reading

Contents

1 Introduction: An inconspicuous girl

2 My biography in brief

3 January 2015: Changes are imminent

4 How it all began: The first year of life

5 Christina’s childhood

6 Christina’s school days

“Here for ten years already”

Christina’s preferences

“Lecturing” activity begins

7 February 22, 2015: Insights into the hereafter

8 Elena

9 Souls and soul plans

10 Critical analysis of our times

11 Holistic medicine

For example, the heart ♥

12 Light and unlight

13 Consciousness, vibration and energy

Scale of Consciousness and LOC values

A universal ethical principle

Multidimensional perception

Separated reality and unified reality

14 Special perceptions and synaesthesia

Of energy signatures and energy residues

Synaesthesia

15 Time-change people

16 Dimensions

The aquarium example

17 The old and the new consciousness

18 The enigmatic chest

Spring holidays 2015

19 Elemental beings

20 The heartbeat of the Earth

21 Christina’s 14th birthday

The white lily

A fine-material visitor

22 The school system of the future

23 Nutrition

Living on light

How should we nourish ourselves?

24 Healing

“I’m not going to be a healer.”

Two ethical principles for healers

Future health care

Running and yoga

25 Love

26 Further gifts manifest

X-ray vision

Subtle nature

“Some kind of angel”

“More than just oxygen”

Signs of the changing times

27 Christina’s pillar of light

28 The phantom of death

29 The names Elena and Christina

Happy funerals

30 Telepathy, telekinesis and other gifts

Telepathy

Frequent gifts of today’s children

A second third eye

Materialisation

Everyday telepathy

Nocturnal astral travelling

Telekinesis

“An artisanal super disaster”

Technopathy

31 School level change 2015

32 Summer holidays 2015

A decision with far-reaching consequences

“What’s so hard to understand about that?!”

The “secrets” of the dark powers

Money, the material instrument of power

33 Beings of unlight

The duality of light and unlight

Christina’s years of being tested

The powerlessness of the powerful and the higher principle of love

Light-filled behaviour in everyday life

The black fish

34 Small everyday occurrences

The enigmatic daisy

Telepathic children everywhere

Messages from above

Records from the past

Christina’s hearing

A reassuring realisation

Why are you here?

Invisibility

35 Conversations with Christina

36 The question of career choice

The seven rainbow colours

Taster days

37 The mystery of Elena

38 Profession and vocation

39 2016: A network of light is forming

40 The book project

Help from the quantum field

How things will continue: The three key terms freedom, truth and love

41 Closing remarks by Christina

Acknowledgements

About the author

“We Are Peace” – An Impulse from Christina von Dreien

Introduction:
An inconspicuous girl

A large part of humanity experiences life as a more or less arbitrary sequence of happy and unhappy coincidences. Admittedly, I was one of those people. With a positive attitude to life, a clever mind and a heart in the right place, I tried to follow my path in life to the best of my knowledge and belief. As is usually the case, my private and professional life was shaped by education and society, cultural and religious rules, dogmas and solid constructs.

Meeting people has always been a major part of my life – people of all ages, of different origins, with different ways of thinking and acting. These differences have always fascinated me. I asked myself: Why do some of us develop into benevolent, peaceful human beings, while others seem to accept hatred and violence as part of their everyday life? Why are we in search of happiness, in so many different ways, and what is this aspired “happiness” anyway?

It soon became clear to me that a good education, professional success or material prosperity are not the only ingredients in the recipe for happiness. In fact, the key to personal happiness, to inner contentment and fulfilment can only be found within ourselves. Happiness comes if we are able to free ourselves from patterns of negative thought and self-sabotage and succeed in unfolding our true inner potential, our real being, our purpose in life. However, looking inwards is not generally something we have been encouraged to do and very often, those who seek their inner self are initially confronted with a deep abyss, with inner chaos.

Whereas as babies, we still naturally follow our own inner guidance and are connected with other levels of reality, in the course of our lives, we are increasingly shaped, conditioned and programmed from the outside, so that in adulthood we mostly function according to patterns and constructs that have been created by other people and by society. We are trained to orient ourselves outwards, not inwards. This inevitably creates an ego, an artificial ego that does not correspond to our true being. For many, realising that true happiness and deep fulfilment cannot be achieved by trying to imitate others, or by chasing after material things, is difficult. They seem to have lost the balance of body, mind and soul as well as a natural connection to their inner voice, and they wander, confused and anxious, through life.

