The Forest Within: A Journey Beyond the Self

The Boy Who Belonged to Trees

I wasn't born—I emerged. Like a seedling pushing through dark soil toward sunlight, finding myself suddenly here, embodied in this peculiar vehicle of flesh and bone. Yes, there's a birth certificate with a date, and yes, there are two wonderful beings who once called themselves my parents but whom I now recognize as fellow travelers, cosmic siblings who happened to arrive a few decades before me. They passed down their beautiful quirks and sacred wounds like family heirlooms, genetic codes inherited from other fascinating characters stretching back through time.

The costume for this journey was woven in Estonia—a place where forests still remember their ancient songs and people speak a language as old as the last ice age. Being Estonian isn't just a nationality; it's a particular tilt of the soul. We don't simply live near forests; we lean toward them like sunflowers tracking the sun. Our shadows stretch longer among trees than they do in cities.

In our ancient tongue, the word for breath—"hing"—is identical to our word for soul. We don't just breathe; we "soul" our way through life. This isn't poetic license; it's linguistic truth that reveals something fundamental about who we are. Long before I understood any of this intellectually, my body knew it. My cells recognized the trees as kin.

As a child, I would vanish into the woods for hours, returning home mud-streaked and pine-scented, my pockets bulging with curious stones and fallen feathers. My parents never worried. In Estonian families, this is simply what children do—they disappear into the green world to receive the education no human teacher can provide. The forest was my first language, moss my first alphabet.

When school finally claimed me, everything changed.

The Cage of Borrowed Dreams

"Sit still. Be quiet. Follow the rules."

These commands felt like violence against my nature. The classroom walls seemed to press inward, the fluorescent lights draining color from the world. I watched as, one by one, my wild-hearted classmates learned to dim their light, to walk in straight lines, to answer questions with the expected responses.

I played along, but something essential within me refused domestication. I'd stare out windows during lessons, my consciousness drifting to the trees visible in the distance, sending them silent messages: I haven't forgotten you. I'm still yours.

Year after year, I tried to play the game, but something in me refused to comply fully. The Soviet collapse hit when I was nine, throwing our entire society into chaos just as I was entering my formative years. All the rules changed overnight. The ideological certainties that had structured my childhood evaporated, replaced by a wild, unpredictable capitalism that no one quite understood.

While adults scrambled to adapt to this new reality, we teenagers were left adrift—inheritors of a discarded worldview with nothing solid offered in its place. No wonder I became the black sheep of the family. I wasn't rebelling against stable structures; I was flailing in their absence.

By eighteen, far from being what society would call successful, I was thoroughly lost. I had neither credentials nor direction. My attempts to follow the new paths laid before me always somehow went sideways. While others seemed to navigate the post-Soviet landscape with growing confidence, I remained disoriented, unsure what game we were even playing anymore, let alone how to win it.

I couldn't articulate it then, but looking back, I see I was suffering from a double alienation: disconnected from both the natural world that had been my first home and from the human society that was supposed to be my second. This was the beginning of what would become years of increasingly beautiful disaster.

The Beautiful Disaster

By my mid-twenties, I was what poets might charitably call a beautiful disaster. Outwardly functional—with a job, relationships, and opinions about everything from politics to football teams. But inwardly? Pure chaos.

I'd wake some mornings staring at my reflection, genuinely confused about which version of myself I was supposed to be that day. The costume felt ill-fitting, the script poorly written. I couldn't remember auditioning for this particular role.

Around me, the world was changing too. The Soviet empire had collapsed, and overnight, capitalism rushed in to fill the void. We were told this was progress—that microwaves and mobile phones and shopping malls would make us happier, freer, more fulfilled. Yet everywhere I looked, I saw people running faster on the same hamster wheels, just with newer, shinier gadgets clutched in their paws.

"Is this it?" I'd wonder, watching people in supermarkets debate the merits of competing laundry detergents with the intensity of Cold War diplomats. "Is this what we've been liberated for?"

My escape was always the same: I'd vanish into the forests and coastlines, wading into rivers with my fishing rod, watching the stars emerge over Baltic shores. In these places, the radio static in my head would gradually quiet. The questions that seemed so pressing in the city revealed themselves as borrowed concerns, not my own. My breathing would deepen, my shoulders would drop, and something within me would recognize itself in the wordless presence of rocks and wind.

It was like being handed back a part of myself I hadn't realized was missing.

I tried arranging my life to maximize these moments of authentic connection—working in the city to support a family and home, but reserving all possible time for the natural world that restored my sanity. I became adept at living between worlds, neither fully wild nor fully domesticated.

