Episode 4 – Discover the Path of the Heart – The First Three Pillars of True Love

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.

In this fourth episode, she and her teacher and guide, Pål-Esben Wanvig, talk about the Path of the Heart: why love is something practical, the difference between emotional states of suffering and rich emotional states, and the first three of the 9 Pillars for Finding the Path of the Heart: gratitude, forgiveness, and physical, emotional and spiritual self-regulation. 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

• What love is, and why being “in the light” helps little if you come home and yell at your family
• Emotional states of suffering and rich emotional states: how far you are from your heart
• Why beings of light won’t help the ego, and the ritual text that finally sold a house
• Pillar 1, becoming a master of gratitude: from the morning list to spontaneous gratitude
• Pillar 2, forgiving yourself and others: why forgiving doesn’t mean accepting what happened, and the story of Eva Mozes Kor
• Pillar 3, physical, emotional and spiritual self-regulation: the pressure cooker, the aura and the third chakra
• The six remaining pillars, and where to start

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 theme: the Path of the Heart

Pål-Esben: Hi, and a warm welcome to a new episode, Amina!

Amina: Thank you so much! We like to keep at it, Pål-Esben.

Pål-Esben: What are we going to talk about today?

Amina: Today we’re going to talk about something called the Path of the Heart. It’s exciting stuff.

Pål-Esben: It is exciting stuff, and we’re getting into a theme that sounds very simple and uncomplicated, but which is perhaps actually one of the most complex things a human being can engage in. And in esoteric circles there are many, many misunderstandings around these things we’re planning to discuss. Where do we begin, Amina?

What is love?

Amina: We can start with: what is love? What is the Path of the Heart? I remember that at the beginning of my spiritual wandering, my spiritual awakening, or whatever you want to call it, I was introduced to this idea of love. The idea that we are all one, that we come from the same source, and that we must live in love. And I felt that was lovely. Who doesn’t want to feel love? Preferably all the time; it’s really nice, after all. So I began to integrate this. What is love? I began to feel loving feelings, took part in various circles and events where we felt the love, and it was very nice.

But what I struggled with was this: even though I now believed I had integrated what love means, shouldn’t life then feel a bit more full of love in my everyday life? Am I only supposed to feel love when I’m at an event? That’s a bit limited, isn’t it? So I struggled to understand, I don’t know what to call it, the concept: to understand and live out what love is. I was introduced to the idea that everything is love, seen from a slightly higher perspective, the way I know many people in alternative circles are today. But what does that actually look like in practice? And that’s where you came into the picture, Pål-Esben, when I got to know the 9 Pillars for Finding the Path of the Heart. That’s when the bombshell dropped!

Emotional states of suffering and rich emotional states

Pål-Esben: When we discuss the more spiritual aspects of love, you can drift a long way into the depths of those discussions. That everything is love? Well, is everything love? Not as I experience it. In a state of oneness, where everything is one, love doesn’t exist. Why not? Because love is what binds things together. And in oneness there’s nothing that needs binding together. That’s also an interesting discussion on a deeper level. But we’ll start on a very practical, pragmatic level. Because after all, we are human beings.

And the question is this: yes, the heart sounds so lovely, love sounds so lovely. Because as you say: you come into an esoteric setting, and you’re supposed to learn to be in the light and live in love and all of that. And that’s nice enough. But it doesn’t help much when you come home and yell and scream at your partner and children and are in destructive mode. I wouldn’t call it meaningless, but it doesn’t have much of an impact. Being a saint in one place and an ogre when you get home isn’t exactly very authentic. Later today we’ll get to what’s called the shaman’s-pelt syndrome, which is one of my favourite topics to talk about. How authentic are we?

But first let’s talk about what love is. We said a little about it: love is binding things together. But how does love play out in our everyday lives? I use a very simple way of explaining this. When a human being is in an emotional state of suffering, filled with anxiety, frustration, resentment and insecurity, we know there isn’t much goodness in it. If we compare love with goodness, you notice it in a discussion with your partner, your kids or your employer: there isn’t much goodness, love or anything good in these emotional states of suffering. You could say that when a human being is in an emotional state of suffering, they are very far from their heart. Very far from what represents the heart, which has to do with rich emotional states.

A rich emotional state is anything from the feeling we have when we look deep into our partner’s eyes, to when we’re with our children or having a good time with someone. Everyone knows what a rich emotional state is like: joy, happiness, meaning, love for children and partner. When we’re in a rich emotional state, we’re very close to our heart, and then we often act in a very constructive and good way. If you have a discussion with your partner in an emotional state of suffering, you create conflicts, and you yell and scream at each other. But if you’re in a rich emotional state of, for example, gratitude, the discussion goes very differently.

On a completely practical, pragmatic level, the Path of the Heart, that is, the path we walk to come into contact with our heart, is about how we live this out and connect with the people around us in daily life. It’s about the degree to which I’m in an emotional state of suffering, far from my heart, as opposed to a rich emotional state, very close to my heart. That was where we started when we began discussing this, you and I. It’s the difference between the path of light and the path of darkness. The path of darkness is emotional states of suffering, with frustration, irritation and all these things. The path of light is emotional states connected to the heart: joyfulness, empathy, gratitude.

