Impressions from one year of living in the Clay house 2020 & how we became a couple

At new years eve Jan moved into his newly finished clay house. He describes it as having found a deep peace and waking up every morning with joy instead of stress and anxiety for the first time in his life. He kept building up details of the infrastructure around the clay house, like a water tank and a big pond to store water for the summer, and just for the beauty of it (see pictures below). He also built a compost toilet, a barbecue place, tried to make his own bio gas… The perfect Robinson-Crusoe-Man-sanctuary-dream coming true.

He also gave tremendous physical help for the projects of the land owner as a thank you for living there. I always saw him carry heavy stones and cleaning away garbage in the fisherman´s garden.

I didn´t visit Jan very often that winter, I was too busy with my own move to Graciosa and being at the beginning of the start of a new life – but it was always a magical experience to enter his secret forest garden, a little sanctuary he had created. Once I visited him on horse back, we felt like in an other world where the worries and burden of modern technology doesn´t exist.

I must say in hindsight that I was avoiding Jan. I even got excuses to be mad at him. I understand now that I couldn´t admit that I had deeply fallen in love with him when I had met him the first time one year ago, and he kept mirroring me the man I had been dreaming of my whole life, and what I could now see and physically perceive, after having worked for exactly 7 years on my physical, emotional and spiritual healing. Whenever I met him I was feeling like the Universe is mocking me, holding the biggest Christmas present ever in front of my nose, me, a married woman, Jan surprising me with more details of himself that were matching very exactly some hidden dreams of mine (I had always dreamed to be with a man who can make music, to share just one small example, I even had planned to one day buy my own hangdrum! And to be so connected with nature, with creativity, with his dreams, his body, his own emotions.). How could this not stir up some difficult emotions! It was not allowed to be…

It was only after I came back from Germany in the end of February, my husband staying there for a few weeks more to work for the military. The borders closed right behind me due to the Covid craze.

The end was that I didn´t see my husband anymore for the next 4 months. Which felt like one year, because so much just happened, I experienced tremendous challenges, change and growth, being with the farm in a foreign country all on my own out of a sudden (my sister was living with me for a few months, though). The distance allowed me to really find my inner strength, despite tremendous anxiety, terror and suffering from the local separation and complete uncertainty that the extreme measures brought with them. I understood that the Universe had made a decision for me, when I had been unable to do it.

It was only when Jan connected with me because I heard that he was ill. He wrote to me that he was suffering from bad diarrhea. I asked a few more professional detective questions, in the end I was wondering if he got a blow to his head. In fact he has had an accident, got a concussion when climbing around in the lava cliffs and was lying quite severely sick in his clay house. I offered to work with him (again, he has been my first (free, I was just starting as a practitioner and he was so sympathetic to me) client when we first met one year ago) with my Vagal nerve stimulation device which works with the whole cranial nerves and the physiological structures that also connects to all the organs, but also our subcortical areas and emotional center and our „energies“.

I myself was working with myself with this energetic method and I was on a fast, because I felt I was going through a tremendous shift and my body went into detoxing mode. Something old and heavy in me wanted to be shed and let go, my true self to break through, like a caterpillar going into the pupa state and through metamorphosis. The new country, the distance to all the people of my former life, also a tremendous online health event I was preparing and launching, which also brought me into contact with powerful and very mature personalities, my identity shifting, my energetic field being updated, expanding and starting to run the program for the next level.

Jan just took one session, and he went through a deep emotional release, crying for the whole one hour session. Under tears he was sharing with me after the session that he was so grateful and happy about his life here, but that he was so ready and longing for a relationship. „I have so much love to give“. He even had built the bed of the clay house extendible. He had gone through so many hard life lessons and found the place where he really wanted to live. And he wanted to share this beautiful life. His heart was searching for his mate for life. But he also was in big doubts that he could find someone who would love the life on Graciosa so much like he did. I took his hand and said with almost overwhelming sadness coming up in me: „I know you will make a woman very happy“.

The part in me that was still in some kind of a shock and freeze response after being separated for unknown time by the world wide hysteria and felt abandoned, dependent and incapable and no happy end in sight, was suddenly pushed to the background by a strong new and yet unknown side in me that had a bold and adventurous energy to it.

Jan had to go to help a friend, and I just decided to come with him, my good friend, and I swung myself on the back of his electric cargo bike.