I had the growing impression that when it comes to personal happiness and fulfilment as well as matters of global justice and world peace, humanity has made no progress for centuries. Humanity may be more adept in science and technology today than ever before, but it does not seem to have learned much more in the way of real wisdom and the capacity for peace. A one-sided rationalistic, materialistic way of thinking is being promoted by the increasing dominance of commoditisation in our economy and social structures. This has dominated our existence almost completely for over two hundred years, and, as an unpleasant consequence, we are being increasingly confronted with the fatal effects of the exploitation and desecration of our planet Earth. Today, in many areas, we as humanity stand before our self-created piles of rubble.

But, what happened to the inner development of soul and spirit during all these centuries? Why do so many struggle with their own destiny in life? Why has our society changed into a brutal system of struggle, greed, envy and the pursuit of power and glory? Most of the time, we live in an unsatisfactory, artificial reality that worships the ego and prevents an expansion of consciousness and therefore also the unfolding of our true potential. The great majority of people continues to remain in the collective thought and action structures of the past, making individual development impossible.

It is no wonder that, nowadays, so many feel overwhelmed by the pressures of the working world and are deeply unhappy with their lives. How can you be satisfied if you do not live according to your own personal purpose, but merely function according to given foreign structures? Is that what we were born to do? I don’t think so. It is therefore not surprising that mental illness is constantly on the increase, despite top medical care.

Never before has mankind been confronted with so many global problems and challenges as in our time: countless conflicts and wars; rampant poverty and need in many places; human misery and streams of refugees; strongly fluctuating financial markets, currency crises and recessions; fatal ecological dead ends; inner conflict and disorientation as well as the deplorable state of affairs in many governments around the world – all these seem to be signs of either imminent demise or imminent change and turnaround.

In this book we assume that what lies ahead of us is major change – and that we are indeed already in the midst of this turnaround, in an evolutionary transformation of humanity. This change will come about through every single individual, starting with those who were born on earth specifically to initiate and support precisely this change. Christina, whose story is told in this book, is one of these pioneers of a new humanity.

For my part, I was convinced for a long time that the conditions on our planet could only be influenced to a very limited extent by my own thoughts and actions. I assumed that a global change towards more justice and peace would have to be regulated mainly by superordinate power systems. However, in their complexity, most political, economic and social structures seem incapable of further development and threaten to collapse in the near future, due to their destructive basis. There is too much that seems to have got out of hand in our world, and too many people who seem to have lost the ability to understand these highly complex processes, let alone prevent the emerging global chaos.

I also shared this widespread opinion – until the beginning of 2015, when the already exceptional life of my daughter Christina began to undergo an undreamt-of new development. Since then, at almost fourteen years of age, she has enabled me, in a most extraordinary way, to gain new insights into the confusing events of our time by describing the processes on our planet from a completely new perspective. Christina taught me that every single human individual has an influence on world affairs. Human beings, as individuals, contribute through the orientation of their consciousness and their personal energy level to how things will develop within their own inner being, within their immediate environment and consequently also globally. This is an impressive example of the fact that the power of consciousness together with inner vigilance and clarity is far superior to the one-sided rational mind.

I experience my daughter, Christina, as a young, authentic person for whom life and love are synonymous. I experience her as a girl with an extraordinary energy potential which opens the way to abilities and perspectives that are incomprehensible to a rational way of thinking. She is a person for whom dealing with higher, multidimensional levels of reality is just normal, as is the constant inner connection with everything created. She lives in a consciousness that encompasses the unity of all existence and cultivates a respectful, loving relationship with every being with whom she comes into contact, at all times, without ever evaluating or judging. She not only succeeds in shedding light on severe personal tragedies from a calm perspective, but also demonstrates a philosophical wisdom and depth which is astonishing and captivating.

Christina is an example of a new generation of young evolutionary thinkers who recognise, describe and live human existence as a complexity of quantum physics, neuropsychology and spirituality. She has always shown a keen interest and remarkable insight into today’s world affairs. In this regard, she once said: “As long as people carry more fear than love within themselves, democracy, no matter how fair and right it may seem, will always be used for the sole purpose of hypnotising the masses.”

Christina likes to deal with complex questions of philosophy, cosmology, quantum physics, astronomy and astrobiology, anthropology, mythology, technology and economics, as well as sociology, evolutionary biology, neurobiology, neuropsychology and numerous other sciences.

