Obstacle.love

    How to Embrace Challenges Using the Yopada Approach

    Let’s be honest. I shunned adversity like everybody else.

    Even despite a dozen years of parkour training and running this site called obstacle.love for 6 years I still didn’t embrace challenges in general.

    It’s only after I discovered the YoPaDa approach – a mix of yoga, parkour and (ecstatic or conscious) dance techniques – it dawned on me that it’s possible and how it works.

    I do not mean just obstacles in a parkour sense (think walls etc.)! 

    When talking about obstacles or challenges I also specifically refer to tasks and issues that burden you – 

    • health issues
    • work issues
    • money issues
    • relationship issues.

    In recent years I had plenty of those and there was always a lot of resistance in me to deal with them. I was far from embracing challenges. 

    Why and how did it change? See below!


    From Zombie to Yogi in 6 Months?

    The obvious reason for avoiding obstacles was that I had a very low energy level so everything was exhausting me. 

    Yet the underlying issue that also made it a lot worse was that I felt overwhelmed by the prospect of dealing with something and thus let the issue grow until it blew up sometimes.

    Even when you’re perfectly healthy, many obstacles seem insurmountable at first. 

    Some may be too high but many others are also within your reach.

    So once you can grab hold of them and move inch by inch you can finally end up on top of things sooner or later simply by moving forward.

    OK, long story short: as I was so chronically ill that I resembled a zombie for over half a year I had to come up with new ways of dealing with reality.

    (Feeling and looking as sick as I was, I could literally play a zombie in one of those zombie parkour videos without any make up or acting!)

    Also while at it I had to find ways of physical, mental and spiritual

    • training
    • meditating
    • recharging

    that allowed me to deal with inner and outer obstacles or resistance as well. 

    Ultimately I started “dancing with the walls” using the yopada approach. How exactly?

    It’s a mix of yoga, parkour and (ecstatic) dance techniques among a plethora of other influences.

    Yoga

    Let me confess: I never took a yoga class in my life for various reasons.

    Yet I have used yoga poses from the start when warming up for parkour since 2011. 

    I was so rigid and inflexible when I started to train it in my mid thirties that I would otherwise probably crumble during the first actually serious jump.

    So yoga the way we do it in the west is – viewed from outside – similar to a form of gymnastics. 

    You have lots of different but strictly defined exercises or poses (asanas) you have to implement correctly to achieve something (like saluting the sun or doing a handstand).

    Yet after reading books like An Autobiography of a Yogi or Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras it becomes clear that yoga can’t be just that limited stripped down “wellness” version of it. 

    Yoga is a meditation methodology to achieve spiritual liberation.

    So for a 12 years I would rarely look up any advice on how to correctly implement specific poses.

    Instead I was convinced that I’m just doing some weird (and often embarrassing) version of yoga-inspired moves and positions that were probably wrong.

    I didn’t care though as I only did them to warm up by myself to prepare for actual parkour training.

    Recently during my prolonged illness fatigue debilitated me and the only thing “to raise my spirits” was ecstatic or conscious dance. 

    There I decided to embrace it and do yoga wrong on purpose.

    In my weekly “Dance your Life” classes by Natural Flow I was told to move 

    • intuitively
    • erratically
    • differently 

    and “not just doing preconceived yoga poses” etc.

    So indeed I did that – as I didn’t do yoga correctly anyway for the past dozen years!

    That way I would often sit and lie down to crawl, squirm and wriggle on the floor – frequently with closed eyes – and assume that nobody is looking at me as I don’t look at them either.

    Ideally I wanted to disappear anyway as my ill state of health also encompassed more or less fresh wounds all over my face and body.

    So instead of trying to do them correctly or as I imagined them – silently expecting proper yogis to consider them wrong – I just embraced my “wrong” way of doing them.

    Also I just decided that when I’m doing them wrong anyway I could make them even more wrong on purpose! Yay!

    So instead of trying to get the exact position of limbs and other body parts right and align them with each other I would put them all over the place. 

    It was probably looking more like a baby trying to learn movement than yoga. That was indeed liberating! 

    While at it I enjoyed my strength from the years of practice and tried to place my body weight on one leg or hand. 

    So here I was doing things I would never even dare to try as a proper yoga pose.

    I even got inspired by some handstand variations I would never even attempt (as I can’t do a handstand properly – just an assisted one on the wall). 

