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Life presents us with a lot of different challenges and opportunities. There is usually no rest in between these waves of change that keep rolling towards the shore that is our present moment. Especially nowadays – and this won’t be news for you – the waves keep coming faster and faster and it’s really hard not to get drowned. We keep coming up for air. Sometimes it feels like this is all we are actually doing. The shore itself – which could be the silent center of our being – seems to disappear in our struggle to keep our heads above the water.

At least that’s what life feels like a lot to me right now.

Surfing the Waves of Change

There is this great metapher I use myself about surfing the waves of change. The ideal is to not be drowned by the waves, but make use of them to propel us forward.

This is a lot to ask!

In order to become successful surfers we first have to learn how to swim. Then we need to find a bay where the waves come to use in a pattern and rhythm that we can actually master. There is no use to expect of us to surf with the champions or be able to surf each and every wave that comes our way. Some places are not right for us at this moment. Some waves are just too big. No need to self-sabotage by trying to master a wave that we are just not equipped to handle.

Sometimes it is right and correct to take a risk and to dare to dream big. In fact, I wish for all of us to dream bigger! We are all more brilliant and capable than we dare to imagine at times. At the same time we need to be smart about it.

If you desire to ride the big waves then you need to build your strength and your skill by starting with the smaller waves. You can probably still explore the waters of the bay you want to surf in, but start with the small waves. Start with the waves that are closer to where you actually are right now and probably also closer to the shore. You can always go deeper into the water at a later point in time – but you need to build your strength and skills first. You might also need to find a good surfing teacher AND an expert of this very specific bay you are trying to master. Don’t expect yourself to be a master from the get go. Learn from the masters and the other surfers in that area FIRST. This is the safest and the most certain way to become a master yourself.

All of that said: Sometimes the weather is just not right for surfing.

Surfing (and therefore living) requires a level of flexibility. When a good wave comes your way – hit it! Don’t expect that kind of wave to come to you every time and every day, though. This is not how nature works. This is not how life nor the universe works. Accepting not every wave is yours to surf (yet?) and that not every day is or needs to be like surfing the perfect wave is essential.

There is also wisdom in making the most of your time between waves or when the weather is just not right for surfing anyway. You can still work out on the beach. Or rest. Or play. Or hike through the forest. Build your strength and renew your energy. Don’t exhaust yourself before the actual wave comes or you will simply not be able to ride it.

Obviously when you are sick there is no point in forcing yourself to swim out into those waves to begin with. Recover first. Get rest and help as needed.

Looking over the calm ocean sea

Embracing the Process

All of this takes practice (not perfection!) and I’m right here practicing with you. I’m meditating to better access the shore by increasing my capacity to be present to the here and now. I’m journaling, channeling and asking friends to help me figure out what bay might be mine to conquer next. Which are the areas where I will (and already do) excel. All of this combined with doing the actual research, diving into the materials of experts AND still doing my best at both of my jobs.

All of which is a lot! Which is also why I have been silent here for quite a while. I’m still available to take on some new clients in between, but most of the time my time and energy resources are just already spent and scheduled.

I will make an effort to share my occasional updates here and hope to be able to produce the occasional video for my youtube channel as well – but this will not just depend on my willingness and energy, but also on the windy weather and sometimes very unpredictable waves of the bays I am already having obligations to.

I’m happy to support you if you need help figuring out the whole surfing process with my skills. And I hope that you already found some helpful thoughts and advice in these words.

If you feel like you are drowing: Ask for help. Remember the waves you already mastered. Ask for help.

Build your strength. Train and increase your skills. Identify and get the training and advise you need.

Then hit those waves and make the most of it!

The sun is rising over the ocean waves promising hope at the end of the tunnel

How wild, untamed and free do you dare to become?

The first time that I encountered the term ‘rewilding’ was in Peter grey’s very insightful and important blogpost called Rewilding Witchcraft. It follows the idea that Witches and Pagans have sort of forgotten their roots and their purpose which are connected to engaging with and protecting the wild. It challenges the respective audience to open up their eyes to the current ecological crisis of the planet and most of our local environments. It asks us to revisit our spiritual practices and question them.

Do they really connect me with the wild inside and outside of myself?

Do my actions build connections with, acknowledge and protect the non-human communities I live with?

These are some of the guiding questions which have walked with me since I first read Peter Grey’s words. It’s what started my own rewilding journey.

small boy at the edge of a lakeI have always felt a very intimate connection with plants and the spirits of nature. I spent a lot of my childhood and teenage years in the garden and the forest. I talked to trees and faeries.

