Ilona Bublitz, Pantarei Approach Practitioner
The air radiates when Ilona speaks about the place where she is right now. The way she describes her surroundings shows that this is so much more than just a place she calls home. It is also an inner state of being.
She says, “It is beauty, it is deliciousness, it is freedom and it is home.”
Originally from the countryside in the northern part of Germany, Ilona has lived and worked in different places all over the world, Hamburg and Berlin amongst them. Two years ago she moved to the countryside close to Berlin, together with the love of her life. With every cell of her being Ilona praises how much she loves nature and the forest they live by.
Looking back
Ilona looks back at a very successful career in the media and television. As a TV producer, she worked for many big primetime shows. She developed TV shows herself, set them up, put teams together and even wrote two books. She truly worked hard!
When you see Ilona today in her aliveness and joy, you would never believe that she has been through some truly traumatic events in her life. For many years, she turned a lot of her energy against herself. One day she literally died – and decided to come back again.
“I still remember it like it was yesterday. How I woke up and later stood outside in the streets of Berlin looking up into the sky having this one clear thought: I must have understood something wrong. I cannot believe that life is supposed to be this way. It makes no sense that so much of what I do is leading me to a place of suffering. I don’t want to suffer. So why do I end up there?”
In this moment something truly opened up in her. “I realized that I know only little. And that was a good thing. For it meant there must be another way to live that I don’t know yet. From that moment on I dedicated myself to finding out how I can fully embrace life and myself – and later: how to pass that on to others.
New beginnings
Ilona decided to change her life completely and a whole new world began to open up for her. She went through an intense process of inventory – looking at her past, her thoughts, her fears, her relationships, her habits, her feelings of guilt and shame. One by one she decided what she wanted to keep and what she wanted to change or let go of. And her life began to change dramatically.
She made new friends who supported and loved her through the whole process. At one point she realized how, for the first time in her life, she felt trust in someone. And she began to trust in life itself.
Ilona became a Kundalini Yoga teacher and teacher trainer. She went through a holistic consultancy training and finally founded her “ALIVE” one-year trainings. Here she teaches what she found: how to fully embrace yourself and how to create a passionately lived life that honors who you truly are – and the gifts you bring to this world.
At one point she decided she wanted to look at her traumatic experiences on a deeper level. Gigi Madl, a good friend of her’s suggested the Pantarei Approach. Ilona describes her first session with Vered Manasse as a truly amazing experience. She deeply fell in love with the approach and how Vered calmy, openheartedly and with a lot of humor, addressed how she was denying one of her biggest strengths, and how that was causing her an inner conflict.
“I had immediate trust in Vered. In a way, the session was very simple and my body remembered what it always knew. She was grounding my own knowledge in the body. And I loved it so much that after the first session I knew that this was the missing link.”
What is it that touches you most about working with people?
“It is the trust. People come and tell me their stories, painful experiences and they allow me to be with them in this. I honor that from the bottom of my heart. I truly trust in the core of our being, in our essence, in who we are. There is something in each and every one of us, that is already whole and always was. It’s something which cannot be destroyed, no matter what we are going through in life.”
“This is where our uniqueness unfolds from in a million different ways. This is what I am always dedicated and connected to, with all my love and curiosity. Because it wants to unfold. We want to be who we really are and live it. We sometimes just don’t know how!”
“There is a deep knowing in myself as a practitioner today that I can rely on staying calm and curious in these moments. I stay with my breathing. I stay with my client. I stay open. Open to my intuition, open to the client revealing the one thing that suddenly lands in me on a deeper level showing me the path.”
Can you describe this knowing inside of you?
“It’s a paradox. It’s knowing and not knowing at the same time. Of course I have learned a lot of things along the way which blend in during the sessions. But I want my intuition to take the lead, not any concept I might have, or even put that onto the client. To me that’s one of the things that makes the Pantarei Approach so incredibly powerful and healing: we do work beyond concepts. We truly meet a human being.”
How does the Pantarei Approach blend in with the other things you do?
“Kundalini yoga is all about moving energy and different states of energy and how to use them in your life. It’s incredibly beautiful. In Kundalini classes, I teach the whole class as one person. However, I always make it very personal and love to address the different people in the room while I take them on a journey on which they can discover or develop new strengths and aspects of themselves.”
“I teach through my sensory system, through what I feel, and I direct and shift the energy through the exercises, the breathing and the focus points I give. I address the whole body of people, and I allow all of that to happen in myself as well. If I want the energy in the room to sparkle like Champagne up the spine, I need to allow that in me. I need to be open for the fullness of life! The joy, the depth, the power, the pain, the grief, the endurance, the stillness, the laughter, the craziness, all of that — to teach the richness and fullness of life in class.
Often people that know my Kundalini classes who then come to me for a Pantarei Approach session, describe my sessions as Kundalini-one-one. In my opinion both Kundalini Yoga and the Pantarei Approach blend in together very well.”
What does intensity mean to you?
“My whole life was intense and it still is. And my assumption used to be that I had to level myself down. I often hear that I can be such a force, and intense. But if I look at it today: this is when I’m fully alive!
For me it’s a question of where to lead this intensity. What do I want to create with it? For a long time in my life I used lots of my own energy to harm and hurt myself and of course I did it with a lot of intensity. But if I take the intensity and use it in a Pantarei session, to create a new training, or for setting up a disco evening for my loved ones at home, it is a beautiful thing! There is nothing wrong with intensity. It’s only a question of what you do with it! I don’t need the intensity to go away anymore in order to be at peace within myself.”
“Today, I find peace, when everything is allowed in me, and when I can allow others to be themselves. And that might look everything but calm! There might be tears, or anger, or a big celebration. When I can truly be myself and I fully agree with that, everything in me is coming home. That’s where everything in me can rest today: in the fullness of life and who we are.”
You can get in touch with Ilona via her Website, or write her an email **@il**********.com
Written by Lena-Philine Zinser 
Photography by Grit Siwonia