Modern Love

Love & Other Emotional Crimes

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  • The Burn-Out

    I couldn’t help but wonder… How many cities are actually designed to destroy us… and why do they never send a follow‑up apology email? I feel happy for my girl friends who found home in Milano, and how this city that’s my training ground and zen-testing, is somehow their happy place. 

    Some places drain you without remorse. The noise, the density, the emotional smog in the air; suddenly your body is clenching every muscle like you’re preparing for impact and didn’t get the memo.

    And then one day… Your upstairs neighbors decide they’re headlining an Italian R&B World Tour. Your other neighbors are reenacting Parliament: The Musical. Your coworkers are collectively stress-breathing like a broken espresso machine.

    And you catch yourself thinking, “can noise kill you or just spiritually assassinate you?”

    Turns out: neither, but it can make you question all your life choices and consider becoming a hermit in the Alps for a couple of weeks.

    So naturally, your brain does what any responsible adult brain does: It dissociates. You escape to the reality you want in your dream: You’re wandering through a cheese expo, sampling Swiss cheese like you’re the Queen of Lactose. Life is good. Your cortisol is on vacation.

    Honestly? I crave cheese the way some people crave stability. My dream house? Made entirely of different types of cheese so I can nibble on the walls when I’m stressed.

    And when winter hits…? Throw me into a lake of fondue. Let me backstroke through melted Gruyère like a happy little raccoon. 

    But reality hits like a cold shower: Your neighbors are still loud. Your job is still loud. The planet is still loud. Where am I gonna go? Live on a star? Although that was a childhood dream of mine, even my inner child got educated on science, biology, and space. 

    So you retaliate with the maturity of a seasoned adult: You BLAST your own music out of spite. You slam on your Beats like you’re performing a noise exorcism. You decide that inner peace means “no outside noise. Just me, my playlist, and maybe God if He’s quiet.”

    Meanwhile, your little sneaker who wants to sprint to Switzerland on the next train, is packing her tiny emotional suitcase like, “Enough. Let’s go where the frequencies are civilized. And calm.” 

    But no. Not this time. Because this era is called “You’re Not Outsourcing Your Emotional Stability and Your Zen-Mode to Switzerland.”

    No Bernsie. No Aare river emotional support field trip. No letting Switzerland do 70% of the energetic heavy lifting while you pretend it’s your breathing exercises.

    This season? Is radical sovereignty. It’s me choosing to be zen here, not just in a country that feels like a healing crystal (not everywhere, just in some places, for me.) 

    So it’s me. My cozy-ass home. My emergency fondue stash (obviously). My music. My energy. Me, regulating myself like a tiny enlightened bouncer at the door of my own nervous system.

    And somehow… It’s working. Just not every single day. But guess who catches me when I burn-out? Me. 

  • Mercury Lemonade (served chilled, with extra chaos)

    November rolled in and, surprise surprise, five planets decided to moonwalk backwards. Mercury included. Because apparently the universe looked at our lives and said, “You know what this needs? A little confusion and emotional déjà vu.”

    I’ve been feeling it since the shadow period, which, by the way, is just cosmic slang for “the pre-party to the main mess.”

    Here’s what Mercury Retrograde really does: It opens the group chat of your past. You’ll get emotional notifications you didn’t subscribe to “Remember this feeling?” “Miss this person?” “Regret that text?” like it’s customer service from your unresolved emotions.

    If you haven’t closed a loop peacefully, Mercury will kindly reopen it like a wound with a Wi-Fi connection. Suddenly, it’s 2024 again, and you’re emotionally reliving scenes you thought were deleted footage.

    But here’s the twist: this isn’t punishment. It’s emotional composting. You’re not backsliding, you’re recycling. You’re being given a cosmic second chance to feel what you couldn’t feel then, and release it this time, for real.

    Eventually, those old memories will lose their emotional charge. They’ll just be… stories. No longer triggers. More like, “Ah yes, that was my character development era.”