We just started doing more things together and I overcame my shyness and pride and asked him for help with some small tasks in my Quinta. His grounded and balanced presence was so healing for me and at the same time, with the distance and the time apart from my old life, I could with more and more clarity look at everything, see behind my programming. It is enormously painful to admit the magnitude of the own life choices, but also the impact of our unconscious childhood programming and trauma and especially how we have allowed other people to treat us, out of fear to lose the love and because we couldn´t believe that we deserve something so much better or we just didn´t see any way out. There is always a deeper level of understanding what true love really is, how much our hearts can heal.

In the end it was a process that went over a few more months, where I opened up more and more to Jan, letting him more in, allowing more my real feelings and consciously saying good bye to the old (actually, while I write this in 2023, I wonder if this process is ever gonna end). It is impossible to go our life´s path with making everybody happy, we just owe it to the world to make authentic and honest choices. I came to understand: The only healthy way for me is through. There is no turning around anymore, or the energies that have been activated in me would have destroyed me. What was once out of the box couldn´t be shoved back, a growing tree cannot be planted back into his small pot.

In that process I experienced my physical Kundalini Awakening, fueled by intense love hormones, the awakening spring nature in which I was deeply diving in (naked swims in cold ocean water, getting dried on the hot and electromagnetic powerful black lava rocks, being fed the freshest and cleanest foods from the land, nights in the clay house that felt like sleeping in Mother Earth´s womb, finding peace for the first time in my beloved Jan´s arms, completely stopping to use earplugs and a sleep mask for the first time in my life). Jan himself was a clean power grid for me in the whole process, purified by his minimalism lifestyle in sync with the rhythms of nature for two and a half years now, just being there, holding space with his strong and safe (I didn´t know that this existed before – and how healing it is) masculine energy for me, allowing layer after layer of what was holding me back and paining me from my past to surface and transform.

We experienced an indescribable honeymoon time where we just felt like two innocent children playing in the paradise. The whole nature seemed to celebrate with us, it felt like Mother Graciosa was our wedding priestess. Each morning we were woken up by the first rays of sunlight and the birds, opened the windows and the door and made Yoga and breath work in the clay house, ran down the long path to the ocean to swim in the crystal clear water, during the days we explored the island together, met friends or we had to do some works, and in the evening we picked vegetables from the garden, made fire and prepared simple food and tea and watched the stars and the moon appear in the darkening sky.

When my family back home understood the impact of my decisions and my husband came back to the island and we started to fight over our Quinta, Jan gave me the strength and clearmindedness to break through abusive, violent, manipulative and immature patterns by my opponents, but he let me do it, so I experienced tremendous growth in that process, even though it was intense, to say the least. I completely moved into the clay house for some time, where I could find rest and lick my wounds, regain my sanity. Without this powerful and deeply healing counterbalance I could never have gone through this war, my greatest nemesis. I feel like Jan´s sanctuary was purifying me completely within a few hours and I started to feel my own energetic gifts to emerge.

But there were also moments when we were just holding each other and crying deeply. Our love felt so old, so deep, so familiar, but still was like a delicate flower bud, trying to take roots on the material realm, just like the veil of a faint dream, still so tender and fragile… The frail crinkled wings of a butterfly right after leaving his pupa.

Many of the islanders offered their support, being touched by the story and our love.

The moment of truth came when I was faced with losing my own dream home, my Quinta, my other big love. It seemed hopeless, the adversaries too strong, but in the end it was at me to make a shift in consciousness, to own what I really want. I didn´t really believe in a future of happiness for me, I didn´t believe in my capability to take care of this place,…

But all I had to do is to find my Yes. And Jan just gave me the money that was missing to pay the other side out. It was almost all he had left in savings. He just fully trusted me. He just felt a calling here. And I found my verbal strength and suddenly all the tormenting shadows disappeared on their own. In the end the worst enemies are the ones we carry in our psyche decades too long.

We were working like bulls to make a start with the Quinta, but also tremendous loads of super stressful and truly unromantic paperwork around. During the same time I got a load of new online-clients, and Jan also kept working on the clay house garden, which was already providing much more food for us than the Quinta garden.

Read more about the events in the following articles and in the pictures below…

Read here about the unexpected end of our clay house time…