The Journey to Self-Realization

On a summer evening on a coastal path, a friend offered Amina some mushroom tea and told her she might see strange figures, or people with elephant heads. Instead she spent hours trapped in the darkest hole she had ever been in, begging to be let out. Pål-Esben, meanwhile, tells a story he has never told anyone except his wife: how his treatment-resistant depression finally lifted after many years.

When Amina first came to Pål-Esben, she smiled, had done her hair and make-up, and did not bring up her problems in the first conversations: she had come to learn shamanism. But what radiated from her, he says, looked like a grey, jagged hedgehog. Once she had received help, he told her that last time she had looked like a hedgehog, and that she now looked much better.

A few years ago, Amina dated a man who could live with all the alternative things she was into, until the subject of aliens came up. That, he said, was where she had gone mad. Pål-Esben, for his part, has a good friend who spent more than two decades in Tibetan monasteries, where the wisest teachers say plainly that their land was once visited by beings from elsewhere.

When the thermometer in Pål-Esben’s office in Germany passed 30 degrees this summer, he didn’t wish the heat away. He decided to install air conditioning. Amina, who once disliked sunny days and worried about bills, learned to ask herself whether she could live in a tent if she lost her flat, and found that she could.

This past summer, Pål-Esben’s old house of oak and clay in the middle of Germany, which normally stays cool in the heat, got so hot that he started talking about installing air conditioning. As a child, Amina couldn’t even watch children’s films like The Lion King: it took her weeks to get over them.

The first time Amina marked one of the seasonal rituals, she didn’t really know what to do. She wrote what she wanted to let go of on a slip of paper, sat down outside in the snow in her slippers, and burned it with a lighter. Pål-Esben, meanwhile, lives his year more or less 100 percent in rhythm with the seasons: full-on action all summer, and hibernation all winter.

As a child, Amina hated nature, and nothing was worse than a school trip into the woods. Then the pandemic closed the cafés and the gym, and she ended up sitting awkwardly by a tree, saying hello and wondering how the two of them were supposed to communicate. Today she feels shut in if she can’t get out into nature for a day or two. Pål-Esben, meanwhile, switches his phone on once a month, or once every six months.

In this forty-first episode, Amina and her teacher and guide, Pål-Esben Wanvig, talk about the nine pitfalls that stop most seekers on the path to freedom. They explore why there is no hero’s journey without a guide, why the old you has to die, and why real awakening is about letting go rather than learning more. It is part of “The Journey to Self-Realization”, a podcast about the bravest journey a human being can set out on: the journey home to yourself.

Daniel André once searched everywhere for enlightenment: in the third eye, in kundalini, in DMT and ayahuasca. Then, in the middle of a noisy kindergarten, he watched his thoughts and feelings drift away like a cloud. Eva is still in the same demanding job, but now she walks to work bubbling with joy. And Linda Helene compares coming home to oneness with coming home to her childhood home, times a very big number.

At an alternative fair, a man who called himself an enlightened master and offered satsang came over to Amina and asked her to draw a rune for him, to find out which rune could help him let in more light. Pål-Esben gives burned-out clients an exercise in sitting still and doing absolutely nothing, and so far every one of them has come back frustrated, irritated or furious with him.