When We Align with Life: A Journey from Mind to Soul
✍️ From WHO Geneva to a Soul-Led Path through Aikido, Awakening, and Yoga
An Ideal Life
At 45, I thought myself to be in my prime: I was living what many would call “an ideal life”. I had spent nearly seven years working with the World Health Organization and the last two in Geneva on a major global program. I drove around on my fancy BMW motorbike, skiing on weekends in Zermatt, vacationing in the French Riviera, and living with a wonderful girlfriend one minute walk from Lake Léman (also called Lake Geneva), while making a positive impact on the world. From the outside, it looked like I had it all. But deep down, something was growing unsatisfied.
Comfort lead to complacency,
Complacency to deception,
Deception to delusion.
I had always believed my work in humanitarian aid was an act of service. Yet over time, I began to sense a misalignment between my original intention and the reality of the structure I was embedded in. The more I looked, the more I saw that something deeper in the system was broken, and no amount of money, brilliance, or goodwill seemed to affect it.
A Whisper from the Soul
By mid-2006, I was increasingly restless. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but my soul was whispering. For a decade I had been practicing Aikido and had found a great teacher in Patrick C. in Montreux. On a Sunday night at the end of a weekend workshop, ready to head back to Geneva, my friend Olivier looked at me and said:
"If I were you, I’d leave that job."
It was a shock. I hadn't said much about how disillusioned I was, but clearly, my energy had spoken.
The Unexpected Sign
Scott, my boss, was a busy man —he wouldn’t come into my office unless it mattered. That Monday he entered, which was a surprise in itself, to apologize: my new contract had been issued for six months instead of the expected year. He wanted to reassure me that he would get it corrected.
In response I found myself calmly saying, "It’s fine. In six months, I’ll be gone." The words came from somewhere deeper than reason.
At the same time, I had been pleading to get a six-month leave without pay— to breathe, reflect, and realign. The organization pushed back. They offered more money, shorter leave. But I wasn’t asking for money. I was asking for time.
Time is the true wealth of life; we trade it for everything, and that is the delusion—for nothing matters more.
The Leap
I resigned in January 2007. It felt like standing at the edge of a cliff. I signed up as an uchi-deshi, a live-in student in Montreux to train full-time in Aikido and to earn my black belt. It still thought of it all as a sabbatical.
“You will learn while falling," he said, and I did.
Before I could begin training, I had to be accepted. When I told Patrick Sensei I wanted to study with him full-time, his response was both piercing and unexpected: "What makes you so sure I want to be your teacher?"
He asked me to write him a letter explaining why I wanted to train with him and what I truly wanted in life in general. What followed was a month-long exchange—each letter from me met with a deeper question from him. It became the first phase of training: peeling layers, touching something raw and real. In this place where I had it all, something was missing, and I wanted that although I could not name it.
In the end, he asked: "Are you ready to stand naked at the edge of the cliff and willing to leap?" When I told him I could not fly, he replied: "You will learn while falling."
Living in the dojo, sleeping in the changing room, training six hours a day, cleaning, running, biking, and swimming in the freezing lake—it was a time of intense physical discipline and radical self-inquiry. I was seeking to answer the real questions: Who am I? And how shall I live?
The Fall and the Flame
Then came the accident. A dislocated shoulder ended my Aikido training in a single moment. But in the dojo culture, everything is a teaching. "Don’t even think of resigning! Sit and reflect on how this is the best thing that can be happening to you right now," Patrick Sensei said as I sat on the couch in agony.
In the pain and stillness that followed, something broke open.
On the night of my 46th birthday, March 22, 2007, I had what I can only describe as an awakening. As I was trying to fall asleep, I was swallowed by a vortex—a vertiginous, engulfing spiral that threatened my sheer existence (or so it seemed). A powerful energetic event overtook my body. Time disappeared. The next day, words flowed without searching. Everything was perfect—and had always been.
The puzzle of my life rearranged itself. Every piece had a new place. Every pain, every joy, was part of a deeper order. Each of them leading to now in pure perfection. One thing became sure: I was not in charge of the puzzle—a deeper intelligence was!
I experienced a profound sense of peace, clarity, and love.
And I knew I would never be the same.
India Beckons
After the awakening, I could no longer go back. Aikido was not an option anymore, but yoga was. I followed Val, my girlfriend, to India. While she studied Ayurveda, I explored yoga. In October 2007, we enrolled in a Yoga Teacher Training at a Jain Ashram in New Delhi, led by Sanjeev B. of YogaLife.
Four weeks later, Sanjeev asked me to become his assistant.
When life closes a door, it opens another one.
The New Road
In less than a year, I had gone from WHO officer to an employed yoga teacher. Without effort, without planning, simply by listening to what life was asking of me next.
My colleagues at WHO, who had warned me I was being foolish, began calling me brave. Some even confessed their envy—not for the path I chose, but for the freedom they saw blooming in me.
Aligning with life liberated me from trying to figure it all out, what a relief: I was free!
In the End all is Perfect, Always
Alignment is not a plan. It’s a surrender. It’s not the absence of fear, but the presence of truth.
I did not know what I was doing when I left WHO. But I knew that staying would cost me more than I was willing to pay: my soul. That single decision cracked my life wide open, not into chaos, but into clarity.
Ask yourself:
on your death bed, looking back, which choice do you want to have made?
I see clearly now in retrospect: the push and pull between the mind and the soul. The mind is the known—time and space, money, logistics. The soul lives in the part I don’t know I don’t know. It cares nothing of time—it is eternal. Nothing of space—it is infinite.
My mind was trying to figure out, to find a solution. But from that place I could only fix a problem; I could not create out of the sheer ecstatic beauty of life itself. To move from one to the other requires a leap of faith—a jump of the cliff into the unknown. And to the mind, it is terrifying.
But if the soul does not live in time, we humans do, and the best time to jump is always now.
When the pain of being a bud was more than the pain of becoming a flower,
I bloomed. — borrowed from Anaïs Nin
To this day I have remained in sporadic contact with Patrick Sensei and you can contact him through his website if you’d wish to work with him. Patrick Sensei is a genuine master and his skills go way beyond Aikido. If you chose to connect with him please let me know. Not only I’d be happy to help, but I could also make an introduction for the right person.
Post Scriptum
Some parts of this journey—how the awakening was meticulously prepared by Patrick Sensei through physical, energetic, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual overwhelm—deserve more space than a single paragraph can hold.
The same is true for the awakening itself: the experience, the integration, the aftermath. To do them justice would require a full telling, like the post I once wrote about the kundalini rising in Singapore.
That story will come—in time.
PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.
Because the stories we tell are not just stories—they are the reality we live.
You've certainly come a long way... You've come a long
Thank you dear friend, for provoking me back to presence and heart today.