This business idea originated as part of a Project Management course in spring 1999, when I was seeking a combination of wellness and coaching myself, as I wanted to transition from working as a copywriter to a career coach. I was very much identifying myself with my profession, wherefore this journey became deeper than expected. After showing my business plan to a man working in the wellness industry, I received a freelance assignment as a writer and editor to his membership magazine, and did so during my university studies in Work science.

In 2004, I took extra graduate classes in Conversation technique with a focus on coaching and mentoring sessions, that were developed after my exam paper didn’t make the cut, with a professor thinking that coaching as a profession was fluff, but I began working as a Job coach in my own company Balansfokus after getting some support by a student incubator organization. Then I was suddenly put in foreclosure at the same time my mother passed away and therefore took a break and went to Hawaii to heal. When I returned and tried to begin working again as a career and life coach in fall 2005, nobody was interested, and I didn’t get any job.

In 2008 after I had written my book about my healing in Swedish, entitled The Keys to Paradise, I developed my business plan and had a vision about making it look like a gazebo, but bigger. I ran my idea by some of my contacts in dancing, yoga and qigong south of Sweden, but nobody was interested. I then looked into building it in Stockholm instead and contacted some people here, while looking for a location, set on blending in and contributing to the emergence of eco-design and planning. After no interest here either, and losing my home in south of Sweden in fall 2009, I went back to Hawaii in 2010, to finish my Masters degree there and hope to start it up in San Francisco the following year or so.

In Honolulu 2010, I developed my business plan further after translating my book into English. I saw an opportunity to build it with ready-made bamboo structures that together with foundation, utilities and so forth would come together exactly how I had envisioned it. I shared my plan with various people, like my Hula-teacher, the university, and one of the founders of organization Kanu Hawaii, through which I found the architect. I also shared it with the people I met at the YWCA 2011 thinking of their coaching and how these things could be incorporated into Telluselle Living Center in a similar fashion. But then, I was deported.

Back in Sweden and having recuperated somewhat, I started to look into building it in Stockholm again in 2013-14. I went to see Co-ompanion, an incubator type consultancy for creating a cooperative, which was the form of shared ownership I thought could be a good idea. I shared it with the WestAfrican dance teachers and with the Isadora Duncan teachers here, but as so often in Sweden, nobody stepped up to the plate, not even for a meeting about it.

In 2015, on a vacation to Estoril, Portugal, I visited a spa where I got some much needed Hawaiian Lomilomi massage and began to see how I should position myself as something neither just a spa, nor just a dance studio but an actual wellness center offering several services and classes, with me as the coach for sacred circle groups and one-on-one sessions while being the manager. But then, I was heavily subjected to vicious libel and could neither get any PR for my books, nor for this business idea or move ahead with my plan to also make a lei out of bamboo. I couldn’t get any job either. I held some coaching for MeetUp-groups instead, and some introductory Hula-classes, but all came to a halt.

In 2018, a Swedish psychiatrist decided to declare me insane, partly because he though I wouldn’t consider isolating the house hosting this wellness center, which of course was something I already checked in Honolulu 2010 and he never asked about, just assumed. This made me flee Sweden, wherefore I first went to Germany in 2018-19 and then back to Portugal 2019-20, considering both places to live in, but realising it would take much effort and time to learn either language good enough, so that wasn’t really an option, unless I could work solemnly in English.

Fascinatingly, I came to live in a neighbourhood since 2023, close to an old house and tower, in an octagon shape! It was formerly owned by Fredrika Bremer – Sweden’s pioneer feminist and author making way for creating equality and more women authors, meeting in this house. It’s now a café and restaurant. The original house, including the octagon shaped tower, was built in 1867 and is called Lyran, after the instrument Lyre.

What happens next? I’ll let you know…