The Full Circle

I was surprised by how powerful a Facebook memory took me back through the memory lane of a big cycle I recently completed. If you are on your life-changing journey, or completing it right now, I’d invite you in and sit with me in this reflection.

Dubrovnik, May 21, 2015.

I was standing not far from Pile Gate in the old town, waiting for my taxi to the airport, returning to Zurich after five days at a conference called AFest. I was nervous and excited at the same time. I knew I was going home with a different commitment to myself, and if I kept it, I had no idea where it would take me.

I made a life changing decision on day zero of the conference. After a 4.5-hour session guided by Lisa Nichols, I walked back to my hotel room with a question I couldn’t shake loose: “Until when are you going to keep ignoring this voice inside you?”.

The truth is, I had been hearing this voice since 2005. It asked me to get to know the deeper parts of myself. I answered by researching a certification in coaching… and then I put it back in the drawer. “I don’t know enough about life yet”, I convinced myself then.
My soul didn’t give up. She poked again, in that less-than-five-minute walk from the conference hall to my bedroom ten years later.

I remember sitting quietly at the edge of my bed. Silence, and then a click.
I said out loud: “Okay, Universe, I surrender. I am saying yes to what it is that I am meant to be and do here… on one condition. Give me clear guidance. I have no idea what I need to do. Show me so clearly that I won’t miss the sign. I promise I’ll do it”.
Cathartic, yet I slept well that night.

The next day, I met Marisa Peer and experienced her hypnosis method, a way of working directly with the subconscious mind to change your life. My soul nudged me. Five months later, I became one of her first forty students.
This was the first door. I didn’t know then where it would lead. I only knew it opened and I entered, wholeheartedly.

As I write this now, I see it clearly.

Dubrovnik was not the beginning. It was the moment I said yes to what had already begun.

The beginning was early December 2008.

I was sitting at my desk at work in Zurich. I had a successful career at UBS. 2008 was a very difficult period for the bank. Unconsciously, I absorbed a lot from my team and my environment. I showed up as I always had – pushed through, carried it all quietly, and ignored the depletion that had been growing over time.

That morning, I remember feeling my body start to shut down slowly. I had a couple of meetings and all I could think was: “When is this going to end?”.

By lunch time, I couldn’t stand up when a colleague came to fetch me for lunch. The exhaustion had gone so deep it had become structural. My body and my mind stopped talking to each other.

“You are experiencing burnout. This is very serious. We need to do something…I don’t want to have to refer you to a burnout clinic if it gets worse”, said the social counsellor at the bank. I am deeply thankful that UBS offered this kind of support for their employees then.

I had been operating on a particular kind of fuel for a long time: overachieving, over-responsibility, over-protecting the people I cared about, and putting myself last. This was my default. I didn’t have language for it then. I only knew that by December 2008, I had run out of fuel.

The fear of what I experienced then made me vow to myself straight after “No matter what it takes, this would be the first and the last time I would put myself in this situation”.

I had not chosen burnout. I simply never realised I had a choice to live beyond the unconscious patterns running me. In the vow moment, I chose to live a conscious life. This was the real beginning.

What followed was years of transformation. Therapy. Energy healing. Coaching. Shiatsu. Pilates. Somatic work. Subconscious reprogramming. Spiritual practice. Each one was valuable.
Patterns shifted, burdens lightened, moments of genuine relief arrived. I felt myself again.

By 2010, my body regained its strength and vitality again. I felt more present in my own life. I began to understand what I wanted more of, and what wounds still needed healing.
I left UBS at the end of 2011 on a high. I had an extraordinary career trajectory there.
I chose to leave. This time, I listened to my soul. I took four months of sabbatical and set up my own international executive search business in 2012.

I wanted time, freedom, the space to breathe and be fully myself. Being my own boss gave me some of that. However, my inner foundation had not yet changed.

Then came Dubrovnik – my conscious yes to change the inner foundation of my life.
In 2015, I surrendered to my soul plan.

Upon returning to Zurich, I began to transition out of executive search and through the first door into what I had been moving toward for years: getting an education and certification to work with the subconscious mind (RTT method by Marisa Peer) for lasting change.

Behind that door was another door. And another. And another.

