Moments That Matter: On Healing, Perception, and the Return to the Divine

Photography by Anika Schett

The Moments That Shape Us

Everyone of us has a story to tell and we sometimes tend to believe that story is not relevant for us nor others. That’s where we get it wrong, as each story is an accumulation of moments that do matter.

Because in the subtlest moments we encounter key experiences that make or break us.

In these moments we have a choice to make, either we listen in and follow our own guidance or we allow the external world to be our compass.

How has that been going so far?

That’s the reason I chose to look at these moments and started documenting them to understand which decisions I have repeated, not from intuition but due to conditioning imprinted by external sources.

Conditioning and Early Imprints

Between 0–7 years old we function mainly in theta and gradually increasing alpha brainwave states, which is like a more receptive state of mind, and we are literally sponges and absorb everything, how our environment perceives the world, acts upon it, and treats each other. Our beliefs are influenced by how our surroundings interact with each other.

Now I go even further, our ancestral line also plays a role in how our subconscious mind gets influenced, as cycles repeat themselves and many times our behaviour is not rational nor logical, as it is rooted in being triggered subconsciously and we feel like we cannot help ourselves but react, not respond to situations.

Heritage, Trauma, and Separation from Essence

Part of this journey cannot be separated from where I come from. My life is intertwined with my parents’ legacy and the lineage I was born into, both from my Chinese Peranakan heritage and my German heritage. Over time, I began to realise that not everything I was carrying was truly mine. Values, expectations, and ways of being had been passed down quietly, through observation and experience.

At a certain stage, I felt the need to step away from it. Especially when I experienced severe PTSD when my father, the last patriarch of the family, passed away, everything felt heavier, more intense, and harder to navigate.

What I came to understand is that trauma does not only affect the mind. It creates layers that can distance us from our essence. It influences how we perceive, how we feel, and how we respond, often without us being fully aware of it.

And so much of what we live from comes from these layers. Not from clarity, but from protection. Not from who we are at our core, but from what has been built over time.

The work, for me, was not about rejecting where I came from, but about seeing it with more awareness. Understanding what felt true to carry forward, and what no longer needed to be held onto. Because healing is not about erasing the past, but about creating space for what is real to come through.

These moments can break us and set the trajectory of our lives off kilter.

But it is ok, we just need another round to learn our lesson and it is like Google Maps recalculating the journey to our dreams with some detours.

As David Ghiyam expresses it in his kabbalah courses.

The Moment of Awareness

At a certain stage we are done getting the journey recalculated and we become so aware of these detours and the repeating cycles that we just want to be able to sort this out. So then we start embarking on a healing journey that changes and transforms our lives and our personality completely. It is not comfortable and a lot of uncertainty will encounter us, but it is necessary to strip away the old layers of oneself. It is an act of unbecoming.

Control vs Flow

There are phases in life where we move by force, through discipline, control, and the constant need to push forward, believing that effort alone will shape our reality. And then there comes a moment where this way of moving begins to break down.

Not dramatically, but quietly.

You feel resistance where there was once flow. You sense that something is no longer aligned, even if everything still appears to function on the outside.

This is the moment where the question shifts.

Not how much more you can push, but whether you are willing to stop forcing and begin allowing, trusting that the divine can do what control never could.

Breaking Point

For a long time, I lived within that first way of moving. I built, performed, navigated, and sustained a life that, from the outside, appeared coherent and functional. Yet beneath that surface, there were layers of unresolved experience, grief that had never fully been processed, behavioural patterns that repeated themselves without conscious awareness, and a persistent internal dissonance that could not be resolved through effort alone.

I also hit rock bottom various times, financially, emotionally and mentally with burnouts, and physically with diseases. Like a reset button that has been forced upon you by a greater power than yours. Do you surrender or keep fighting. You allow it to happen, surrender and adapt.

The Unravelling

What followed was not a single defining event, but a sequence of moments that gradually dismantled the structures I had relied on. Loss, addiction, emotional withdrawal, and eventually the body itself becoming the point of expression through autoimmune disorder and the development of a benign tumour.

It was within this process that Moments That Matter was written, not as a retrospective reconstruction, but as a lived documentation of what it means to confront oneself without the protection of narrative.

At the same time, it asks the reader to reconsider the significance of the moments that often pass unnoticed, the internal hesitation before a decision, the instinct that is dismissed, the subtle awareness that something is not aligned and yet is overridden.

It is within these moments that the trajectory of a life is continuously shaped, because lives change through accumulation, through decisions, silences, compromises, and occasionally courage.