Then the children came—beautiful beings who looked at me with absolute trust, expecting wisdom I wasn't sure I possessed. Watching them, I realized with heart-stopping clarity: I was passing on the same fractured inheritance I'd received. The same disconnection. The same confusion. I could see my father's expressions crossing my face during moments of stress, hear his exact phrases coming from my mouth.

This realization broke something open in me. If I couldn't offer my children something truer than what I'd been given, what was the point of any of it?

The Call Beyond the Edge

Have you ever stood at the edge of a cliff, feeling simultaneously the fear of falling and the strange, almost magnetic urge to jump? That's where I found myself—not on a physical precipice, but on the edge of my constructed identity.

Something was calling me beyond the boundaries of who I thought I was. I could ignore it and continue the familiar charade, or I could step into the unknown.

I chose to jump.

My first step was studying holistic regression therapy—a last-ditch attempt to "fix" myself while maintaining the external structures of my life. It was meant to be a controlled exploration. Instead, during my first session under light hypnosis, I found myself in another body, another era, experiencing a life so viscerally real it made my current existence feel like the dream.

That single experience cracked my reality wide open. If that other life was real—and the bone-deep knowing in my body insisted it was—then who exactly was this "I" that had always felt so solid and continuous? What else might be true that I'd never considered?

I descended into an obsession—devouring spiritual texts, traveling to study with teachers in distant places, experimenting with meditation, yoga, plant medicines, sound healing, anything that might tear another hole in the veil of consensual reality. I was no longer interested in adjusting my mask to fit better; I wanted to know what lay beneath all masks.

My family watched with increasing concern as the man they knew seemed to dissolve before their eyes, replaced by someone unrecognizable, someone who stared at trees for hours and spoke of consciousness and energy fields at dinner parties. I couldn't blame them. From the outside, it must have looked like madness.

In truth, it was.

The Sacred Madness

Here's what spiritual books mostly don't tell you: awakening often looks like a complete psychological breakdown. As the structures of your former identity collapse, there's no guarantee the new architecture will form quickly enough to catch you.

For me, the collapse was total. But it didn't start right away. It built on itself for almost 10 years, filled with smaller transformations as a taster—preparing me for what was to come. I had to learn both the theory and experience of spiritual transformation, to understand its language and meaning at the deepest level. Now I know why—otherwise I would have lost it completely.

Mine was so intense that there were no people around who could truly understand what I was going through—not even the wisest companions with whom I had journeyed so far. Neither I nor they could have suspected the intensity of what lay ahead: Within a few months' period, I lost my partnership, my home, my business, my social standing—all the external markers that had defined me. Most painfully, my relationship with my children became strained as I needed much time and space to deal with my own mental disintegration.

I remember sitting on the terrace of my childhood forest house—the place I had retreated to for solitude. My father came to visit, concern etched into his weathered face, asking if I needed "professional help." The irony wasn't lost on me—I'd been seeing more "professionals" than he could imagine, just not the kind he had in mind.

"I'm okay," I told him, though I was anything but.

"You're staring at trees all day," he said. "That's not okay."

I wanted to explain that the trees were finally speaking to me clearly after a lifetime of whispers. That in their presence, I was remembering something ancient and essential. That what looked like breakdown was actually breakthrough. But I knew he couldn't hear it. Not yet.

So I just nodded and promised to "try harder" to rejoin normal society.

But by then, I'd glimpsed too much to go back to sleep. I'd tasted something real beneath the layers of conditioning, something that felt more like home than any home I'd ever known. Something older than my personal history, yet intimately familiar—like remembering rather than discovering.

I surrendered to the dissolution.

The Great Silence

For three years, I lived in a space between worlds. Unlike the romantic image of the mystic taking odd jobs to sustain his spiritual journey, my path unfolded differently. About nine months into my transformation, the pandemic hit, bringing the world to a standstill. While others experienced this as an unwelcome disruption, for me, it was perfectly timed—almost as if the universe had arranged a global pause precisely when I needed it most.

As lockdowns emptied streets and people retreated into isolation, I simply leaned into the silence that was already claiming me. I stayed out of the picture entirely, retreating to my forest sanctuary where I could observe the unfolding global drama from a distance. What I witnessed was remarkable—the "normal" world suddenly revealed itself as the collective hallucination I'd begun to recognize it to be. The fragility of our social systems, the arbitrary nature of our economic structures, the desperate clinging to certainties that weren't certain at all—it was all laid bare for anyone with eyes to see.

I spoke little during this time. Words had become suspect, too easily twisted into fancy cages for direct experience. Instead, I watched—the movement of clouds, the growth patterns of plants, the subtle shifts of my own consciousness as it responded to everything around it.