    Personally, my retrograde rerun seems to be October–December 2024. Of course it is. The season of my life I still haven’t fully made peace with. I keep thinking, “Ah, I’m healed now.” Then life or some planet say, “Cute. Let’s test that.”

    So here I am again, remixing anger into clarity, chaos into closure. This is my Mercury Lemonade. Sour, slightly bitter, but surprisingly refreshing once you stop resisting the taste.

    So if you’re feeling it too: the emotional flashbacks, the random longing, the texting temptations to get closure from a ghost who didn’t take any accountability: take a deep breath. This isn’t regression. It’s integration. And if you’re feeling angry at yourself for bending over backwards for someone who didn’t deserve it, work on your boundaries, and give yourself that love. Multiply that love, and give it to yourself. Because you deserve it. 

    We’re just learning to sip the lessons life squeezed out of us. 

    Make your home cosier. Reorganize your kitchen. Give yourself a facial. Connect to nature. Go to the sauna. Jump in snow if cold’s your thing. Light your candles, turn on your cosy galaxy lights, play your favorite songs. We’ve got this. 

    Now go feel your feelings. Mercury insists.

  • Snacks

    I remember going to a supermarket with an ex, buying snacks, and doing what any sane human being would do, wanting to have a snack on the way back. I opened it, and he looked at me like I had just committed a crime. “Can’t you just wait until we’re back?” he said, in full snack-police mode. That killed the vibe. The mood. The entire snack timeline.

    Then later, with another guy, after I’d retired from mid-commute snacking due to previous trauma, he surprised me. He bought snacks for the way back. My inner child practically jumped up and down in joy inside my heart. “Finally, someone who gets it!”

    When I was little, around five, I convinced my parents to let me go to the supermarket alone because apparently I was already a fiercely independent grocery enthusiast. I bought myself a snack, sat at the park, and ate it before going home. Meanwhile, my parents were in full panic mode, convinced I’d been kidnapped. When they found me, just chilling, I said, “I got myself a snack for the way back.” They were speechless. I was snack-satisfied.

    I think that’s the thing about connection. The more someone brings out your inner child, the happier you are. Science even says we’re more likely to fall in love with people who remind us of our childhood. I lived that. He had my favorite childhood tea at his place, completely by coincidence. Then, as we hung out more, I kept rediscovering snacks from my childhood in a totally different country. Coincidence? Maybe. Magic? Absolutely. Drinking milk with milk chocolate? Love it. Late night candy? Yes please. My inner child was thriving. She finally felt safe. Seen. Snack-approved.

    Since I was a kid, I always wanted someone in my life I could bring shells to. He was that. I’d spend hours at the beach finding the most perfect ones to bring back. He’d put them around his apartment, and that, even if it sounds small, was a dream come true. He was the guy who made so many of my childhood and adult dreams come true. Not all, but most.

    It didn’t last, of course, but that’s beside the point. If there’s anything I miss from that connection, is how my inner child felt around him. Safe, happy and healed. 

    Now, I surround myself with people who bring that version of me out. The one who laughs with her whole heart. The one who gets overexcited about gummy bears. The one who loves animals, and shares food without being asked. When my inner child comes online instead of hiding in her room, I know I’m around the right people. It is not the same, but it doesn’t have to be.

    So yeah, snacks and candy, apparently, are my love language. If you ever want to win my heart? Don’t wait till we’re home. Just open the damn bag.

  • Maybe Spirituality Was Never Supposed to Be a Practice

    I used to think I wasn’t spiritual at all. I couldn’t sit still to meditate, what I did to ground myself suspiciously looked like walking barefoot in the park, and every time someone said “visualize light,” my brain responded with: how about we just feel it instead?

    For a while, I felt guilty about that. Like I was missing some invisible membership card to the Enlightened People’s Club.

    But then, one day, somewhere between the flow of the Aare and the rhythm of a Swiss-German song I couldn’t stop humming with dragonflies landing on my body, I realized: I am meditating. Just not in the way people say I should.