The truth about you shows in the details

Pål-Esben: And then there’s one more thing. I said to you: the truth about you, Amina. The truth about what you are. It shows in how you deal with this in practice in your life, with the people around you. It shows whether you are love, or whether you’re in a shaman’s-pelt syndrome, where you say you are love but are really something else. So, Amina: when I introduced this to you, both the emotional states of suffering and the rich ones, the Path of the Heart, and the truth about you, that it doesn’t show in what you say you are, but in what you actually do in your life: what did you think and feel about it?

Amina: Well, you made it very clear that the truth about a human being shows in the details. And then I was a bit like: “Oh, right, so I can never have a bad day again? I can never crash again. I can’t do this, and I can’t do that, ever again.” I felt a bit like a whinger. I got in touch with my inner whinger. Then I thought there had to be another way of looking at this, and that’s when I got to know myself a little better: the reaction I just had, did it come from love, from rich emotional states, or from emotional states of suffering?

What I made up my mind about quite early on was that whatever I found in myself on this journey of development, I wouldn’t take the whip to myself. Not even if I discovered that I’d been a bit fake somewhere, or that I had an attitude I don’t want as part of my ethics, but which was clearly there all the same. I’m not going to be horrible to myself. It’s just learning; I’m getting to know myself. That was quite important for me, and it has been the whole way. Of course I’ve crashed there too. I’m only human and all that. Yes, thank goodness. Thank goodness.

Meeting the nine pillars

Amina: But I remember the first time I saw that list, the 9 Pillars for Finding the Path of the Heart, which we use at the Yggdrasil Shamanic School. I thought: “That’s easy. Gratitude is easy. Self-regulation is easy, I’ve learned that. And the almighty syndrome, well, I certainly don’t have that.” It looked very simple. But when I began to dissect these pillars, I got to experience their deeper aspects, and not least the practical ones. Because what is gratitude, really? Is it getting up in the morning and declaring that I’m grateful for the clouds and the sky, when I’m not really? So I started with something I’m actually grateful for, without pretending. And then I let it develop, because the first pillar is becoming a master of gratitude.

Just to take that as an example: gradually I got to know gratitude better, and this feeling of gratitude began to appear in me and became part of me. I definitely think there are deeper aspects of gratitude I haven’t yet felt, but I feel it has given me a more practical approach to what love is. And also a greater understanding of what it isn’t. Love doesn’t mean floating on a pink cloud all the time. Love is also putting your foot down and setting healthy and loving boundaries, speaking up when something isn’t OK. There’s power in that too. Many people think, and I used to as well, that love is all sugary sweet and lovely and nice and candyfloss. But there’s also a very strong force in it.

So seeing love as something practical, that it shows through my actions and through how I meet difficult situations: that’s where I’ve especially been put to the test, in the settings where I’ve been under a lot of pressure, and I’ve learned a great deal about myself. I’ve lived a life with huge difficulties regulating my emotions, where everything that happened to me was either loved more than anything on earth or hated with a passion. I had a love-hate relationship with all people, situations and feelings, a very big and wide spectrum earlier in my life. So yes, it has been a path of development.

Practical love, not a pink cloud

Pål-Esben: It has. And what we do, at least in our tradition, is to be very practical. Because it doesn’t help to be up on a pink cloud where you’re supposed to be living in love. It’s about how you live out the principles of the path you walk, in a practical way in your daily life. That’s where we show where we really stand. If we live a life full of emotional states of suffering, we’re really living with the flame turned right down. We constantly go around with some resentment, a feeling of fear, an uneasy feeling inside us. That lowers a person’s quality of life considerably. At least it can. So the question, when you begin a profound primordial shamanic process of development, is: how do I bring myself out of this suffering in my daily life? How do I find more contentment and meaning? And the good feelings, the rich feelings: how do I manage to cultivate them in my life? That’s where we start.

When we talk about a primordial shamanic path of development, this plays a much bigger role than for a person who has no relationship with what we can call metaphysical beings. By metaphysical beings we mean angels, power animals and the like, that is, beings of light. For those who have no relationship with such things, it’s mainly about finding more of these rich emotional states in their daily life. And this alone can revolutionise and transform a person’s life considerably, which I have experienced many, many times. I also guide people who come to me with burnout, who have nothing to do with shamanism, but who simply want to come back to themselves, feel happy, find meaning in life and feel that life is actually good to live. With them, too, we start with these things.

The beings of light and the poor little ant

Pål-Esben: But for someone who is a shaman, at least in our tradition, there’s also a deeper reason why finding the Path of the Heart is so incredibly important. These metaphysical beings, angels and power animals and the like, are a little more developed than us humans. You can see it as a metaphor: imagine an alien who is a billion years ahead of us in development. Think about what humanity has done in the last hundred years, and then imagine what it would be like here if we went a billion years forward in time. A touch more developed. And probably, if an alien like that came down and looked at humanity, it would just shake its head and see us as ants crawling around.

That’s how it is when we humans, shamans for example, or people on other spiritual paths of development, turn to a being of light like that. It isn’t an alien, that was just my metaphor, but it is so far ahead of us in development, and so much closer to the creative force, to what has created everything. And then we come along as shamans and want to make use of it: “Oh, dear power animal Wolf, could you help my neighbour run into a bit of trouble, since he cut down my tree in the garden?”, in other words, as revenge. Or: “I’d really like so-and-so’s partner, could you make sure they get divorced?” What do you think they think when we’re driven by our intention, driven by fear, hatred and control, as we humans often are, and come to a being like that with wishes like these? “Poor little ant. Of course I won’t help you with your ego. Of course I won’t help you with your hatred.” Because these beings are so close to what we call primary feelings, or, very simply put, the heart, that of course they won’t have anything to do directly with people who are trying to cause harm to themselves and others.