During that time, I lived in various places, as I needed something to change—so I changed houses, locations. Always at the far end of society, somewhere in pristine nature, with minimal possessions and no technology beyond the basics. I'd wake before dawn and sit in silence outside to welcome the emerging sun. Evenings, I'd do the same as it sank below the horizon. My days were mostly long meditations, sometimes sitting, sometimes long walks.

When you are quiet long enough, the silence starts speaking back. That is not the human mind anymore speaking. That is cosmic intelligence. Its wisdom is timeless and goes way beyond human stories and our own existence. Between these bookends, I simply lived—chopping wood and carrying water, as the Zen saying goes—while listening and seeing stories of the Beautiful Beyond, as I call that now. All that had happened to me made sense - there was no other way to get my attention turned totally inwards - and that was needed to give me the gifts that were now pouring in. God has very unique ways to deliver the messages.

People who knew me before occasionally attempted contact, but most eventually gave up. I had nothing to offer them—no news, no accomplishments, no entertaining stories. I tried sharing glimpses of the Beautiful Beyond a few times, but I learned quickly from their responses to keep it to myself. They thought I had completely lost it. I had stepped off the social carousel and was watching it spin from the outside.

"You're wasting your life," an old friend told me during a rare visit. "You're not contributing anything."

I understood his perspective. From the outside, it must have looked like I'd simply quit—on responsibility, on purpose, on life itself. But internally, I was engaged in the most demanding work I'd ever done: dismantling the false self I'd constructed, piece by painful piece, to see what remained when it was gone.

Most days, nothing remained—just vast emptiness where "I" used to be, a spacious awareness in which experiences arose and dissolved like clouds in the sky. Other days, ancient grief would surface, and I'd find myself sobbing on the floor for hours, releasing pain that seemed to belong to all of humanity rather than just my personal story.

Gradually, something shifted. The emptiness became less frightening, more like home. The grief burned cleaner, leaving clarity rather than ashes. The silence between thoughts deepened and sweetened.

One ordinary morning, sitting on a dew-damp rock watching the Baltic turn golden in first light, something clicked into place—or perhaps out of place. There was no revelation, no voice from the heavens, no blinding light. Just a simple recognition: there had never been anyone separate from all this to begin with. The seeker dissolved into the sought.

I laughed until tears came, at the cosmic joke of it all. I'd spent years searching for something I'd never lost, could never lose, because it was what I already was.

That was the beginning of the return.

The Journey Back to Life

Life has an exquisite sense of timing. Not long after that dawn realization by the Baltic shore, I felt a gentle pull back toward the human world I had retreated from. But this wasn't a return to my old life or identity—it was something completely new. What emerged from the emptiness moved more lightly, held less tightly, loved more freely. Where once I had carried rigid stories about who I was and wasn't, now there were just open possibilities.

The writing that had begun during my darkest moments of transformation continued, evolving from desperate attempts to map unmappable territories into something clearer and more refined. Words that had once stumbled and groped in the dark now moved with precision, like fingers finding their way along familiar contours in a previously darkened room.

My first meaningful reconnection was with my children. I didn't attempt to explain my journey—how could I translate those three years into language they could understand? Instead, I simply showed up with complete presence, listening to their lives with undivided attention, meeting them exactly where they were. Slowly, the bridge of trust rebuilt itself.

What nobody warns you about spiritual awakening is the profound communication gap that follows. My mind had altered so fundamentally that ordinary conversation felt like trying to describe a symphony using only three notes. Concepts and frameworks that most people navigated with ease now seemed like quaint artifacts from a civilization I had once visited but no longer inhabited. It took another couple of years before I could comfortably move through human spaces without feeling like an anthropologist from another dimension.

This created one of life's beautiful paradoxes: the deepest silence had taught me how to truly speak. By surrendering completely to wordlessness, I eventually gained access to language that came from a different source altogether—words that didn't merely describe the experience but somehow transmitted it directly, like seeds that could sprout in the listener's consciousness.

As I gradually reintegrated with society, I found myself drawn to people operating at the edges of conventional thinking—visionaries reimagining our relationship with the planet, pioneers developing regenerative approaches to economics, artists creating from that same wordless source I had come to know. These weren't people I sought out through any strategic networking; they simply appeared at the right moments, as if life itself was orchestrating these meetings.

I discovered a new role emerging—serving as a kind of translator between worlds. With one foot in the mystical and one in the practical, I could bridge indigenous wisdom with scientific precision, technological innovation with timeless human needs, rational analysis with intuitive knowing. I found myself involved in collaborations I could never have planned—projects that wove together ancient understanding with cutting-edge science, artistic expression with social transformation.

Most surprising of all was the joy—not the conditional happiness I'd known before, which had always depended on achievements or acquisitions—but a groundless delight that bubbled up from simply being alive. This joy required nothing external; it was simply there, like the background hum of the universe finally becoming audible once all the mental static had cleared.

