Season 1

Picture a small child who smiles, throws leaves up into the air and shrieks with laughter, for no other reason than that the leaves are so exciting. For most adults that state is very far away. Pål-Esben says the way back to it runs through the heart’s rhythm, not through a pink cloud, and when his students make a breakthrough, he asks them how they have celebrated it. Often the answer is a puzzled “Huh? Celebrate?”

Amina was once told that she and the man she was in a deeply destructive relationship with were twin souls, one soul split in two, and she swallowed it whole. A year and a half ago, while giving a talk at the Alternative Fair in Oslo, she noticed a smiling man in the audience who seemed very secure in himself, and they have now been together for a year. As a boy, Pål-Esben would sit outside in the evenings, looking at the stars and longing to go home.

When Pål-Esben was starting out on his journey of development, he told his guide he wanted to move somewhere with sun and beaches, where he would be happy. The guide just laughed and asked whether he really thought he’d be happier, since his baggage would come with him. Later, paralysed on the sofa by a depression no treatment could touch, Pål-Esben made peace with it, put on Netflix, and things began to turn around.

As a child, Amina felt she had a calling, and she thought it meant she was perhaps going to be a celebrity or a superstar. Today she hears the ego as a voice that is always in a hurry, and the soul’s voice as a calm breeze. Pål-Esben describes the soul as a sphere of energy the size of our solar system, and this planet as the elite university for souls, where your challenges make up your doctoral thesis.

Amina used to draw the curtains against the summer, and as a teenager she sulked whenever she got her feet wet. Today she can sit down by a tree and ask it for advice. Pål-Esben once had a student so anxious that she began by stepping outside her front door for a single minute. A year later she celebrated by spending the night in a hammock in the forest.

Amina once sold cakes, and any cake that wasn’t completely perfect went straight in the bin, so the whole project ran at a big loss. Today, when she forgets to bring something important to an event she is running, she simply uses what she has and makes something new out of it.

For years, Amina needed the people around her to believe what she believed, and with a partner, preferring jelly babies to her Haribo could almost be enough for a break-up. Today she finds it deeply liberating to hear someone say they disagree, and to feel that it’s still fine.

Standing in a queue at a petrol station, stressed and in a hurry, Amina felt a strange attitude rise up in her: that the people in front of her had no right to be ahead of her in the queue, because of where they came from. She had always seen herself as someone who accepts everyone, and the discovery showed her how much can lie hidden in our own depths.

What does gratitude feel like when it’s more than a list you write in the morning? One day, as she was driving somewhere, Amina suddenly felt an enormous gratitude for life itself welling up from deep inside her: a natural high that didn’t depend on anyone saying something nice to her.

What happens when you change and the people around you don’t? When Amina stopped reacting the way she always had, a former boyfriend turned violent, and family and friends asked whether she didn’t care any more.