Your Container. Your Home Coming

Today marked my twenty-five-year anniversary of living in Zurich, Switzerland.
When people find out I live in Switzerland, they often say, “You are so lucky”.

I understand why.
Switzerland is stunning. It is safe. It is organised and run in a way that very few places on earth are. I do not take any of it for granted.

Yet luck is not how I got here, and it is not what has kept me here for twenty-five years.
This quarter of a century was never just about rooting in a place. It was also about rooting in myself.

In 2001, I graduated from university in Indonesia.
As I prepared my next step, I made a prayer to the universe. I asked, quite specifically, for a place with clean air and clean water.
A place where a single woman could live feeling safe, day and night.
A place where I could work for an international company that took its people seriously and invested real resources in them.

Yet the deeper reason why I asked this was that I needed a place where I could hear myself, my inner voice.
A space where being different would not feel like a weight, or at times like a punishment.
A container for my life where I would have the physical and energetic space to get to know the real me.

A couple of years prior to this prayer, I lived in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, working with an international group of young people called AIESEC International.

Being in that kind of environment, I was naturally reflecting often about who I was and how I interacted with people.

I realised that while I had moments when I was outgoing with others, I found it difficult to keep my heart consistently open, to really let people in, to let people experience the true depth that I already carried. I did it so selectively. There was more to me that I let them experience.

I listened and met others more often than I let others meet me. There was a lot of internal processing before I truly opened myself up to them.

Sitting deeper with this, I realised that I did not actually feel safe being who I was. I had the feeling that very few would truly understand me, and that it was better not to show myself fully.

It was clear to me that my real issue was not the other person, but my relationship with myself.
I wanted to love myself more, and for that, I needed to face the questions: “Who am I, truthfully? What makes it so difficult to love myself?”

I knew there was a lot to unpack there.
I did not know how I would do it or how long it would take. Now I know it is a lifelong journey.

Despite not knowing the how or the how long, I knew for certain that I needed a specific kind of place to do so, and Indonesia was not that place.

Indonesia was where I grew up and where my family lived.

I loved Indonesia, but I often felt restricted. It was a place that carried many obligations, expectations, and rules for me. I did not have a consistently strong enough backbone to say no to many of them then. In addition to that, culturally, personal privacy and boundaries were not always respected.
This was one of my struggles growing up. I felt I often hit invisible walls around me.

While I loved my family deeply, I knew Indonesia was not the right place to return to after Rotterdam for what I needed and wanted.
I did not yet know where the right place was.

I asked myself whether I was running away from responsibility by not returning to Indonesia.
At the time, part of me felt the guilt.
Having said that, the inner pressure to get to know the real me was very strong, a now-or-never kind of feeling.
In the end, I found a middle ground that was acceptable to me at the time: to live in my own separate yet safe space, while still showing up from there for my family. It was a comforting enough choice for me.

I did not know the answer would be Switzerland. I had never lived here.

When an opportunity opened at UBS in Zurich and they flew me in for the final assessment, they asked me to stay a couple of extra days to simply feel whether I could be comfortable in the city.

I did, and I knew within those days that I felt safe.

My heart felt settled, even when everything was new and I had to build my life from scratch.

I often laugh when I remember that my plan was to stay for eighteen months and then move to London. Here I am, still here, twenty-five years later, even more settled.

The place where we root is our container.
It impacts our lives more profoundly than we often realise.

Some of us consciously choose where we live by selecting a specific place.
Some of us, like myself, decided on the experience we wanted to have and received guidance as to where that could be.
Some of us simply found ourselves, or were placed in a location, and stayed.

I believe that regardless of how we arrive where we are, there is a deeper reason why we are there.
We are meant to be there in this moment.

I only began to understand what Switzerland was for me in full much later.
Someone asked me recently whether Switzerland was a good place to live. I realised that the answer was neither short nor straightforward.

In the living of it, you do not always see the shape of what a place is doing for you. You simply feel it, or you feel the absence of it when it is gone.

Looking back now, I can say it clearly: Switzerland is my home and my threshold, both in one.

My home because I can breathe well here, feel nourished, and rest well.
Yes, of course, I feel at home in Switzerland also for its beauty, its structure, its wonderful stillness and quietness.
I feel there is spaciousness and groundedness in it. The small big cities (I love how big cities here are not big!), the lakes, the rivers, the hills, the mountains, the seasons, the air that is exactly what I asked for.
I also love that it is quiet in the evenings.

All of this gave me something I had wished for: a physical environment that was genuinely nourishing, where simply being outside and breathing is an act of restoration. I did not know how much I needed that until I had it.

Switzerland has also been the threshold through which my deeper self could walk, again and again, for me to come home to myself.
It held the conditions for the transmutation journey I had chosen to undertake.

Switzerland, in its neutrality, did not take sides in my inner wars. It simply witnessed them.
In that witnessing, over twenty-five years, I gradually reclaimed the self that I had hidden two and a half decades ago.

This reclamation was not always gentle.

I never knew there was such a thing as burnout until the UBS Social Counsellor diagnosed me with it at the end of 2008.

At that time, Switzerland was one of the few countries in the world that already recognised burnout as a real and serious condition, long before it became commonly understood elsewhere.
I do not believe it was a coincidence that I ended up here.

All of the support I needed to rise after the burnout, including therapy, energy work, subconscious reprogramming, and somatic healing, was available in Zurich.
I had never heard of these approaches before. They were not as mainstream as they are today, and yet I found them.

I worked with them in privacy, even when many people around me would not have understood why I did not pursue more conventional support such as a psychologist or a coach.

I felt safe choosing approaches and methods that resonated with me, without having to explain myself to anyone. Just resonance, and nothing else. Their respect for privacy is one of the things I truly appreciate here.

In Zurich, I felt I could move more freely to follow what my heart and body wanted, rather than what was considered normal. Somehow, I did not feel the weight of what is acceptable as much here. I felt welcome to be different.

The interesting thing is that my experience of Zurich and Switzerland may not be typical.
I have had conversations with others who found Zurich or Switzerland too rigid, too suffocating, too inflexible, too small, too boring.

I understand that.

These same qualities land differently depending on the person and their needs.

Switzerland has been a loving container, sturdy enough to hold me when I cracked myself open and rebuilt. Its energy is grounding and stable for me, to this day.

Now, your turn.

I share all of this not to romanticise my journey.

I know how painful it is to be somewhere that does not feel right, without knowing what to do about it, without knowing whether you can do anything about it, or whether you even have the right to want something different.

I also know that not all of us are in a position to choose.
Some are restricted by circumstances beyond their control.
Some are living in places they did not ask for and cannot yet leave.

May this reflection and invitation sit with you too.

Your container, even when you did not consciously choose it, is in a relationship with you.
Something is being offered there – a quality, a mirror, a community, a particular kind of stillness or friction – that your journey to become more fully yourself may need right now, even if you cannot yet see it clearly.

The container does not have to be perfect to be purposeful.
You do not have to have chosen it to be in a real relationship with it.

Before you move on from this reflection, I invite you to pause and sit with one or all of these questions:
• What is this place already offering me that I have not yet been willing to receive?
• What does it ask of me, and what might it be building in me, that I have not yet acknowledged?
• If I do have the freedom to choose: what do I actually need my next place to be and do for me?

There are no right answers, just honest ones.

You may find that where you already are has more to offer than you have allowed yourself to receive.
You may find that it is time to ask for something different.
Wherever it may lead you.

And, Switzerland, thank you for twenty-five years of being exactly what I needed.

With love,

Astuti

💛💜

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“May the remembrance within you bloom in perfect time”

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