The Journey to Self-Realization

When a friend proudly asked Amina to come and admire the decking he had built, she was irritated, because she felt it was only his ego wanting praise. Pål-Esben’s advice was simple: go and celebrate that decking. He learned the same lesson the hard way himself, when he felt like an alien among the lads and his guide told him he would end up a very lonely person if he carried on down that road.

After her first real experience of oneness, Amina went for a walk in the mountains, saw a stone and burst into tears because it was so beautiful. As a teenager, Pål-Esben could bend spoons without touching them, and years later, after his burnout, he still dreamed of becoming famous as the spoon bender, until his first teacher asked him whether that would really make him happy.

When Pål-Esben asks burnt-out clients to sit for half an hour a day doing absolutely nothing, most of them can’t manage more than two or three minutes before they’re climbing the walls. And a baroness in burnout, a client of his wife’s, only began to calm her chaos once she had one phone for her children’s group chats and a five-minute daily limit on social media on her private phone.

As a little girl, Amina loved to dance and sing, until she was told that nobody in her family could dance, and that she had her dad’s moves. And when Pål-Esben was seriously ill, he would put on a perfect mask at the doctor’s, while his wife sat beside him, frustrated and sometimes furious, because he looked as if nothing was wrong.

When Pål-Esben’s guide confronted him about his pathological jealousy over lunch at a seminar, he ran out of the restaurant like a teenager who had been told off by his dad, and it took three months before he would speak to that guide again. Amina knows the pattern too: as soon as she feels well, she wonders whether she really needs the forest bathing, and one cinnamon bun can quickly turn into ten.

Some people believe the soul records a cassette of everything that will happen in a life, puts it in the player, and then incarnates on autopilot. Pål-Esben doesn’t buy it. For years he fought his own illness as an enemy, and the day he began to see it as a friend that kept him on track, new solutions began to appear in front of him.

A man who had been suffering for two decades, burnt out and unable to look after his newborn child, was given a first task that included switching off the news and social media for two weeks. When he and Pål-Esben spoke again, he felt hope for the first time in 20 years. And at Emory University, mice that had learned to fear the smell of cherry blossom passed that fear on to their offspring.

Amina’s cat had stopped eating, and she had already booked him into an animal hospital a boat ride away. She gave him a healing with the runes, started packing, and 25 minutes later he sprang up and went to his food bowl. More than two decades ago, Pål-Esben performed one of his first rune rituals in the castle where he lived, and his friend came running down the corridor to ask why the lights were going on and off.

On the huge stones of the Externsteine in Germany, Pål-Esben bellowed out his first rune ritual in his Trøndelag dialect, so loudly that the others said they had never heard anything like it. Two or three months later he met his wife. Amina wrote a song for her own ritual to attract the right partner, and two months later Erik was sitting in the audience at her talk.

The first time Pål-Esben had a reiki session, the healer stood shouting and shaking with his hands held over Pål-Esben, and the engineer in him got quite a shock. Even so, he felt much better for a few days, so he began travelling from Trondheim to Oslo twice a month for more. At the end of June, Amina felt deeply betrayed by some of her friends. Not long ago she spent time with them again, and there was no bitterness at all.