    Maybe spirituality isn’t meant to look like sitting cross-legged with your eyes closed. Maybe it’s just being fully alive. Maybe meditative states happen naturally when your feet touch earth, not when your mind repeats affirmations. When you come across an animal, an insect, a bird and your heart’s walls melt. When you’re in a city that feels like home and you don’t have to do anything else but be. 

    Maybe alignment isn’t found in routine, but in recognition, the moment you notice how your entire being lights up in certain places, around certain people, under certain skies. 

    Maybe meditation is as simple as relaxing your body when its automatic reflex is to tighten up from cold. Maybe it’s keeping yourself calm in a sauna when your heart races. Maybe it’s balancing on a board or holding onto a boulder. Maybe it’s focusing on your breath to fall asleep, or on an ascent when your heart is racing.

    Maybe your flow state is when you’re going down a mountain on your bike. Maybe it’s hearing the sound of moving water. Maybe it’s being underwater. Getting kissed by the sun. Feeling the salt on your skin. Gliding through powder, or the waves. Carving on your skateboard. Whispers of wind that feel like freedom. Birdsong at 4AM. Morning red, evening pastels. Watching the clouds drift laying on grass. Smelling the air after rain or just before snow.

    Some souls don’t come here to follow the steps. We come here to remember that there were never any to begin with. We can find the spark in anything. We can turn anything into purpose. We can be anything our heart calls us to be. 

    We find divinity in movement, in breath, in laughter, in mistakes, in the way the world mirrors us back to ourselves. And when we stop trying to do it “right,” that’s when we finally realize; we’ve been doing it right all along. We don’t need a label for the way we choose to live this human experience we call life.

    So no, you won’t see me in linen clothing with crystals, affirmations, or with the wild eyes of the people who’ve spent too much time in Bali. But you will see me living my life with awareness.

  • The Chaser, The Runner, and The Woman in Between

    I used to think I was just one woman, but it turns out, there were two of me living in the same body rent-free.

    One was a chaser. She chased everything. Love, purpose, community, enlightenment, the next big spiritual high. Basically, she was a cosmic adrenaline junkie; high on ascension symptoms and fantasy. She wanted to exit the body so badly like it was a bad party. The queen of the upper center.

    Then there was the runner. He didn’t chase. Oh no. He escaped. He’d sprint the other way; into work, travel, over-exercising, casual dates, anything to sit with emotions, discomfort. Anything to avoid meeting me. The king of the lower center.

    Together, these two created what I like to call my internal soap opera: “As the Energies Collide.” Push, pull. Chase, run. I was both the storm and the weather report.

    I’d overthink myself into existential origami. Grip onto people like they were Wi-Fi in a dead zone. Bend my boundaries like I was gripping on a boulder for my dear life. And for what? I wasn’t going to fall five meters down. I was always going to land on my feet. Gracefully.

    Maybe that’s why I loved hiking. The uphills gave me my “chaser” high. The descents made my “runner” feel like he was achieving something. Flat walks? Boring. Too… emotionally stable. Going up mirrored my highs. Coming down mirrored my lows. Flat walks? Emotionally uninteresting.

    Then came life’s plot twist: injuries. My mobility said, “sit down.” My soul said, “and now, feel.” I had no choice. The universe basically confiscated my escape routes. And when I tried going back to escapism in the mountains this October, life threw in “haha, cute, you think you can go back to the same old way?” and gave me another injury. At this point I know if I try escaping like that again, it’ll be my other knee. 

    No more running up mountains. No more numbing through “adventure.” My inner masculine; bless his stubborn little heart, wanted to escape through alcohol, casual sex, substances… anything to escape throughout this year. Was I able to do any of it? Absolutely not. I was guided by forces bigger than me that blocked anything that wasn’t aligned with me.

    At the time, it felt cruel, boring. Now, I see it was divine intervention. It was the only way I’d ever learn patience. Stillness. Acceptance. Regulation. My body became the teacher my ego never signed up for.

    And one day, my inner feminine, my sweet little seeker, wanted to leave again. The gravitational pull was too much for her, and I caught her. I said, “No. You’re home. You belong here. We’re safe here.”

