I’m quite the neat freak—whether it’s bookshelves, shoes and clothes, kitchen cabinets, or garden beds; whether it’s poetry or journalistic texts: Time and again, I’m rearranging, dusting, ironing, and reorganizing; things get stacked back and forth, folded into boxes and then hung back on hangers, weeded and replanted, edited and rewritten yet again, until eventually a sense of coherence emerges.

Sometimes that never happens, so all that constant shuffling around can sometimes feel like running on a hamster wheel.

I’ve often been asked what the point of all this fuss is, and whether I might not have something more meaningful to do than this constant hustle and bustle, which makes everyone around me nervous and doesn’t bring me any lasting satisfaction either.

And then, in the spring of 2024, I came across Benita Cantieni. She was promoting her new book, and I practically stumbled upon some of her social media posts.

Huh, what exactly is she doing there? Oh, I don’t get it.

Somehow, it seemed exciting. Different.

She had obviously discovered something that made her very happy and that she wanted to share with the whole world.

Their contributions shone like a promise: One of them had reached the ripe old age of 75 and seemed as sprightly and agile as a young cat.

And no Botox or fillers—she looked different, just natural.

My curiosity was piqued, so I wrote to her. She sent me “Staying Flexible and Strong for Life with a Tiger’s Spirit” to the editorial office of “Drogistenstern.”

From then on, the book went everywhere with me. I read and read, tried out the exercises, and was amazed. The steep slope and the hinged lids soon proved their worth—especially when weeding and tidying up. It was so much easier now.

And what Benita Cantieni wrote about the pelvic floor also made sense to me.

Why hadn’t anyone told me this sooner?! I stopped taking the elevator and doing those tampon-lifting exercises, and was thrilled to have discovered my levator ani muscle. My bladder relaxed, and it stayed tight even when I sneezed or hopped around.

I continued to immerse myself in the book and ordered the other books as well.

Time and again, I had to Google anatomical terms. I had absolutely no idea where this much-talked-about psoas muscle was located, and how on earth one was supposed to move the coccyx—one mystery after another.

It was as if I were setting out on a journey to a completely foreign country—just like Jules Verne when he set out for the center of the Earth.

Wherever I looked, I discovered wonders: networks of muscles that had previously been dormant, and suppleness in joints that had been frozen in pain for decades.

My shoulder blades nestled softly against my back, my sitting bones throbbed, my diaphragm stretched taut like a trapeze, the abdominal wall became long and elastic, the straightened leg axes took the pressure off my arthritic knee, and the crooked middle toes began to straighten out.

I found an inner order that gradually guided me toward an organic, natural balance.

This isn’t about a divine—but rather a vivatomic—reorganization of the body. I’m not really into God anyway. But Benita Cantieni’s principles of Vivatomy® made perfect sense to me right away, intuitively.

And the more I learn about it, the more fascinated I am by this incredible adventure into the living world of the body.