Episode 14 – Mental Health and Shamanism. From Diagnosis to Freedom and Balance. ADHD, Anxiety, Low Mood and Restlessness – Find the Way Home to Yourself

Amina grew up with a mother who has bipolar disorder, and as an adult she was given three diagnoses of her own, one of which was later taken away again. Pål-Esben lived for years with treatment-resistant depression. In desperation he flew to a clinic on Mallorca for ketamine treatment, which helped for a while but turned out not to be the answer.

In this fourteenth episode, Amina and her teacher and guide, Pål-Esben Wanvig, talk about mental health and shamanism. They explore when a diagnosis is a relief and when it becomes a trap, the 90-day programme for calming the whole system, and why shamans and conventional medicine should work together. 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.

This episode is an English translation of our Norwegian original, voiced by the digital avatars of Pål-Esben and Amina.

In this episode

• Amina’s story: an unstable childhood, three diagnoses, and seeing a diagnosis as a tool rather than an identity
• When a diagnosis is a relief, and why identifying with it makes change harder
• ADHD in a society under pressure, stress as a fundamental trigger, and the place of medication
• The 90-day programme: a change of diet, a news fast, forest bathing, utiseta and breathing that calms the nervous system
• Gratitude as a natural high, and why doing things wholeheartedly makes the difference
• Pål-Esben’s own story, from burnout and treatment-resistant depression to ketamine on Mallorca
• Amina’s darkest episode, and how kindling the light within leaves less room for the darkness
• Cathrine Emilie’s journey, and why shamans and conventional medicine should join forces

This podcast is for you if you:

• Seek real depth in your spiritual practice
• Want to understand yourself on a more fundamental level
• Are curious about shamanism but tired of superficial “new age” spirituality
• Have taken many alternative courses but still feel that something is missing
• Feel an inner longing for freedom, love and wholeness

In a time when so many get lost in external methods and promises of quick fixes, this podcast invites you back to the only place where true answers can be found: your own heart.

Listen above, or read the full conversation below.

Transcript

A warm welcome to the podcast “The Journey to Self-Realization”, a primordial shamanic journey of development back to your true nature. This podcast is a collaboration with our favourite magazine, the health and lifestyle magazine Medium, and is devoted to exploring the bravest journey a human being can set out on: the journey home to oneself. We follow Amina, a student at the Yggdrasil Shamanic School, as she goes through a deep primordial shamanic process of development together with her guide and teacher Pål-Esben. It is a raw, unpolished journey of discovery towards true joy in life, deeper meaning, and a life that truly feels good to live.

This episode is an English translation of our Norwegian original, voiced by the digital avatars of Pål-Esben and Amina.

Today’s topic: mental illness in a process of development

Pål-Esben: Hi, Amina, and a warm welcome to a new episode of our podcast.

Amina: Hi, Pål-Esben, thank you, likewise. This is fun.

Pål-Esben: Yes, we’re excited about what we’re going to talk about in this episode, because these episodes of ours aren’t scripted. We have a topic at the start that we discuss, but nothing we’ve talked about in advance or written down. So you, dear listener: if we miss the mark a little, or drift off a bit, you’ll just have to be a little patient with us, but we’re doing the best we can. And what are we going to talk about today, Amina?

Amina: Today I’d like to talk about mental illness and mental health challenges in a spiritual process of development, a process of personal development. Precisely because I have quite a lot of experience with it myself, especially with this business of thinking that you can’t change, or can’t get better, because you have that diagnosis. Then you’re put in that box, and you have to carry that identity for the rest of your life. Everyone has different experiences with this, so it’s not as if you can just press a button, but I’d like to share a little of my experiences and my story around this.

Pål-Esben: That’ll be exciting. And this is also a difficult topic, surrounded by a lot of taboo. Before we start, I think we should stress this: if you’re ill and need help, and have problems with your mental health and these things, we always recommend that you seek help from your GP, a therapist, a psychologist or a psychiatrist, because what we’re going to talk about now is no substitute for professional medical help. So now we’ve said that too, since there are some quite harsh things we’re going to talk about here, especially with your story. We’ll talk about what has been possible in connection with a primordial shamanic process of development, and what can also happen with the mind and with the diagnoses you’ve been given in the past. So you can just fire away, Amina, and talk a little about your experiences around these things.

Amina’s story: from an unstable childhood to three diagnoses

Amina: Yes, I can do that. I’ve struggled with my mental health for as long as I can remember. I had an upbringing marked by a lot of instability. My mother still has bipolar disorder, so we were either on a trip to the moon or down in the deepest darkness. So I grew up around this, and of course around many other things that were difficult in childhood. And Mum has always done the best she could with what she had, and I think all parents do. But it wasn’t until my early twenties, after I got divorced, perhaps in my mid-twenties, that I had a boyfriend who had a talk with me one day and wondered whether I might have a disorder, whether it was a personality disorder. He brought it up a bit vaguely, because he’d begun to recognise the signs in me: the fear of being abandoned, the instability, my difficult self-image, the way I was so changeable, up and down, high and low, how my personality changed so much without my being able to keep up with what was happening and why. And of course the impulsive behaviour, being completely carried away by every emotion. And I suppose I actually dismissed that pretty quickly, because I didn’t recognise myself in it. It was just a bit difficult sometimes, because when things are going well, it’s so easy to forget what things were like when they weren’t going well. So that was sort of the opening into it, but I rather forgot about it.

Then I suppose it was when I worked at a place called Servicetelefonen. It was an order office, that is, outsourced customer service and order handling. And then my eyes began to cross; I began to see double on the screens, which meant I had to strain to keep my eyes focused for many hours a day, and I held on and held on and held on. In the end I burned out completely, because I was trying to keep it together to be a good worker. And when I went to my GP, I said that I was completely worn out, completely burned out, that I had suicidal thoughts, that something was seriously wrong. So I was referred to the district psychiatric centre, and after a long assessment period I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and then with borderline personality disorder. I went on a course for bipolar disorder, and after that I started treatment for the personality disorder, a treatment that lasted over 18 months. It’s called MBT, mentalization-based treatment, where I talked to a specialist psychologist once a week and was in a group where we brought up particular topics that had been difficult recently. So there was good follow-up there. When I’d finished the treatment, which was a very good treatment for me, they also removed the bipolar diagnosis. Because they saw that if it had been bipolar disorder, it would have been clearer and more visible, since it isn’t something you can keep in check just by pulling yourself together. We’re often very good at pulling ourselves together so that people will like us. But I’d asked several times during the treatment whether I could be assessed for ADHD, because it was something I’d recognised in myself from childhood into adulthood, but they wanted me to put it on the shelf until this treatment was finished.

