Season 4

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.

Before she began her process of development, Amina thought meditation could be almost anything: someone in the lotus position on a mountaintop in the Himalayas, someone knitting, or someone busy with their tarot cards. Pål-Esben’s starting point in this episode is that it is impossible to do meditation at all. And when brain researchers went looking for the control room, the boss who is really you, they found nothing.

Early on her spiritual path, Amina asked a friend where you could buy spiritual clothes, and wondered whether she could still wear make-up. Now Pål-Esben asks her a far harder question: when she sits down to meditate, is it really her meditating, or is it her ego?

Pål-Esben knows a woman who sat in a tent outside the gate of a Zen temple for weeks to prove she was worthy of being let in, and his mentor slept outside his first mystical temple in Tibet for weeks before they even opened the gate to him. Years ago a counsellor convinced Pål-Esben that his mother was to blame for his burnout. It took him three years to see through it, and then he apologised to her.

As a small boy, Pål-Esben would often sit outside under the starry sky, looking at the stars and longing to come home. Around the age of 10 he could put his hand on a book and understand everything in it. Amina came back from her first experience of oneness, at a ritual at Spidsbergseter, feeling as if she had just woken up in the morning: human life is only a dream.

As a child, Amina felt something constant inside her that knew everything she did, said and felt, and it wasn’t God. Pål-Esben was once sitting at a symphony concert in Trondheim when his whole system opened up: the tears ran, and the bliss stayed in his body for weeks. The same thing happened again at the alternative health fair in Oslo, when a band called Dakini began to play.