So when we begin a primordial shamanic path of development, one of the things we learn at the start is to make contact with our shamanic guides and our power animals. If we then come in and say, “dear this and dear that, please help me sabotage this”, or “I’d really like lots of money”, they’ll just give us a weary look.

The ritual text that didn’t work

Pål-Esben: The same applies when we begin with shamanic magic, or structural magic, as we call it in our tradition, where you carry out a ritual and get help from these metaphysical beings and resources. If you go into the ritual with a wish that’s connected to the ego, you get no help. I’ll give an example. On the beginners’ course, when we’re learning shamanic magic, I say: “It’s so important that your ritual text and your wish come from your heart, and not from the ego. If they’re connected to the ego, this simply won’t work.”

A few years ago I had a student who was going to sell their house. In the ritual texts to be used in the ritual, it said: “Please help me sell my house, and I want at least such-and-such a price, and it has to happen like this, and it has to happen like that.” The student got going, did the ritual and sent out the energy. A few months later the student came and complained to me about the exciting ritual from the seminar: it didn’t work; nothing happened. The first thing I say is: “Can you send me this intention of yours, the ritual text?” There it was, almost one hundred percent ego-centred: “I want what I want.” So I say: “We need to change this ritual text”, and explain why it’s a problem. We change it to say that we want to attract a buyer, so that both seller and buyer are happy with the price and a good balance is found. The student took it on board and started doing the ritual, and came back to me after three or four weeks: “Pål-Esben, Pål-Esben, I’ve sold my house! This is absolutely incredible!” Not so incredible, really. That’s how it works, but only when you do it right, only when your intention comes from your heart.

So you can see that when we work with these things, this becomes extraordinarily important, far beyond the practical business of handling emotional states of suffering and rich emotional states. So I wanted to say a couple of words about that too, before we dive into how we cultivate this in a practical way. Because the next question that comes up is: “Yes, I hear what you’re saying about the rich states and the states of suffering. I don’t want the states of suffering, I understand that; I’d like the rich emotional states.” And then the question is: how do we shift from a life with a lot of emotional states of suffering to a life with more of the rich emotional states? How do we cultivate that? For that we have the 9 Pillars for Finding the Path of the Heart, which make this practical and pragmatic for everyone. And you touched on this briefly, with regard to gratitude.

Amina: Yes, this thing about ritual texts and sending out a wish, or what you wish for in life in general, is something I’ve thought about a lot. Where do my wishes come from? Do they come from the ego, or do they come from the heart, from love? But if you were to give a tip to someone who wants to feel love more in their daily life: would you say that when you begin to live out love through practical steps, through who you are in everyday life and how you live your life, you’ll get closer contact with your heart?

Pillar 1: becoming a master of gratitude

Pål-Esben: Yes, that’s a direct consequence, of course. Because the fewer emotional states of suffering there are taking you away from your heart, the easier it is to come into contact with your heart and the power that lies behind the heart, which is otherworldly stuff. I don’t think we’ll talk much about that today, but there’s a potential for power in the heart. The heart is really our third brain. It has neurons, brain cells, it lives a bit of a life of its own, and it’s connected to other metaphysical resources that have to do with our existence. Many people say the heart is the bridge to our soul. That means that the more we’re connected to primary feelings or rich emotional states in our lives, the closer we are to our heart.

And you touched on it there: the first pillar for finding the Path of the Heart is about becoming a master of gratitude. I emphasise: a master of gratitude. What I often see, as you also say, when someone is started on gratitude exercises, is that you’re supposed to write a list in the morning: “I’m grateful for the house, I’m grateful for my kids, I’m grateful for this and that.” But that often doesn’t have much of an impact on a person’s emotional states. If you really want to go the whole way to becoming a master of gratitude, the first step starts with not just writing a list of what you’re grateful for. That’s cognitive, intellectual, and has very little to do with our emotions. Instead you take the first item on the list, close your eyes, and step into the feeling that belongs to that item.

For example: the first item on the list of what you’re grateful for is your children. As a mother or father, you close your eyes and perhaps picture the birth of your child, or a good experience with your child. You project yourself into the situation with your mind and relive it, and gradually you’ll be able to relive the emotions and feelings connected to the situation. That takes a bit of practice, since so many people in our society are numb when it comes to good emotions, the rich emotions. Many students who come to me and start this simple gratitude exercise, five minutes every morning, find it hard to get in touch with the feelings related to what they’re grateful for. But what happens every time you practise this is that you gradually begin to relive the good, rich emotional states related to the setting you’re grateful for. That’s what you bring into your life, there and then. You get easier access to the rich emotional states: gratitude, joy, empathy, compassion, joyfulness. This has to be built up again through practice. Gratitude is one thing, but its consequences are something much bigger. Because one of the consequences is that you come back into contact with your primary feelings, which in our society we’re unfortunately often numb to.

The natural high

Amina: I can feel myself getting very emotional when you talk about it now, because I remember how it was at the beginning, when I worked a lot on this, and I see it in the light of something I experienced the other day. I was driving, on my way somewhere, and suddenly I felt an enormous gratitude coming from deep inside me. It’s a good, natural high, so to speak. It wasn’t a feeling that came because someone said something nice to me, or because I had something to look forward to. It was a deep gratitude for life itself. It sounds a bit strange, but being able to experience those feelings is absolutely wonderful.

