Between method, trust, and presence

I've paused briefly and would like to write something "out of the ordinary." Something about HOW I understand my work and HOW I do it.

Throughout my professional life, I have completed numerous training courses and further education programs, become familiar with diverse methods, deepen my understanding of concepts, and learned various tools. These form a solid foundation for me, a viable base upon which I build my work. Methods provide me with orientation, language, and structure. They open up spaces and make processes comprehensible. At the same time, something else has increasingly come to the fore for me over the years: a growing understanding of human nature, professional expertise, clarity, and an increasingly deep trust in my intuition. The knowledge of how to create safe spaces for the people I work with and how important that is. This trust didn't arise suddenly, but rather developed quietly, nurtured by experience, encounters, and mindful self-reflection. Today, I understand intuition not as the opposite of professionalism, but as its maturation. My work is systemic, human-centered, mindful, and conscious. I approach people neither as a practitioner of methods nor as a woman who knows better, but as a human being among human beings, attentive to dynamics, nuances, and what wants to reveal itself in the given context. Methods are available to me, but they do not dictate the process; they are tools for me, not dogmas.

From this perspective, I look forward to 2026 with great anticipation. In the first half of the year, I will be able to continue doing what I love most: conducting restorative circle dialogues together with my colleague from the social services department at the Bielefeld-Brackwede correctional facility, providing violence prevention training, offering expert consultations on child protection and family-like residential groups, and conducting workshops on all sorts of topics such as communication, conflict management, and the like. At the same time, I will be trying new things, exploring new spaces, and further developing my work, particularly at the European level regarding restorative practices and restorative justice in closed systems.

I look forward to encounters, to depth, to vibrancy. And to being present, mindful, clear, and trusting, and to being effective.