Part 2: Believing in the Body’s Wisdom

My best friend drove to me every day. He got me out of bed, put me in his car, and took me to boxing. It wasn’t about the workout. It was about survival. There was something powerful in choosing pain—leaning into it, shaping it, surviving it. Pain I invited. Pain I endured. Pain that didn’t control me, because I had chosen it. For the first time, I didn’t feel weak. I felt strong. Voluntary pain became a mirror—I saw that I could hurt and still be okay. That I could choose struggle and survive it. And there was power in that.

Later, I added winter bathing. Every time my mind wavered—sometimes even whispering that I wanted to give up—I plunged into the ice water. My entire being, every cell, my very soul, screamed, “Get the fuck out of this shit! You don’t want to die and freeze to death.” The cold hit me harder than anything else—a brutal, primal jolt that forced me to fight for life. The colder the water, the stronger the command to escape. And if you can stay there, hold that moment, something shifts. You realize not only do you have control over your body and all the emotions alive inside you, but once you’ve mastered that brutal moment, no challenge outside the water can scare you the same way anymore. You carry that strength with you—you can hold that space in your everyday life.

And with it came meditating too. Not because I sought enlightenment or some higher state of being. I didn’t care about chakras or bliss or any spiritual milestone. I just needed peace. I needed something to slow the racing thoughts, to ground me when the world felt like it was crumbling.

Before I found my own way, I would try to meditate the “traditional” way—forcing myself to clear my mind. But as soon as a thought came up, I’d get annoyed at myself for having it. Then frustration would spiral into judgment, and the whole thing backfired. Instead of calm, I’d feel trapped in a loop of self-criticism. Everything changed the moment I stopped trying to control the process and began listening instead. I stopped trying to achieve something or control the process. Instead, I simply tried to sit down and be. To give space—to hold that space—for every thought, every feeling, every tension in my body. To welcome everything with as much time and kindness as it needed. I like to say, I don’t practice meditation. I practice The Art of Sitting Down.

I’d discovered something that helped—boxing, winter bathing, meditation. These rituals breathed life into me when the weight pressed down, strong enough that I felt I no longer needed the pills. They gave me the strength to face what lay beneath once I was off them.

The wind of my clinical depression had reached my sister, and out of deep concern, she gifted me a session with a clairvoyant. She believed I needed closure—that somehow talking to Rasmus could bring peace, maybe even heal me. I didn’t blame her; she didn’t know the full story. I’d never told her about the nights trapped in sleep paralysis or the scars on my soul. Still, despite my doubts, I went. I wasn’t expecting answers. I was just desperate for something—anything—to help me feel lighter.

The clairvoyant didn’t just talk about Rasmus in the way I had expected. She didn’t give me some grand revelation about talking to the dead. Instead, she saw something in me that I couldn’t see myself. She didn’t just acknowledge my grief over Rasmus—she saw the entire weight I carried, long before his death, and long before I had any awareness of what I was holding. She spoke of past trauma. She said that I was carrying energy that wasn’t just from this life, but from another. A deep, unresolved pain from a past existence.

It was the first time in my life that I felt truly seen. Not just as a person walking through the world, but as a soul. My brain said she was crazy, but my heart sensed that she was right. For the first time, someone recognized that the weight I carried was not only about what had happened to me in this life but was something ancient, something that had been passed down or imprinted upon me. It wasn’t just my mind and body that had been affected—it was my soul, too. She told me that this was a part of who I was. It wasn’t a matter of fixing me, but of helping me understand who I had always been.

The clairvoyant, sensing something beyond the immediate grief, recommended regression therapy. She explained that the pain I carried wasn’t just mine—it was something deeper, something ancestral, even something from past lives. She spoke to me about the soul's journey and how some of the pain we carry isn't just the result of what happens to us in this life, but echoes of unresolved wounds carried across time.

The idea seemed wild. Past lives? Regression? Crazy talk. It felt almost too out there, too unbelievable. But the more she spoke, the more it felt like there was a truth in her words that I couldn’t fully explain, but I could feel it, deep in my bones. I had spent so much of my life fighting the weight of invisible forces, wrestling with emotions and pains I couldn’t articulate. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t all just my imagination. For so long, I fought against forces I couldn’t even name—demons, for lack of a better word. These invisible, suffocating beings that I couldn’t see but I felt. It wasn’t just a sense of emotional weight or overwhelming thoughts—it was physical. The demons were raping me. Literally raping me. I felt their hands on my hips, the weight of their bodies pushing me down. My dad’s words, “They’re just blockades inside you, they can’t really harm you,” felt like a slap in the face. Really? Blockades? They were not blockades. They were tormentors. Every touch, every sensation, it felt real, man, it was real… What was I supposed to do? Let them continue to rape me? How could anyone ever expect someone to let that go? To just breathe through it? I couldn’t. I fought it, I fought them and then I woke up. Heart in my throat, completely drenched in sweat, too scared to go back to sleep. I would lay down and look at the roof for What felt like hours passed before I drifted back into sleep. When I woke, the bruises still pulsed beneath my skin—tender reminders of something I couldn’t yet name. How could anyone possibly understand?

