the art of pioneering

Artikelen, Connecting the Dots / By

(Men’s work, Mary Magdalene, light work and the Amazon)



Pioneering has fun sides. It is an adventure, like being a detective or adventurer uncovering unknown territories, travelling beyond the boundaries of what is allowed or what should be, entering forbidden places, and unravelling collective secrets. It gives life meaning, content and depth. 

However, it also brings uncertainty, fear of failure and deep doubt. Am I going in the right direction? Is this really the intention? What if it all leads nowhere? Have I gone mad? Is this perhaps just my own issue and no one is waiting for this? These are so the bears on the road and the demons that constantly travel with you. 



When I started doing men’s work, it was initially a descent into a very deep, big, black hole of pain, loss and grief. I descended into the pain of the ‘fatherwound’. What I did not know then was that I was descending not only into my own ‘father wound’, but also into a collective wound of many, many men. Actually a kind of psychological crater in society. (That wound is being reopened with the current wars: generations of men are disappearing again and leaving behind fatherless sons.) 



Fortunately, I learnt through the work of Carl Jung that there is such a thing as the collective unconscious. That your own pain and blind spots can suddenly become a conduit to a larger collective field. And I discovered a second thing: You don’t only suffer the consequences, but can also do something about it: bring awareness.

I discovered through my work in Gaza – another immense dark hole of pain and trauma in humanity’s collective consciousness – that you can not only work with individual trauma, but also ‘heal’ trauma in the collective field. 

However, this requires a sharp distinction between what is your own and what belongs to ‘the other’, cq the field. I discovered that I was a sponge for collective fields, and no matter what I did, I could not close myself off. I knew only one way to get out of it: to look at it as a job. I made it my work. ‘If you are down, go deeper.’ That’s what helped me get through it mentally in the end. It turned out there was much less wrong with me than I initially thought. I was just picking up the pain fields that were already there, like any shaman or wounded healer. 



The pioneering also applied to the work on Mary Magdalene, which exposed the lack in the world of the ‘sacred feminine’, the need for intuition and female spirituality, emotion and feelings, sacred sexuality and connection to the body. All things that had been glossed over by the church. I wrote ‘Book of Love’ in 1998 to touch on those issues, but it took several years for it to reach a wider audience. Many men and women were pioneers in this field over the years. 



That’s another tricky thing about pioneering. It often brings loneliness and a lack of recognition. Extremely painful and frustrating, because what is perfectly clear and important to me is not yet an issue at all in the world around me. It creates a certain alienation, or call it detachment….
But: as the photo of the recently held Free man festival show, I am no longer alone in many things: men’s work is booming, Mary Magdalene has become a popular theme. Slowly, more and more men and women are realising the importance of this inner work of the soul. 



A final tricky point that pioneering brings: it does not bring in money. Unfortunately, it often costs money. That’s why years ago I switched from a ‘sales’ model ( I offer something, another person gives money for it) to a ‘donation’ model. (I give freely, and I receive freely). In doing so, I somehow stepped out of the economics business. (I will write about that at another time, as it involves one of the deepest aspects of our way of life.) 



Right now, I would like to take you on the soul adventure I am currently engaged in. It is also the reason I moved to Tomar inPortugal with Anne. It opened the door to a story that has shaped much of our history. In Tomar, the Templars hatched plans to discover the rest of the world. For the first time, they had maps and instruments that allowed them to sail the oceans. The age of explorers had arrived. People like Vasco da Gama and others were Templars who explored new territories: South America, India etc. This brought great innovation, but also – as it turns out now – great misery. What was a discovery for us and offered new opportunities for the west, was for the Indians in the jungle the end of their civilisation.



My dear friend Marita Coppes, in her book ‘The Last Story Weaver’, writes about the ‘weaving errors’ of history, and that it takes meticulous work to take the loom apart to extract the original error. 
One such flaw arose with the colonisation of South (and North!) America by whites. The abuse of indigenous people and the clearing of the rainforest left a deep scar. A wound that still rattles on, as we continue to steadily degrade the rainforest via oil extraction, meat production and gold mining. Forest fires – lit or not – do the rest. It is a global disaster in-the-making. 

What the Indians discovered and tried to make clear to us was that the loss of the Amazon means not only the end of their civilisation, but also the end of the civilisation of all humanity. Without oxygen – the Amazon are the lungs of the earth – we are doomed. We are already beginning to experience the consequences in the giant floods on one side and forest fires on the other, a sign that the balance of nature is out of balance and that ‘Mother Earth is sick’, as the indigenous elders have been telling us for decades. And the cause is ‘us’. 



Now the thing about blind spots is that we prefer not to face them. Some people blame the changes in climate on all sorts of things – solar flares, periodic changes, aliens, chemtrails, the secret government etc – but not ourselves, when the simple fact is that we are all to blame. We all buy from the H&M or order over the internet, we all drive a car (or fly everywhere like me), we all have plastic in our homes, and so on. However, burying our heads in the sand, or picking on others does not make much sense: it only prolongs and exacerbates the pain. It requires….. ‘awareness.’



And that’s where my current pioneering spirit comes in: my plan is to organise a big global ‘Ceremony for the Earth’ in the Amazon forest during the 2025 climate conference. A way to reconnect with the earth and nature from our hearts. Because it is not nature that needs saving, but ourselves. 
It was with great pleasure that I embarked on the adventure with a first journey of discovery last August to the jungle, up the Amazon River, like the explorers before me, to track down the woeful errors of history. You can read the trip report in the link below, and this winter I plan to write another book about it. 



So…
I would like to invite you to join me in this adventure. Either by travelling with me, to Brazil, Sinai, Tomar or the Azores: on the website connecting-the dots.eu you can find all the events.
 Many hands make light work…

And should you want to join in any other way, have ideas or want to contribute, welcome.

From 2-6 October we have a first brainstorm/consultation in Tomar to see how we can give this project hands and feet. There are still places!



Warm regards!


Ton


Ton van der Kroon
Author: Ton van der Kroon