And then I remember that towards the end of the treatment, the specialist psychologist said she thought it could be a good thing if I were assessed for ADHD. Perhaps I could get some medication to calm my nervous system. Because she saw that the nervous system was perhaps one of the last pieces that needed to fall into place before I could have more calm in my life, or be able to keep developing. So I was assessed for ADHD, got the ADHD diagnosis and started on medication. And it was when I started on medication that I began to understand what it’s like inside the heads of normal people. That was when I actually began to find calm. About a year after that, I started my training with you, and I also noticed that it was easier to meditate on medication, easier to find a new flow in daily life. And I remember that when I started on medication, a psychiatric nurse told me that a great many people can take medication for a couple of years and then stop, because the brain has begun to build up a new pattern. So that’s what I did in time: I stopped the medication and felt that yes, I’ve built up a new system inside here. And it has been a bit on and off in periods since then, but today I’ve found methods and techniques that mean I don’t need it. But difficult periods can still come, when life happens, and the nerves act up, and being a woman and all of that.

So what’s a bit scary is that you can very often be put in a box when you get a diagnosis. I’ve heard many people say: “Yes, but I can’t help it, I’m just like this, I have that diagnosis, so I can’t change.” And I have every compassion and understanding for those who feel that way, because I’ve felt it myself too: that I really can’t change, because this is just how I am. And then I’ve found that it’s absolutely possible. I’m more inclined to say that if you get a diagnosis, you should look at it more as a tool than as a fixed identity. It’s a tool for understanding yourself, a tool for finding the methods, techniques, mindsets and ways of living that you yourself need. So that’s a bit of the background story.

The diagnosis as relief and as trap

Pål-Esben: The challenge with diagnoses is that, on the one hand, it can be a relief finally to get confirmation that there actually is something wrong with me. You go through difficult things in life, and you don’t quite understand why you react irrationally or so emotionally, and why you get all this negative feedback from the world around you. And then, when you get a diagnosis, many people feel relief at finally being understood, perhaps for the first time in their lives. But on the other hand, diagnoses are also a challenge. As you say: if you feel you’ve been pigeonholed and say that’s just how it is, you begin to identify with your diagnosis. I’ve seen that many, many times over the more than 20 years I’ve worked with people. The more a person identifies with a diagnosis, the harder it is to make changes and find alternative solutions. Because you say: “I’m just like this, the doctors have said I’m just like this, the psychologists have said that’s how it is.” And they often say that you’re just like this, and that there’s no possibility of doing anything about it. And then, over time, you can become so identified with your illness that you believe you are the illness. And then of course it becomes very, very difficult in time to be open at all to someone who says that perhaps you should look at this or that, perhaps you should see such-and-such a specialist to see whether you can get out of your situation. In your case it wasn’t so long since you’d been given the diagnoses, so you were still searching, still open, curious. You weren’t completely locked into your own identification with your diagnosis. But I’d guess that for you too it was a relief to have some experts saying that it’s no wonder you feel the way you feel.

Amina: Yes, very much. I remember that the man who assessed me for ADHD sat looking at the papers afterwards and said: “I don’t really understand how you’ve made it through the school system.” He also wrote in the papers that I have so many other qualities that make up for all the shortcomings, and that have always made it hard to spot in me.

Pål-Esben: Let’s stay with ADHD for a bit here, since we can talk a little about depression afterwards. Because I have quite a lot of experience with depression, and an experience there of what it means not to identify with a diagnosis, which was telling the psychologist to go to hell. I didn’t accept being given a diagnosis of depression, because it was sort of unthinkable in our family that any of us should be depressed, so I was going to find my own solution to this.

ADHD: a diagnosis that is exploding

Pål-Esben: But that’s a completely different matter. Let’s stick to ADHD first. ADHD is something that’s exploding in our society, especially among children, so more people than ever are being diagnosed with ADHD. And what’s also interesting is that more and more adults are getting this diagnosis. I don’t know whether it existed a long time ago. Perhaps it did; at any rate it existed as a diagnosis. And now far more children than before are diagnosed with ADHD. That’s a problem with our society and the system we live in, and probably also with the extreme pressure that young people and adults are put under in the society we live in.

And I come across many parents who have children with concentration problems, big problems at school, restlessness, all the things that typical ADHD problems can lead to. But on the other hand, I find it strange when you see the insane pressure kids are under today, compared with when I was young. That’s a long time ago in my case. When I was young, it was almost back in the war years. A very, very long time ago, I remember we were out playing every afternoon, together with everyone else. There were no watchful parents standing guard all the time in case we climbed trees, no hysterical parents like that around us. We could just be outside playing and having fun for hours, all the kids on the block, almost every day. And there was no social media, no Snapchat and TikTok and whatever they’re called, and definitely no mobile phones. So the way of living and growing up was very different from how children grow up today, when you’re expected to be online and make sure you send messages and share snaps. And on top of that, the parents watch over them like hawks: helicopter parents everywhere. There’s almost never any peace for kids today. There’s a gigantic difference between when I grew up and how things are today.

And that’s perhaps one of many explanations for why children today are so incredibly stressed. They’re chronically stressed kids, as we see when it comes to sleep, and the massive sleep problems young people and teenagers have. All of this brings chronic stress with it, not to mention adults today compared with how it was 50 years ago: that pressure and that stress are very different. So these are lifestyle diseases, which is at least how I characterise ADHD. In other words, it’s a kind of illness connected to lifestyle and society that just keeps increasing with every year that passes, and that makes parents desperate when it comes to their kids. Because I understand the suffering the kids experience, and how the adults who are supposed to take care of their kids also suffer with it. I’ve worked with many families that have almost fallen apart through the chaos that arises. So I understand how difficult this is. And I also understand how difficult it was for you, when you had no control over how you directed your attention, with everything from lack of attention to hyperfocus, which are really two sides of the same coin. That’s why this is a big challenge we have in our society. And of course, when doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists and so on look at it, their solution is medication. Sometimes medication is necessary, and it’s not that I’m against medication. Because I see with you, for example, that you tried to come off your medication a little too early, and then this restlessness came straight back. That’s why medication can be very helpful, both for children and adults, as a transition period until the new neural network has been created. So I’m opposed to fanatics who say that ADHD is just nonsense, that medicine is just nonsense, that you have to do everything naturally. You can’t always solve an ADHD situation in a natural way. But we can say a few words afterwards about what I recommend adults and parents do about this.