    Yet in the past I often did a lot of push up variations using various hand positions, one hand or even one hand and one leg. 

    So I would dance my life slowly placing my hands somewhere on the floor and pushing it without trying to reflect any regular correct poses or exercises.

    Thanks to the yopada approach you can do it outside: 

    • embrace the “wrong” intuitive types of fluent moves that do not attempt to reflect predefined poses. 
    • embrace not only the floor but walls, benches, bike racks playfully to come up with individual and improvised flows.
    • do whatever fits the particular place, mood and context here and now instead of saluting the sun even when it’s raining.
    • literally touch the surroundings, not just smartphone screens, possessions, or bodies.
    • ultimately hug the universe by coming into contact with its various forms.


    Parkour

    Parkour is less strict than yoga but here also you have a list of moves to learn for overcoming specific types of obstacles. 

    Moves like the parkour roll, kong or wallrun are a common practice ideally.

    Over time you learn them very well and accomplished athletes start to add acrobatics, gymnastics, or breakdance elements like flips and twists to it to make it more 

    • spectacular
    • challenging 
    • impressive.

    Not me! Even after so many years I still do them in an awkward and imperfect way. I can tell you how to do them right but will fail at showing you properly.

    Despite many years of ongoing practice I knew that at my age and strength, agility and flexibility level I would not be capable of branching out into even more challenging disciplines. 

    Thus I was content with just doing the same type of moves for a decade – until I couldn’t even do some of those anymore due to chronic illness and ever worsening symptoms. 

    I was in the dark on what caused my increasing fatigue over the years before I finally found out and was able to act on it. I will tell you later (or you scroll down to read it below).

    So sometimes I was not strong, courageous and energetic enough anymore to even overcome obstacles I did in the past with ease.

    At the end of 2022 while preparing for surgery I finally got really sick with the flu and even after recovery I never really became healthy again experiencing more and more CFS-like symptoms:

    Everything became harder.

    • Balancing on a rail I did for a decade while being dizzy?
    • Rolling on concrete floor while having back pain?
    • Running up a wall when you can barely walk?

    Not impossible but quite hard and also devoid of joy while increasingly risking pain.

    It was probably a bizarre sight when I moved like a drunk or an old man and then gathered all of my remaining energy to run up a wall and drop down on the other side to shuffle again after that.

    It didn’t help that I looked like a drug addict given my battered skin and sometimes even bleeding wounds.

    I kept training outside despite this – I had to walk the dog anyway – and we usually would jump together.

    So I increasingly tried to add more flow-oriented and less taxing routines to my regular parkour training.

    Yet on many days I had to quit and could barely return home on foot after or during warmup.

    In the past the warm up phase would usually take up like one third up to a half of my training time of around 90 minutes. 

    So after half an hour or 45 minutes of doing random stretches, a few jogs, maybe some push ups, squats or dips I would have to return home before the fatigue, dizziness or migraine would finally kick in and overwhelm me now.

    So essentially having to wade through a prolonged but boring and embarrassing warm up phase (you know what I mean if you have ever witnessed one of those old men who probably haven’t trained for decades and finally embrace some movement on their own) I looked for an alternative. 

    I also looked and asked around on the Web for a meditation technique that did not require sitting but did not find anything suitable. 

    The only thing close to what I was looking for was a prominent freerunner who broke his ankle and was literally dancing with the walls despite wearing a cast:

    Yet this guy was world class even during injury recovery moving like gravity did not exist!

    Can parkour-like movement still be fun with very limited energy, strength and agility? Yes!

    Dancing with the walls is always possible!

    Indeed dancing with bike racks is even more fun haha.

    Yet you don’t need any static obstacles, you can dance alone or with your dog e.g. anywhere or anytime or in other words here and now.

    I sometimes pretend to stretch when I start out to dance in the middle of the street so as not to scare people who might think I’m insane.

    So today was the first day I did it while simply walking the dog and jumping around with my limited parkour abilities. 

    I woke up and started writing this before even eating breakfast so I had to go out on an empty stomach and my head and back already started to ache due to the strain of highly concentrated writing and sitting.

    How could I move around and experience a joyful training session without enough energy 

    to do proper warm up or parkour? Hey, wait. I just discovered and tested the YoPaDa flow approach over the weekend! Why not just practice what I preach?

    So I started moving around obstacles I have faced a thousand times in new ways.

