She got expelled twice, fell for a hijacker and ended up in Ibiza. At almost seventy she is a psychotherapist, a fasting guide and a healer who has spent decades asking the questions most people spend their whole lives avoiding. Nobody stopped her then. Nobody stops her now. This is that story.
📋 Full Description:
Some lives were never going to fit the mould, and Ilona Pantel-Ayal stopped trying to make hers fit somewhere around the second boarding school that expelled her.
She grew up in post-war Germany too curious, too rebellious and too much for every room she walked into, and when the rooms kept rejecting her she eventually stopped looking for ones that would accept her and went looking for something else entirely. She fell for a hijacker, left Germany alone, found Ibiza and never left. But the life is not really the story. The story is what was underneath it.
She watched her mother vanish — not overnight, but slowly, in the way that is somehow harder to witness. A woman who had been vivid and artistic and electric, swallowed by a menopause nobody around her named, a diagnosis that was wrong and a life that had quietly consumed everything she actually was. The singing stopped. The dancing stopped. And a seventeen-year-old girl stood there watching it happen and filed something so deep it would take thirty years to fully surface: why do some people lose themselves and others don't, what happens when you abandon the parts of yourself that don't fit, and what healing actually means when you finally decide to find out.
She spent the next fifty years answering those questions. Trained in psychology in Barcelona and at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, with further training across New York, Santa Barbara, Ojai and Seattle. A certified fasting guide leading Buchinger method retreats since 1993. A practitioner and teacher of Mayan light language and Tachyon healing. And a woman who at fifty looked in the mirror and recognised, with complete clarity, that she had been doing to herself exactly what she had watched happen to her mother. She stopped. Quietly, completely and without asking anyone's permission.
In this conversation Ilona goes to places most guests never reach — what fasting clears out that therapy alone cannot touch, the invisible hand that pulled her back every time she was about to go under, and why she believes the women society writes off at fifty are always the most dangerous ones in the room. At almost seventy she is the most herself she has ever been, and this conversation is proof of exactly what that looks like.
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