She succeeds in harmoniously combining scientific and metaphysical aspects without any problem. With her multidimensional understanding of the universe – from its self-organising intelligence and divine geometry to our human DNA – Christina reveals insights and knowledge that she could not possibly have acquired in her short human life to date. She is quite at home with the demanding contents of the respective sciences – with the technical language as well, if necessary – but in many cases, her explanatory approaches lie above state-of-the-art science. It is not unusual for her to discover that, for much of what she perceives outside three-dimensional reality, there are no earthly words at all.

With all this, Christina belongs to a new generation of young earth-dwellers who feel called to show people an alternative to the previous three-dimensional thought patterns and structures of life. Through a widened consciousness, a higher cognitive capability can be awakened in each individual, enabling us to sustainably heal ourselves and our planet Earth. Fear and horror, misdirection and destructiveness should no longer be predominant in a future society but instead deep inner wisdom, mutual loving recognition and collectively created peace.

Christina’s message shows us just how turbulent the times are in which we find ourselves. We are in the middle of an evolution of consciousness that will lead to profound changes in all areas of life. Outdated ways of thinking, concepts, theories and coping strategies created by the one-sided rational mind are not going to lead to new ways of doing things. Only a widened consciousness on the soul-spirit level will achieve this. Through the merely three-dimensional, materialistic orientation of science, however, most people today have almost forgotten how to find a natural, inner access to themselves and how to maintain a spiritual connection to transcendence. As a result, they no longer recognise the larger interrelationships and the deeper meanings of things and are all too easily overcome by fears and doubts. They live separately from the whole and are not guided by their inner voice, but only by an artificial ego and externally dictated life circumstances.

Christina clearly emphasises that fears, doubts, feelings of guilt, envy, hatred, destructiveness and all the other negative feelings have no basis in the plan of creation. They are all created by people, so they can also be dissolved by people. Much of what a large proportion of mankind sees as pain and suffering is simply a learning process, which we can also meet with goodwill and love – no matter how difficult it appears to be – and thus transform. Christina says: “Love is that which is infinitely present in the universe, a primal substance which is the basis of everything that is.”

This book tells the true story of a girl of our time, who was born with a greatly expanded consciousness. She is blessed with multidimensional perception and other paranormal gifts and handles them in a completely natural way. In fact, these abilities are only side effects of her true being. She is a girl of our time who, from deep within, is prepared and willing to put her existence at the service of a global change towards a positive and constructive future.

Christina is by no means alone in this. For some years now more and more children have been born with high vibration frequencies and mental gifts, who emit light in the truest sense of the word with their presence and their words alone. This new generation of human beings exemplifies to us in a completely natural way what authenticity, joy of life, personal responsibility, devotion, love, wisdom and peace mean – without fear and without excessive demands.

At first glance, Christina seems to be a perfectly normal girl, even inconspicuous. Her extraordinary energy level only becomes visible when you look closer. She has always been familiar with higher cosmic laws, and knows how to give us insight into other spheres and planes of existence in a comprehensible, humorous and buoyant way, enabling us to form a better understanding of the current processes on our planet as well as in our own life. She sees even the most difficult scientific and world-political subjects from a multidimensional perspective, surprising those present repeatedly with original analyses and parables.

Many people today are already aware that we live in outdated three-dimensional systems that are unable to cope with the increasingly complex challenges of the present and the future. As never before, human beings long for deceleration and harmony, for new ways of thinking, for new forms of human interaction and structures of life, but many of them still lack the conviction that such a global change is at all possible. Through her own example, Christina is able to give these people hope and confidence by embodying the fact that we are already in the midst of this process of change. The light is already there, but many of us are not yet able to recognise it. Christina says: “All human beings are light, they have just forgotten it.”

Her clarity and insight are able to broaden our horizons and most agreeably eliminate some of our major question marks – all without her having studied in the conventional sense. Her example gives us an idea of the enormous potential for development that essentially every human being has.

Fortunately, my world view, my understanding of the world and my way of thinking have changed fundamentally over the past two years. I realised that if I wanted to change anything, I had to start with myself. I had the liberating experience that everything I encounter in this life – even the supposedly “negative” and restrictive – always contains the potential of positive transformation. This is a process which was not always easy and not always pleasant, but which I would like to continue and to deepen. Step by step, I was able to revise my outdated ways of thinking and expand my personal reality, so that today I have a much clearer understanding of our earthly existence and our divine origin than just a few years ago. I am constantly learning to let go of restrictive patterns of thought and action, to be less judgemental, and to be open for a larger reality, even if I often cannot reach it with my rational mind.

