It was the spring of 2011 and behind me lay some of the craziest years of my life. The birth of two children, marriage, three job changes, one mine and two Tina's, moves with the whole family to three different places... During this time, I also tried to get my life in order. It had been a few years since I had decided to stop drinking. I was dealing with a complete change in my social network, my relationship with my parents and my unexplained health problems - collapses.

Those were years of searching myself and years of constant battles with myself.

In good faith, I tried to either hide all of this well or just "sweep it under the rug" and not dwell on it too much. I put a lot of energy into building my relationships with my wife and daughters, my work and my sport.

This made me feel successful at work, in was in a good relationship and felt good as a father...

Until my first Core Energetics weekend workshop!

Like so many things before, Tina discovered Core Energetics body psychotherapy. Sometimes I just admire what she is able to find in her constant search for ways to complement and improve her psychotherapy practice. So she attended that first workshop that was organized in Slovenia and the message she gave me when she returned home was, "I just have a feeling that you should check this out. I think this could be something for you."

Of course I wanted to know how it had gone and why she thought it would be good for me and all my doubts came out. At the time, I still thought and believed that I would solve all my problems on my own by myself. But there was, and still is, a part of me that trusts that Tina wouldn't suggest such things if she wasn't serious.

And because I've always thought of myself as a relatively open-minded person, I went...

A decision that changed the course of my life!

Today, about a decade later, I understand what happened at that workshop.

But at the time it was just a big "system error" mixed with a deep feeling and intuition that I simply had to continue on the path that was revealed to me.

The workshop taught me three important lessons, not only on a cognitive level, but also in terms of my experience.

The first was the visualization we did in the workshop, where I practically came to the edge of a collapse and back again. Collapses were very stressful for me at the time because they occurred unexpectedly and ultimately without a specific cause. Practically coming to the edge of collapse and back again, especially during a visualization, penetrated deep into my thought system and was too much for me at the time to diggest.

My first big lesson was that despite my education, I actually had no idea about some basic things in life, such as the fact that we have a body and feelings as well as a head and how all these parts interact and communicate with each other.

An essential part of the Core Energetics workshops is also the so-called "bodywork"." The purpose of bodywork is to "open up" the body and prepare it for the work, which means that we can quickly get into different emotional states.

I will never forget the feelings after the first bodywork session. I felt like I had come home. It was a very physical, indescribably beautiful and serene feeling. As a child of divorced parents, finding my home had been an issue for me for a long time.

And that some things you look for on the outside are easy to find on the inside was my second big lesson. Today I know that this feeling has to do with being grounded.

The same goes for other feelings I was looking for on the outside. The beauty of the feeling after the bodywork was very similar to the feeling I had in moments of unconsciousness during one of my first collapses. At the time, I "woke up" with such a beautiful feeling that I vowed to seek out and pursue situations in life where I could experience such beautiful feelings again.

Again, some things we look for on the outside, we can easily find on the inside! Needless to say, I was pretty unsuccessful in finding these situations at first. Today I know that you don't need collapses and unconscious states to experience these feelings. Most importantly, it is crystal clear to me that they exist. They exist within us!

I come in contact with them most often through bodywork, sometimes when I am in a deeper connection with others, for example my wife, my daughters or the people I work with. Sometimes I feel them when I'm learning something new, and sometimes they just show up when I manage to be as authentic and honest with myself as possible.

And these are all just different aspects of grounding!

But the processes that lead us to these feelings are not always easy.

To feel them, we have to look at and confront our own shadow. We must first accept our negativity and then transform it, do something with it. The more we are energetically willing to look at our negativity, our lower self, the more accessible these feelings that reside in our higher self become to us.

And that was also the third important lesson for me. Each of us has hidden feelings or emotions that we need to deal with more intensely in the process of self-discovery. Some confront themselves more intensely with their anger, others with their fear, others with their sadness.

I had to start facing my shame.

There have been many situations in my life where I have felt shame. Most of the time, I only felt ashamed for a moment and then tried to quickly "sweep it under the carpet" In short, I didn't even know I had a problem with it.

But this time it was different.

At the workshop, the shame burst to the surface in its full extent, more specifically on the way home from the workshop. I cried almost the whole way home. I just couldn't control my emotions. The images and feelings from the workshop kept coming back to me. For the first time in my life, I realized how much misery we cause with our parenting, especially us men with our alienation, our expectations, various forms of violence and the simple fact that we are not authentic. I was ashamed of being a man; I was ashamed that I couldn't be a good husband, a good father; I was ashamed of my actions in the past.

On the way home, I made the decision to change things drastically.

There are things that can change our lives, and there are things that we look for on the outside, but in reality, they are to be found on the inside! Feelings and emotions are the domain of the body, not the head and thinking. We can be as intelligent, mentally capable and educated as possible, but we can still be completely closed off emotionally - with a closed heart and a tight belly. In the long run, this leads to significant problems in life, especially in relationships, because blocked emotions prevent us from experiencing real closeness with other people.