An adventure that flipped our world upside down

There and back again,.. I could say.. But actually we are still on our adventure, that started last december, on the 15th, to be exact. We left, all of a sudden, Belgium to start our journey in Spain, the island of Mallorca.

Winter was coming, costs in Belgium were rising for energy and the vibe of frustration was growing between citizens. The health situation was allowing space to witness a lot of family dramas around me, letting go of my father and making sure my love was surviving her breakup with her youngest son. Which was vibrating densely throughout the journey to come. With a promise for work on Mallorca, we pushed through, with the vision of building our own family and life the way we wish to live. More connected to nature, on our own terms and agenda, as far as possible from a system with structure of obligations, that I found personally, that's blocking and holding people back from their dreams and personal development.

I was already on my own mission for a long time and started to discover a partner with the same wishes and desires in heart, to go on an adventure like this, with our own family. We already knew in the beginning before we started that our 7 year old daughter was dealing with deep rooted anger issues and didn’t have the skills and knowledge for herself, to even make it possible to express her feelings with clarity and understanding. I kind of held back for a while to observe her more and to get to know her over the first months. At the same time also adepting to the idea of being a father figure for this tiny sprout with the energy of a nuclear bomb.

I came from a peaceful life, where I finally managed to find my perks and tools to heal and started to heal the balance within to navigate efficiently through life, towards my personal goals and desires, to continue my own process of healing and to be able to serve others in a better way. Having all the space to sit with myself and take time off from social life. Within a steady routine in meditation and contemplation, there was no way of finding balance within.

Now popping up from the ultimate life of living in isolation in a rainforest to go back to tiny gray Belgium, was a big culture shock, not even thinking of living in a family setting all of a sudden and learning that this was about to be a life changing experience. Where I had to find completely new ways of managing this personal balance and fuse it together with my family and their deepest wishes and desires. Making sure all of us would be on the path of life that brings us to our highest potential of being the best version of ourselves we could be. Our first mission was to make sure Nora found her trust with us and would be willing to go on this discovery to find the roots of her anger and frustrations. It was going to be a very ugly one and would demand a tremendous amount of faith and dedication to face this dark part within her shadow side. It took us the whole trip through Mallorca, Barcelona, Peniscola (the depth of our own hell and shadowside), where the 3 of us were facing our deepest darkest fears and emotional traumas. All this while walking to facets and multiple layers of different lives, being healed throughout this trip in Spain. By helping Nora through her darkness, we joined her, you could say. To face our own side of it. She was so brave to do a series of Kambo sessions with me, which first broke the ice and eventually after a couple of rough battles, she managed to purge a lot of these old traumas to find clarity on the other end. Which brought another very painful part up for Debra. Nora discovers that her anger was connected to the moment both of them left Arizona, to leave a life of pain, abuse and misery. To find a new way of creating a safe and healthy place for Nora to grow up and become a beautiful responsible lady, embodying her big body of energy to share her light with the world. Along the road I was pushed to endure and train my capacity of simply being there to hold space for my 2 wonderful ladies to go through this healing process, while dealing with my own process of integrating from my last diet in the rainforest. Even knowing, that this by itself was a huge one to tackle and master, I had completely no idea what I was about to go through in healing my own past as a child in this life, interwoven with all the traumas that my soul carried around for life times and found there way finally to rise and by faced to see with clarity, to let go and fill the space with new and better ways that bring us closer together and create a space where we can develop to our own potential, while being supported by each other, with only one expectation, to do things your desire from heart and wish to create to be a happy person. And so we can be happy together. Now we are staying in the south region not far from Madrid, close to Toledo. Our first workaway experience and a very interesting one. In the beginning, we got knocked on our asses, by feeling the rest and the leave of the responsibility to keep pushing our business and making sure we could pay the bills and have a roof over our heads. It’s one thing to do this by ourselves, but to do this in a family setting, demands a whole new set of responsibilities and mindset to work your way around to reach our destination. After spending so many months, with the 3 of us, coming into a group/community dynamic demanded again some more adjustment to the structure we tried to build up along the road. But rest was primarily the most important one and we decided to put down our personal business for a while and first heal and recover after such a long period of hard work. Also Debra had some very heavy health issues, that happened in a big dramatic way. Around the end of may, we kind of got a bit worried that we would have a baby on the way tested (negative), because of the way she felt for a while already. 2 weeks later things didn’t change and she was feeling drained and still not good. So we decided to do a second test, which came to be negative again. But then we knew something serious was going wrong. A couple of days after the last test, we decided to go for a Kambo session to see if we could nuke it out with some medicine from the rainforest, so she would be able to come back to a path of recovery, ASAP. The session was very heavy for her and cleansed a big amount of what was making her feel bad. The day after she went to the bathroom, to discover that she was about to lose her IUD, which came out with body tissue and oxidized, black copper IUD and lots of blood. It was supposed to be good for another 3 years, if we would take the doctor’s word for it. Very soon after this happened she started to have a stable period again on a monthly basis without the threshold of pain she had to endure before, flowing back with the natural time, the cycles of the moon.

