Dear Reader,
For three years, something woke me at exactly 4:52 in the morning.
Not a sound. Nothing I could point to. A weight, sitting on my chest in the dark, patient as anything that knows it has you. I would lie still, listen to my own heartbeat, and think: if nothing changes, this is simply my life now.
It took me three years to learn that thing's name. I'll tell you what it was. But first you need to see how it got in.
How it got in
By day, I looked like a success story that was still loading. Sales and marketing. International travel. Hundreds of calls a week. Doors knocked until my knuckles knew them. Leads bought with my own money. I watched my savings drain the way you watch a sunset: slowly, and then all at once. My motto in those years, which I said out loud, to real people, was massive action solves every problem.
And at night, I studied manifestation. I paid thousands of pounds for the courses and the seminars. I visualised until my eyes ached. Then I lay in the dark doing the maths on why it seemed to work for everyone except me.
If you have ever done everything right and still woken to the same unchanged life, you know the weight I mean. So let me hand you something now, years before I found it myself:
It was never your fault.
The courses weren't wicked. They were incomplete. They all shouted what to do. Not one of them asked who I actually was before telling me who to become. Keep that. It matters more than anything else on this page.
The ring
There was a man in those years. I won't tell you his name. He wore a diamond ring, and he had a habit of twisting it, slowly, while he talked down to the people who made him rich. I had helped build his business with my own weekends. Privately, I called that ring the blood diamond, because I knew exactly whose sweat had paid for it. Some of it was mine.
I used to watch it turn on his finger and feel something I couldn't name yet. Now I can. It was recognition. Somewhere under the exhaustion, I already knew what woke me at 4:52. I just couldn't afford to look at it.
The question with teeth
One grey morning, finished in every way a person can be finished, I finally looked. I sat on the edge of my bed and asked the question I had been outrunning for three years. Not who did this to me? I had a comfortable list of answers for that one. The real question.
Who kept choosing to stay?
And in that quiet bedroom, the thing that had been sitting on my chest every night finally turned round and showed me its face.
It was mine. It had been mine the whole time.
Now, I know what you may be thinking, because I would think it too: every author has a rock-bottom story, and it always ends with them selling me something. Fair. So let me give you the next part plainly, because it's the part that matters.
That answer was not blame. Blame is just the weight wearing its second costume. It was a key. If my choices had built that life, call by call, night by 4:52 night, then my choices could build a different one. The thing in the dark fed on one belief only: that I had no say. The morning I took my say back, it started to starve.
Turning the boat round
So I stopped forcing and started understanding. I studied reality creation, and the old wise books buried under the modern hype. I studied naturopathy and herbal medicine, because an exhausted body cannot carry a hopeful mind. I trained in gymnastics and Kung Fu, where I learned the sentence I'd needed for a decade: force is what you use when you don't yet have technique.
And one mentor did what no course, no seminar and no guru had ever done. He tested what I was actually built for. The results read like a twist ending: my natural gifts were nearly the opposite of the work I had been grinding myself down with. Three years of “failing”, and I had simply been rowing, with all my strength, in the wrong direction.
Six weeks after I turned the boat round, the clients I had chased for years began coming to me. I still remember standing in my kitchen in the strange quiet of a morning with no cold calls in it. Just the kettle. Just me.
Nothing woke me at 4:52 any more.
Who I am now
Today I work as a clinical alternative medicine practitioner, with herbal medicine, homeopathy, quantum and energy healing, and reality-creation coaching. Over the years I have sat with countless sensitive women carrying struggles the world too often dismissed: the sleepless nights, the money fear, the body that won't settle, the quiet sense of being too much and not enough at the same time. Their courage, and their real lives, shaped every book I write.
I was born in the Czech Republic, lived for years in London, and I'm home in Czechia again now. Two countries, two languages, and the same lesson in both: sensitive people aren't broken. They were simply never handed the right map.
The woman I write for
I write my books for the woman still lying awake at 4:52. They will never shout at you, never blame you, and never promise a Lamborghini by Friday. They begin with your body and your nervous system, because a settled body is where every real change starts. Then they do something quieter, and far more dangerous to the thing on your chest: they hand you back your say.
If you want overnight magic, someone louder will happily take your money. But if something wakes you in the small hours too, hear this: nothing is wrong with you. It was never your fault. You were just handed half a map, and the half you were missing is exactly what I write.
Start with whichever book found you. They all lead home.
Monika
P.S. One last secret, and it's my favourite. You'll have noticed Sasha, the little one on my lap. Dogs teach, for free, what I once paid thousands to learn: rest when you're tired, trust the ones who love you, and greet every morning as if it's good news. So more than half of the revenue from my books goes to animal rescue charities. Every time one of these pages helps you take your life back, somewhere a rescued dog or cat gets dinner, a warm bed and a second chance too. Some hauntings end well. Yours included.