Soul Dreamers – The AntiHero’s Odyssee’s back to the Heart
24th July 2017, Estoril, Portugal
6:49am
The Inspiration
The phone alarm rings, awakening me from a vivid strange dream into the lapse of an early morning awareness. I am in Portugal, at the Salty Pelican Resort in the seashore town of Estoril about to start my first yoga retreat experience.
I open my eyes feeling excited and scared at the same time. I feel excited because of the apriori cognitive gut feeling of how yoga may bring a physical and emotional sense of healing to a wandering soul; yet at the same time, I feel startled because I have no idea on what “downward dog” means. I booked the experience a few months back spontaneously under the advice of Sara, my psychotherapeut back in Budapest.
And here I am now making my debut in the yogis world.
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I head downstairs where an angelic woman with green eyes and beautiful energy welcomes us. Her name is Ida, she is from Finland, and she will be our yoga trainer for the next 8 days. We walk together to the pier, lay down our mats, and start the session. I feel clumsy and uncomfortable at the start believing I am the only person getting most positions wrong and out of pace. However, Ida is calmly supportive, and I am surrounded by an inspiring sea of feminine energy that I sense fully through the ocean morning mist. We reach the end of the session, and conclude with a lengthy savasana pose.
As I lay down post-work out, I feel my blood circulating throughout my body, my physical sense takes me out of my wandering mind; I feel present, alive, centered, and grateful. As I witness my inner strength, the sun rises slowly over the surrounding hills. It is one of those pink-blue mornings so abundant in Portugal. And as the day is about to begin, tears shed over my face slowly.
I feel a rare life happenstance – where I do not need to be elsewhere. I do not feel like running or moving onto the next task. I do not need to do absolutely anything. I can simply be. I am allowing my intuitive feminine energy to pervade my masculine presence, all symbiotically intuitive about what is about to emerge next in my life. And out of an instant elucidating moment, I realize the need and the deep calling to integrate such activities into my daily routine. From that day onward, yoga has become an integral part of my daily life.
The Dream
But moreover, what happened in that simple yet incredibly powerful revelation was the planting of an idea which slowly but surely lead to the Soul Dreamers genesys. Or onto the Odyssey roadmap back to the heart.
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An inner intuition whispered the need to construct a safe space where my healing journey onto presence and inner growth intertwines with other similar souls’ pathways. The creation process has been long, adventurous, and beautiful. I have spent a couple of years ideating the vision initially on my own, and slowly communicating with others creating lively conversations around the phrase “What could it be?”, and “How could it be?”. I started dreaming and sharing the dream throughout my travels and journeys.
What was initially a simple yoga retreat center idea shifted towards a place of connection and exchange between responsible tourists and the local nearby communities. I had a strong intuition that mutual learning experiences can occur when there is no barrier between locals and retreaters, when such interactions happen not due to spontaneity but through the co-creation of holistic structural programs benefiting both. I have started dreaming of social impact, of deep nature getaways, of adventurous immersions, of spiritual self-awakenings.
The healing journey continued via various programs and onto diverse locations throughout the years but what perhaps was the biggest and most painful lesson of my life was the short lived yet powerful encounter I have had with a twin flame, a Colombian presence of divine light and darkness.Through our very brief and lively relationship, Michelle taught me the power of commitment and of letting go, the importance of feeling both love and despair unleash as a means to embrace emotional intimacy, and the innate constant possibility of inner growth and forgiveness each one of us hols inside. I thank her for inspiring the Soul Dreamers Project and my own evolution towards it, and in allowing Colombia to become our spiritual home and starting place.
Michelle was also the source of courage in allowing myself to embark on the Ayahuasca journeys, in not running away from emotions but fully embracing them as a healing method onto stronger emotional raw connection to myself and to significant others.
The Challenge
And then Covid clashed all over us, and the groundbreaking year of 2020 washed away any short term plans. Being for the first time in a decade confined at home alone, and having nothing else around except for a cozy flat , the Portuguese seashore, and a supermarket, I initially panicked. I felt my constantly running self physically imprisoned, restricted to a delineated area, the lockdown concept acting diametrically opposed to my own freedom quests. I felt my own Soul Dreamers vision challenged by the world policies effectively ending tourism for a lengthy time.
But the same period has also been a real blessing providing the necessary tools of resilience and self-reflection setting the creative path onto a deeper focus. I bought a whiteboard, and one happy day after a strong holotropic online breathwork session, I felt inspired to write a detailed schema of what is nascenting within. That schema became the framework for action leading into a script, a plot, and with the combined internet research, I have started reaching out to common dreamers, to communities in Colombia and beyond. Throughout those conversations, we’ve created a team, and we’ve slowly progressed towards the current program.