    Instead of calling my dog and becoming increasingly louder I just let her wiggle through my legs and arms while I was performing weird but flowy and unexpected moves.

    Bike racks became my dancing partners but that’s OK. After all, I’m single so nobody will be jealous!

    Instead of being annoyed and dragging or pushing my dog forward I let her dance with me on the street. 

    And guess what happened, nobody laughed at me or thought I’m crazy. I got smiles, interested looks and even compliments along the way. After all I’m in the hip “Kreuzkölln” area of Berlin so it might be because people are more open minded here but who knows?

    So instead of forcing myself and my dog to train a given amount of time and do a particular number of specific moves or jumps I just had to go with the flow literally. And it worked! Woohoo!

    Given the lack of energy today I also decided not to overcome the obstacles as I would usually do. 

    As I did not have a proper warm up this could be also dangerous. So why not combine the warm up and the parkour from the very first moment then? 

    Instead of “wasting my time” with boring warm up routines, how can I move and flow around using unexpected movement?

    Why not simply touch and “check the surfaces” and move around obstacles and press them and drag them and hug them all at once? 

    Again! I have no partner so I can hug the whole universe as nobody will be jealous!


    Dance

    I always loved to dance. Yet I was usually too embarrassed or self-conscious to do it in my teens and early twenties.

    I finally started dancing without too many inhibitions in my late twenties.

    It was nothing specific, no fixed style or routine was involved. I danced to no specific music, it could be

    • hip hop
    • ragga dance hall
    • electronic music
    • indie pop
    • or rock music.

    During my time in Nuremberg more than 20 years ago I had a sedentary office job staring into the screen and was super agitated afterwards in the evenings.

    So I just went to a famous independent club and youth center called Desi (it still exists!) and would attend any event. They had concerts or club nights almost every day! 

    So no matter what the bands or dj’s played I would just dance to it sooner or later (or not at all as long as nobody else danced) but in most cases I did. 

    I was new in the city and had no friends so I couldn’t embarrass myself too much anyway. That was before meetups and social networks like Facebook – the Internet was still about mere websites, forums and mailing lists mostly back then.

    Yet then I had to return to Berlin, finally “grow up” and take care of my family while making money.

    So I stopped dancing as it would mean going out to a club that would start at 1AM. If you would arrive earlier like at 11 you would have to drink, inhale cigarette smoke and stay idle until 1 or later waiting for the actual cool crowd to arrive.

    Fast forward 15 years and after a broken relationship/marriage, losing my work and health here I was again wanting to dance.


    Ecstatic Dance

    I’ve heard of ecstatic dance a few times before – mainly from my wife who would go dancing without me as someone had to stay home with the kid and dog and later after we already separated.

    I did however once walk in on an ecstatic dance session on Tempelhofer Feld while walking there with my ex or wife (we’re still married but live separately so I never know how to call her) .

    She had to go after half an hour. I was pleasantly surprised nonetheless that I was able to perform a sufi type of dervish dance while holding my dog in my hands.

    So the joy came quickly enough. Around me a dozen or two other people were dancing each according to their own rhythm not using a particular style.

    After that the ecstatic dance scene went increasingly underground using private Telegram groups. I don’t even own a smartphone to lessen my screen addiction so I did not become part of it.

    During the COVID years ecstatic dances became rare and hard to attend yet I almost went once.

    The next week I actually went by myself. Yet it was banned by then and the police already patrolled the area.

    They chased potential dancers away apparently due to complaints from people living nearby as later described in the Ecstatic Dance Berlin Community Facebook group. 

    So 2023 it was now or never. My health was steadily deteriorating despite sometimes improving a bit again, and I didn’t know how long I would still be able to dance as even walking became harder for me due to CFS-like symptoms.

    So I went once to a vision dance as described in the article on how the yopada approach came into being.

    Then I went to a regular “dance your life” conscious dance course. Then another one. Once that got canceled I went to a transformative dance session twice nearby. All the various monikers like

    • ecstatic dance
    • vision dance
    • conscious dance
    • transformative dance

    seem to be different names for a broader dance approach that is most known as ecstatic dance. 

    Being ecstatic has a somewhat sexual or drug induced undertone so I guess these other terms are meant to take away the somewhat limited associations.

    No, you don’t need to be naked or take drugs to practice ecstatic dance! 

    Phew! I was relieved indeed as I wasn’t comfortable with my scarred body and never took any serious drugs other than smoking some weed with others when they offered it to me.