Natural routines and lasting changes

Amina: Yes. My experience of taking medication and then stopping is that it’s still important for me to keep up the natural routines. I use a fair amount of herbs, natural food, things like that, and then walking in the forest, meditation, silence, not having too much on my schedule. Because when I keep up the healthy habits… I’ve found a way of living that means those symptoms don’t come back, but if I don’t keep it up, they can come back very quickly. So part of it is that there’s no quick fix; you have to make some lasting changes in your life that are good for you. But going a little into what you talked about, where ADHD really comes from: I’ve had some conversations with friends who were also diagnosed as adults, and who are absolutely determined that no, it’s congenital. I’m a bit open to the possibility that it could be other things. Why didn’t we have those diagnoses in the old days in the same way we do today? And every time I’ve brought that up, I’ve often been met with very strong resistance. The way I understand it, there are some people who may have made it part of their identity, and who feel that I’m trying to take their identity away, while I’m just trying to raise the question: could it be something else? To philosophise a little around it.

Stress as a fundamental trigger

Pål-Esben: And this is precisely the challenge we talked about at the start. If you begin to identify with a diagnosis and say that this is how it is, that it’s congenital, perhaps because you’ve read it in a book or heard someone say so… But it’s easy to prove, if we study the history of the last hundred years, that this isn’t congenital in everyone. Perhaps in one in ten, but definitely not in everyone. For you, and for many, many others I’ve helped out of ADHD, the fundamental trigger that sets off the symptoms in a great many people is stress, or rather chronic stress. And of course, if you identify with it and say that it’s your illness, it’s something genetically determined, it’s something congenital, then you’re also saying that this is how it will be for the rest of your life, and that you’re not interested in looking at any other solutions at all. It just is that way. And the way I see it, that’s a very limiting way of looking at life, instead of being a little curious and saying: “OK, I’ve been given a diagnosis, but what’s possible here, beyond what the GP says, or the psychologist or doctor, who often gives me a diagnosis and medication and says I’ll have to stay on it for the rest of my life?” But there are many people out there who have solved the problem of ADHD and no longer have the diagnosis, even though they once did. So it comes down to a person’s fundamental philosophy of life. Do we just want to hold on to something as an illness, or do we want to be open to seeing whether there are possibilities of finding a solution, possibilities of getting better?

My experience through all these years is this. If I manage to reduce the fundamental chronic stress in the body, that is, the biological stress, in addition to the psychological and emotional stress, and also help the client find methods and patterns of behaviour they can easily use to calm down and find balance, then it’s entirely possible, at least in eight out of ten cases, to reach the point where ADHD isn’t limiting in life. And when we talk about this stress, we’re not just talking about cognitive and emotional stress, but also about physiological, biological stress: everything from inflammation in your body because you eat too many fast carbohydrates, to eating a diet that leads to all this restlessness internally. So these are the factors I always look at. And then we can try a programme where we minimise the internal stress in your body. We change the diet for 90 days, taking out trigger substances like sweets and fast carbohydrates, and perhaps we test milk and gluten and eggs for a period and see how the body reacts to them. In addition, we start on coping routines such as deep breathing, different forms of meditation or ways of finding silence and these things, which you have lots of experience with.

Presence in the little things

Amina: Yes, absolutely. And one of the things that has helped me on the way here, especially when it comes to meditation… Because if I try to tell someone with ADHD to just sit and be still, well, their mind is already racing. Ordinary people can struggle with that too. When I’ve worked with this, I’ve worked a lot on making room for meditation and silence in everything I do through the day. A lot of it has been about presence, noticing when I’m not present in what I’m doing. Take holding the coffee cup. Coffee isn’t really the best thing to drink, so let’s say the cup of cocoa, the glass of water, whatever it is, the toothbrush. You just stay fully and completely present with it: how it feels in your mouth, what it’s like to hold it, how it smells. All of this has helped me to be more present in silence, in calm. The same goes for what you say about the breath, which is very good for calming the nervous system, at least mine. Quite early on in the training here, you talked about breathing out for longer than you breathe in. If you do that for a little while, and it doesn’t need to take long either, you’ll feel things calming down. And there’s also this business of making the small changes: you don’t have to do everything at once. But especially when it comes to meditation and silence… I started with this in nature, and there you get a completely different presence than when you sit at home in your living room, which helped me a lot in finding calm in the first place. And on the days when my head was racing, when I couldn’t quieten my mind, especially at the beginning, I’ve also worked on accepting it. That can still happen from time to time today, if there’s a lot going on. Then I tell myself: “OK, I’m aware of it,” and I don’t try to fight against it on the days when it doesn’t work. It has been a process of development, but the way I am today, I can find that silence and that calm.

The 90-day programme: calm in the system

Pål-Esben: Yes. And perhaps we can go briefly through the programme we start people on who’d like to try it out. It’s for anyone who’s open to it and has ADHD or ADHD-like symptoms. You don’t need a diagnosis for it; it’s enough that you have problems concentrating, problems with being a bit up and down and back and forth, or problems with hyperfocus, which amounts to the same thing. The starter programme, which in my experience works for eight out of ten, begins with number one: you first have to be willing to try something new for 90 days. If you think it’ll be fixed in a day or two, forget it. So it’s 90 days: a programme we do over 90 days, where the first goal is to calm the whole system down. In addition to suggestions on nutrition, on what to eat and what absolutely not to eat, it includes how, for 90 days, we cut down on unnecessary stressful input, like all the news that feeds you war and ruin, death and destruction, continuously. You cut out news, newspapers and all destructive, negative input like that for 90 days. The suggestion is that you make sure scrolling on social networks is limited to one hour a day at most. That means you start a programme where you calm the system down dramatically compared with how things have been before. Because the more worked up the system is, the more worked up the mind is. The more stressed the amygdala, our fear centre, is, the less control you can have over the symptoms of ADHD. And that applies just as much whether it’s children or adults, same thing.

