I Built The Body. It Wasn't Enough.
I was seventeen when I first understood the difference between looking strong and being strong.
I had the body by then. I'd built it on purpose. And the fear was still there. The insecurity. The feeling of not quite belonging. It had all just learned to wait underneath a more impressive surface.
If you've ever reached the result you worked so hard for and felt nothing change inside, you know what I mean. This is the story of what came after, and why it's the base of everything I do with clients now.
Where it started
I grew up in a culture that put physical strength above almost everything else. Boys trying to become men. Competition. The pressure to belong and to be better than everyone else at the same time. The body was currency. And the body was a performance. You built it for others to see, even if you told yourself it was for you.
Privately, I was looking for something else. Safety. Control. The kind of self-mastery that would finally make everything else fall into place: the fear, the insecurity, the not-quite-belonging. The logic seemed solid. If I could build my body exactly the way I wanted, the inside would follow.
So I built it.
The compliments came. The recognition came. The fear and the shame didn't leave. They just learned to wait under a more impressive surface.
What succeeding didn't fix
From the outside, I was doing well. In how I looked, and in what my body could do. I'd gone a long way down that road, further than most people around me were interested in going.
But inside, it didn't match. The compliments didn't land. The recognition didn't touch anything real. I had a high-minded philosophy about skill, depth and real capability over looks, and almost nobody around me was interested in it or equipped to get it. They saw what it looked like. That was enough for them. It wasn't close to enough for me.
I still couldn't fully be who I wanted to be, or figure out how. The physical road was clear, and I was on it. But what I was really looking for wasn't at the end of it.
The thread that was always there
Philosophy was never separate from any of this. It ran alongside everything, sometimes underneath it.
I went to church with my mother as a kid, because I wanted to. I chose philosophy at school when I could have picked something easier. I was drawn early to East Asian thought: Daoism, Buddhism, the martial traditions that saw the body as a place of practice, not performance. And alongside that, to the esoteric, the mystical, the animistic, including my own indigenous heritage. A holistic, undogmatic view of the world that refused to separate the physical from the philosophical, the body from the spirit.
What I was looking for, I think, was a way of being in my body that the fitness world couldn't give me. Not a better program. A different relationship with being alive.
The traditions that moved me most had one thing in common: they saw the body as something to live in, not something to conquer.
Meeting people who lived it
The turning points in my development were almost always people. Not systems or methods. People who embodied what they talked about. Thinkers who were also practitioners. Teachers whose bodies told the same story as their words.
Meeting Ido Portal was one of those moments. Here was someone working exactly where I'd been searching: movement as philosophy, the body as a lifelong practice instead of a destination. It felt like permission. Proof that what I'd been reaching for was real, and livable.
There were others. Some I'll name, some I won't. What they had in common was the ability to close the gap between knowing and doing. Between understanding embodiment and the daily, unglamorous practice of it.
Eight years of ritual
For eight years I worked at Vabali Spa in Berlin, leading sauna infusions, meditations, ceremonies and rituals for the people who came through. Looking back, it shaped me as much as anything I did in training. Maybe more.
Vabali is a nude spa. On a normal day, I was around several hundred naked bodies. Thousands a month. That kind of constant, unavoidable exposure does something no amount of thinking about body image can. It confronts you, again and again, with bodies as they actually are. Not performed, not curated, not dressed up for the occasion.
I came in confident and physically capable. I'd built that. But confidence on top of self-consciousness isn't the same as being free of it. The exposure worked on me too. Slowly, just by adding up, layers of self-consciousness I didn't know I still had started to dissolve. Not through effort. Through being there, every day, until it stopped being something to manage and became something to live in.
What I saw in others shaped me just as much. Something happens to people in a space like that. When the performance layer comes off, literally, something underneath shows up. People come together differently. They soften. They become more themselves. The usual social armour stays in the locker. What's left is more honest, more human, and often more tender than anything that happens when everyone is dressed.
It was a living lab for everything I now understand about embodiment. Not as an idea. As something I saw every day.
During those years I also used the sauna and ice bath as training tools, daily and systematically, long before heat and cold became a wellness trend. I was pushing the edges of what I could do and recover from, and the heat and cold were central to that. Not a protocol. Just part of how I looked after a body I was asking a lot from.
Leaving Vabali was one of the steps toward the work I do now. Not a break from it. A focusing of it.
When my body stopped me
At the end of a year of heavy, progressive lifting, the hardest training I'd ever done, I herniated two discs.
It should have been devastating. For someone whose identity was so tied to physical capability, a spinal injury at the peak of it had every reason to be the breaking point. It wasn't.
The practice held. Not the training program. The practice. The inner orientation I'd spent years building. The ability to feel what was happening instead of pushing through it. The foundations that saw difficulty as information, not just an obstacle. I met the injury from inside a relationship with my body that was already built on something other than performance.
That was the proof I didn't know I'd been working toward. The somatic foundation carried me through something physical strength alone never could have.
The life that holds all of this
I've been with my partner for eighteen years. We have an eight-year-old daughter. Our relationship has changed, not despite the work I've done on myself, but alongside it, and sometimes because of it. There have been periods of deep personal searching. Parts of myself I hadn't had the courage or the clarity to look at before. The kind of inner work that can't be separated from the body, from philosophy, from the ongoing project of becoming more fully and honestly yourself.
I don't separate these threads. The personal and the professional, the physical and the philosophical, the private and the practitioner. They're all part of one inquiry. MB Practice exists because of all of it, not just the parts that look like credentials.
Why this matters for you
I'm not telling this story to prove authority. I'm telling it because the work I do with clients comes straight out of it.
The seventeen-year-old who built the body and still felt the fear: I know him from the inside. The one who trained consistently and couldn't understand why it wasn't fixing the right things. The one who got more out of a Daoist text or a moment of real stillness than out of any personal record. The one whose body stopped him completely and who had to find out what his practice was actually made of.
That's where this coaching comes from. Not a method borrowed from somewhere else. A practice grown out of one life, and offered now to people who recognise something of themselves in it.
If your body has been a project you push instead of a home you live in, that's where we start.