The journey that followed was not a straight line.
It moved in two rhythms I now know to call ascension and descension: cycles of clearing and rooting, upgrading and integrating, that happened in layers, over years in ways the outside world couldn’t see or understand.

There was grief throughout.

For every version of myself I had to let go of. For every layer of the old identity I shed. For everything I had associated with safety and security that I had to part ways with. For the relationships that no longer resonated.

For the high-achiever who earned her worth through how useful she was to others. The woman who kept giving what she had not yet learned well to receive. The woman who kept anticipating danger to protect the people she loved.

I grieved the comfort of things that had told me I was safe – possessions, titles, regular income. All of it had to go, for a reason I didn’t fully understand at the time.

I know it now: my soul wanted to experience true worthiness and belonging.
Not worthiness earned through having or doing or being validated by others.
It is the felt sense of being worthy and belong simply because I exist. That I, in fact, am my main safety net.

I went through all of it alone.
Not alone in the sense of having no one. I had loving family and friends, and they mattered.

I lived alone in Zurich. I came home to an empty apartment to meet me every day, through all of it. There were not many distractions, just countless intense honest conversations with self.

Every realisation, every decision, every grief, every shedding, every dark night…I met alone, while also going to the grocery store, answering emails, paying bills, helping others through my work and showing up to life as it kept moving.

Transmutation was not something I did on the side. It was the life.
I was changing at a level people around me couldn’t quite perceive or be part of.

The old version of me, the one they knew, the one that was familiar and legible, was completing its arc. The new one had not yet found full form.

For a long time I existed in the in-between, and the world doesn’t always know what to do with someone living there.

I stayed in it anyway. It became obvious to me what I wished I had and didn’t, and I did what I could to meet these needs myself.
I kept going because I had declared surrender, and I meant it.

Eventually, one thing became clear.

This realisation – that transmutation and life were never two separate things – also showed me my reason for being.

Looking back, I see clearly what I needed during those years.
I needed a consistent, reliable presence.
Someone I can ask questions of.
Someone I can sit with to process my feelings and my insights.
A safe witness to my becoming without their projection onto me.
Someone who feels safe so I can open the deeper parts of myself in their presence.
A mirror to see my own beauty that I could not alone.
A companion for the in-between that does not flinch at what I experienced.
Someone who understands what is going on.
A presence that makes me feel that I am not alone in this.

I found pieces of this in my therapists, my coach, my teachers, my friends, my family. I would not be here without any of them. Yet, there was no single presence that could offer all of it, consistently, across the whole arc of what I was going through.

Over time, I learned to become more and more of these for myself. My need was deeper and more constant than what any one person could meet.

All these years later, I realized that I am now what I needed.

I am a living field, literally, which means I embody and emanate what I have become: safety, love, truth, sovereignty, and freedom. These are my baseline frequencies now.

In my presence, regardless of what role I play – a friend, a sister, a partner, a guide, a stranger – something in them settles, their nervous system relaxes, and they become more open to themselves.
How do I know? Their sharing and what I witness.

I became this because of everything I’ve been through.
The burnout. The grief. The illness. The solitude. The joy. The victories. The years of doing the work without knowing where it was going. The aloneness of the in-between. All of it was the becoming.

Today, eighteen years after that morning at my desk in Zurich, eleven years after Dubrovnik, I am sitting with this Facebook memory and feeling something I can finally name:

I became what I needed.

This is the first in a series of reflections I’ll be sharing about what it means to change the inner foundation of a life, beyond its content.

What it takes and what it means to live in alignment with your soul’s design and plan.

For today, from my heart to yours, let me leave you with this:
If you are in the middle of something hard;
If you feel so alone and exhausted in moving through the decision that you believe in;
If you have done the work and found yourself returning to the same ground;
If you doubt whether your outer life will ever meet your inner one…

I see you. I was there.
Keep at it. You are not alone. I am here, even when we don’t meet physically.

With love,

Astuti

💛💜

If this transmission nourished you and you feel moved to offer a gift in return, you are welcome to: offer a gift · share this sanctuary

“May the remembrance within you bloom in perfect time”

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Click here for a free Clarity call with Astuti: https://astuti-martosudirdjo.youcanbook.me/

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