And while we’re on the pillars: the second pillar is becoming a master of forgiving yourself and others. I think there are quite a few misunderstandings here. Speaking for myself, I think I bought the idea: “Yes, forgive, that’s lovely.” I had simply decided to forgive everyone in my life who had hurt me. Just accepted: that’s how it is, I forgive and move on. I had probably accepted that the past is the past, but the truth showed when I still couldn’t talk about all those things without choking up, or still felt negative emotions towards that person from time to time, even though I had, quote unquote, decided to forgive. It was when I got to know the deeper aspects of forgiveness that I understood this has to happen on a deeper level. But I also know that a great many people are triggered when you talk about forgiveness, because they’ve been through such big traumatic things. And I think there’s a very big misunderstanding doing the rounds here, a bit like what we talked about at the beginning of the episode. That’s what I find.

The master aspect: spontaneous gratitude

Pål-Esben: Before I say a few words about that, I want to go back to what you said about gratitude. Because what you mentioned just now is that we begin to slide into the master aspect of gratitude. The first exercise, the first step on the staircase, is the exercise where you don’t just write down what you’re grateful for, but actively go into the situation with your inner eye and relive the feelings and the gratitude.

When you’ve done that and begin to get in touch with it, and it begins to become more authentic, then you begin to experience what you’ve just described: gratitude arises spontaneously in everyday life, without you doing anything at all. For those who are beginning to become masters here, this is pretty spectacular. For example, you’re walking down the street in town, and suddenly you’re so moved by the blue sky up there that you get goosebumps and the hairs stand up on your arms. Or you go out into the garden and see a wood anemone, and out of the blue comes this tremendous feeling of gratitude for this little wood anemone. It’s spectacular. When this begins to arise by itself in a person’s everyday life, without them having to do anything, you begin to come into contact with the master aspect.

And then you can imagine the following: a person who has a lot of emotional states of suffering, and who begins to experience spontaneous gratitude. Then we can tell that these states of suffering are beginning to fade more and more, and that they have more and more contact with the rich emotional states. This is only the first pillar. And what I often come across is a certain ignorance about these things. So many people talk about gratitude: “I’ve read books about gratitude, I’ve done gratitude exercises.” That doesn’t mean you’ve understood what this is about. “Being grateful” doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with actually being grateful; they can be two completely different things. What we’re talking about here is a process of cultivation, where you have a staircase in front of you, and the first step is the first exercise. When you begin to master it and are in contact with your rich emotional states again, you’re shown the next exercise on the staircase. And as you climb the steps, you get to where you are today, where this arises more and more spontaneously in everyday life without you doing anything at all. It’s so spectacular. I don’t know, Amina, it’s absolutely wonderful.

Amina: Yes, it really is, truly.

Pål-Esben: It isn’t long since you started your path of development, as we’ve mentioned in our previous episodes. It was a year and a half ago that you started, when things were really difficult in your life, with a massive amount of emotional states of suffering that came and went uncontrollably. And here you sit just a year and a half later, delighting in, among other things, spontaneous gratitude in your everyday life. It’s really like night and day compared with when you started.

Amina: Truly, truly. Yes, yes, truly night and day. I feel that words are so inadequate to describe the deep, real feeling. Because when you experience it, you experience it, and then you understand what all the fireworks are about.

Burping on the sofa: the consequences of gratitude

Pål-Esben: Yes. And this in turn has a direct influence on other areas of life. For example, when you’re sitting with your partner, and your partner is perhaps less than optimal. We’re talking about us men here; we’re often less than optimal in many areas. You as a woman can sit looking at your less-than-optimal partner, sitting there burping on the sofa, or whatever it may be. And when you’ve spontaneously begun to get in touch with gratitude, instead of getting furious at the burping and farting, you’re just so grateful that you have a partner who loves you. So this has big consequences in every area of life, the day you begin to become a real master of it. And so far we’ve only talked about the first of nine pillars. Each of the pillars has this potential.

Pillar 2: forgiving yourself and others

Pål-Esben: And the second one, which you’ve introduced here, is gratitude, no, sorry: forgiveness. I think it must be one of the most misunderstood areas out there. Forgiveness is bound up with many dogmas, which we find in religion, among other places: you’re taught that you should turn the other cheek and accept it when someone does something hurtful to you. And then there are many misunderstandings of the kind: “When I forgive something, it’s the same as accepting what happened”, which means many people struggle with these things. But forgiveness is basically only for our own sake. We humans go around carrying burdens from experiences we’ve had earlier in life, with situations or people that have hurt us. And the only one who suffers from it is you, carrying the resentment, the injustice, the pain, and in the worst case post-traumatic stress disorder if you’ve been subjected to abuse and violence. You can of course carry this pain around your whole life. But I’m in favour of seeing how we can let go of the pain, so that we can come closer to our heart and experience more of the primary, good feelings in life.

So forgiveness is something we do only for ourselves, and it’s about letting go of the burden we carry. And as for accepting what happened: forgiveness has nothing to do with accepting that someone has done something hurtful to you. It’s only about forgiving in order to make peace with it: you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, you had no control over what happened, and through forgiveness you choose to break the emotional ties between present and past, so that you don’t carry the painful feelings from the past with you in your life now. That’s what this is really about. Doing this correctly is basically a complex affair, but really also very simple. On my blog I’ve written an article about the seven pillars for being able to forgive, which describes the process very clearly. Because it’s a process you have to go through. As you said, it isn’t enough just to close your eyes: “Now I’m going to forgive, now I’m going to forgive, now I’m going to forgive.” That doesn’t work very well.