    So no, it’s not a tantra session or something although there are some contact improvisation elements to it.

    So indeed some people – even women I didn’t know the name of – touched me, which surprised me as I had literally fresh wounds on my skin during those sessions.

    We did get ecstatic during the “dance your life” sessions at the peak of the dance set or playlist but it is not required. Some people were already resting during that part.

    What is common to all those techniques and labels is that you somehow embrace the flow of

    • your body
    • your surroundings (be it people or the natural and built environment)
    • or the universe as a whole.

    You can do all these things outside even better. 

    And you can do it without music – the music may even contradict your own flow. 

    Last but not least there is much more space and fresh air outside and many more other forms of built environment you can touch and explore like we did during the dance sessions. 

    Just don’t expect strangers to touch you on the street, especially not women you don’t know the name of haha.

    Unless you meet up for “dancing with the walls” or yopada first and forget their names (like I’m prone to do due to CFS battered short term memory).


    Other Influences

    Of course what I do is nothing completely fixed or hermetic.

    Unlike with yoga there are no strict rules in yopada. You can do whatever you like!

    There is no right or wrong way to move! 

    Unlike in “daredevil” parkour videos you don’t need exceptional strength, agility or flexibility either.

    Every age, body type, fitness level, health status is welcome and ready to do it right away.

    It’s not like it’s strictly yoga, parkour and dance (whatever you call it – vision, conscious, transformative or ecstatic). 

    There are numerous influences that have inspired me over the years or most recently. 

    Here are some of the more prominent or easier to name influences in no particular order:

    • dog (parkour) training
    • body weight strength training (think Mark Lauren)
    • qi gong and tai qi
    • break dance and capoeira
    • calisthenics
    • Paolo Coelho
    • pole dancing
    • Zen
    • solfeggio frequencies
    • ThetaHealing
    • The Secret
    • non dualism

    Make sure to check them out now! It’s either now or never! 

    You can’t check it out tomorrow just like you can’t check them out yesterday. 

    You can only check something out now!

    Even if the date changes the next day it will still be now when you check it out. So why waste now now?


    Dealing with Obstacles in Life the Yopada Way

    So how to embrace or love obstacles and deal with challenges using the yopada approach?

    Damn! You bored me with so much back story and explanation! You’re so wordy and self-centered! 

    Give me the flow advice finally!

    OK, so here is how to go with the flow in life.

    Yet I have to bore you with another depiction of “poor me” struggling with 

    • health
    • money 
    • relationship 

    issues.

    Imagine you are sick and tired, broke (and in debt) and alone so that there is nobody who can help you and you still have to deal with reality.

    You wake up already dead tired as if you had a severe depression but even if you brighten up you don’t have the energy to move. 

    Ah, yes, poor me! No, just kidding. I’m not trying to get compassion here.

    It sucks! So instead of further imagining the malaise, just be grateful that you are somewhat healthy, you still have some money and there are some people around you, even if they are annoying at times.

    And hooray! You can move. You can get up in the morning and you are not tired. You are actually rested! 

    • You can look straight.
    • Your stomach is not grumbling.
    • You have no brain fog. 
    • You are not dizzy.
    • Your head is not aching. 
    • Your face is not itching

    and bleeding when you touch it accidentally. 

    How beautiful life can be!

    Yet I wasn’t there for more than half a year. 

    When I gathered all my energy I was able to work for an hour or two at most a day. 

    Sometimes it was just half an hour and my face would literally heat up so much that I would have to put cold compresses on it or smear some china oil all over my face as otherwise it would overheat and bleed from a dozen of spontaneously opening wounds.

    By work I mean anything, like writing for client blogs which I have done for a living for the past 15 years or any other 

    • paid work
    • doing household chores 
    • or dealing with paperwork.

    So given all those obstacles anything – even checking your mailbox, both physical or electronic – became a challenge. 

    Especially that the debt became more pressing. From years past it accumulated and had to be dealt with. Additionally rising costs and all types of payments appearing out of the blue were taking a toll. Lots of paperwork and begging had to be done dealing with

    • student debt
    • tax debt
    • health insurance debt

    While at it I had to try to come up with new freelance client work. 

    So what do you do when you have only half an hour to an hour a day of energy?

    And maybe 2h on good days while you get really sick three days a week so that you can’t do anything other than looking into the screen and scrolling as focusing already triggers migraines. 