At the same time I was socialized like most of us. I was told how to sit, eat and behave. I was told that there are no spirits in my room at night. That the natural world was not really dead, but below human consciousness. That there was no actual way to talk to trees or rivers. That God had blessed humans with unique mental capacities which allowed us to condition, control and rule the wilderness outside of us as well as our body and animal nature.

These teachings were given to me by my parents, but also the other kids I played with, neighbors, school, etc. These were some of the collective assumptions about reality that I had to accept (at least officially) to become acceptable. Unacceptable beliefs and actions were laughed at or punished.

Add to that all the emotional and physical abuse I experienced by family and ‘friends’ as a child and teenager for being different than expected. For being other(worldly?).

As a result I forgot how to see and talk with the faeries and other beings for a while. It took me years of dedicated spiritual practice to get them back. Some of my clairvoyant abilities are still not nearly as evolved as they were when I was 5 years old.

statue of a druid in front of treesThe kind of spirituality that had always spoken to me and was instrumental in my emotional healing process and self-empowerment was Witchcraft.

When I discovered this alternative to Christian beliefs and doctrines when I was 12 years old I was so excited! It felt like coming home. Like I’m not weird for experiencing the world a certain way, but gifted.

Witchcraft and other shamanic, Pagan and polytheist practices and beliefs continued to inform me since that time.

I loved especially how these beliefs and practices seemed rooted in nature and emphasized how to live in ‘harmony’ and ‘balance’ with the natural world.

It wasn’t until I started learning more about ecology, nature conservation and sustainable agriculture that I noticed how removed many of these (modern) beliefs and practices actually were from nature.

I believe that the same can be said about a lot of teachings and beliefs within the ‘New Age’ and ‘spiritual’ community.

I am no exception to probably being a little blind-sided by growing up in a relative urban environment within Western civilization. How could I not be?

I did run through fields and forests as a child and we still grew at least some of our food in our garden. We foraged mushrooms and herbs for tea. We used natural medicines. We were probably more attuned to the land and that kind of ancestral knowledge than most of our neighbors.

And I still never shot a deer or killed a chicken. The amount of food we grew in our garden was minimal. We foraged for entertainment, not for survival.

Which means that there was a lot of knowledge and understanding about how nature works that I didn’t get. Some of which I could read about, but a lot of which can only come from first hand experience. What I like to call body knowledge.

What does all of that have to do with spirituality?

Yoga pose in the middle of a street in a cityMost of our spiritual beliefs and practices in the West – especially within the New Age community – have been conceived outside of a natural environment or have been adopted (and modified) from more ‘exotic’, Eastern cultures which themselves were and/or are divorced from nature.

How can these beliefs and practices liberate and empower us if they continue to deepen the divide between ourselves and the natural world? Between our mind and our body? Our soul and our flesh?

As I have written before: These lies of separation are the root of all evil. It is this kind of estrangement from ourselves and the natural world which gives not only rise to war and terror attacks, but also the ecological crisis we find ourselves in.

Which is why I believe that all of our spirituality must be centered around coming back into connection. Intimate connection with our body and sexuality. Intimate connection with other humans in their diversity as well as with the non-human worlds we are part of – especially the natural environment around us.

This is why rewilding spirituality is important.

Which is why I want all of us to really question not only the origins and purpose of our spiritual beliefs and practices but also their effects on us and the natural world.

How does your spirituality re-connect you with nature?

How does it estrange you from nature?

And what purpose do you choose your spirituality to serve and why?

No teacher or book can answer these questions for you. Observe your own experience. The choice is yours if you dare to choose. The time is now to make a change.

(And I have specifically designed this online class for men who choose rewilding.)

Man in suit sitting on a rock in a forest

Some of you might know that besides being a professional psychic and spiritual teacher I work part-time as a counselor and youth group facilitator at the local LGBTQ center. Nothing like regularly working with kids and young adults who suffer from serious depression, PTSD and dissociation to keep you and your spirituality grounded. It regularly makes me reevaluate what works and what doesn’t in terms of spreading awareness, health and empowerment through my teachings and perspective. It makes me perceive my own privileges better – and challenges me to figure out how to let this understanding inform my spirituality and my work.

See, I’d love to just sign up for ‘positive focus’ as the feel good drug of choice at any time. The problem is that is doesn’t work for most people on earth, because being able to maintain positive focus for even a couple of minutes isn’t as much about commitment and will as it is about privilege. Most people on earth aren’t that privileged.