I came to understand that the purpose of spiritual awakening isn't to transcend the world but to fully inhabit it—to bring heaven down to earth, to embody the sacred in the mundane. The enlightenment I had sought wasn't an escape from life but a complete immersion in it, with all its messiness and beauty.

When people ask if I regret the losses that came with my transformation—the relationships, possessions, and identities that fell away—I can only laugh. It's like asking someone if they miss their prison cell after discovering they've always lived in an infinite garden. What was lost was never real to begin with; what was gained could never be lost.

Living Between Worlds

When people ask what I "do" now, I struggle to answer in conventional terms. My life no longer fits neatly into professional categories or social roles. I work on projects that some might label technological, others spiritual, others artistic—but those distinctions feel artificial, like trying to separate colors in a rainbow.

What I actually do is listen deeply to what wants to emerge through me in each moment, then offer myself as a clear channel for that emergence. Sometimes this looks like writing that bypasses the intellectual mind and speaks directly to the heart. Other times it manifests as facilitating transformative experiences for groups ready to shed old paradigms. And sometimes it's simply sitting in reverent silence with trees, exchanging intelligence that has nothing to do with words or concepts.

I find myself collaborating with remarkable souls from diverse fields—not because I sought them out, but because life has its own elegant way of bringing together those who serve similar currents of evolution. These connections arrive with a sense of recognition, as if we've known each other across time—fellow travelers who have been working on different aspects of the same vast project.

My deepest practice now is simply paying attention. Not the effortful concentration I once mistook for presence, but an effortless awareness that embraces everything arising in experience—sensations, emotions, thoughts, perceptions—without getting caught in any of it. From this awareness flows a natural compassion, not just for human suffering but for the growing pains of a world in transformation.

As I move through my days now, I find myself responding to life's invitations rather than pushing toward predetermined goals. Without the weight of maintaining a fixed identity or trying to be someone special, movement becomes lighter, more responsive—like a river finding its natural course around obstacles rather than fighting against them.

This fluidity doesn't mean lacking direction or purpose. Rather, it allows for a deeper alignment with currents of meaning that run beneath the surface of ordinary perception—the same intelligence that orchestrates the precision of ecosystems, the unfolding of galaxies, the evolution of consciousness itself.

The Bridge to What Comes Next

This Earth we're part of is undergoing its own metamorphosis, its own sacred crisis. The systems that have shaped human society for centuries are revealing their flaws, their unsustainability. What looks like collapse on one level is actually breakthrough on another—the necessary dissolution of what no longer serves life so something new can emerge.

I don't know exactly what that emergence will look like. No one does. But I do know that each of us who awakens to our true nature becomes a cell in the evolving body of a new humanity—one that remembers its belonging to the living Earth, that operates from wholeness rather than fragmentation, that creates from love rather than fear.

This is the work that called me beyond the boundaries of my former self. This is the adventure that continues to unfold in ways I could never have imagined. This is the journey that makes sense of everything that came before—not as steps on a linear path, but as facets of a multidimensional unfolding that was always heading home to itself.

If you've read this far and something deep within you is resonating, perhaps you too are being called beyond the edges of who you think you are. Perhaps the confusion or crisis you're experiencing isn't something going wrong, but the first tremors of your own butterfly transformation.

I offer you this: trust the process. The dissolution has its own intelligence. What looks like breakdown is actually breakthrough. And on the other side of the sacred crisis lies a way of being human that you may have glimpsed in your deepest moments of connection—a way that feels simultaneously ancient and new, familiar and unprecedented.

You are not alone in this transformation. All across the world, people are awakening to their true nature, remembering what we've always been beneath the layers of conditioning. Together, we're midwifing a new chapter in the human story—not through force or strategy, but through surrender to the great Mystery that lives us all.

Thank you for reading and breathing with me on this journey. May you be happy and thrive in your life. May you find what you came here for. May that discovery blow your mind and open you in ways you'd never expected. The path is not always easy, but it is always worth it. And remember—when everything seems to be falling apart, perhaps something far more beautiful is falling together.

There is a path, yours, to find
a path where soul and song align
there is a path, each step divine
to lead you on, to leave behind.

your courage carves your sovereign way
~ I notice every stone you lay

away from knowledge, away from known,
sometimes stepping, sometimes blown.

slow and quiet, the heart of feeling
still, trip and fall in search of meaning
still, get drunk on childlike  dreaming
you lick your wounds and pray for healing.

this giant, gentle pilgrim made
reclaiming truth you once betrayed

become the daughter of the moon,
proud brother of the sun
‘till ancient soles complete

the path
~ your infant steps begun.

Seram