I am glad you are here
I walk the same path this book is about: stillness, meditation, yoga and the eight steps at dawn. Challenges, goals, numbers, strategies, family and everything else by day. I do not show you the way from the outside. We walk it together.
By day I build marketing strategy at a market-leading group. At dawn I sit in silence before I speak to anyone.
“It is five in the morning. The terrace door is open, my mat is in its place, the incense is lit. Fifteen minutes of breathing, then my favourite asanas: at first the body resists, and then, all at once, everything turns light.” This is how every day of mine begins. I have worked in marketing communications for nearly twenty years, and my work is one of my passions. The other is yoga: I have known since childhood that one day I would practise, even though where I grew up, yoga was not a topic anyone talked about.
I was born in Berehove, a small town beyond the border, in a country that no longer exists on the map. There was a time when everything we could hold in our hands was taken from us. Everything except what we carried within. Behind my name stand two generations of silence: my great-grandfather, who was silenced, and my father, whose beautiful life’s work stayed silent. I am the third. And this is where I cut the chain: not by being louder, but by learning how value that has stayed silent becomes visible, understandable, transferable.
In 2012, at a low point, I took a notebook and gave it a name: my wonder factory. I wrote into it the life I wanted, as if it were already mine. Years later I leafed back through it: almost all of it had happened. That was when I understood that our possibilities are endless: we are capable of anything, when the intention is pure. I have been learning and practising it ever since, and now I am sharing it: the deepest things in the most everyday language, lightly.
I am a working mother, a wife, a marketing leader and a yogi, and that is not four lives. It is one. If twenty years have taught me anything, it is this: great things are not great because they are hard.
Mondy: say it.