A news fast: 30 days without chaos

So say you tell yourself: “OK, I’m willing to try it for a few weeks and see how I react.” In the last 21-plus years I have never come across a person, a client or a student, who hasn’t had amazing results in their life just by cutting out the news for 30 days. It’s frightening how this continuous barrage of news, which we take in consciously and unconsciously, stresses the head and stresses the mind. It’s frightening, and you only see it if you try to go without it for 30 days. It’s literally frightening how much influence it has. And you, who have struggled with these things: I take it you tried this tip too, and checked how it worked?

Amina: Absolutely, absolutely. So today I’ve understood that the news… I can’t do anything about what’s happening out in the world anyway, and cutting out the news helps the mind a great deal. I was someone who often went on the news site VG.no because I was bored, or because you click on one thing and then another, and you think it’s harmless. And then there’s scrolling on the phone, because social media bombards you with impressions. People share things, then you have some thoughts about it, then you’re influenced, and then perhaps you end up with a bit of a poor self-image, because you ought to have done it just as well as that person. Then there’s fear of missing out, and all the things that can come in that you perhaps don’t consciously think about. So when I take a break from social media, whether it’s a week or a few days, I notice how much it does for the mind. A great deal. And then there’s all the pinging that pops up on the phone. I don’t have notifications on most of the apps. Now, parents are a bit forced into this with apps and pings, because you have to be in a Facebook group there, then there’s football in that app, and then you have to get messages and things like that. The week I have the children, I have to be a bit more available than the other week, but that’s what it’s like to live in that society. You can’t cut out everything, but you can look at which areas you can start cutting down on.

Pål-Esben: Yes, and you were willing to do this from the start, and I hardly think you’d have got the results you did if you hadn’t been willing. So it’s really the first test of whether a person is willing to do the things that are necessary to get out of the symptoms of the diagnosis, because this definitely doesn’t happen by itself. The alternative is that you can choose to say: “Yes, OK, I’m ill, I don’t want to do anything about it, so I’ll take medication for the rest of my life.” But if you study the consequences of using this medication, it also has a consequence over time: a consequence for your brain when you’re on Ritalin and the like year after year after year. We won’t talk about that now, but there is a consequence, and it isn’t something natural for the body. So if it’s possible to find the way out, it would be a good idea to decide to say: “Let me try this for at least 30 days and see how I react.” Because it’s liberating to spend a few weeks without this chaos going on in the world with politicians and others all over the place, which gets worse and worse with every day that passes.

So that’s number one. No, it’s number two. Number one is an adjustment of the diet, especially of what triggers the body, with fast carbohydrates. Number two is trying to minimise destructive and stressful input from unnecessary sources like the news and mindless scrolling everywhere, plus all these pings from all the apps. It’s possible for most of us to switch off at least that. Says the man who isn’t on social media at all, but that’s another matter: I belong to an older guard. Even my mother was on social media more than I am. So I’m starting to put on my grandad uniform here now.

Forest bathing and Shinrin-yoku

And the next thing we look at is how we begin to use nature in an active way, because nature is such a strong source and such a strong helper for calming us down. Here we encourage something called forest bathing. In Japan this has been known for many, many years as Shinrin-yoku, which means walking in the forest or in nature without an agenda. And a great deal of research has been done on it, in Japan and at other universities around the world, which proves that it affects blood pressure in a positive way, it affects the cardiovascular system in a positive way, it affects the hormone system in a positive way, and of course it has a quite dramatic positive effect on the fundamental stress level. And that was something I recommended to you very early on too, but you had a bit of resistance to going out and wandering in the forest.

Amina: Yes, because it was boring, you see. What’s supposed to happen there? Should I go right or left? I can’t find the calm. Where is it? Is it behind that tree? So you come face to face with yourself, and that’s a big part of it too: seeing how serious things are for people today compared with how we lived before, in harmony with nature and nature’s healthy rhythms. For me, at the beginning, it was discipline; I had to use willpower. But when I began to have some deeper experiences of calm, of presence, of nature, it began to become more of a longing, and things began to change in my life. And then I’ve had those periods when I’ve forgotten to keep doing it, because life got in the way. Then there was no time any more, and the consequence of that… Today I understand: whoa, I don’t want to end up there again. So that has also been a very important experience. It’s about using nature, walking in nature completely without a phone, without music in your ears, without dogs and children and friends you talk to: just being, just bathing in what is. It’s also about watching out for expectations, which I had to watch out for a bit; I caught myself at it. You can often get expectations that now nature is going to fix me, now I’ll just be here and it’ll fix me. So there are many thoughts you can have around it, but it’s absolutely such an incredibly important source for finding that calm, that sense of safety, which becomes a mainstay for everything else you do. I feel it’s one of the fundamental things.

Utiseta: contact with nature’s rhythms

Pål-Esben: Yes. And modern people’s complete disconnection from nature’s rhythms is actually, in my experience, one of the most important reasons why people aren’t doing well. The constant stresses, the way a lot of chronic illness arises: it often comes from there being too much inflammation in the body, and one of the most important sources of inflammation is chronic stress. When people have action all day long and all evening long, we encourage them to learn this anew. It’s quite interesting that you have to teach a human being to use nature, because I very rarely come across people who understand what it means to use nature to restore the natural rhythms in themselves. Because it isn’t enough to walk the dog or go for a jog; that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about taking 30 minutes or an hour. Leave your mobile phone at home, or put it on flight mode, take out the earbuds, put on your trainers and just walk by yourself in the forest without an agenda. Just be with the forest. It can be by the sea, in the mountains, it doesn’t matter, but we’re using the forest as an example now. Just walk slowly along a path in the forest and feel what it’s like to be in the forest. When you’ve gone a little way in, you sit down on a stump or a stone or by a tree or a stream, or wherever it may be, and then you try to make contact with nature: with the grass, with the earth, with the tree, with the wind. And it sounds a bit odd, because it’s a bit challenging at the start. As you say: nothing happens, this is boring, why am I just sitting here, what a waste of time. That’s what’s normal at the start, but it’s worth it. Then, in time, you learn something we call utiseta meditation, a very specific, simple form of meditation that you do out in nature to connect with the natural rhythms. It’s something you learn in half an hour, and you can do it for five minutes or ten minutes or an hour; it doesn’t matter. It’s a specific method we have in our shamanic school to help even a beginner connect with the natural rhythms, and within one to two weeks you begin to get results with it. It’s one of the most miraculous things I see with new people who come to me for help: what happens when they do these things. Then it doesn’t take many days or weeks before life begins to change. Their shoulders begin to drop, they begin to think more clearly, it’s easier to concentrate, and not least it’s easier to make good choices and set healthy, loving boundaries for all the chaos around them.