But then… coffee.

I’m not exaggerating—it was like being lifted from the dead. Every sip pulled me bit by bit back into my body. Like some kind of miracle. A sacred offering from the gods. How insane is it that we get to sip beans grown in Peru, Ethiopia, or Vietnam, delivered straight to our doorsteps? We live in the most extraordinary time in history, and we barely notice.

Meeting the clairvoyant felt like being seen for the first time. Not as someone “with depression,” not as a broken thing—but as a soul carrying the weight of lifetimes. Pain that stretched beyond memory. She didn’t offer a cure. She offered a key. Regression therapy, she said—healing not just for this life, but for the echoes that came before it.

Of course, I was skeptical. I had been raised around healing—my father was a healer, for god’s sake. And yet, the deepest wound I carried was his abandonment. How could I believe in the medicine when the doctor had been the one to poison me? What faith Who survives that kind of betrayal?

And yet… something in her voice rang true. Not with certainty, but with resonance. She wasn’t trying to persuade me. That was what made it land. There was no agenda, no Something in her voice rang true—not with certainty, but with resonance. She wasn’t trying to convince me, and that’s what made it land. No urgency. Just a quiet knowing that stirred something inside me, like a note I hadn’t heard in years but instantly recognized. I called Tine. She paused, thoughtful, then mentioned someone—a man she’d once seen. A former administrative director at Maersk, of all places. Denmark’s corporate giant. He’d left it all behind to become a soul worker. She said he was different. Grounded. Clear. Intense. Also: expensive.

I hesitated. I didn’t have that kind of money, and I could already picture my mom rolling her eyes, thinking I’m crazy, being concerned. So I called my dad instead. Told him the price: 1,800 kroner. He didn’t flinch. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. Then added, “And whatever he tells you—don’t try to make sense of it. It won’t.” Cryptic. But oddly comforting. Like he’d already walked this road, quietly, and didn’t need me to understand—just to go.

And so I did. And there he was. No crystals, no feathers, no incense drifting behind him. Just a man. Calm eyes. Steady presence. And a silence that seemed to slow down everything—my thoughts, my breath, even time itself. The session began. “I call the unicorn’s raindrop energy,” he said. I almost laughed. It sounded psychotic. But then I felt it. A drop—an actual sensation—landed on the side of my head. It startled me. My skin lit up. A ripple of electricity ran through me like lightning striking the center of my nervous system. It was real. Something unseen had touched me.

Then came the void. Not darkness in a scary way—more like a deep, endless stillness. Then: a flicker. Small. Faint. He said, “Do you see the light?” I did. And then it changed. The light became the eye of yin and yang. And just as I was about to say something, he spoke. “I see the light. It’s like the yin-yang… in darkness, there is light. In light, darkness.” He was in my thoughts. Not metaphorically. Literally. The image I’d just seen was now in his mouth. And in that moment, something in me broke—not in pain, but in surrender. The analyst, the skeptic, the overthinker… all of it dissolved, like an old script finally laid to rest. I didn’t need to understand how it worked. I just knew that it did. And that—that was freedom.

After the session, he mentioned one of his healing courses. Pre-recorded. My brain immediately balked—how could something recorded years ago possibly help me now? But my soul had stopped arguing. It just said, “Yes.” So I bought it.

Halfway through one of the sessions, he suddenly paused. “I don’t know why I need to say this,” he said, “but it’s important.” Then he looked straight into the camera, as if peering through the screen — through me — into the very core of my being. “Your soul picked you for a reason.” And just like that, everything inside me shattered. I didn’t cry sad tears — these were sacred, ancient tears, like a long-forgotten part of my soul was finally waking up. Something deep and raw inside me cracked open, breaking through years of silence and doubt. I felt held by a presence older than time itself, as if my soul had reached across an invisible veil and wrapped itself around me in a fierce, tender embrace. I didn’t resist. I surrendered. I wept like I hadn’t in years. And in that moment, my armor of skepticism fell away — for the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t afraid. I was truly, profoundly reconnected with myself.