The Paris story: the resentment that had to go

Pål-Esben: In the old days I was perhaps an expert myself at bearing a grudge against people who had done hurtful things to me. I remember I had a partner early in life, before I started my primordial shamanic path of development, 30 years ago or so. I was so in love, we had everything, we’d even decided to get engaged, and I thought my life was all set. Then she went to Paris and met another guy, came back to me and said: “No, I want to move out now.” My whole life fell apart. It was very painful. And what happens afterwards? “How could you do this to me?” You go around projecting hatred and frustration, and you let all of it grow.

I was carrying a couple of other episodes like that when I started my journey of development, my primordial shamanic journey of development, at the start of 2004. My teacher at the time said: “I can see you’re carrying a lot of resentment towards people who have done things to you.” Resentment towards my employer, whom I blamed for my going into burnout because they didn’t look after me. That’s monkey stuff, pure monkey behaviour: blaming everyone else for my problems. Then he says, and he was talking especially about my exes: “How do you think your life will turn out, Pål-Esben, if you don’t let go of these things? When you get a new partner and go around carrying this scepticism and these painful feelings, how are you going to be happy in your next relationship? Because you’re going to meet a true partner, one who’s right for you and your soul. You need to let go of this junk, let go of this suffering, to be able to set yourself free.” And then I thought: OK. That was where it became my task to begin to understand why letting go was so important. Not accepting that my ex did this and that, or that my employer didn’t set boundaries for me, but simply letting go: “OK, that’s what happened, for whatever reason. But it happened, and my task now is to delete the painful emotional links back to what happened, here and now.” You do that through a very specific forgiveness process that we use.

How was it for you, Amina? What did you think about forgiveness and resentment and all that? Perhaps you were one of those who didn’t have any of this in their baggage at all?

“Ho ho ho, you’re forgiven”: intellectual forgiveness

Amina: No, nothing. A completely clean record there, I can tell you. No almighty syndrome either, so that’s never crossed my mind. No, seriously: as I said earlier, I had some things I knew had happened to me in the past, which I had decided to forgive because it was so lovely and nice. But when I met my mum, for example, I was triggered just by her breathing wrong, or drinking wrong, “wrong”, quote unquote, by nothing at all. Then I realised: OK, there are deeper things here I need to work on. And actually, this may sound a bit hallelujah, but once I was working on forgiveness, doing shamanic energy work, gaining an understanding of the past and taking practical steps forward, it took maybe a week at most before I could be with my mum and simply not be triggered. She has her personality, I have mine. It was such a liberation.

And a client I’ve had over a period of time: I had a session with her maybe a month ago, where I saw that she was carrying resentment towards a family member. I tried to hint at it a little, because I didn’t want to come on too strong: “Well, what about looking a bit at forgiveness, so you don’t have to carry it?” Then she said: “No, I can’t. What happened, it’s, no.” And I can understand where that feeling comes from, because some pretty harsh things had happened in the past and in childhood. But then I said: “OK, I understand. But have a little look at it.” And then I actually sent her two links to videos you’ve put out on YouTube about forgiveness, part one and part two. I said: “Watch these before next time, and just see whether anything resonates with you.” Then I met her two or three weeks later, and by then she’d gained a completely new view of it, and she was ready to do energy work to let go of it. There was a bit of a hallelujah mood there too. So I just wanted to share that: things actually happen when we work with forgiveness, both energetically and, not least, with the practical steps as well. Then you get a greater understanding of what forgiveness actually is.

Pål-Esben: And your client probably had the attitude that once you’ve forgiven, you accept what happened. And you don’t want to accept what happened at any price, or condone it, so you have to hold on to these painful feelings, because you feel it isn’t right to let go of them; that would be the same as accepting it. It’s a hamster wheel that many people find themselves in, and it means they never let go of their resentment. But as I said: you can choose to carry the suffering with you for the rest of this incarnation, and it’s only you who suffers from it, not the person who did something wrong. Or you can choose to let go of it.

And as you touched on: it isn’t enough to let go intellectually. It’s easy to “prove” it to your mother, for example: “Forgive, forgive, forgive. I forgive you, Mother, for everything you’ve done. Ho, ho, ho, you’re forgiven!” And a bit of incense too, of course. That always goes down well, a bit of incense and a bit of drumming and so on, but it simply doesn’t work. Because you see it when you’re with that person: you feel it sting, you feel the irritation. And that’s where you find the proof of whether you’ve really forgiven. Then the minimum is that you can relate to the person who hurt you in a neutral way, without negative emotions coming up. And for those who hurt you a long time ago: you shouldn’t go and look them up to check whether you’ve managed to forgive. But this is how I notice it: when you stop thinking about it, when you stop experiencing the negative emotions, then the mental and emotional ties and connections have been dissolved, and the past is separated from the present as far as emotions are concerned. The experiences are still there, of course, but the destructive emotions are gone. And you can deal with things in a better way, as you experienced with your mum.

Amina: Yes.