Meanwhile I recognise the so-called “problems” and obstacles in my life as learning processes and the supposed “blows of fate” as experiences with the offer of inner growth. The results of this expansion and transformation of consciousness are highly gratifying: equilibrium, satisfaction, fulfilment, inner freedom, true joie de vivre and, not least, holistic healing and health.

Christina’s nature and her message give us an idea of the direction in which humanity will develop and how important this spiritual development is for each individual person. Her unbiased cosmopolitanism, her love and her benevolent treatment of even the most difficult individuals and events are always impressive to experience. At the same time, she stresses that we all carry the same higher potential within us. She says: “With increasing consciousness, the power of the mind will gradually replace physical capabilities. This will happen faster than most people can imagine. Exciting times are approaching.”

Having a scientific mind-set, I initially failed miserably in my efforts to find an explanation for what Christina was telling me as well as the phenomena she revealed, using conventional scientific models and methods. On looking closer, however, I noticed that there are clear similarities with current research in areas such as quantum physics, astronomy, neurobiology, neuropsychology and consciousness research. However, one gets the impression that Christina’s knowledge is much more far-reaching and deeper, and therefore often difficult to reduce and express in familiar terms, since it is neither visible nor verifiable in three dimensions.

Christina reassures us in this context by saying: “Nothing is complicated in the universe. It’s the people who make it complicated. The Earth is a school, the Universe a college.”

Christina succeeds in bringing us closer to this uncomplicated and natural essence of higher dimensional existence and the Divine. In a sensitive manner, she touches and moves others solely with her thoughts and words. A respectful attitude towards the whole of creation is always apparent in all her conversations and actions. She says: “Divine intelligence and sentient consciousness existed far before the formation of the earth. Consciousness is the engine, the driving force of every creation. It created matter, antimatter and countless universes. The planets in our solar system, the stars and even the empty space in between – everything is filled with life and consciousness. Three-dimensional life is universally seen as an exception, not as a rule.”

By definition, higher realities cannot be reduced to fit human concepts and terms, so they can neither be proved nor disproved with just words or arguments. They can, however, be experienced to some extent with widened perception. This arises from an inner willingness and openness to exceed the limits of the previous horizons of experience and to penetrate into areas of consciousness that cannot be reached and thus cannot be measured with the three-dimensional human mind.

Those who have had a near-death experience, for example, or who have already encountered higher spheres through meditation or the like will probably have few difficulties in accepting and integrating the statements made in this book. However, doubters and sceptics are also cordially invited to study the following without bias and without prejudice and to exchange ideas with us on the subject.

Christina describes the forthcoming evolutionary change of humanity in a highly differentiated manner and suggests viewing philosophical, scientific and socio-political issues from a multidimensional perspective. In an enlightening way, she describes the revolutionary impact that the positive changes that await all those who are open and ready for them will have. She makes it clear: “I am not in this world to expose the mistakes of others or to judge them. All I want is to bring back light and peace to humanity. Then the unlight will dissolve on its own.”

Christina’s life story up until now, which is told in this book, was extraordinary from the beginning, starting with her birth and with her extremely difficult first years of life, and it reached another, new phase of development in 2015 and 2016. We assume that this is only the beginning and that Christina’s purpose in life and her messages will reveal themselves more and more in the coming years.

I write this story from the perspective of the mother of three children, with Christina in the middle. Her twin sister Elena, two minutes older, died two months after her birth and since then has accompanied Christina in an extraordinary way from a spiritual sphere. Her brother Mario, two and a half years younger, enriches our lives in his own way with his sunny, energetic nature, even though the focus of this book is primarily on the twin girls.

Dear readers, to help you to better understand the context of this book, I would like to introduce myself in brief in the following chapter. I do this, because I seem – without realising it – to have gone through a range of experiences and tests, which now enable me to accompany Christina in an appropriate way, as well as to follow my own purpose in life more and more.

My biography in brief

I was born in 1972 in Toggenburg, Switzerland, as the seventh of eight children, and enjoyed a loving childhood, in close touch with nature, in a very simple, busy, rural environment. As children, school and home filled our lives. At that time we had no car, and we knew nothing about holidays, because our parents’ farm demanded the constant presence and cooperation of every member of the family.