    • You minimize distractions and obligations
    • You reduce any conceivable burden to the minimum!
    • You single task to the extreme (one thing at once and per day)!
    • You split up larger tasks into numerous tiny parts
    • You overcome obstacles by crawling slowly

    Well, many times all I could do on a given day was write a few comments on social media. 

    Having brain fog, dizziness and migraine is not fun. 

    All I could do on such days was often lie down in bed and stare at the screen which made the migraine worse but without it I would have to focus on my brain fog, dizziness and wounds which would make them feel even worse.

    On other days, I had to do what was required of me and deal with mounting paperwork e.g. How?


    How to Open Your Mailbox and Bad News When You Crumble

    When you are already crumbling, any other additional stressor can be a deadly blow.

    You’re not the only one to crumble though. 

    You can split up even the most mundane tasks into even smaller ones.

    This is also what you do to learn the harder yoga poses or the more difficult parkour jumps.

    I would usually try to gather enough energy to open the mailbox all week. Sometimes I managed to open it once a week. Sometimes more than one week went by where I would drag my body along feeling growing pressure to open it every time I passed it.

    When I actually managed to do it was like a home run! Had I more energy I would probably jump out of joy of finally making it!

    Once I gathered my energy to open the mailbox there were usually several official letters. Some of them were already bright yellow!

    So I knew that opening them up or having to face the reality of them or dealing with them would drain the last bit of energy I had. I wouldn’t be able to deal with them but also the “bad news” would frustrate me to the core. I would be devastated. So I couldn’t risk it.

    So how exactly would I deal with such an official letter?

    How would I gather energy for a week or longer to open the mailbox? 

    On any given day I would ask myself: can I deal with it now or will the bad news crush me immediately? On most days my foggy, dizzy head and my tired, exhausted body would say “no way”.

    Then one day out of the blue or sometimes due to very strict specific measures I will describe later I felt strong enough to open it!

    Then I would open it as fast enough as possible in order not to give up halfway. No kidding!

    I would only look at the one letter on top when possible in order not see the whole extent of the tasks and issues I have to deal with.

    Then I would take the elevator (I was too weak to take the stairs on most days – prior to that I always used to take two or three steps at once due to training parkour).

    I would open the door and put the letters on a nearby shelf as quickly as possible without looking at them.

    Then they would lie down near the door for as long as I needed to gather energy to look at them.

    Like with any obstacle outside in parkour you can or often have to check the surfaces of the obstacles.

    I would look at the color of the letter. Is it a yellow one? That could hurt a lot! Yet without checking it it could hurt even more! Damn. So I would sort the letters. 

    The biggest obstacle had to be overcome first. Yet I knew that looking at it would just make me nervous, stressed and I would literally trigger a migraine and make me start bleeding. So I would put the other letters on top. 

    Some of them were less important and contained probably neutral, irrelevant or even good news (albeit that was an exception).

    The sorted letters would move to the next place where I would look at them later.

    Then one day I would look at the envelope. 

    • Is it thick or thin?
    • Is there a lot of paperwork inside or just another reminder to pay or maybe an official overdue office? 
    • What does the date say? 

    Damn, this and that one already was sent a month ago. 

    OK, so I would put the letters near or on top of my desk. Not that I sat at my desk these days. I was too tired to even sit in my office chair. 

    I would grow accustomed to the letters lying there. 

    Like in parkour I would visualize in my head dealing with them. 

    • Calling someone responsible and asking for another week or month to deal with it. 
    • Writing something so that I could officially request to postpone it. 
    • Counting the money I had left in my head and trying to imagine how I could split it up to pay for the outstanding invoices.

    I would also do some “preps” as it is called in parkour. 

    How would I prepare? 

    • I would take similar letters from the past I had already dealt with the years before. 
    • I would check what they might entail. 
    • I would look up websites that could potentially help me. 
    • I would copy or save the numbers I would have to call to deal with them.

    Then one day I knew that I had enough energy to open a letter. Maybe just one letter of the dozen that lay there. I knew that I had no other task that day.

    In the best case I had meditated. I had trained. I had eaten (I had to eat all the time to compensate for the constant lack of energy). I would do some stretches or jump up and down to disperse the nervous energy that grabbed me already. I would literally warm up to open a letter!

    So, could I open it and potentially deal with it immediately (as usually once I opened the letter the payments or actions requested were overdue)? I had to consider the opening hours of the tax departments etc.