Forgiving yourself

Pål-Esben: So there too, in the second pillar for finding the Path of the Heart, it says: becoming a master of forgiving yourself and others. And forgiving yourself is a whole subject in itself. We often go around bearing a grudge against ourselves: that we haven’t been good enough, that we made mistakes here and mistakes there. I deal with quite a lot of people, and it’s so common for people to go around whipping themselves for not being good enough. I think that to be able to forgive others, you first need to forgive yourself, perhaps become friends with yourself. Because the more negatively you see yourself, the further away from your heart you are too. Self-forgiveness is just as important as forgiving others. It also means learning to make peace with yourself for who you are, and accepting that it’s OK to be the way you are, Amina. It’s OK that you’re 80 percent and not 100 percent perfect. It’s OK to make mistakes, it’s OK to mess up. But it takes work to get to the point where that’s OK.

Amina: Yes, of course. And this thing about forgiving yourself for what you didn’t know back then. Because where you stand today, you’ve learned much more about life and have more knowledge than you had before. One example is me. I’ve carried a lot of guilt towards my children, because I know so much more today than I did ten years ago. Sometimes my thoughts can take me there: “Oh, but I should have done this and that ten years ago, and I shouldn’t have done it like that.” But back then I had nothing to go on that would have let me do it that way. So letting go of the things you think you could have done differently now that you know better, and really forgiving yourself for them too, has been something I’ve worked on, at least.

Pål-Esben: That’s a classic example I see in most mothers, and especially fathers. They learn basic psychology, how behaviour works and what makes us tick, and they develop and become a better version of themselves. Then I think pretty much everyone goes back and thinks: “Good grief, if I’d had this when I had my kids, I’d have done this and that.” And then they believe: “I damaged them because I did this and that.” But of course that isn’t how it is, because every mother and every father, at least the vast majority, do the best they can with the knowledge and insight they have at any given time. We can’t expect to do anything better than the insight and knowledge we have right now, can we? We can’t project ourselves 50 years ahead and say: “Today I’m going to act on the knowledge I’ll have in 5 or 10 or 20 years.” And that’s where forgiving yourself comes in: “OK, I was perhaps less than optimal with my kids here and there, compared with what I know today. But I also acknowledge that I did the best I could with the insight I had into bringing up children, and I make peace with it.” That’s also an important part of forgiving yourself. It’s a perfect example.

Eva Mozes Kor: everything can be forgiven

Pål-Esben: So we’ve only just touched on these pillars, and you can see: if you begin to sort these things out and bring them into your life, you let go of more and more of the emotional states of suffering and open up more and more to the rich ones. You come closer and closer to your heart. This is a process of cultivation that isn’t done on a course; it’s a lifelong task. So I’m impressed by you and many others, by just what’s possible here. I’ve met people who have been through the greatest traumas a human being can go through, and who have had the courage to let go of it and forgive it, and set themselves free through it.

A good example can be found in my blog article about forgiveness, with Eva Mozes Kor, one of the twins tortured by Mengele in Nazi Germany. She carried the hatred and resentment towards the Nazis for several decades after she was liberated. Only after around 50 years did she say, in an interview, that the only thing they had no power over was her will to forgive them. And she forgave. Her life changed radically afterwards: from being full of emotional states of suffering, she could once again delight in her grandchildren’s smiles. That interview is well worth watching, as a reminder that absolutely everything can be forgiven. Even the most extreme traumas can be let go of. But it’s impossible to let go of them as long as you keep clinging to them, and as long as you believe this is about accepting what happened. It’s only about setting yourself free. So: a very, very exciting pillar.

Pillar 3: physical, emotional and spiritual self-regulation

Pål-Esben: OK, shall we take the next one, then? Number three, the third pillar, is becoming a master of physical, emotional and spiritual self-regulation. So, Amina, say a few words about your experience of that.

Amina: Yes, well, I’ve struggled a great deal with emotional self-regulation, and at the beginning of my journey of development it was like this …

Pål-Esben: What is emotional self-regulation? Can you explain what it is?

Amina: Yes. Emotional self-regulation is about regulating your emotions and not acting on impulse, not acting on this autopilot that comes up in us when we’re triggered or something is touched in us, and that makes us react to the impulse. I used to react on impulse a great deal. I was really just a victim of my emotions, quite simply. I had no control over my emotions, no control over self-regulation. It was up and down and high and low and left and right, all mixed together within a single minute.

But then I began to get to know it: “OK, what’s happening now, when I feel this feeling, when this emotion comes up in me? I can choose to yell and scream and tear something down, or I can choose not to.” And I became quite good at that: not acting out. I began to get control of it. But what I didn’t really get control of, and which I noticed long afterwards, actually only when I started my training with you, was that something was going wrong here. Because it imploded in me. I was really just carrying all these emotions around, and that meant the energy came out in other places in life. Just like the people who honk at every mistake someone makes in traffic: I often feel that here’s someone with an energy who just needs to take that irritated energy out on somebody. Anyway: it popped up in other places in life. So I worked on that together with you.

And when it comes to physical self-regulation, I got to know that too. I used to do a lot of physical activity; really, the overtraining was an addiction that wasn’t healthy. I’ve been a bit of an all-or-nothing person. But in the end I broke my leg badly, and that was probably the universe’s way of telling me: “Now I’ve given you enough warnings. You can’t exercise 25 hours a day; it doesn’t work.” So I had put training on the shelf for two or three years, without any physical activity. But then we had a conversation once about me having some anger energy in me: “I feel a bit aggressive, I don’t quite know what it is. I’m not really cross about anything either, not consciously, anyway.” And then you told me about how we need to get this force out. Then you might need to hit a punchbag or a pillow, or go for a run if that’s your thing: in other words, find a way to get the energy out. And also this thing about eating healthily and looking after the soul’s temple: getting enough sleep, looking after your body’s physical condition, getting the right vitamins. I also had my hormones checked, as you advised me, and saw that I didn’t have the very best starting point for a healthy and optimal body.