They say that your own shining light gradually attracts other similar ones so perhaps the most blessing element of the long journey has been the people I have interacted with. Feeling the energy of excitement, wonder, and commitment from other persons supporting the process through advice, volunteering or funding. I am forever indebted to them.
The Adventure
Late 2020, I have decided to explore the chosen land for our first retreats, Colombia, with the goal of directly witnessing the healing journey through community immersions myself. My goal has been to understand the mystery of the subconscious calling felt for the land, and to pursue happenstances leading to choosing naturally the communities supporting us in the program.
Slowly but surely, the communities came alight. A journey on a small boat taken through the breathtakingly beautiful Delta of the Dorian river surrounded by exotic birds, capuchin and spider monkeys, and sheer natural beauty led me to breathe in the story of past trauma, rebirth, and forgiveness experienced by the Jimenez family in the Suriki reserve. Their story is the narrative of Colombia, a country of breathtaking natural beauty, immense ecotourism potential as well as a country with a legacy of violence having gone through a civil war-like division slowly reconciling through a journey of self-love and forgiveness.
A trip into the Sierra Nevada mountains connected me to Zara, and her women led community of permaculture, a nature sanctuary of peace and eco-learning. A friend advised me to meet Jeronimo, the leader of an Ayahuasca eco-community in the heart of the Antioquian forest proning me to volunteer for over 6 months in order to understand my own connection to the ancestral medicinal practices; onto deepening my own capacity for self-awareness and compassion for both darkness and light so I can act upon such important inner learnings and consequently serve others better.
The A-Ha
Perhaps the most elucidating experience I have had so far which brought into full light the source and unfolding of the Soul Dreamers upcoming journey took place in the Amazonian forest, in an indigenous community in Putumayo. I have participated in a 7 day medicinal plant retreat inside the authentic Inca territory of Jungillo. While each of the sessions allowed for a deep fall into my soul abyss only to resurrect stronger and clearer in the aftermath, the very last one left a deep imprint into my heart. Not only was it the most intense therapeutic session I’ve experienced so far but also the most clairvoyant one.
The journey started through complete darkness succumbing to the unconscious depths of my soul. And through its “rebirth” it eventually allowed me to fully grasp my own mission in life. And no, it is far from a cliche. I have learnt during that session that the power of love, hope, forgiveness, compassion, and empathy comes directly from the source of nature. Nature in its pure simplicity heals, and it can do it fast if we’re open to its easily permeating message.
The Mission
While grasping this simple and vital element, it became my own duty to take the message further. I have realized that it is my role, OUR role as a generation of self-leaders in the making to become ambassadors of communities in nature, connecting the newly acquired wisdom onto a heart opening journey of self-love and dedication becoming better persons for ourselves and those around us.
Through this powerful heart opening session, I also understood that positive transformations happen increasingly less at the policy level through elections, street movements, or street revolutions. The status quo as we see it currently around the world predicates a continuous ego leadership in which short immediate gains, personal power struggles, and fear inducing elements are the natural way of running the world. A systemic change a l’ancienne is becoming a mere illusory oasis.
The Odyssey back to the Heart
However, there is a solution to it. The remedy is so simple and easily replicable, and it asks us to stand still, stop running, breathe in, and courageously feel our emotions. It asks us to simply be. lt allows us to embrace nature’s tools towards self-knowledge so we can unblock our natural flow of thriving creatively together. The method is self-awareness, self-compassion, and self love, and it can easily be received through nature’s mysterious ways, and via eco-communities passing on their long lasting wisdom and messages further.
The method is simply following through on our own self-leadership pathway by taking a personal and collaborative journey into clarifying our own mission and vision in life. This way we can open our hearts to ourselves and those around us – family, profession, vocation wise.
And the final and vital question to ask is not what can we receive throughout our life long journey in order to reach inner happiness. Instead, the bigger question to ask is what we can offer to ourselves, to our closed ones, to our communities that can inspire self-leadership and transformational capacity so we can co-create together a fairer, more inclusive healing world? How can we reach our final destination having no regrets in our connection to ourselves and other?
Such questions will be explored in our Soul Dreamers program – a Journey Towards Compassionate Eco-Leadership.
First Soul Dreamers Retreat and Program coming up shortly. Detailed info in our next newsletter.
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Love always.