    • Just like with parkour I knew there was this obstacle to deal on that day and I had enough energy to try to overcome it.
    • I would grab the knife and open the less scary letters first just like I do out on the street with the less scary obstacles. 
    • I would open each envelope as fast as possible in order not to back out. That’s also like with parkour. You have to gather enough speed to overcome an obstacle.
    • Each envelope I opened was a success! I celebrated that! Just like with parkour where you celebrate small victories.
    • Then I would just scan the text. Maybe I would just spot the headline, due date or amount to pay.
    • Sometimes I would let out a huge sigh then or was already too exhausted to read the details whether the amount had to be paid immediately or within weeks or whether it was already overdue. 

    Sometimes just one letter was enough to siphon off all of my energy. On other days I was able to open a few letters. Rarely did I manage to open all of them. Indeed I still have lots of unopened letters I haven’t dealt with as of the time of writing, some of them more than half a year old.

    Sometimes fear and anxiety only grabbed me while dealing with those letters. 

    I had to use all of my energy to calm down and call the responsible people (who usually were very forthcoming after I told them my pitiful story).

    How I Dealt with Student Debt

    So let’s recap a particular challenge maybe some of you can relate to.

    The student debt was a great example. I had to deal with it last year and then I got sick with the flu after Christmas so I had to write an official request before New Year and ended up writing it on New Year’s Eve among many other overdue documents. 

    When I am sick with migraine I get dyslexic. It means I can’t write a proper sentence anymore even though I’m a professional writer. The flu of course triggered an additional migraine that lasted for days.

    My computer was also broken so I needed extra care and patience while I was feverish and thus had several attempts (just as with obstacles in parkour) just to send the message as my vision became increasingly blurry.

    • I hit “send” before it was ready. 
    • Then it was the wrong address. 
    • Then I forgot the attachment. 

    I celebrated New Year by falling asleep at around 10 that evening amidst fireworks in the hippest area of Berlin. I closed the windows to minimize noise and my dog was happy to sleep as well amongst all the turmoil. 

    I didn’t even have the energy left to undress but I was freezing due to the fever anyway so it was fine!

    Btw. It was 17° Celsius here in Berlin on that day so I wished I could have gone out. 

    Usually it’s around zero in late December here. Despite that temperature I only managed to go out a few minutes for a few meters with my dog twice that day and I had to rest or sit down every few steps.

    Then at the start of 2023 all of the responses arrived. 

    All the officials wanted me to act at once. I was still recovering from the flu and dizzy and the letter from the student debt department (it has a menacing German name I can’t translate) was large, thick and scary.

    I could barely manage my daily life. How on Earth I was able to deal with all this? I had nobody to really help me. Not that I didn’t ask. It was just me and the obstacle, I mean letter.

    So I put the letter down on a chair near the desk/table. On many days I didn’t even dare to look into the direction. On other days I would watch it from afar and deliberate whether I could deal with it. On most days I would shy away. On others I would cringe. 

    • Then one day I looked up the student debt letter I dealt with last year.
    • Then like two months later I would sign up for the website of the student debt department to be able to upload documents.
    • A week or so later I was able to upload my bank statement to show that I can’t repay it now without even opening the letter.
    • The answer arrived a few days after that. Sending in your bank statement was of course not enough.
    • Then finally a “good day” came where my lack of symptoms made me optimistic. I think it was almost April by now.

    I had found a naturopath who managed to reduce the symptoms significantly using homeopathy.

    • I was able to train parkour with my dog that day. 
    • I ate frequently enough and did not use up all the food energy for preparing more food.
    • I had some time between meals (usually half an hour to an hour, then I had to reload my energy). 
    • I opened the letter and it was full of paperwork to be done with lots of paperwork to add to it to prove that I can’t repay my student debt immediately or ASAP.

    And guess what? I still had two whole weeks to deal with it!

    It wasn’t overdue yet. So I spent a week gathering energy to be able to deal with it and pushing myself to finally commit and attempt to overcome that obstacle.

    Then I spent a whole week including Sunday dealing with at least one document or upload a day. 

    I would fill out a doc or write one or photograph some proof (using a proper camera as I don’t own a smartphone) and upload it using their proprietary and difficult to use tool. I would often have to eat and wait until the evening so I had enough energy or my migraine subsided.

    Then for another two weeks I would still upload some additional docs every other day. 

