RE WILD
The Snake, the tree and the honey
Vision
Wikipedia describes the term rewilding as follows:
“Rewilding is a term used especially in ecology and nature conservation, and it describes the process of restoring nature to its original wild state. The expression emerged when efforts began to counteract human-made changes in ecosystems.”
But what if rewilding is not only about forests, rivers, and landscapes?
What if it is also about us?
We are raised inside systems of thought. We are taught what is right and wrong, possible and impossible, sacred and ordinary. Our worldview and mental patterns function like a language. And a language is learned. A language reflects a culture and how that culture sees life.
Across the world, people experience reality differently because of the words and stories they grew up with.
If a language can be learned, it can also be unlearned.
And if it was learned, there must have been something original before the learning began.
Something untouched.
Something wild.
Is that not a liberating thought?
To rewild ourselves is to gently strip away what we were conditioned to believe we are. It is to soften the rigid structures of identity and return to the living intelligence beneath them.
Beneath the roles.
Beneath the noise.
My vision is to offer pathways back to our true nature.
Back to our sacred wildness.
Back to the unfathomable wisdom that lives within the body and the earth alike.
This wisdom cannot be forced or intellectually understood.
It is remembered through connection.
Through breath.
Through land.
Through direct experience.
Rewilding, for me, is the quiet revolution of coming home.
Lunisolar Calendar
Our body is a sacred constellation of cycles.
The circadian rhythm governed by the hypothalamus and the rising and setting of the sun.
The cycles of hormones, the subtle communicators between the universe and the body.
The way the moon moves the oceans, and the water within us.
We are rhythmic beings.
It should never be the goal to transcend the body.
But to access infinity through the body.
To use this vessel, and its intelligent systems, to access the mechanics of the universe.
Returning to a lunisolar calendar system initiates us into a resynchronisation with the mother of all, our living Earth.
We begin to move with the sun and the moon again.
In doing so, we gently strip away a culture we are not even sure why we followed in the first place.
And perhaps, in that return, something ancient within us can begin to heal.
Why combining Eastern and European spirituality?
Yoga as a "detour"
Over a hundred years ago, the practice, traditions and lifestyle of Yoga, found its way to the west. At a time where these western societies had lost most of their connection to the rich spirituality of the land and their ancestors.
The wave of Christianity had washed over Europe and from there found its way to the rest of the world.
This Christian flood left very little spiritual wisdom alive. Banned, forbidden, burned, beaten and re-educated.
We were left cut off from the very soil and memories under our feet.
Until so many of us started waking up again. Having lost our own connection and spiritual traditions, the people of the west got pulled to any world-spirituality still alive. Many found it in the east. In the thousands year old tradition that we slumped under the name "Yoga". It found us right at that time when we started looking for what we were missing.
Kundalini
Of all the yoga traditions and schools I have explored, I feel most drawn to Kundalini Yoga.
By using the practises, tools and techniques of these schools, I use a living spiritual tradition which has such an enormous library of information and such a rich technology, to widen my bandwidth, make space in my own channels. Opening channels and streams within my own vessel, so that I can became sensitive enough to remember the ways we used to work with the same energies here in Europe.
The way in which this specific eastern school, has defined the energy system of our body, resonates deeply with me. The way in which "it just fits" as a guide through the rhythms of nature, gives me the chills.
To practice Kundalini Yoga is a "detour" for me. The necessary long route that I must take. An opportunity I'm grateful for. To walk outside the lines of identification. To have found back to power of the voice and to chant and sing in group.
Paganism
The broad definition of a pagan is of someone whose religion is not Judaism, Islam, or Christianity.
Am I a pagan? Yes.
Am I a spiritual re-enactor? Not really.
My goal is not to recreate things exactly as how were in history (with the limited sources we have). My goal is to remember and work with a broad sense of ancestry and the very soil under my feet.
It's a path that is unique to me. A path that undoubtedly will turn and twist in the future.
And in that uniqueness, I encourage you to find your own voice as well, as long as you walk with respect.
Does that include working with deities? Yes. It includes working with all kinds of nature-beings, elemental forces, archetypes and the personification of complicated concepts that are deities.
ANIMISM
"The belief that spirits exist throughout nature".
The Indo-European root of the word “ane”, means “to breathe”.
Being an animist means that you perceive all things – humans, animals, plants, rocks, rivers, human handiwork, words, names, mantra, etc. – to have spirit and therefor free will.
It is a very metaphysical belief system that is so widespread through all original spiritualism in all corners of the world, that it could be argued to be “the first religion”, even though I see religion and spirituality as 2 very different things, especially with in today’s society.
Am I an animist? Most definitely yes!
I recognise our place in the sacred pattern that is consciousness. The memories are in the soil, ancestry and future.
As the wheel of the year turns and the seasons shift, there's no better time to tap into the essence of your being and reconnect. The energetic rhythms of nature are sacredly reflected in us.
World Spirituality
In many ways, we were cut off from our own source, here in the West. And we see the result in the way in which many westerners have been flocking to mainly India and South America for an empty-hole-in-my-chest-fix.
Our colonist ancestors have spread waves of horror over the whole planet. And now we run to those very places for our own healing. We need their medicine and the very wisdom our ancestors tried to uproot.
We died somewhere in our own history. Brought this dead to all corners around the world. And now we draw to those very corners to be reborn.
But when does that change into appropriation? There are so many opinions and perspectives on this. But to me, it's all about the intention. Do we acknowledge the origins of the tool or technique we are using? Are we selling something we have no real understanding of?
Simply said: Is you doing or using this thing causing embarrassment to where the tool or technique most recently originated?
That being said, and maybe in contradiction of it, I do believe in the power of channelling and drawing from the living traditions of World to reconnect with the practices and magic of European traditions.
There are so many similarities throughout the different branches of spiritual practice the world knows, many different ways and names to work with the same energies.
I do see it as a bit of a narrow-sighted mistake to see the world as a collection of static circles of culture. We are and always have been travellers. We are and always have been multicultural. Culture and tradition has travelled together with ethnicity in countless human migration periods. Their spiritual worldview has travelled with them.
Just read anything about Indo-European history.
I pray that we learn to see spiritualty as water again. Flowing and filling any possible chape on it never-ending journey around the world.
I pray that the world shows a compassion to the truth seekers of the west. That we can sail all branches of mother river, to eventually, hopefully, find our way home again. Becoming sensitive enough to smell the waters deep under our feet. So that we can teach a remembering to the next generation.
I pray that we are forgiven our detour.
One People
I know how approtriative it sounds, but to me it's not a matter of this practice belongs to them and this practice belongs to those. We are not the owners of anything. We are the gardians.
It's about the energetic rhytms of nature, sacretly reflected in us.
I would love to see how we can complement each other and use each other technologies to remember that what is forgotten, like we are one people of the earth.
It doesn't matter where you come from, where your ancestry lies or on which soil you live. There are so many ways of working with the same energy-patterns that influence our whole planet.
It is about reading into the under-currents.
It is to you to choose your path.