Gratitude: the natural rush

Amina: Yes. And you may want to pull me up on this one, but when you have ADHD, or you’re after that dopamine rush, I just want to say this: if you’re after a natural rush, there’s no greater natural high than gratitude. I mean, when you really come into contact with deep, genuine gratitude, it’s something that beats any dopamine rush you can get out there. I don’t know if I can even call it a dopamine rush; that’s why I said you might pull me up. But this business of making contact with deep gratitude, which we have a whole episode about, episode 4, is something you can really live on, a fuel I have no words to describe. And this isn’t very complicated to do. It just takes a little cultivation over a few weeks, but the result can be quite extraordinary.

Children, diet and the place of medication

Pål-Esben: You do similar things when it comes to children too; there isn’t a very big difference. With children you also need to teach them concrete methods for handling stress in their daily lives, and how to self-regulate. Otherwise it’s more or less the same. Through all these years I’ve helped people get quite brilliant results with their kids, but one in ten, up to two in ten, need medication, at least for a period. And then there’s no shame in trying it. If you’ve tried everything else, the so-called natural way of doing things, and it doesn’t get results, whether you’re an adult or a child, there’s no shame in getting help with medication for a period. That’s also important to stress here, because there are far too many people out there, especially in the more holistic community, who are negative towards all forms of medication. They’re negative towards pretty much everything that isn’t, quote unquote, natural. But for me, it’s about how we help our children. If a child can’t sit still at school and concentrate, if they’re bullied because they’re restless and so on, and whatever you do it doesn’t get better, then I’d say that medication such as Ritalin can also be a miracle, both for the child and of course for the family. But at least in eight out of ten cases, in my experience, it’s possible to do something about this, quite extensively, without medication. And that’s what I’d recommend trying first. But it takes a bit. If we’re talking about parents here, it takes a bit to take the Seigmenn, the Norwegian jelly men, and Haribo and the like away from the kids. Do you have Haribo in Norway?

Amina: Yes, don’t we have Haribo? I’ve certainly eaten Haribo, anyway.

Pål-Esben: Seigmenn and the like, then. Because I also meet parents who don’t want to, because then their kid gets difficult, howling and screaming. When my dear wife and I bought the house I live in now, an ancient house of oak and clay, a family lived there who had an eight-year-old son, and the son really had extreme ADHD. And when we came in to visit the house and see how things were, the first thing the mother did was to take out a huge bag of Seigmenn and feed this boy sweets continuously. If he didn’t get sweets, he became hysterical, and then of course it’s difficult. And that’s something you at least have to go through: a change of diet, with sweets out of the picture for a while. Of course it takes a bit, and for you as an adult it takes a bit too, especially if you’re addicted to that sugar kick. But it’s entirely possible, and the results can be very, very positive.

Breathing that calms the nervous system

So that’s sort of the foundation of what you went through, and of what I also recommend to those who’d like to try these things. In addition, we have certain breathing exercises, as you talked about, where we have a particular way of using the breath to activate the vagus nerve in the autonomic nervous system. That’s the part of the autonomic nervous system that calms our whole body down, the parasympathetic part of the nervous system. There are a couple of cool breathing exercises where you can actively trigger the vagus nerve, so that you shift into a parasympathetic state within a very short time, a relaxed state, the way you learned. One of them is to make sure you breathe out for longer than you breathe in. If you breathe in for, say, six seconds and out for eight seconds, the vagus nerve will kick in automatically. There are of course even cooler things than that, but there are many things that can help in this process. That’s what I at least encourage everyone to do: why not try this wholeheartedly for a few weeks and see how it works? For you, Amina, it was a miracle.

Wholehearted or half-hearted

Amina: Absolutely. And there you see that some of the most important things we can do to calm the nervous system and feel better are actually free. So things don’t have to cost the earth; you just have to be willing to give it a chance. Because there’s a difference between those who do it half-heartedly and those who do it wholeheartedly. Those who do it half-heartedly will do it half-heartedly and say: “No, I tried, it didn’t work.” Those who do it wholeheartedly will end up with rather different results.

Pål-Esben: And that’s what’s impressive about you, Amina. You’re one of those who have done everything wholeheartedly, and that’s also one reason why you have these radical improvements in your life in so few months. That doesn’t come from being quarter-hearted or half-hearted. You’ve really tried as hard as you could, and done things wholeheartedly. And that’s also one of the most important qualities you have for getting where you are today. It’s something everyone can decide on, but it takes a bit. You need a bit of courage to do these things; you need the guts to get over the doorstep, which can be the longest mile of all. “Oh no, it’s better to sit with Netflix. Am I supposed to put on trainers and tracksuit bottoms and go out into nature for 20 minutes?” No, it takes a bit. But you need a bit of courage and a bit of backbone, so that you put on your trainers and go out for a walk. And that’s something that doesn’t come by itself. It’s something that you, Amina, had to activate in yourself.

Amina: Yes. I had to use willpower and find my deepest why for the hard days, and pull on my grown-up trousers and my sports gear and all that. And the thing here is that you don’t have to do this on your own. You can seek help and get someone to hold your hand, as I did with you. So you’ve got someone to talk to when you hit resistance and thought: “No, damn it, this won’t work for me.” It helps to have someone who inspires you and says that perhaps you could try it this way instead, so that you’re not sitting completely on your own trying to do something that’s difficult for the intellect and the ego, which is change. Then it’s probably a good idea to look for someone who’s on the ball and qualified to help you through a process like that. Because there’s definitely no shame in seeking help.