At the age of 16, I was allowed to study a foreign language – as were three of my older siblings before me – and spent a year in Ticino. I very much enjoyed the internship in a private nursing home, especially the freedom and independence associated with it, and on top of this the Italian language, the almost Mediterranean climate and the people with their Latin mentality.

This was followed by a hospital internship in German-speaking Switzerland and then training as a medical assistant (“Medizinische Fachangestellte”, MFA). All this I managed with ease, so that, after my training, my work in a country doctor’s practice was not much of a challenge. My dream as a twenty-year-old was to travel to the Amazon region in South America and work in a jungle clinic. I dropped this plan, however, when I was told I would have to commit myself to working with the Red Cross for two whole years.

I therefore looked for other challenges, started jogging more ambitiously in my free time and joined a running club, in which I then became intensively involved. For me, running in the great outdoors was a very satisfying physical balance to my much loved work in the doctor’s surgery.

Shortly afterwards, I moved into my own flat together with my future husband and, in 1994, when I was just over 22 years old, we were married. From 1994 to 1998 I worked in a turbulent doctor’s surgery in the country, which gave me a deep sense of fulfilment. During this time, we also built a house (1996), and six months later (1997) my husband realised his wish to have his own company by founding a timber construction company. Full of verve, I took on the office work, but found that it didn’t really satisfy me, inwardly. Nevertheless, I learned a lot of new things through working in the business, and I liked the idea of continuing this as a sideline later on, when we had children.

In the same year, at the age of 25, I was also looking for new sporting challenges. As an enthusiastic long distance runner, I ran my first marathon in November 1997, albeit against the advice of my trainer. Deep down, I was convinced that I was virtually predestined for this distance. I was extremely happy to be running, although, with a comparatively modest training volume for a long distance runner of about 75 km per week, I hadn’t had adequate preparation. Nevertheless, in pouring rain, I celebrated my first Elite Swiss Champion title over the marathon distance – not exactly in world-class time but, all the same, in 2:44 hours, which was enough for me, as a marathon debutant, to be awarded the national title. That I had potential was obvious, and my great fascination for this competition distance was awakened.

After this first sporting success, I found myself suddenly standing on a new, unusually large stage, where I was confronted with a multitude of reactions from the sports world and the general public. This meant that the expectations and the pressure to succeed also increased enormously. I still felt myself to be the same person – albeit newly titled “Swiss Marathon Champion” – but the many beautiful, sometimes surreal new events in my life made me think. Suddenly, I found myself on front pages and in magazine articles – with pictures that I’d never approved, and even statements I’d never made. The response to my sporting success was somehow wonderful, but, in our already busy lives, there was hardly any room for future offers and obligations outside the framework of work, training and competitions. The expectations and the pressure to perform – on the part of the association, sponsors and the media – became ever greater, and the negative consequences of all this became apparent just one year later.

In 1998 I reduced my work in the doctor’s surgery by 20%, in order to have more time for sport. But at the same time our own business began to flourish, so that this provided no relief. My day usually began at 5:00 a.m. with training or office work, before the day-to-day work in the surgery started.

At that time, I was not always able to meet the pressures of public attention or cope with my sporting competitors happily. Several blows below the belt and learning processes followed in public. In 1998, while defending the marathon title, I had to give up because of vomiting. This happened again at the Swiss championship over 5000 m. I also just missed qualifying for the Half Marathon World Championship – the result of letting myself be controlled by others, in many respects, when it came to sport.

All this was in conflict with my inner being and, consequently, I was confronted repeatedly with my own weaknesses and unfavourable thought patterns. To top it all, countless people approached me with all kinds of supposed patent recipes on how I could get this problem – quite a common one in competitive sports – under control. A number of experienced athletes and coaches tried to help, and I was given several well-intentioned tips, job offers and the like.

Fortunately, it soon became clear to me that it wasn’t just a question of externally reorganising and optimising my daily work and training routine. It was, far more, a clear challenge to listen more to my inner voice if I wanted to continue to be successful in this business. It was ridiculous that, as an enthusiastic runner, I was physically in top form, but couldn’t call up my potential at the decisive moment, due to various external influences – associations, coaches, appointments, media, etc. My ego had sabotaged my intuition and thus also my success with its excessively outward orientation.

I realised that I still had to do the running myself, nobody could do that for me, and that the enthusiasm for running could also not be conveyed to me from outside – only taken away. To prevent this, I was now called upon to learn to concentrate on myself and to pay attention to my inner voice. Particularly in endurance sports, the immediate, massive, bodily reaction which occurs when you approach something with negative emotions can be experienced very intensively.

