Posts

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

A couple of days ago a friend told me that I am clearly a lightworker. That doing lightwork was a deep and essential part of my being.

As someone who has spend a long time in resistance to even the concept of lightwork (along with several other terms and concepts used within the New Age community) I was perplexed by this statement.

the yin yang symbol made up of white and black riceI quickly ended up explaining, like I usually do, that, yes, I do see a value in light and its positive attributes, but that there are also a lot of nourishing and positive aspects of darkness. That there is an inherent danger in identifying too strongly with the light if that means rejecting and even demonizing darkness.

While there is a lot of truth to that statement I now feel like I completely missed the point at this moment in our conversation. I was so in resistance to being called a lightworker that I didn’t even ask what he meant by that term exactly or how he sees me doing it.

The reason why I am so much in resistance to the terminology of lightwork is not just that some people who make use of it have used it as an excuse to deepen the rift of separation within themselves and the world (a rift which I perceive of as the root of all evil). There is also an aspect within me that doesn’t want to identify too strongly with a movement and community which is judged by some as a bunch of crazy people. I do not want to be seen as insane by association.

At the root of all this is my shame.

While I do see the value that my extrasensory abilities have to myself and others they are also something that parts of me are still ashamed of. These parts feel shame for being the weird kid. These parts feel ashamed because other people think I am seriously crazy. These parts feel shame because I was told that the realities and beings I perceive are just expressions of human fantasy and are not to be treated as real. They feel ashamed because I have been taught that ‘hearing voices’ is one of the clearest signs of insanity.

One of the threats that my mother made regularly when I was growing up and not behaving in ways she wanted me to was that people would come to put me into a psychiatric ward. That there was only one future for me if I didn’t start to act ‘normal’: imprisonment, isolation, never being taken seriously, being physically restricted, being in pain and being constantly medicated.

An isolated boy/ LightworkerAs a result I tried suppressing my abilities as a child and stopped communicating about the magical worlds and beings that I continued to perceive. I was alone with the faeries and ghosts I saw. Isolated when I talked to the trees. Craving for people who might one day be able to accept me as well as the song of creation I heard in my mind.

That’s one of the reasons I started to get involved with spirituality to begin with. Not just to better understand what I perceived, but also to find a community which would embrace me with all my gifts. Gifts that parts of me had started to believe made me unlovable.

While I had the pleasure to meet a lot of beautiful and loving people on my spiritual path so far it is only now that I begin to fully realize how much of myself I still kept holding back. I could cast spells with Witches, dance with Pagans, muse with New Age friends over the spiritual properties of crystals – but I always restricted my truth and self-expression to a degree to remain acceptable and liked by the respective group I was with.

The same way that I had tried to fit into main stream society before I still tried to fit into the social roles, norms and expectations of the spiritual people I was involved with. Still holding on to the underlying belief that my true and complete self-expression was unacceptable, unlovable and would be rejected.

I do acknowledge that I already released and transformed HUGE amounts of shame since I started my spiritual path. Witchcraft and shamanic practices as well as intensive use of the Completion Process served me very good so far. They will continue to serve me as I allow myself to become more inclusive and expressive of my whole Self.

Bright light illuminating a dark forest (Lightwork/ Shadow Work)Am I a lightworker?

Probably yes. As long as lightwork means bringing things back from the shadows of unconsciousness into the embracing, loving light of awareness in order to (re-)integrate them. Which is all the term really means (and which ironically is also a definition of Shadow Work).

And as long as this doesn’t mean excluding or demonizing the things that are dark – because there is also much beauty and healing found in the embrace of darkness.

Excluding and demonizing the dark is actually the very opposite of what lightwork is actually about. It is not about waging war with darkness nor the things hiding or simply living there. It is about embracing duality. Or even more correctly: It is about integration of all that is (including light and dark) and raising your awareness to a level that can actually do that and sees not only the necessity of it, but also the beauty and joy inherent in that process.