Privilege means that you are given certain rights and can expect certain benefits and treatment in life which aren’t available to most other people. Especially not for other people who don’t look , love and pray as you do.

circle of different shoes in various colors, but of the same size (diversity)In most cases privilege is so commonplace among the members of a privileged group that they don’t even realize the benefits they are granted as special. They simply assume that having these things, being treated that way and finding yourself represented in the media and government is a normal experience for everyone. They don’t perceive a variety of perspectives because their friends, family and social circles are made up of people who look, love and pray at least similarly to them. They don’t really experience the ‘others’.

Like in agriculture this kind of cultural monoculture is not only cost intensive and requires a lot of resources and restrictions to maintain – it actually created ‘pests’.

Isolating a piece of land from the natural diversity surrounding it as is done in conventional agriculture is creating a rift in the Web of Life. Nature always promotes diversity and will be trying to close that rift. Which is why pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, walls, fences and plain force become necessary. They are weapons against nature. Weapons used to defend the rift. Weapons which have been shown again and again to create only more resilient pests. In the end Nature will always get Her way.

Even though we have been brought up to believe in a distinction between the human and the natural world this is just another lie of separation. In truth no such distinction makes sense. Our buildings are build out of wood, stone or metal. Even the chips in our computers require crystals to work. We can built walls and come up with ‘new’ materials in our labs – but we only have this natural world to depend on. We still depend on the resources and abundance of Mother Earth. We still depend on the Sacred Elements of Air, Fire, Water, Earth and Ether/Spirit to survive and thrive. Trying to push them out and reject the laws of nature did never work in the past, isn’t working now and never will. We are part of this fabric no matter what.

honey bee sitting on a pink flowerGiven that we are part of the Web of Life and therefore subject to the laws of nature above everything else the question arises what that could mean for the ways we life, love, pray and built our life. Do we continue to fight the laws of nature? Or will we try to figure out how to respect them better so that we can begin to live in harmony with them and being supported by them as a result?

For this post let us just focus on one law for the moment. The Law of Diversity.

Nature strives for diversity always, because it thrives on it. The more diverse an ecosystem ends up to be the more resilient it gets and the more diversity it can sustain. A meadow always strives to become forest. A true forest is always chaotic and diverse.

Bringing that back to human society we can hopefully see now how trying to maintain a cultural and spiritual monoculture is as futile and as harmful to the earth (and human beings as part of the earth) as an agricultural monoculture. It will be impossible to maintain it without violence. Violence against the ‘others’ on the outside of our walls, fences and neighborhoods. Violence against the ‘others’ in our own midst as well. Violence which in most Western cultures is directed against the feminine, the queer, the transgender, the Black, the brown, the indigenous, the ‘oriental’, the dis_abled, the poor, the Pagan, the Witch. Essentially everyone who looks, loves or prays differently than we do.

It is worth mentioning that the constant threat of violence has caused those of us who find themselves at the receiving end of the lash to build our own walls and castles in self-defense. It is our way to cope with ‘minority stress’ and surrounding danger.
While this is understandable and the establishment of ‘safe spaces’ necessary we need to be careful not to create and nourish the rifts that divide us further in the process. We, too, have to leave our own castles regularly and start to listen to the ‘others’ more. Usually we will find people who have even less privileges than we do. We need to listen to their stories. We have to stop assuming that the stories we keep telling ourselves are more correct and worthy than those of the less privileged. Usually the outsiders are the ones who can take a better look and have deeper insight particularly because of their ‘otherness’.

We need to visit those who have more privileges as well. They need to see us. They need to hear our stories. We need to make our stories heard by them.

Looking at our spiritual communities we need to stop condemning those who pray differently than we do. Especially when their reality has been shaped by violence and structural discrimination beyond the scope of what we are able to perceive and believe yet.

We need to stop judging their practices, emotions and goals from a place of Ego. Instead we need to approach them with genuine curiosity and respect.

Why do they curse? Why don’t they? Why do they kiss the floor? Why do they light candles? Why do they pray to demons and angels? Why are their ethics different from mine and what can that teach me about my own position in the world, my own blindness and my (in-)sight?

We need to come with an open mind and listen. We need to come with the intention to learn in order be able to mend the Web of Life. Only then can we gain understanding and develop true compassion.

If we truly want to live in peace with the earth and each other, then this is the only way I see that happening. Even though we might need to redefine what that ‘peace’ should look like based on our new-found diversity of perspectives.

hands of a black person greeting the sun