Going home 💛

When my grandmother was dying during Covid, I had a mystical experience at her hospital bedside. We were listening to “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
I was holding her hand.

Beneath everything, I felt an immense love - including for her life, which had contained a lot of suffering.

It was a love that felt more real than everyday life and lifted me, for a while, beyond its constrictions.

And I knew: I want to go home.

Separation

The love I felt in her last hours also showed me how far removed from it we can sometimes feel.

We live here in the midst of separation. You and me. Better than, less than, good and bad: competition, strife, jealousy. An icy wind.

Our current global economic system is built on this separation and encourages it.

Outside and inside

The separation is out there, in the world, and in here, in ourselves.

I believe the dysfunction in the world wouldn't have such a hold on us if it weren't also present, often unconsciously, within ourselves. That's one of the reasons I believe so deeply in the value of inner work, and in making the unconscious conscious.

Because if we become more rooted in our own power and more connected, will we still allow ourselves to be led by unhealthy systems and destructive leaders?

Or could something far more beautiful be possible?

Something many of us probably long for, deep down?

The shadow

For the past few years, and still today, I have spent a lot of time looking at the separation within: parts that don't come from love, but from old pain. Like the part of me that sometimes wants to be better and more special than others.

I keep finding it hard to accept these parts. I want to be a good person, and that wish comes from genuine intentions too.

And don't the most destructive world leaders, caught up in their illusions, often believe they're doing something good for the world, serving some greater ideal?

I'm not saying that our everyday human dysfunction is the same as the dark triad traits of certain leaders. But I do think each feeds the other.

Or, as it is sometimes said: isn't it our own unconsciousness that keeps evil in place?

* A little hint: the things in the outside world that you find yourself strongly focused on may point to something that is still hidden within you.

A healthier consciousness, a more beautiful world

Activists sometimes accuse people who do a lot of inner work of navel-gazing, while activists are sometimes accused of moral superiority.

I think reality is nuanced, and that in everything we do as human beings there's often some static on the line. After all, we don't live in that deep reality of love I began this story with.

I do believe we can move closer towards it - and that doing so can bring enormous fulfilment, and simply a much better life.

As I know from experience, the way there is not to bypass the shadow and the fragmented parts within ourselves and the collective, but to learn to meet them with care, however hard and uncomfortable that is.

Because in the shadow, love lies hidden, always there, patiently waiting for us.

October 2026

Thank you for being here - and if you dare, dive into your shadow! :)

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