    I think I uploaded at least 20 at the end. 

    And Woohoo! My student debt repayment has been postponed for almost a year. I was a little too late so it was a few hundred Euros I had to pay additionally but I wouldn’t go bankrupt immediately. Woohoo!

    Damn, I was proud of myself and my accomplishment!

    So actually I finally embraced that challenge and was able to become fond of it!

    On top of that it pushed me to go to the ecstatic or conscious dance classes.

    I knew I had to do something to “raise my spirits” in order to be able to finally face the challenge and sort out the issues.

    Otherwise I would probably still think that I’m not cool enough or ready to dance ecstatically and touch young women I don’t even know the names of.

    You think that story sounds ludicrous? Wait until I tell you how I managed to take out the trash as a zombie! 

    Yes, anything can be a monumental task. Next up: How to Take Out the Trash on CFS the Yopada Way!

    Yes, sometimes the obstacle is not a huge wall or the challenge is not a one-arm handstand.

    Yet you can treat any issue like an advanced yoga pose or a very tricky obstacle in parkour.


    Woohoo I Feel Alive Again! Let’s Dance!

    Ah, among all the bad news I almost forgot to mention the good news!

    The first jawbone surgery I had to undergo went very well and even though I was incapacitated more or less for like a month I’m back at like 60% to 80% on most days so instead of binge watching old science fiction series like Farcscape:

    I’m back at writing again and this time more than just comments.

    If I have written a comment on one of your posts in recent months please appreciate it. 

    Sometimes it was all I did during a whole day and it kept me and my creativity alive. I put all my remaining energy and love into those comments.

    And if it sounded somewhat grumpy it’s not because I have a bad character or hate you. 

    It’s because there was no energy or love left to carry a whole comment so the “lower vibration” energies were somewhat creeping in between the lines. It was the fatigue, brain fog, dizziness and pain I felt not “me” or the Universe. 

    Each time you noticed my comment and responded I knew that I was not alone and there is someone who appreciates what I do, even when it’s just a like.

    And God it feels good to be alive again, not just a zombie! Being able to go to the park! Not just the “green square” type of nearest park 5 minutes from my building. 

    God it feels so good to really write again – not just a one line comment! 

    God it feels good to have “clear skin” meaning just three or four small wounds in your face instead of a dozen big and regularly bleeding ones.

    It also feels so great to take a shower after weeks when I was even too exhausted to do that!

    As of writing I am awaiting the second surgery to remove the other cysts and jaw bone inflammation sources. What type? See below!


    How NICO Made Me a Zombie

    The type of jawbone inflammation (called NICO) I experienced is pretty common yet rarely diagnosed as it is invisible even by x-ray unless an expert uses DVT (digital volume tomography) or even more complex procedures.

    And the symptoms you get depend on what your body can neglect at first and what your individual health history is. 

    Without treatment your body will be weakened increasingly until you die of one of the various “causes of death” there are. 

    You can get cancer, a heart attack, multiple sclerosis among others.

    The toxins that are created by the bacteria from dead teeth actually decompose your jaw. They are trapped as they can’t leave your body. So you are literally becoming a zombie. 

    No wonder I looked, felt and behaved like one. Indeed I was lucky that I had a history of acne and heavy metal poisoning so that my body was used to removing toxins through the skin. 

    Indeed before I found out about the NICOs I tried several detoxes and almost each time my face would almost explode leaving me dizzy and with numerous bloody wounds so that I had to stop after a few days or weeks.

    So if you have some weird pains, allergies or inexplicable health issues you may want to check your teeth and whether you have heavy metal poisoning and/or silent jawbone inflammation.

    Your problem might seem to be a mental health or psychological problem (like depression) or any type of non-specific chronic illness like CFS. You might become grumpy, angry, and fearful.

    I have tested my blood numerous times, my teeth, my heart, my eyes and found nothing. 

    I even visited a psychiatrist who wasn’t really helpful – just stating that I have “depressive symptoms”. I knew that before.

    I was healthy by the standards of modern medicine! Some of my test scores were even excellent for my age given my healthy lifestyle. I never knew whether to laugh or cry reading those test results. 

    Finally a neighbor I met “accidentally” suggested to me to test my blood for NICOs and indeed my so-called RANTES test results of silent inflammation markers was double the maximum amount of 30.

    You can do the test for around 30 Euros and send it to a laboratory.

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