No Right Angles: the Unregulated Life

A tale of how certainty proved limiting and limitations proved liberating.

The Move That Made No Sense on Paper

In May 2021, my husband saw a Facebook post from an old friend and colleague: “Who wants to start work in the X hotel spa in Austria next Monday?”

“Me,” he wrote back playfully from our balcony in Berlin, the city where he was born and where I had lived for over 20 years.

Like much of the world, we were not in love with lockdown in a big city and we had nowhere to go to wait it out. His business had collapsed overnight and there were no concerts for me to play. I had been commuting to my university in Freiburg, in southern Germany, for 4 years already anyway. With both of us at a professional impasse and in the absence of all the amenities a city could offer, there was actually not much of a reason to stay.

“Are you serious?” I asked when he told me about it.

“I don’t know, maybe,” he said. “Let’s just go there and see what it’s like. You’ve always wanted to live in the mountains.”

This was true, but I still thought he was out of his mind. For one thing, I had always said that if we moved again, it would have to be a logical move to put us closer to my university. Now he was contemplating a move to a remote Austrian ski resort located a good 10 hours away from Freiburg. I knew it could never work, but he insisted we at least go there together for his interview in June so I could decide after being there.

It was a typical resort town, devoid of life beyond outdoor stores and après-ski parties. But then we took the lift up the mountain, and when I saw the sea of peaks rolling out beneath our glass-enclosed gondola, a little tear escaped my eye. How I had missed the mountains! I had spent 5 summers of my youth at the Aspen Music Festival, and mountain life was my idea of paradise.

the view from the top

Illogical Proposal

Before I knew it, we were getting serious about it. How would it work? How would I travel to my university? Where would we live, since the resort town was not an option? I went into search mode, a skill I had perfected as a freelance musician, having spent years of my life organizing my own travel and accommodation. I found a cute town south of Salzburg and north of the resort town that looked absolutely perfect. It was on the main train line and still sat right at the edge of the Alps. A month later, we came back to go apartment hunting. The first one we saw, the rooftop apartment of a 16th-century building in the heart of the old town, was The One. And so, contrary to all logical life planning and conventional wisdom, we relocated our life to the Austrian Alps in August 2021. I would commute from there to Freiburg every other week, spending 5-6 days there cramming in 2 weeks’ worth of teaching into one. The journey was ‘only’ 7 hours one way.

If at this point you are questioning my sanity, you should. And also google how many cello professorships exist in the area, and how many of those tenured positions become available in any given 20-year period, or even any 30-year period. When you have worked yourself into such a highly specialized niche, there are sacrifices involved in sticking to it.

After our self-orchestrated move, which transpired under now hilarious but at the time extremely stressful circumstances, we spent the first night on our bare mattress on the floor. I had never felt a sense of welcome from a building before, but on that night I heard those crooked, ancient walls whisper, ‘You can rest now. You’re finally home,’ and I felt the energetic proximity of the wooded alpine foothills that cradle the town on one side like half a hug.

A friend of mine used to come over to my place in Berlin and say, “it looks like you just moved in,” even after I had already lived in any given place for years. I joked that my real home was the German railway system. The interior decoration of most of my former residences was such that I could pack everything up in a day or two without leaving any trace of my existence. White walls, minimalist furniture, hardly any pictures or plants unless they were gifts I didn’t have the heart to throw out.

I told myself this was because I simply preferred minimalism, which was true, but I suspect it was also an unconscious epigenetic holdover from ancestors on both sides of my family who had to be on the go for centuries, whether due to war, economic necessity, or religious/racial persecution.

I filled the Austrian apartment with plants, pictures, framed photographs, blemished but gorgeous midcentury furniture from the bargain antique shop across the street. It was a universe apart from the ultramodern, faceless greige of the brand-new Berlin apartment building we had last inhabited.

one of the bargain beauties I sadly missed out on

Wayfinding

In 2022, I took a sabbatical from teaching for a semester. I couldn’t believe I was allowed to call this place home. I lived with the constant low-grade guilt of having somehow cheated my way out of city life and everyday misery.

While on sabbatical, I took Martha Beck’s training to become a Wayfinder, as she calls us—people who can sense their way through the world by perceiving their inner life and surroundings with great nuance and guide others to do the same. I loved the training and the people I met in it, people who have become some of my closest friends. I was excited and inspired by the work of accessing intuition and facilitating that access for others. It occurred to me while taking the training that my husband already had many of these qualities, that his Wayfinding had instigated our move to my dream location.

I was playing fewer concerts and realizing that I was fine with that. I had never had the physical constitution to be a full-time touring musician anyway, and I now began to cherry-pick my performance opportunities and focus on the musical partners and projects where real magic could happen. I did not need to do that 100 times a year; maybe I didn’t even need to do it 20 times a year if it meant leaving home and spending countless hours in trains and planes, at stations and airports. I was learning to put music in a different category, one that made more sense in my new home. It began to morph from a career identity to a healing medium; I was growing more interested in its transformative qualities than its ability to dazzle and entertain.

Meanwhile, I began to settle into the manifold quirks of living in a 500-year-old building the way one gets to know the idiosyncrasies of a roommate—some charming, others annoying. Each window is a different size and requires a bespoke technique to open it, not to mention different lengths of curtain rod. The electrical wiring to the buzzer works when it wants to. Some of the walls are impenetrable medieval stonemasonry; others are 1980s drywall (the former breaks your drill bit, the latter crumbles under anything heavier than a picture frame). There is not a single right angle to be found in any room.