And then we come to spiritual self-regulation. There I haven’t really managed to pin down, once and for all, what spiritual self-regulation actually is.

The pressure cooker and the angel stand in London

Pål-Esben: First of all: what’s hardest to start with, before we get to what’s called spiritual self-regulation, is emotional self-regulation. We humans often get an impulse: someone says something to us, and we just react on autopilot, for example by becoming negative. So that’s where we practise this space between impulse and action, which is called free will. How we cultivate this space is absolutely central: that when your partner does something you’d normally get irritated about, you actually press the mental pause button, look at what this is, think “how do I react constructively to this?”, and then press play. That space takes a bit of cultivation before it can arise. Most people have very little free will available, since they so often react on autopilot. But it’s entirely possible: in the course of a few weeks you can build it up considerably, as you did at the start, and suddenly you had more control over how you react when someone does something to you.

The challenge was this: you gritted your teeth, and then you push it down into the pressure cooker, and that’s of course a problem. The art of self-regulation hadn’t quite reached the finish line yet; you were still practising it. And then it doesn’t help much when we just grit our teeth and smile and are “spiritual”, quote unquote, because we’re supposed to be in our heart, so we have to smile all the time. So we grit our teeth, and we have this smile, and the pressure in the pressure cooker rises.

I’ve told you about it before: I was at a big fair in London, and there was an angel stand there with the head angel for Europe, and lots of angel students around, who went about with their wings on, smiling and smiling. It was so angelic it was almost poetic to watch them. And one of them had clearly been eyeing us, since we had many more visitors to our stand than they did, and the irritation built up, while the smile became more and more strained. Then came the point where she exploded and screamed, and the head angel had to take her angel wings back and send her home. That’s an example of passive aggression. You become passive-aggressive, and that’s not what we’re aiming for. We’re aiming for healthy self-regulation. That means we also need to deal with our emotional system, not just the cognitive one, when we’re in this space between impulse and action. Because if we push it down into the pressure cooker, the pressure rises. That’s what you noticed: your body became restless, you felt stress inside, you felt something wasn’t right. And then you try to grit your teeth even harder: “I have to be a good student here, I have to show you, Pål-Esben, that I can do this.” And then it gets even worse. Completely natural.

Then I said: Amina, don’t push it down into the pressure cooker. You have to get the energy out. This is yang energy that has to come out, not by you yelling and screaming at the kids or your partner, but by us using it for something else, something constructive. Chop wood, hit a punchbag, go for a jog, do 500 press-ups, whatever it may be. This has to come out in another way, so that it doesn’t get pushed down into our pressure cooker. If you’ve done this for many years, that in itself can lead to muscle pain and joint pain, which is often related to passive and suppressed aggression. I notice it again and again with clients and students. Not always, of course, so I don’t want to trigger anyone here, but very often, in these situations, we have to look at suppressed aggression and passive aggression. You may not even be aware of it. But it has to be released and let out. Then you’ll also be able to notice it in the muscles, because this is stress, and it settles in the muscles. So physical self-regulation, looking after your body, is a topic in itself; we won’t say more about that now.

The aura system and the lie detector

Pål-Esben: But spiritual self-regulation, what is that, then? Let’s take the simplest layer of spiritual self-regulation: energetic self-regulation. That means regulating our energy system: how we regulate the chakra system, and, as we become more skilled, our aura and our light body. Of course, the emotions in our daily life have a very great bearing on the state of our energy systems. If you look at a person’s aura system with your inner eye, it’s very easy to see which emotions this person is filled with. Someone who is filled with frustration, resentment or whatever it is looks like a grey cloud, like a hedgehog, jagged and restless. But in someone who is in good emotions, the aura and chakra system is much more harmonious. It consists of many more colours, and there’s much more stability in it.

My wife is brilliant at this. In the beginning I found it very frustrating, because she could see the aura system long before I was able to myself. This was 20 years ago. We’re sitting together, I’m talking, and she says, in English: “You’re not telling the truth now.” “Er, I am telling the truth!” “No, you’re not telling your truth.” “How can you know I’m not telling the truth? It’s what I think and feel. How can you say that?” At first she didn’t say any more, but eventually it came out that she could see how the aura system changes when a person lies. You can see it if you see the aura system: the moment a person even thinks about lying, a very particular change, a shift, happens in the aura system, so that you can immediately see whether the person is telling the truth or not. So in the beginning she was a living lie detector, and that was very frustrating for me, because sometimes a little white lie is a comfort. “How are you?” “Oh, everything’s fine.”

But can it be that you don’t even realise you’re lying yourself? Of course it can. But very often you do it deliberately; you have an agenda behind it, and it doesn’t have to be anything negative. A white lie can also be there because you simply don’t want to talk about it. I think back to myself in the old days, when I was so ill. When someone asked how I was, I said: “OK, fine, I’m fine today”, even though I wasn’t, because I couldn’t face discussing everything I felt and the pain I had. That’s what I did at the start with my wife too: “How are you?” “Fine.” Then she says: “Why can’t you tell me the truth?” We had some interesting discussions about that. So having a wife who sees the aura system, and who can catch you lying no matter what, is a bit stressful at first. Eventually I came to expect it, and began instead to say how things were actually going. Until eventually it came to me too: my third eye, how shall I put it, shifted gear, and I began to see the same things my wife sees. That means it can be a bit difficult to be my student too, especially if you try to tell a story that doesn’t quite hang together. You noticed that at the start. I said to you: “Amina, how are you?” “Oh, it’s going fine.” Because Amina likes to be positive. And you noticed that I just sat there looking at you and thinking: “How are you really, Amina?” But as a rule, in 99 percent of the cases where I see someone saying something that isn’t true, I say nothing, and I judge nothing. There can be many, many reasons why people say what they say. And who is to judge anyone for not telling the truth?

