in a wheel but because the more focused we work the better the results will be – EVERYWHERE!

LoVe from misssfaith