    And everything shifted.

    It wasn’t instant peace. It was more like emotional detox. The part where your soul drinks green juice and cries for a week. But then… it happened. The chase ended. The running stopped.

    Suddenly, both energies weren’t enemies anymore. They started cooperating. Protecting. Loving. They weren’t going in different directions: one up, the other down, instead they started coming toward one another, meeting in the middle in Union.  

    I guess that’s what they call balance. Feminine and masculine. Chaser and runner. Yin and yang finally booking the same therapy session.

    And when life decides it is your time… Nothing can stop it. Which unironically I had already dreamt about in April, when I had no idea what on earth was going on. And it’s been one heck of a journey, one where I would have never signed up for consciously, but had no choice but to accept.  

    And maybe that’s what alignment really is: when the parts of you that wanted to escape finally realize there’s nowhere better to be than home… in your own heart.

  • The Art of Being Grounded

    Today, I accidentally grounded myself. Not in a “spiritual practice” kind of way, more in a “bureaucracy dragged me to Switzerland and I ended up on a random walk by the Rhône” kind of way.

    Normally, I’d call that walk “too flat, too boring.” I’m a mountain girl. I crave altitude, challenge, sweat, existential breakthroughs at 2,000 meters. But my body, still in recovery, had other plans. Apparently, she wanted flat. Gentle. Ordinary and yet with hidden beauty everywhere.

    And somehow… it was perfect.

    I passed quiet valley towns, waved at black nose sheep, spotted horses, crows, a shy eurasian jay, the all black crows I love so much, cure sparrows… Basically, a Disney line-up for introverts. The sun hid behind the mountains, the air bit just enough to remind me it’s November. I photographed the first frost of the season like it was a celebrity sighting. 

    And for once since my August Bern trip which I spent 9 days in a constant state of bliss thanks to the Aare; I wasn’t thinking again. Not about what’s next. Not about the past. Not about anything, just the occasional Swiss German grammar questions I came up with. And my new favorite song, Grüens Liecht playing in my mind on repeat. My mind was… empty. And it felt peaceful. Blissful. 

    Afterward, I did what any enlightened woman would do: blew too much money at Migros and Coop. My fridge always looks like a Swiss grocery aisle – chocolate, cheese, butter, salad dressing, zopf… I even bring pasta back to Italy. If Italians find out, it won’t be good for me. In my defense I buy it for the shape. They don’t have “hörnli” and I love that shape of pasta because it reminds me of my childhood. My taste buds definitely don’t care about geography. They like what they like. 

    Then, like the universe wanted to wink at me, I stumbled into Fasnachtseröffnung. The costumes, the brass, the wild joy of it all. I’d been thinking about 11.11 11:11 for a week, and suddenly there it was, three days early. Unexpected, and definitely brought a smile.

    My old self would’ve hopped on the next train to Bern, chasing the gravitational pull I always feel towards that city, my personal north star. But instead, I stayed grounded. I stayed here. And maybe that’s growth: realizing you don’t need to orbit the brightest star in your universe to feel illuminated.

    Today reminded me when you’re whole, when you’re present, the coordinates don’t matter. Peace travels with you. 

  • Linguistic Diversity

    Christians call it a spiritual attack. New age spirituality calls it being in low frequency, or a Dark Night of the Soul. Psychology says it’s clinical depression. Philosophers call it an existential crisis somewhere in the dread of being alive.

    Christians believe a person is under demonic influence. New agers say, “your chakras are imbalanced.” Psychology throws you a few labels: narcissistic traits, psychopathy, trauma response, and philosophers shrug and call it a phenomenon of interpretive relativity.

    Christians call it following God’s word. New agers call it alignment, living from the heart. Psychology says, “you’re healed.” Philosophy says you’ve mastered life.

    Same thing. Different words. Everyone describing the same human experience with the vocabulary that matches their level of consciousness.

