From Tampere to Bordeaux - with a detour in Asia

Bonjour,

my name is Eerik and I was born in eastern Finland in 1983. Our family moved quite a bit when I was a child but as I was looking for a university where I could study my passion, Social Psychology, I visited Tampere and immediately felt like home. There I lived, loved and graduated before moving to the countryside for a while and then spending some time in Asia.

Finally, I came to visit some friends in Sadirac and had again this "sentiment bizarre": I have come home. Life is good here. I work as a researcher for the same university that I studied in. These days internet and EU make it possible to have a lot of this kind of freedom in some professions.

I also started to organize Laughter Yoga in Bordeaux - I picked up the certification to teach it in India and it goes so well together with my Social Psychologist education. In Finland I also used to work as a counselor in Women's shelter (parents and children escaping domestic violence). This is one of the jobs that is so challenging, that people are afraid to apply for it.

Doing well in that job and other counseling jobs before that makes me want to continue working face to face with people who face difficulties. So I started to offer online counseling to Expat Finnish people and receive any english-speaking expats looking for some support, in my livingroom.

I am lucky to have found a place that is ideal for counseling. My customers can stop to look the trees swaying in the wind over the field and the backyard garden the colors inside are good and a high sealing gives space for thoughts and emotions. I don't want to sound like I am here just to sell my services, but finding a good way to organize my professional life is an important part of why I feel so content in France.

In my blog I talk about expat experience and counseling. My goal is to also find more and more ways to integrate my research, and science in general, to counseling and popular writing.

To help with that goal I created a Google Collection to start to pile up relevant research and reach out to some interested people: https://plus.google.com/collection/MmVa9 But now I think I'm getting a bit off topic.

But this is my life now in France. And all this in the middle of getting to know the amazing about of different delicious cheese and beautiful Chateaus feels inspiring to say at least.