Expressing Joy Through Words and Waves: Livelifelikeanocean Coffee Chat

I did an Instagram live a while ago. You can listen to it by clicking on the button below or reading the transcript in this blog article.

Hello and welcome to the livelifelikeanocean podcast.
My name is Sandra and today I want to invite you to a little coffee chat. I have done an instagram live, and I did a free flow life and I had no notes. It was just an experiment and I think maybe you like it and have a little listen to it and enjoy it. Maybe I will do a few more in the future.
It’s a little introduction about livelifelikeanocean and how I started my swimming journey.

Welcome to the first coffee chat. I just want to talk to you a bit about livelifelikeanocean and introduce myself to you. So I thought a little live video is a great idea for that.
I’m a bit nervous because I don’t like to be in front of a camera. I love to be behind the camera and take photographs and write.

Writing and creating and designing are what make my heart feel good. It’s lovely when you can create and let your creativity flow and it’s a bit kind of funny. The reason why I call this coffee chat is because when I make my coffee and I’m a little bit serious about coffee, it’s a really nice routine, especially in the morning and I have this old coffee grinder and, yeah, I grind my coffee beans fresh in the morning and have this old Italian espresso maker. It’s a kind of ritual.

And then when I drink my coffee and look out of the window I get quite some good ideas sometimes. And one morning I had this idea for livelifelikeanocean and this name came to me and first it was only a blog website in German. I wrote about how the ocean helped me to overcome my autoimmune disease and especially how I could deal with trauma I experienced in the past.

It was the beginning of a really interesting and great journey. I found my creative voice and then I switched to English and for quite a while also to French, because I have two favorite places by the ocean and that is in Brittany in France and Cornwall in England.
I thought maybe I could merge this together. And so I started to write in English and in French. And I also love poetry. It’s a kind of expressing my feelings, photography and going out in nature and taking these photos and being by the ocean and write my thoughts and feelings out of my head and my heart, it was quite a healing journey for me.

And also I became very passionate about water sports. I learned to sail and to surf and to swim. In the beginning, I could only swim 1 km in breaststroke and I was like these kinds of elder women who swim always head above the water so that their hair didn’t get wet. I don’t know when I started to learn front crawl.

It was at a time when I fell ill with my autoimmune disease. 2010, it was around Christmas, and I think I started to go swimming daily in 2013/14. And yeah, it was really that I only swam for half an hour. It healed me and I always loved to be in the water.

I started to set myself goals and a challenge to swim 2K or an hour. I really wanted to learn to front crawl. It looks so good when swimmers can swim so fast and so I watched so many YouTube videos and I learned it step by step. It became really a daily routine that was quite a journey. And now I swim around 3K every day and I got stronger, I got healthier.
And one day this incredible and impossible dream for me came up to swim the English Channel.

I talked to friends about it, and they all called me crazy. And someday I met my coach in our local pool and he was searching for a swimmer, for a team, for a triathlon team. And, yeah, he spoke to me and asked me if I would take part in such a challenge. And I thought, why not? And he said, okay, then I train you. And so I got my coach and one day I just said to him, I would so love to swim the English Channel. I know it’s totally crazy, but yeah, I would love to do it.

And he looked at me and said, „Why not?“ And so I was so over the moon that someone takes me seriously about my dream. I started training for two and a half years and in 2020 all this kind of lockdown COVID kicked in.
But nevertheless, I tried it in September and unfortunately I got a really tough spring tide and very strong currents, so I had to abandon my swim after 12 hours. And yeah, that was really hard. I was really, really sad and disappointed. It was like a dream crashed. But on the other hand, I was also proud of myself that I came so far and with these circumstances that you couldn’t train enough with lockdown and COVID; I think it was a very good result.

But the dream never left me and so I decided to try it again next year. That’s the reason why I’m on this challenge to swim 1 million meter in 2023. That’s the reason why I want to do with you in mid February a little challenge about goal setting. And so I thought to myself maybe I should do coffee chats around goal settings and how you can make it easier for you and with more joy and ease that’s maybe a little introduction why I came to this idea.

So, yeah, that’s a little bit about myself, about my big dream and about the coffee chats. This is only a little introduction and when you have any question, just email me or comment below and I will answer them next time. So thank you for joining and I wish you a very good afternoon and weekend.
Bye.