My name is Alexandra Silagyi, born and bread in a small Transylvanian village, in Western Romania. What follows is my personal story so far, distilled in roughly 509 words. It is a 2 minute read. Please take this as a gesture of connection with you rather than a statement of self-importance.

So, when life got hard as a student in the big city of Vienna I ran back to Romania because that is where my nervous system felt safe and connected. When I moved to Amsterdam and gave birth to my son, I ran back to Romania to integrate that. When my daughter arrived, I ran back to Romania. When heartache hit, I of course ran back to my safe haven to find answers. When I felt lonely, I did run there, to that faraway place on the outside where I thought my wellbeing was. Until life invited me to find that sense of safety and connection on the inside, with me, in the here and now. It has not been a gentle invitation, there has been a wide range of emotional and physical discomforts and pains involved. I am still in the process of regeneration and reintegration. Ayurveda has played an important role for me in clarifying how health is only possible when there is understanding of and willingness to connect with what is here and now, within and without. And what is needed to integrate and harmonize the dynamic reality. It’s a lifelong journey of repetition: from harmony to disharmony to repair. Over and over again. No shortcuts. No magic pills. No magic solutions. It is dedicated work. It is also why Ayurveda considers it supportive to live with the seasons in terms of what we eat and what we do. Nature is a teacher, and its processes are close to our human condition. We are cycling together through the same phases, again and again while the aim is to simply find comfort in what is inside and outside: the noise or the silence, the city or the village, the winter or the summer, the joy or the sorrow. Anywhere and, well, always would be ideal but as often as possible seems realistic.