    You don’t have to believe in the word “chakra”. You can go full science mode if you want, and still, the fact that we don’t yet have tools sensitive enough to measure every internal process doesn’t mean the connection isn’t there.

    The Bible doesn’t use the word “chakra,” obviously. But it points to the same principle: energy, life force, breath, flowing through what it calls the temple of the Holy Spirit.

    ROOT – groundedness and faith (“planted by streams of water”)

    SACRAL – creativity and life (“rivers of living water will flow from within”)

    SOLAR PLEXUS – strength and will (“the joy of the Lord is my strength”)

    HEART – love and purity (“guard your heart, for everything flows from it”)

    THROAT – truth and expression (“life and death are in the power of the tongue”)

    THIRD EYE – spiritual vision (“the eye is the lamp of the body”)

    CROWN – divine connection (“be transformed by the renewing of your mind”)

    Modern psychology would translate it as: you’ve healed your childhood trauma, stopped projecting your wounds onto others, and maybe still take some pills, just in case.

    Plato said the soul has three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite and virtue is when they’re balanced under wisdom. That’s basically the philosophical version of balanced chakras. Aristotle called the psyche the animating principle of life, same thing as the “breath of God” or “life force energy.” The Stoics talked about Logos: divine reason or order running through everything. Living “according to nature” meant aligning your inner being with that cosmic order. Basically: walking in the Spirit, but make it Greco-Roman.

    What if we stopped fighting over semantics and accepted that everyone’s been describing the same thing all along? Whether you call it energy, spirit, psyche, chi, or grace, it’s the same current. Maybe the point isn’t choosing the right label. Maybe it’s purifying the noise within, accepting there is a creator behind all this, living in alignment, surrender, and acceptance, no matter which dictionary you use.

  • The Cloud

    I like to imagine the subconscious as an infinite cloud floating somewhere above us. Not grey and stormy, but pastel pink, soft blue, brushed with new leafy greens, flashes of purple and bright pink, orange glimmers, dusted in gold all drifting across a deep purple infinity that stretches forever. The cloud feels light, ethereal, alive. Like thought itself breathing in color. Stars flickering through it like neurons firing in slow motion. And inside that infinite shimmer, we’re all connected.

    It’s somewhere between a nebula and lucid dreaming. Weightless, infinite, but alive. 

    Loved ones. Strangers. Ancestors. Everyone who’s ever lived, and everyone who hasn’t yet in linear time. All just vibing in the same frequency field.

    Maybe that’s why love feels like the strongest force we know. Because love is the WiFi password. It opens the door. It lifts us to that cloud, where we remember what we had forgotten. 

    Maybe that’s how we visit each other in dreams. How the ones who’ve left can still find us. How we meet the pure version of ourselves before the the matrix conditioned us which shaped our egos.

    Somewhere in that cloud lives what spiritual folk call our “higher self.” The one untouched by fear. The one who doesn’t flinch, perform, mask, or shrink. The one who remembers who we were before the world told us otherwise.

    Every time we quiet the noise: the scroll, the hustle, the “shoulds,” we connect to that cloud, our subconscious. The static clears and the signal strengthens. And we start aligning with who we’ve been all along.

    Maybe that’s the real purpose of all this. Not chasing meaning, but remembering it. Not escaping the world, but syncing with the part of us that never left the cloud.

    Maybe, just maybe, that’s been the entire point of existence the whole time. Remembrance. 

  • To the Source (And Back Again)

    In Matrix Revolutions, Neo had to go to the Source. By that point, he’d chosen love over fear, stepped outside yet another system of control (hi, Zion), followed the pull of his dreams, and just knew. Even if it meant he might never return.

    But what if the Source was never out there in some glowing, code-filled mainframe? Or an eternal library filled with countless books (that’s what I used to imagine it as.) What if it’s been inside us the whole time, sitting quietly in our subconscious, waiting for us to listen?

    The more I think about it, the more I wonder if “going to the Source” was always a metaphor for diving inward.

    What if every time we meditate, dream, or follow a gut nudge, we’re not channeling something external, we’re simply unlocking deeper layers of ourselves?