Pål-Esben: Correct. I’m an expert at seeking help, and so are you. It’s a bit of a god complex to believe that we have to fix everything in life ourselves. That’s simply not how it’s set up.

Amina: So that was ADHD. Do you have anything more to say about ADHD, or shall we turn to depression, briefly, before we finish?

Depression and melancholy

Pål-Esben: I think we can turn to depression now. It’s important that we say a few words about it too. Now we’re not talking about depression where you have clinical diagnoses, where you’re clinically ill. We’re talking about melancholy, where you have mood swings, where you feel that everything is heavy. That’s something those of us who aren’t medical professionals are allowed to talk about. But if you have a diagnosis of real clinical depression, you should seek help and get help. What we’re going to talk about now are possibilities when you have these problems, so that you can begin to test out some things, because there are definitely things you can do to make life better. And the only exception, I’d say here, is if the brain is lacking substances. Then you can’t just close your eyes and breathe and meditate and say that now everything will be fine. That’s not how we humans work. So if there’s a lack of chemical substances your brain needs, or your body needs for your brain to function normally, then of course that has to be solved in a professional way.

Amina: How do you find out whether you have that? Is it something you find out at the GP or from specialists?

Pål-Esben: OK, shall I tell my story briefly here?

Amina: Go ahead, Pål-Esben.

Pål-Esben’s own story: from burnout to diagnosis

Pål-Esben: Yes. When I hit the wall in 2003 and had my burnout, which nearly killed me, I got caught up in the merry-go-round of GPs and specialists. They scanned me, they took hundreds of different blood tests, they did all the tests, and they found that there was nothing pathologically wrong with me, because all the tests looked normal, quote unquote. And what does the GP do then? Well, he said that there must be something wrong with my head, and sent me to a psychologist. And I went to the psychologist; it was the first time I’d been to a psychologist. It was a total horror experience. This woman took me back to the trauma and the situation that triggered the burnout and all these things. Every week, over and over again, I went into this, and I was flattened for two or three days afterwards, at least. I could hardly move, because I was completely shot. And then I come back the next week, and the same thing happens, and the same again, and I think: “What the hell am I doing here?” And then she says: “Yes, this is depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder, and blah blah blah.” I got lots of odd explanations like that for it. And I got so frustrated and so desperate, because I just got worse and worse every week I saw the psychologist, who was known as one of the best in the area where I lived, that is, in Trondheim at the time. And eventually I say that I can’t do this any more. And what happens then? Either you continue the treatment plan, or we’ll contact NAV, the Norwegian welfare agency, so that you don’t get any more support. In other words, either you do as I want and take some psychiatric drugs and medication, or we’ll make sure you have problems with NAV.

Then I think: “To hell with that.” And of course I’m furious. Here’s someone who first gives me a diagnosis I don’t want. The nerve! Nobody in the Wanvig family is supposed to have anything wrong with their head; that’s not done, it’s not good, it’s taboo. So that was the first thing I got angry about. And the second was prescribing psychiatric drugs, that is, happy pills, call them what you like, and saying: “Either you take this, or we’ll create problems for you.” At the time I was completely against things like that. Today I have a somewhat more sophisticated relationship with it: sometimes it’s very helpful for a period. But back then I told the psychologist that I wasn’t interested. I’d sort this out myself; I’d find the solutions myself. And that was when I flew down to Germany and started my process of finding solutions to my health problems, and found out that there were many things wrong with me, but that’s another story.

A real diagnosis: severe depression and bipolar type 2

And eventually I come to a really skilled psychiatrist, and there I finally get a real diagnosis, which is severe depression, that is, one of the worst diagnoses you can get with depression. Severe depression, combined with bipolar type 2 with an irregular cycle. And it turned out over time that everything was treatment-resistant, which means that whatever treatment I got, nothing improved. So gradually I recognised that I had a gigantic problem with depression: not just depression, but bipolar type 2 that cycled wildly up and down. And I think: my poor wife, living with someone who has this and tries to ignore it and say there’s no problem with him. In time I understood that it must be a big problem. Difficult stuff. But in the end I accepted that I have a serious diagnosis of depression.

And for me it worked like this. I could be up and about and clear-headed and think clearly for a few days, perhaps a week or two, and then suddenly, out of the blue, it flips. There were no external triggers, nothing whatsoever. I go down into the deepest darkness, where I become numb, completely paralysed. And I could be there for several months. Then, out of the blue, with no particular triggers, no change in nutrition, absolutely nothing, it flips, and suddenly my brain works again. It kicks in, I think clearly, and I think: “Good grief, is this possible?” And after three or four days, perhaps one to two weeks at most: boom, down. And then two or three, up to four, months in the darkness again. And that’s how it went for years on end. If it hadn’t been for these small upswings, when I could feel better, I might have given up. And I went through a massive amount: the best psychiatrists, psychologists, every kind of medication, whatever it might be, tens of thousands of euros in therapy and these things. Nothing helped at all. And I was close to giving up and saying that this is just how it is. I began to accept that this is just how it is, that this is how I’ll have to live for the rest of my life. I talked like that for many years. I did the best I could.

Ketamine: a step taken in desperation

And then I come across… I’m always on the lookout for other possible solutions for depression that go beyond conventional medicine. And then I come across, and this is a good many years ago, research on the use of ketamine in treating depression. It was a long time before it came to Norway. Now you can get ketamine treatment for depression in Norway, but it was a long time before it got here. And then I think: “Ketamine? That’s an anaesthetic. They use it to put animals under when they operate on them, and in war and things like that too.” Aha. And then you hear about ketamine abuse in the youth scene, people taking Special K or whatever it’s called and getting high on ketamine, and then I think: “Drugs?” And once I’ve done my research on ketamine, I fly down to a clinic on Mallorca that offers ketamine treatment combined with talk therapy and psychotherapy. Because by then I’d understood that this had to be done in parallel. You can’t just do ketamine treatment; you have to do the talk therapy alongside it. And I went down to Mallorca. It was a nice private clinic, and the weather was nice too. And I remember I was about to have my first ketamine treatment, and they stick the needle into my vein. I had one of those bags, 50 milligrams of ketamine in half a litre of saline solution, and I’m lying there on the couch. And it begins to kick in, and I think: “What the hell is this?” It was quite an experience, I can tell you. You become completely depersonalised: your mind is here and your body is there, and you lose control. And then the hallucinations start coming. It was a horror trip out of another world, since this psychiatrist who did it… It was dark in the room, no music, and there were buses and noise outside. And when you’re having ketamine treatment like that, your senses are hypersharp. Your senses may be ten times stronger than normal. It was such a violent experience, and I think: “What is this?” After 40 minutes you begin to come round, and I think: “Well, that was quite something.”