The third chakra: the healthy and loving boundary

Pål-Esben: But back to spiritual self-regulation. It also has to do with hygiene, in relation to our energy system and chakra system. For that you need some knowledge of how this is done, which you get either through a primordial shamanic journey of development or in other ways. Right at the start you talked about the healthy and loving boundary, and how important it is for staying connected to your heart. In esoteric circles, and in Indian culture, it’s seen like this: the third chakra, the energy centre we have in the solar plexus, is the energy centre that’s there to watch over and protect the fourth chakra, which is the heart chakra. If the third chakra is weak and can’t set boundaries, the stress automatically flows up to the heart. We see this in people who are hypersensitive, who for example can’t sit on the bus without taking in thoughts, feelings and emotions from other people, and it pains them. It’s the third chakra that’s too weak. When it’s too weak, you can’t set energetic boundaries, and then everything is taken straight in. Then we need to build it up. And that is the Path of the Heart: to look after our heart, it’s important that we strengthen the third chakra, which in practice means, among other things, that we learn to set healthy and loving boundaries with the people in our lives. That’s part of spiritual self-regulation, or the cultivation of spiritual hygiene that’s related to it. And a fair few other things, of course, when we begin to go a bit deeper into what we’re doing here. We’re going to move towards our timeless and spaceless nature, towards oneness, spiritual enlightenment and things like that, and then there’s a good deal else that has to be done too. But that’s not a topic for today. Perhaps some other time.

Amina: Yes.

Pål-Esben: That’s what you’re working on today. Now we’re still back at the beginning of your journey of development, where in these first episodes we’re laying the foundation for the profound journey you’ve been on, and are still on, where today you’re beginning to touch your timeless and spaceless nature and have your first experiences of it. So if you, the listener, are sitting there a bit impatient right now, saying: “Are we going to start talking about the interesting stuff here?”, then it’s important for both of us to lay the foundation for how something like this can happen in just 18 months. It doesn’t come just from living in love and in the light, but through a process of cultivation that you’ve been through, and our aim with this podcast is to give an example of what that really means in practice.

Amina: Yes, absolutely.

The nine pillars: the road ahead

Pål-Esben: So we’ve been through the first three, and there are actually nine here, but I think we should start to wrap up now, so it doesn’t get too long. The others are: the fourth is becoming a master of building a healthy value system and a strong personal character, which has to do with cultivating ethics. Number five is becoming a master of seeing the glass as half full, which is an art in itself. The sixth is becoming a master of healing your almighty syndrome. The seventh is becoming a master of healing perfectionism, of recognising that 80 percent is good enough. Number eight is becoming a master of understanding nature’s healing rhythms. And the ninth pillar is becoming a master of understanding and living out your soul’s desires and life mission in this incarnation.

It’s pretty exciting when you begin to go into it, and you’re becoming a pretty good master of many of these things, Amina. Do you have a summary to finish with? Perhaps in a later episode we’ll go into the others too, because there are many exciting things to discuss here. Each of these pillars can change a person’s life for the better. Just one of them can change it. Now we’ve talked about the first three; perhaps some other time we’ll go through the next ones too.

Amina: Yes. And I’d really recommend that all our listeners read your article about the 9 Pillars for Finding the Path of the Heart. It can feel a bit overwhelming to take on all nine pillars in a single day, but the way I’ve done it at times is to take one pillar a week, or one pillar every other week, so that you don’t have to take on everything at once. But I’d really recommend reading Pål-Esben’s article about the 9 Pillars for Finding the Path of the Heart.

Pål-Esben: What have these nine pillars done for your life?

Amina: Everything! They’ve meant that I can feel good in my everyday life, that I can feel good with other people, whatever situations I end up in. They’ve meant that I’ve come into contact with deeper layers of myself that I didn’t even know existed. I had a sort of alternative, esoteric notion of what was there, a more academic understanding of it, but this has definitely meant that I can reach the deeper layers in myself and live a good life. And not least: the times I crash, because I’m human and all that, it takes a quarter of an hour to get back on my feet. In the past it could take several weeks. So that’s it, in a nutshell.

Pål-Esben: Yes, and that’s my experience too, with everyone I take through these things. With these nine pillars, I have yet to come across a person who doesn’t revolutionise their life for the better, even if they only manage 50 percent of it. If there’s one thing you should get started on and try out to get a considerably better life on every level, it’s this: start engaging a little with the 9 Pillars for Finding the Path of the Heart. That, at any rate, is Amina’s and my advice to you, the listener: don’t be overwhelmed. Start with the first one. I think I’ve written an article about gratitude that says a bit more about this. Start with the first one, and really begin to master gratitude; bring it more and more actively into your life. Gradually it begins to arise more and more spontaneously, and through that alone your life will change considerably. That’s my wish for you, the listener, from the bottom of my heart. Amina is already on this path, but we’re never finished. We always have something to learn around these things.

Amina: Absolutely.

Pål-Esben: 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.