I have had very strong emotions all my life. It wasn't possible for me to rise above them, so I learned to separate myself from my feelings. Learned to no longer notice them, by focusing on the outside. I distracted myself with everything that came along, the main thing was not to dive into these inner whirlpools. Of course, that didn't work at all. The more of myself I repressed in one place, the more came up in other places, rather explosively.

In shamanism as well as in trauma therapy, we often deal with the retrieval of parts of the soul or, expressed psychologically, we re-associate with the parts of ourselves to which we apparently lost contact on our way through life. An important part of this work is the stripping of old skin, i.e. the liberation from the stories that we carry around with us because our society lacks the general knowledge of how to integrate stories, let them go and continue onward.

I was booked to do a shamanic Reisa during the Opening Ceremony of this year’s Enjoy the Silence Festival. We gathered on one of the beautiful hills surrounding lake Como and celebrated life and love to the pumping basslines of Psycore music for three days, and to me it felt like a proper healing ceremony, where everyone was their own shaman, and the music was the icaro.

Chi is another word for life energy, i.e. the force that breathes life into matter. This power appears to modern man as a miracle, and he tries everything to explain this miracle scientifically in some way. I find that a little amusing - because the ancient cultures knew exactly what the mystery of life force is: Consciousness.