Month: June 2021

While I was dancing with the moon and the sun last week at the festival, I had quite a number of insights from deep within.

Over the last couple of years I identified as a futurist. And I kinda realized now that this is still a fragment from my old life. Futurist was the term that would best describe what I do in the business context but my reality is, my nature was never that of a businessman.

While I was dancing I realized that although I have quite some talent in the field what I am really interested in is mythology, storytelling, psychology and altered states and the expansion of consciousness and awareness. And I realized that I identify more with a “modern day shaman” – a transpersonal psychologist – than a futurist… at least when it comes to what I am on the inside.

That scene from “What the Bleep to we (k)now?” with the shaman just came to my mind while I am writing this and essentially that is what I do and always did.

I kinda can see the ripples and eventually can see the ships before others do, that’s why some people started calling me a futurist or giving me similar labels.

Yet, I am more of a shaman. And it’s funny, looking back when I was 19, some people used to call me the “Shaman of Hietzing” (the district I am from). I didn’t know then what a shaman is… still, I did sacred medicine work with people, doing ceremonies with people – neither knowing what sacred medicine is, nor what ceremonies are. I just followed my intuition and people loved the one-on-one “sessions” with me. I would go on a path that would make me shine and then in the 2010s I thought I needed to be a businessman to provide for my wife and myself… well at least that is the story I tell myself.

In reality one of the reasons I left healing work was that I felt like I never had experienced my “shamanic crisis” – which I believe to be essential if you work in “traditional” forms of healing. However, this has definitely changed over the course of the last couple of years.

Furthermore, I realized that one of my teachers and inspirers, Stanislav Grof, gave me the blueprint for my path when I joined him in a private session in 2007. I didn’t quite grasp it then, but now I feel like I’m ready.

The feeling I have right now inside is sound. Let’s see how things will roll from here.

For the moment, I just know, I want to enjoy this summer. There is still so much work I need to do before I leave Vienna. So I guess I will sleep less, work harder, prepare for the summer and enjoy my last days in Vienna. And when I am back to Attica again I will focus on the work I truly love, sharing it with the people I connect in love with – celebrating life again.

vox

Making life my mat 😜

I remember when I first arrived at OZORA I felt like an alien.

In reality I kinda just had entered another dimension.

People there looked like from another strange planet.

Some are just crazy looking people, others are a bit weird, some again look scary.

The cool thing about Goa festivals is: People don’t really give a shit about how you run around… but only if you act like an idiot or not.

That actually really helps you to be able to discover yourself: In the process you have the chance to discover your own unique style, your true self, as your style becomes the unique expression of your-self.

So, no-one really cares how you look like but how you act like!

You know, at Goa festivals it is common for people to share anything… even if it is scarce: Their water, alcohol, tobacco or anything else…

It is common for participants to take care of each other – e.g. if a glass bottle shatters on the floor, participants will clean it up quickly as almost everyone walks around barefoot. Or when it is blazing hot some people will run around with spray bottles cooling down their fellow participants by spraying water at them.

It is common for participants to hug each other or make random compliments with no sexual intention.

E.g. hammocks are kinda a public good. Usually you can lie down in any of them. The list goes on and on and on…

It feels kinda odd, simply because we are not used to that.

Freak show?

Just imagine people would act like that in the real world!

I love the Goa vibe as it is uncommen to what I am used to in real life.

Maybe it is just me. But in real life I am used to people just taking care of themselves, usually just looking out for themselves, often looking away when something strange happens, usually not really sharing anything with strangers, usually not really caring what is going on around them.

Freak show?

At last weeks festival I started to wonder: On which side of the entrance is the real freak show?

Who gets to decide?

Well, for me it is really hard to tell… but perhaps in the meantime I became one of them… however… don’t ever tell my baby-girl: I guess in reality daddy eventually became one of the most noticeable freaks at some of those trans-dimensional parties 😳😂😉

vox

When I went to OZORA for the first time in 2016 I didn’t quite know what to expect.

When I arrived there I was excited and at the same time, I felt like there are mostly freaks running around that I couldn’t necessarily identify with.

After my second day I thought I should leave, yet, a friend told me he will show me how to dance with the moon and the sun.

What shall I say… I started dancing with the moon at midnight. I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life before. My body became one with the rhythm and just started moving. My dance would become something in-between a “Qi Gong dance” – where I would move blocked energy from my body and embrace new energy to my body – and ultra speed “kung-fu movements”… i never knew I could actually move my body that fast.

After three hours of non-stop dancing I needed a break. I would sit down on the side of the main-stage at the hill where I had a nice overview of the main-stage. Suddenly, I would start to think of people with whom I still had some unresolved issues in my life. Spontaneously – similar to a family constellation work – I would feel them, feel the pain I inflicted in their life and talk to them, ask them for forgiveness and or farewell them. One by one. Some I would send text-messages to, others I would just connect to internally.

This was one of the most transformational nights I have had in my life… possibly even the one. After about two hours of this process I continued to a dance a bit more before I would go to sleep in a random hammock in the forrest for the first time in my life (and I would never sleep in a tent at festivals on my own again after that night).

When I woke up the next day I learned how to dance with the sun-rhythem. The dance is kinda different: less smooth – more carthasic and liberating. This would become the day I would dance for the first time in my life for more than 10 hours.

Dancing with the moon is more of a “feminine” dance whereas dancing with the sun more of a “masculine” dance. The moon dance would soften the body, unleash stagnation and blockages and make the energy float again properly, while the sun dance is a dance that makes you release whatever needs to be released. And both ways of dancing help me to process my shit.

I returned from OZORA as a different man. It was a new awakening. The beginning of the end of my marriage and the beginning of my new life.

“Goa-dance” would become my carthasis – my healing ritual. In 2017 I would show OZORA to my – then – still-wife but she wasn’t able to experience this journey with me – it was kinda my last hope to reconnect with her in that surreal world again. But she would separate from me a few months later.

During the 2018 festival I was eventually able to let go of her during my first night at OZORA – dancing with the moon again – eventually sending her my sincere blessings for her future life without me at the end of my first ritual (and literally divorcing her the day after the festival in peace).

In 2019 – dancing with the sun – I realized deep inside for the first time that I would become a father that month.

That “epiphany” would make me dance for more than 12 hours continuously out of pure joy and love for my unborn daughter.

OZORA would become my most important yearly ritual. It is like a real-life seven day holotropic breathwork session for me – it has all the aspects of holotropic breathwork with the music, the people and community, the carthasis, the epiphanies and artistic expression, ecstatically dancing would equalize the breathwork and bodywork for me… I kinda subconsciously applied the holotropic breathwork framework I had learned for five years and made the festival my breathing-mat 😉 yet, a good Goa festival feels way more intense and transformational.

Still, for me, Goa/Psytrance, is no music I particularly enjoy. It is a crazy rhythm inspired by shamanic drums – those that catapult you into a trance. And my dance is my cathartic movement that lets me naturally process whatever trauma or stagnation is stuck inside from the previous year.

This weekend, I attended a proper outdoor-festival for the first time since OZORA 2019 (due to the Corona Pandemic OZORA was canceled in 2020 and 2021). It was just a four day festival, yet it did the “job” for me… dancing again on Goa with the moon and the sun.

The timing was perfect… the last days of spring 2021, not having danced like that in almost two years and so much to process.

I had so many epiphanies and insights it almost blew my mind while welcoming the summer of 2021.

Welcome Summer 😉

vox