I started to make friends in my new town and was delighted to find a small community of other artists, seekers, nature lovers, and gardeners here. I immediately grew to love the fact that I could step outside with just a backpack and walk up a mountain from the front door of my apartment building. I had come to cherish the life of the village—something like a New York neighborhood with all the stores, services, and doctors you need within a few blocks, only transported to the Alps and dressed up in country-baroque pastels.

This was the first place that felt like home to me.

Not the first place that felt like home since moving to Europe at 20.

The first place that had ever felt like home.

The Unregulated Life

During the first months of my Wayfinder training, I was blissfully unaware of the fact that Austria does not recognize coaching certifications from the International Coaching Federation or any other institution other than their own. I did not know that the exact modality I was learning would only be a viable option for me in Austria if I topped it off with a 3-year degree in social work. I have a lot of respect for social work, and I know just enough about it to know that I am no social worker.

Germany, on the other hand, where I was still working and paying taxes, recognized my ICF certification, but that would mean leaving the one place that had ever felt like home in over 4 decades of life on this planet, and I was not prepared to do that.

I was not going to move even ten minutes back across the border (which is indeed a ten-minute drive or a half-hour walk from my apartment). This was clearly where I was supposed to be; my Wayfinder training confirmed it on a daily basis. We were instructed to listen to the subtle cues of our bodies and our intuitions, and what could be more definitive than the walls and the woods whispering their welcome?

So what was I going to do about this certification hurdle? I was not prepared to go back to school to get a degree that didn’t interest me, nor was I prepared to move.

Then came the summer of 2025, and if you’ve read any of my earlier essays, you know that I got Lyme disease and fell into a deep Snow White burnout sleep. Funny aside: in the original Grimm Brothers version, Snow White is awakened not by the prince’s fervent kiss but by the prince’s servants, who stumble while carrying the still comatose maiden in her coffin, whereupon the poisoned apple is dislodged from her throat.

My apple was laced with numerous poisons: the belief that I owed it to my parents and ancestors to adhere to my chosen profession, the belief that I needed the stamp of the institution to feel important and secure, the work ethic of putting my obligations and everyone else before my health and wellbeing. The apple is good, said society, it is nourishing. Many of my friends and colleagues were eating the apple and they seemed fine or were at least coping. But I was not.

When I awoke from my slumber months later and spat out the apple, I was no longer amenable to compromise. I looked around and saw that the story I had been telling myself was very different from the one unfolding in real time. I started to put together the pieces.

I was now living in my dream village.

Said village was 1000 kilometers from my workplace.

The classical music subculture where I’d spent much of my life was losing its appeal for me.

I was now using music to heal, not to entertain.

Then I started collecting feedback from people about the sessions I was giving. I read terms like ‘frequency’ and ‘energy,’ ‘calmer nervous system’ and ‘groundedness,’ ‘higher consciousness’ and ‘deep spiritual connection.’

And I had an epiphany, which a friend of mine calls a ‘duh moment,’ because most epiphanies are just facts about yourself that you’ve been ignoring.

I was not coaching people. I was teaching them to regulate their nervous system through deep listening. I was using music to directly facilitate healing and higher consciousness.

When you know that going back is no longer an option, the options for going forward suddenly multiply, like new tributaries after a flood—our town should know; it survived a terrible flood just hours after our first visit, in July 2021.

Again, it was my husband, my fellow Wayfinder, who catalyzed the next step. He looked up the list of unregulated professions in Austria, those that require no additional certification, and found the category that described almost to a tee what people were saying about my work:

“Guidance on achieving physical and energetic balance through music.”

And then I laughed out loud, imagining myself uttering these words at a university faculty meeting, seeing the blank, maybe pitying faces of colleagues as they confirmed for themselves once and for all that I had completely lost it.

And that was fine for me, because I would rather be seen as a deranged witch spewing bits of apple onto the table than forever remain a comatose maiden with no agency.

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If you're curious to know more

What happens when a fully logical life plan stops working?

Sometimes every reasonable next step is exhausted and the way forward has nothing to do with what makes sense on paper. It emerges instead through subtle cues in the body and in one's surroundings that would never come up in a rational planning process. Moving toward what feels intuitively right, even against every practical argument, can turn out to be the right call in hindsight.

How do you know when burnout has actually taken hold, not just stress?

Burnout can look like a prolonged, disorienting collapse rather than ordinary tiredness, a period of illness and depletion severe enough to force a full stop. On the other side of it, the story you'd been telling yourself no longer matches what's actually happening in your life. Waking up from that collapse often means becoming unwilling to compromise on things you'd tolerated for years.

What is nervous system regulation through music?

It is a way of guiding people toward a calmer nervous system and a felt sense of groundedness through deep listening to live, improvised music; it has a healing and regulatory function distinct from performing music to entertain an audience. Clients have described effects like a calmer nervous system, groundedness, and deep connection.

Is this coaching?

No. This work is guidance toward physical and energetic balance through music, a distinct, unregulated category in Austria, separate from coaching, which is a professionally regulated term there requiring credentials this modality doesn't use.

Why would someone give up an established, tenured career for something with no clear professional category?

Because staying inside a defined, credentialed profession sometimes means ignoring a shift that has already happened, from using a skill to entertain or achieve toward using it to heal. Once returning to the old path is no longer possible, new and previously invisible directions tend to open up.