Through this changed attitude, I gradually succeeded in perceiving both successes and failures quite simply as neutral experiences and as learning processes. My determination to improve myself further, especially with regard to these mental aspects, was great, and the results were extremely gratifying: my competitors became friends, training camps became holidays, competitions became welcome experiences that helped me on my path through life and in my personal development.

At the beginning of 1999, I had my life largely under control again and changed my job, working part-time in a cardiology practice. Expectations in sport were still high, but I was able to meet them very differently from then on.

And, lo and behold, success in competitions soon returned. During the first six months I only ran three races – three Swiss championships, which added to the pressure – but these all ended extremely successfully: Gold over the marathon distance, silver over the half marathon distance and bronze over the cross-country long distance. I was able to improve my personal best times once again by several minutes. In autumn 1999, I was ranked 5th in the elite field at the Amsterdam Marathon, and I seemed to have much more sporting potential, which I wanted to unleash in the coming years.

But fate had other plans for me – luckily! In November of the same year, we were involved in a spectacular car accident caused by a drunken driver, involving several vehicles. This accident and its complications made several stays in hospital over a period of weeks necessary, and I suffered from the side effects for months afterwards. Competitions were out of the question in the Olympic year 2000, and so I cancelled my entire competition season and consciously stood back from all sporting activities.

I was obviously almost forced into giving my life a few other splashes of colour. My wish to start a family grew and soon became reality: in autumn 2000, I became pregnant, and my life took a completely different turn, which this book describes.

Having gone through these processes, I can say with certainty – at least in terms of my own personal experience – that you don’t become a successful top athlete solely through professional physical training, but that this happens mainly through internal development processes – provided you are prepared to accept them. One of the most important insights I gained in this respect was that one all too often lets oneself be limited by the well-intentioned tips and advice of others. However, others can only speak from their own horizons of experience, and no one can relieve us of our personal learning processes.

Those who act on their own responsibility with self-confidence and intuitive intelligence, who are courageously prepared to tread new paths, will be able to survive in any extreme situation. From a sporting point of view, they may well be able to deliver top performance for years to come with no “collateral damage” and without sacrificing their health and deep enjoyment of sport. If we do actually learn from our learning processes, then our resilience, our overall joy and serenity in life, our authenticity and integrity also increase.

Despite the two baby breaks, which followed in 2001 and 2003, running was still my much loved hobby. I had been part of the Swiss competition team from 1996 to 2000 and was involved for a second time, between 2007 and 2015, as a national athlete.

During these years, I celebrated winning a total of eighteen elite medals in various running disciplines (marathon, half marathon, 10 000 m, mountain running and cross country running). Due to difficult family circumstances and our business, running marathons was hardly possible so, during those years, I focused in particular on the International Mountain Race and ran a total of eleven European and World Championships, eight of them in the top ten. At the same time, we had great success with the Swiss National Mountain Race Team (in trio) and won a total of seven European and World Championship medals for Team Suisse, including the European Championship title in 2007. It was precisely this success with the national team that gave me excellent and valuable team experience.

However, sport has always been only one of several segments in my life. In those years, at least as much was going on in my private and business life as well. As my self-perception changed and I developed inwardly, my priorities and goals in life also changed. This eventually also affected our partnership of twenty years. After an amicable separation and divorce, my path separated from that of my husband in 2012. I stayed in our house with the two children and took over their upbringing. We had already arranged things in this way earlier on, and it is still the right arrangement for all of us today.

Our children, Christina and Mario, were eleven and nine years old at the time of the divorce, and in the fourth and second year of school, respectively. They came to terms with the new situation quickly and, also after the separation, maintained close contact with their father, who lives nearby.

For the three of us, our new, everyday family life harmonised very well. A few months after the divorce, I also stopped working in our company – after 15 years. I decided to take time out for six months, to enable us to process everything and become familiar with the new situation with as little stress as possible, without repositioning myself professionally. I was clear about wanting to work again on my home territory – health care – later on. I also trained as a cadre athlete with six training sessions a week, which I could easily integrate into everyday life, as in the past. I was still in competition mode, but I was aware that I would probably be retiring from competitive sports in the near future.

I soon came to terms with the past and, in February 2013, began a four-year naturopathy postgraduate course at a college for alternative medicine and complementary therapy. For me, this new course was perfectly compatible with the everyday school life of the children and with sport.