After this we had an exhausting trip to the farm where we are still staying up till today. During recovery we went with a full focus on the volunteering jobs around the farm, to ground ourselves and to recover from the whole journey so far. Working in the garden, watering the pistachio trees, feeding the animals, painting and cleaning the whole domain to bring a fresh energy into an old farm where the people hold a beautiful vision for the potential future of this place.

During this phase we still had some layers to shed off and to clear out to come closer to our destination. After a whole community experience for practically 2 months, we learned a lot and experimented with different approaches on the tasks and responsibilities on the farm to make things run smoothly and find the balance with our personal time and development. We had the honor of 2 beautiful souls that I connected with in the rainforest of Peru, region Loreto - Iquitos. They stayed for a couple of days and were bringing a big relief and fresh energy from the jungle to our doorstep. With some regular Mambederos, fresh essence of the tree I drank on my last diet and fresh Mapacho to smoke, this felt like a blessing after a very long and rough time of integrating her energy and lessons and being so far away from the forest. With a fresh resource of energy and motivation to pick up what we have been trying to build up in the past period, we were ready to go for it. Only there was still something lingering around the corner that none of us could have expected to happen. Sometimes we go out to other farmers' places that are connected to the projects from this farm. Also an offer in a wider range of experience and living amongst the local culture of south Spain. We went off, the day after they took off to catch their flight back to Peru, we went working at Remi’s place. Always fun and he takes good care of the volunteers that help out. Every work session he likes to close down with a local dish from one of the regions in Spain, to share the gastronomical skills from kitchens in those regions. We just went to sit for lunch, when my love mentioned that she wasn't feeling so well. It already happened a couple of moments before during work that she noticed visual black spots, due to a low blood pressure. But it didn’t feel like a big problem, so she continued working until lunch. Until she sat down and said she had the feeling of fainting. Not a biggy and definitely not the first time I need to catch somebody who is fainting. But this was different, she fell backwards in the chair, slowly cramping together, with her hands cramped up and her face turning white. At that point she couldn’t breath and her throat muscles were pulling together with a spastic reaction. The food she swallowed had to be pulled out of her mouth and the feeling of time disappeared for me… I just witnessed my wife breathing her last breath and sat in shock with one arm holding her head and one hand flat on her chest, with the clarity that this wasn’t it and that everything would be fine. Although my mind was racing with a fair of steps that I needed to take when she wouldn’t be here anymore. Trying to sooth our daughter that everything will be fine without knowing things actually would be fine. And all the co workers and hosts paralyzed by what they just witnessed. After someone came running back with some apple juice to have sugar around to drink, she popped back up like she came rushing back into her body. Very disoriented and not realizing at all what happened, besides her part of the story and going back to the great light, that we call source. She is still processing this whole experience and I’m here with my fullest support. She came back with a fresh energy and some very deep insights on her own soul mission, but nevertheless it will take some time for her to integrate and for us to let go of the shock and fear that we might have lost our beloved mom and sweetest love in our family.

After a couple of days being still kind of paralyzed, I managed to sit down and write this out. It has been a while since I have shared some thoughts or stories from our travels. Things have been so crazy, chaotic and fast happening all at the same time, one after another.

It was so far one of the craziest years I lived on this planet in the past 32 years, even understanding that this is just the beginning of a completely new life. Thanks for reading this and please share with people that can find some strength in this story or reflect on their hardships in these current times.

It may look like we have the time of our life and live the dream life by working and traveling around as a family. And yes in a way we do and it is beautiful, but at the same time it pushes us through our inner deepest shadows to be faced and accepted. To become whole, once again. Aho.