Perception, Judgment, and the Mirror

From this perspective, another layer reveals itself: judgment.

The fear of being judged by others often reflects a deeper inner habit of judgment. 

What we perceive externally can mirror what remains unresolved within, a truth expressed across different traditions.

As Herbert Marcuse writes, “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.”

What we perceive as reality is often shaped by conditioning, by external structures that we internalise without questioning.

And as Immanuel Kant articulates, “We can have knowledge only of appearances, not of things in themselves.” What we experience is therefore never the full truth, but a perception shaped by our own internal structures, in many ways only a partial truth.

In that sense, the narrative in this book is not objective reality, but a subjective reconstruction of the past, shaped by memory, perception, and interpretation. And yet, within that subjectivity, truth can still reveal itself, often with a tenderness the mind cannot manufacture.

The Return to the Divine

It is here that the most important relationship in my life became undeniable.

I need to incorporate the relationship to the divine as the most important one in my life, to work on it, to nurture it, even though it is tough at some times, and not seek something outside of myself.

This relationship is the most important thing in my life, and I need to return to it, as I allowed the outside noise to take over.

There will be no one on earth knowing what is best for oneself more than yourself and the divine, source, whatever you want to call it.

And it can become messy, uncertain, and also moments where you feel you have been forsaken, but it is not true.

This life is a game, and once you figure out the rules on how to navigate through healing, manifestation, and also manifesting from your true essence and not your soul corrections and emotional wounding, because if we do it will not make us happier, the essence of happiness comes from within.

Illness as a Mirror

There is also a moment many of us encounter when disease enters our lives, where we fall into victimhood and feel it is injustice until you actually dig deeper and you realise that it was about to come this way with all decisions I made and belief patterns I had. Self-worth was in the centre stage of my disease. Living my life according to the conditioned beliefs I thought were good for me, not realising that exactly these belief patterns were not aligned to my soul and life path.

I remember very vividly when I had my biopsy and the needle went in my breast tissue and I could hear the click sound that triggered directly tears rolling down my cheeks and such a deep trauma that I had experienced many lifetimes before and I jumped in the vision and saw.

When I got home I knew I had to change.

I had to stop going out, let go of so-called friends, stop drinking, stop smoking even occasionally, change my diet

but first and foremost change myself and belief patterns to not attract the same lessons again.

Practices That Brought Me Back

Meditation became one of my main tools, my way of returning to stillness and learning how to listen again. In particular, Joe Dispenza’s pineal gland meditation supported me through that period.

Alongside this, movement became equally essential. Kung Fu, Taiji Qigong, dance, and a daily yoga practice allowed me to reconnect with my body in a way that was not about performance, but about awareness, release, and integration. It was through movement that I began to process what the mind could not fully grasp.

Especially Taiji Qigong, alchemising the emotions stuck in my body in the form of pain, discomfort, tight areas in the hips, around the liver and kidneys, lower back pain, knee pain, shoulders.

I literally went into the pain during the long Qigong burning sessions and could feel the layers melt down and release in my body, and Qi flow again in areas where it was blocked.

During these releases I had visions, going into past lives, which over the past seven years has been honed like craftsmanship.

As part of my gifts, I am able to see my past lives in meditation without any plant medicine or psychedelics, and also to sense other people’s past lives and recognise their souls. I never openly spoke about this until now.

This is one of my gifts that I learned to activate through a quantum healing technique learned as an advanced practitioner in Israel called Alchemy Healing, a technique that allows me to facilitate for practitioners to be able to neutralise their ancestral trauma and not be triggered anymore in their daily lives. Through clinical hypnotherapy, they can either stay within this lifetime or move into the past.

There was also a somatic layer to this work, an understanding that trauma is not only held in the mind, but stored in the body, and that it needs to be moved, felt, and released.

What had been held for so long in the hips, liver, kidneys, lungs, and heart space began to move through me. Grief, fear, suppressed anger, and unprocessed emotions that had settled into the system over time started to release, not all at once, but gradually, as the body felt safe enough to let go.

Unbecoming

In a very real way, I had to change my personality. And what became clear is that

healing is not an act of becoming, it is an act of unbecoming. A remembering. A return.

From Experience to Framework

From this, my work evolved.

The ALINA Protocol™ emerged as a structured articulation of what I had lived and observed, integrating regenerative medicine, longevity technologies, and ancient embodied systems into a unified framework.

But before there was structure, there was experience.

This book is that process.

Moments That Matter: A Journey of Healing, Remembering, and Unbecoming

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