Season 4

When Pål-Esben’s first guide confronted him about his pathological jealousy, he walked out of the restaurant and didn’t speak to him for three months. He also spent seven years with a psychotherapist who just smiled and asked: “Do you still think that’s how it is?” Today he asks a procrastinating client whether he wants to be a baby sucking his dummy, or a grown man.

Pål-Esben’s own mentor meditated for around six hours a day for 20 years without breaking through, until a Zen master pushed him across into oneness, and he cried for three days. After Amina’s first real experience of oneness, at a three-day retreat, she couldn’t function for weeks and struggled even to read on her computer. A year later she went deeper, and now she no longer needs to remind herself that she is really the Sahara.

Amina once worked on one chakra a week, eating red vegetables for the root chakra and yellow ones for the third. Pål-Esben’s verdict is that no chakra really has a colour, since everything is vibration, although a pineapple eaten in a playful spirit may still do the third chakra good, if only through the placebo effect. And when it comes to the last leap, from the sixth to the seventh chakra, no amount of meditation will get you there on your own.

Many who long to wake up want it done in a month: an ayahuasca weekend in the mountains, a guided meditation to activate the pineal gland, a hit of DMT when they have 30 minutes. Pål-Esben has seen people come home from a week’s ayahuasca retreat in the Amazon with a totally destroyed third chakra, and it often takes at least a year to ground people like that again. Amina, who went through traumatic plant-medicine ceremonies, now sees that even her most exalted experiences there were part of the dream.

Pål-Esben once had to control everything, and it led him into a burnout that nearly killed him in 2003. Today he controls almost nothing: life wears him like a glove. Amina pictures herself clinging to the riverbank until her hands bleed, rather than go with the current. And she tells how her son insisted on going to school while he was still ill, threw up, and came home having learned that sometimes Mum is right.

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.