And I had three ketamine treatments the week I was there, and after the second or third treatment I noticed that something had happened to me. I began to think clearly, my head began to work, and I think: “What is this?” I was totally shocked. And after two months the crap came back, but by then I’d been completely well for two months. I think: “OK, I’ll go back again.” I get another three treatments, and I’m well for one month. I think: “This isn’t very good.” And I go down a third time, and nothing works. I think: “Damn it, I’d finally found something that was finally good, and that doesn’t work either.” So that was the first big step, taken in desperation. And today I have several clients and students in Norway who have been helped a great deal by ketamine. You can get it both at a public hospital here in Norway, in Østfold, and at private clinics. So it helped me for a period, and it has helped several people I know, but for me it wasn’t the solution.

Hope and the light in the darkness

So I had to find a more radical solution, and that’s something I’m not quite ready to talk about yet. But I found a radical solution to this that made me completely well. And by that I mean completely well: in four or five years I haven’t had a single relapse. It was a radical thing, and we can devote one of the episodes to it a bit later. But that’s sort of my background when I talk about depression, so I understand how difficult this is. But what saved me was that I never gave up hope, and that I was always in contact with nature, always in contact with the light in myself, even when it was dark. And with everything we use on the primordial shamanic path, I managed to recharge myself, so that I could handle my life in a way where hardly anyone around me saw that I was ill at all. I managed to hide it. It’s perhaps a bit strange to say, but I managed to hide it from most people. Only those closest to me could sense that something was wrong with me. But it was a horror show for several years. So that was sort of my background with depression. How about you?

Amina: With what, do you mean?

Pål-Esben: Depression. Isn’t that something you’ve had too?

Amina’s darkest episode

Amina: Yes, well, I mean, I’ve never had a depression diagnosis like that on paper, but I did get the bipolar disorder diagnosis because I had periods when I was on top of the world, and then I was just completely in the dark. But one thing I noticed, as you said, was that there were no external factors that flipped it. I remember saying that about myself too, and I often hear it from people I guide: “No, nothing happened before this happened.” And often something did. You see that something has happened beforehand, but you can’t quite see it clearly. So it’s a matter of telling the difference between nothing actually having happened, and looking at whether this was what tipped the balance. But this business of being in total hopelessness, everything completely dark, not being able to… I remember I had an episode like that perhaps five years ago. And I’m also the kind of person who… When I’ve told people about chronic illness and mental illness, nobody has ever thought that about me, because I’m the kind who really keeps up a front; I don’t go around moaning and groaning. But there was a period when I couldn’t pull myself together any more, and then I just lay flat out in bed, and my children came up to talk to me, but I couldn’t answer. I was just completely paralysed by the darkness. And ever since I had children, because of my own upbringing, I’ve been very concerned that they should never hear that Mum is ill and has to stay in bed, that they shouldn’t notice anything. So I’ve probably actually been more overprotective, on the negative side again, because I experienced it so much as a child. So it was a very frightening episode for me and for my children, because it’s something they still remember to this day: “Mum, do you remember that time you were lying in bed, and I saw you were awake, but you didn’t say anything?” So this must have been right in the darkest darkness.

And what I notice with the primordial shamanic process of development is that I actually don’t know how well I’d manage to get through difficult and darker things now without falling back on an old autopilot, if I hadn’t been within this energetic field, with all the techniques and methods we’ve learned. Techniques and methods are poor words to use, of course, but this energetic field, this home I’ve found inside myself, this light I’ve got to know, my heart, this greater understanding of who I am and why I’m here: it has meant that I haven’t lost hope the way I did before. It’s a bit like what I talked about earlier. I can go through difficult things, I can find things challenging, but I manage to see it from a slightly bigger perspective, and I manage not to suffer with it. That’s a bit of a paradox, considering how much I’ve struggled with all these difficulties with emotional regulation and all the darkness and these limitations. So I actually don’t know whether I’d have managed to be doing so well today, through challenging things, which we all face because we’re human, if I hadn’t been in contact with my true self, my heart, my soul.

Kindling the light: the way out of melancholy

Pål-Esben: That’s exactly how we do it when a student comes to us struggling with low mood and melancholy, which a great many people in our society struggle with today. And it’s no wonder, with the chaos we have around us and all the fear, that it can become too much for even the most steadfast of us. What we do right at the start of the profound primordial shamanic process of development that we take people through is to begin introducing what the Path of the Heart is, and the 9 Pillars for Finding the Path of the Heart, which we talked about quite a lot in earlier episodes. There you learn how you activate hope in yourself, how you find access to gratitude in daily life, and how you learn to self-regulate your emotions. Because nobody says that an emotion should decide what you think and feel. It’s possible to regulate these things, but then you need to build up a kind of muscle that makes you able to regulate. Because it’s one thing to get a trigger and go down into the negative black hole, and something quite different to get a trigger, look at the trigger and decide how you want the trigger to affect you, or not. That’s a skill you practise. In addition, we work a lot through the 9 Pillars for Finding the Path of the Heart. That’s our way of helping a human being to kindle the light in themselves. And the more light you have in yourself, the more hope you have, and the less room there is for the darkness. That doesn’t mean everything is simply gone, but you manage to handle it better and better.

