Self-identity and the meaning of being human was an important consideration for me since my childhood. I always loved to dance and to create performance pieces for myself, my family and for school or church plays. I had blissful experiences at any age I can remember. Poetry, painting and photography became an important way to express myself, when I was a teenager. Separation and Union were always a creative topic as well as a yearning for global harmony. I did a lot of drawings in school when I was bored in lessons, and in retrospect I love these intuitive doodles, as they were not refined by any expectations for a certain style by an art school. They just communicate a lot of what was already present in me, that I wasn’t conscious of yet. Below are some reoccurring themes that I explored. Most of these paintings or drawings were created during the time I was approaching my A-levels:

The expression of oneness:

The expression of separateness:

The expression of just seeing:

The ecstatic consideration of dance:

and a humorous sense of ‘open-headed-ness’:

In hindsight all of these drawings and paintings were visions of what my life was going to be about. At the time of creating them I had no conscious awareness of what exactly I was so moved to communicate. These images began to make sense to me many years later. I was never very keen to write a diary, but I loved to express in poetry what I couldn’t otherwise find expressions for. These poems in German I wrote when I was 17 or 18 years old:

I ended up studying Fine Arts in Germany, where I quickly discovered film as one of my favourite creative medias. Some short films I had made as well as an unusual electronic object which had a humorous way of having a transcendental message were exhibited in the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel. I then met the Peformance Artist Liz Aggiss in Kassel who offered me a place at Brighton University on the Course “Dance and Visual Practice” in England after I attended a workshop she offered in Kassel. I absolutely loved being at Brighton University. For me it was the most intense time of searching for truth and the creative process was completely intertwined with what went on for me personally. I had heard of Adi Da Samraj, Mother Meera and Mata Amritanandamayi and I was deeply inspired by these unusual beings and their incredible work. Liz Aggiss was very supportive and I was able to find and be myself in the creative process at University. The dissertation I wrote at the time was called “The Oneness of Being” and was part of a combined arts degree.

After graduating with honors, I couldn’t embark on a performance art career though. All  possible support was offered to me, yet it didn’t feel right. Firstly I had completely exhausted myself with the intense search for truth and I knew this wasn’t a way of working that is sustainable over time. I also had a need to spend more time around spiritual groups. I travelled to India and visited numerous sacred places and ashrams.

After that journey there was a phase of roughly two years where I was frequently absorbed in different mystical experiences especially associated with Lord Krishna and I was hardly able to function as an ordinary person. You may relate to that phase in your life where you consider yourself “almost enlightened” but bizarrely nothing really changes about the way you suffer! I kept reading Adi Da’s Teaching and creating art for myself. The paper machee statue below was about one metre high and a representation of Lord Krishna.

I also got gradually put in touch with the dark side of being human. I discovered a number of fears in the body that were related to traumas that were not from the lifetime I was currently living. And I began to remember life and traumatic deaths on different parts of this planet, still affecting me in this current life. I also had to deal with the collective trauma of Nazi Germany in depth and I discovered about every fear that would be able to significantly stop me from doing what I do now: the fear of utter unworthiness for instance as well as numerous fears that you end up being tortured, imprisoned or excluded from society or killed or all of that for almost any reason: having success, being a woman, being a mother, being a wife, living a creative life, being yourself, being a healer… and what I found is that only the growing heart impulse was powerful enough to allow me to move beyond incredibly deep-seated fears and to live the creative life I always felt deeply moved to live.

The more I got involved in Adi Da’s teaching, the more these processes amplified and when I really dropped into his writing there was no teacher, no teaching and no one to be taught left. Adi Da gave me so much. The great search ended, because I realised that separation from what one may call god is actually not possible. I realised that mystical experiences are beautiful and ecstatic, but don’t really bring the harmony into life, I was really craving. He taught me the difference between “cosmic bliss” to simply residing in reality right now and right here. I realised that there is no need to go anywhere to be completely at peace. The Mystery of Life is always present and there is only one being for real to be found. I also realised that there is no point in running away from darkness, fear and horror and that anything suppressed into the unconscious would still live itself out in ways I wouldn’t want. The biggest lesson of all was that separateness cannot be accomplished for real, as it isn’t real. It never is. It can only be enacted. In the video below I am expressing the power of meeting Adi Da and the power of the practice of dancing his word.

It is also Adi Da’s profound poetry that first inspired me to dance the powerful transmission of words. Over the years this practice has evolved into a direct, universal, non-denominational and whole-body invocation of reality as all-pervading oneness and love. At present I primarily either dance my own poetry or simply speak spontaneously from presence, from the heart, from oneness.