    We underestimate the subconscious. It’s an infinite hard drive we barely access. Sometimes I think it already understands everything (every language, even the ones animals speak), it’s just our conscious mind that hasn’t caught up yet.

    Because here’s the thing, neuroscience already told us this. Ninety-five percent of what we think, feel, and decide happens below conscious awareness. We’re not driving the car; we’re the passenger who thinks they’re steering while the GPS (subconscious) just lets us believe it.

    Maybe the downloads we receive aren’t cosmic emails from some divine cloud storage. Maybe they’re reflections: things we’ve seen, heard, or sensed without realizing, all reorganized into clarity. Maybe the “guidance” is just us remembering what we already know. What our ancestors knew. What our predecessors had discovered. And all the evolutionary knowledge has been stored in our DNA and maybe that’s how we’ve been progressing. 

    Because meditation, breathwork, cold plunges: they don’t open some mystical portal; they just quiet the narrator. That loud ego voice that thinks it knows everything. Once that shuts up, the subconscious finally gets to speak. And suddenly, you hear it. You feel it. You know things you can’t explain.

    There’s even a network in our brains: the Default Mode Network, that lights up when we stop trying. When we’re spacing out, shower-thinking, walking by a river. That’s where the revelations drop. That’s where intuition hits us like lightning out of nowhere, except it’s not “out of nowhere.” It’s been you, whispering to you, the whole damn time.

    And here’s the wildest part, science also says our nervous systems literally sync with other people’s. Heartbeats, breathing, micro-expressions. we’re basically walking WiFi routers of energy. Mirror neurons, baby. You feel someone’s vibe before they even talk because your bodies already started the conversation.

    So maybe “oneness” isn’t woo-woo. Maybe it’s just biology we haven’t caught up with yet.

    So no, Neo didn’t go anywhere. He went in. He went in and surrendered. 

    And that’s the move, isn’t it? Not to escape the Matrix, but to unplug from the noise long enough to remember what’s already running inside you. That the Source isn’t a destination. It’s an integration.

    The moment you stop outsourcing wisdom to the sky and realize…

    We’ve been the Source all along.

  • Hooked on Not Hooking Up

    One of the biggest matrixes running the modern world? Hook-up culture. Yep, the fast-food version of intimacy. Swipe right, get off, repeat. No emotional nutrients, just the illusion of connection. It’s sex as entertainment, not embodiment. And sure, people say, “It’s fine, we’re both on the same page,” but here’s the plot twist: energy doesn’t sign that waiver.

    Intimacy is never just physical. It’s energetic. It’s an exchange between souls. It’s literally a transfer of life force. And women -biologically, spiritually- feel that exchange more deeply. We’re the portals through which life enters the planet. We’re wired for creation, not transaction. So yeah, when we open our bodies, it’s not just “casual.” We give. And if that giving isn’t sacred, it drains.

    Religions tried to warn us, but they coded it wrong. “Wait until marriage,” they said. But the real meaning got lost under all the ceremony and control. It was never about a contract or a priest. It was about alignment. About waiting until your energy, and the person you share it with come from a grounded, conscious, sacred place. Not fear, not lust, not loneliness. Alignment.

    Because when you hold your energy, when you stop scattering it like confetti to anyone who gives you a fraction of attention, you become magnetic. You start to feel like home in your own body. You stop chasing validation and start attracting resonance.

    And honestly? In a world where the “third date” apparently means sex, I just… don’t subscribe. My nervous system has been through enough rewiring to know that if someone isn’t aligned, it’s a no. And I don’t negotiate with my intuition anymore.

    The whole point is awareness. Not judgment, awareness. Knowing that every thought, every action, every connection ripples out. There’s a material consequence and an energetic one.

    Emotions aren’t meant to be controlled, they’re meant to be felt and integrated. Thoughts, though? Those you can train.

    And that, darling, is how you become aware of the many matrixes that exist within one another. And with that awareness, you can choose the direction of your life.