All of this assumes that you’re willing to make a couple of small changes, such as cutting the constant stream of destructive news broadcasts to a minimum. Because if you sit two or three times a day taking in the news on TV and radio and social media, where you hear about war and strife and chaos and the danger of nuclear war and how everything’s going to hell, and you hear this continuously, you don’t stand the ghost of a chance. It sets off the fear centre in the brain continuously, all the time, and then it’s very difficult to find your way back to yourself. So these are the things you have to be willing to do if you’re to find your way back to this light, this power, this hope in yourself. You make a start, and you’re willing to minimise the destructive input around you. And that’s really the only thing you need to be willing to do. Otherwise you can cultivate these things, as you’ve done, and in time you learn to handle what used to bring you into a negative, emotional state, a melancholy state. You’ll be able to stop it before it even starts. And then you can turn it around and activate primary feelings connected to hope, joyfulness and gratitude in your life, instead of letting these emotional states of suffering take over continuously. Because they can bring even the strongest of us to our knees. That’s what we do, and it works brilliantly for those who start a profound primordial shamanic process of development like that. Because this is something we go through right at the start of a process like that, and people usually get results within a few weeks: things get better.

When shamans and conventional medicine work together

But we’re not talking here about clinical depression and those things, because that’s a completely different category. If you come in seeking help and have diagnoses of that kind, it must always be done in collaboration with a psychiatrist. One of my students, Cathrine Emilie, came to me in an extremely poor psychological state, with massive social anxiety, massive, the worst form of depression and so on. And in collaboration with her psychiatrist, Cathrine Emilie has got completely back on her feet. It’s a totally out-of-this-world story, which her psychiatrist didn’t think was possible. And if you go to my site, wanvig.no, there are a couple of interviews there with Cathrine Emilie, which show what’s possible if we can collaborate with conventional medicine, psychology and psychiatry, alongside what we help with. In other words, a shaman working together with modern conventional medicine. That works if you have a practitioner of modern conventional medicine who isn’t narcissistic and hyper-arrogant and doesn’t say that all this is just nonsense, but who is willing to say: “Aha, here you have people with good results. Why shouldn’t we join forces and help these people who are seeking help?” That’s what I don’t understand. Why be so incredibly arrogant? Why not try to work together to help people? That must surely be the future, in my eyes, and I hope I’ll be part of that future. Cathrine Emilie’s psychiatrist is one of those who have been willing to collaborate like this, with a totally out-of-this-world result. It’s a story I encourage you to listen to, in the interview and the articles I’ve written about it. You’ve met Cathrine Emilie, haven’t you, Amina?

Amina: I’ve met Cathrine Emilie, and I can tell you: it’s a true story. It isn’t made up. And she shares openly and generously about her experiences with this. I can really recommend watching that interview if you’ve struggled a lot with depression, anxiety, not being able to get out of the house. Because that’s what many people say too: “Yes, but how am I supposed to do forest bathing? I can’t even get outside the door.” You can start by dipping in one little toe at a time. It’s often really good to have these inspiring stories out there, people who have managed what you yourself long for, who have a fairly similar story to your own, because it helps to bring out this hope. So if anyone recognises themselves in this, or is just curious on someone else’s behalf, or curious for whatever reason, I really recommend watching that interview.

Cathrine Emilie: from social anxiety to a night in the forest

Pål-Esben: It’s massive, what’s possible if you’re willing to collaborate. I like it when that’s possible, when people come to me with burnout and in a very difficult health situation, and the practitioners of modern conventional medicine, the doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist and so on, are open to my doing the job I do while they do the job they do, so that we help each other to help the client have a better life. Then you have many more possibilities for helping a human being. It’s a cause close to my heart, but it’s a bit difficult in the society we live in, where arrogance is still alive and well in Western conventional medicine. But hopefully it’ll get better and better. So Cathrine Emilie was in a very, very bad state, and she hardly dared go outside the door. And after one year she managed to spend a whole night out in the forest in her hammock. It’s a totally out-of-this-world story. She went from having so much social anxiety and depression that she didn’t dare go out through the door, to lying alone, after just one year, in the pitch-black night in the middle of the forest, sleeping. That’s what’s possible when we join forces, and not least when we learn how to use nature. So that was for inspiration and hope, because that’s also what we want to contribute with our podcast. We tell our story and our experiences, and our aim is to inspire. And perhaps you can look at other things in addition to what you’re doing today. Because who knows whether there are things around the next corner that can help us? That’s my philosophy, and yours too, Amina.

Amina: Yes, the best of both worlds. There’s no need to fight over what’s right, shamanism or conventional medicine. Here you can really take the best of both worlds.

Pål-Esben: Both, please: that’s my motto here, and yours too. So do you have any words of wisdom to wrap up with here, Amina?

Wrapping up: trust your own capacity

Amina: Oh, words of wisdom.

Pål-Esben: Or closing words?

Amina: I’d like to say something about trust. You who are listening: trust your own capacity, trust that you have the ability within you to make small changes. You don’t need to climb all the mountains in a single day, just make small changes. Know that you have more capacity than you perhaps sometimes think. Yes, that’s what I had to say. And I’d also say that there’s no shame in seeking help, because we’re not meant to manage everything alone here in life, and after all there are so many skilled people around who can help us. It’s just a matter of finding someone who’s capable of it.

Pål-Esben: Very good, Amina. This has been an interesting conversation. Let’s see whether at some point we dig a little deeper into depression and the extreme thing I went through, which solved this once and for all. And next time we’ll take up another exciting topic to do with your journey of development, because this is also about you, Amina, and the pace you’re moving at. And it’s quite out of this world what you’ve been through in these few months. So I just want to congratulate you, Amina: it’s totally impressive what you’ve managed to achieve. And do get in touch with us if there’s anything you’d like us to take up; we’re happy to take up all kinds of topics in our podcast. Thank you so much for staying with us all the way, dear listener. We really appreciate your feedback, and a five-star rating on Spotify helps our podcast reach more listeners. And thank you so much for being here with me, Amina. I really appreciate it.

Amina: Likewise, Pål-Esben.

Pål-Esben: Thank you for being with us, dear listener. I hope you’ll join us again in the next episode. And until then: have a truly wonderful day, evening, night or morning, wherever you are listening from. Take care.

Outro

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of “The Journey to Self-Realization”, a primordial shamanic journey of development back to your true nature. We hope Amina’s story has inspired you to explore your own journey of self-discovery and development. Remember that the path from suffering to self-realization can be demanding, but with courage, patience and support from a competent guide, mentor, teacher or therapist, almost anything is possible. We wish you all the best on your journey, and we’ll talk again in the next episode.