This is a special podcast feature about Gaianet. Gaianet is a global community connecting heart-centred purpose-driven changemakers, whose mission is to work together towards a harmonised world - in their words, to "grow the roots of a new earth."
You might agree with me if I said that right now there's a crisis happening in the world, in society, in humanity - a shift is happening. And it is said that there are two timelines that we can go towards: one of them is the timeline of less freedoms, more control by the system, more surveillance, more censorship, less liberty. And if that sounds like a dark or dystopian future, I agree.
But there is another timeline, the timeline of a heart driven New Earth, where all of humanity lives their purpose in perfect harmony with nature and each other. Gaianet as an organisation has a mission to facilitate the co-creation of this new paradigm and to connect and unite heart-driven individuals and projects.
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* The stories and journeys of the people behind Gaianet
* Their spiritual journeys and milestone moments
* Plant medicine, ayahuasca ceremonies, and perspectives of reality
* What does "living from the heart" mean?
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ππ―πΌππ ππ΅π² π΅πΌππ:
I am Agi Keramidas, a knowledge broker and podcaster. I firmly believe in the power of self-education and personal development in radically improving one's life.
#PersonalDevelopmentMastery
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Episode transcript
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Agi Keramidas 0:07
Welcome to this special feature of personal development mastery podcast. This special audio feature is about Gaianet - a global community connecting heart centred purpose driven changemakers, whose mission is to work together towards a harmonised word, to use their own words / in their own words, to grow the roots of a new earth.
This is the second part of the feature. In the previous part, the co-founders and core contributors of Gaianet answered three questions Iβve asked them: What is Gaianet, and who is Gaianet for. They shared their views on the current global situation.
In this second part of the feature, I will again let my guests' voices tell the story of Gaianet and I will be your narrator, sharing my own perspective when I feel that it's needed. In this second part of the future, we're going to dive deeper in the people themselves. And you will hear them talk about their background, key defining moments, their spiritual journey, and their calling to start Gaianet.
And so let's start with getting some background for each of them so we can begin to understand them better. And the first one we will listen from is Daan Gorter, co founder and vision keeper of Gaianet. Daan has an interesting story. He said he was feeling like the black sheep of the family because he was always asking the deeper questions, the questions about meaning.
Daan Gorter 2:07
I felt like the black sheep of the family. And I felt like the odd fish in my friend groups and my environments, generally speaking social environments. And why was that? That was because I asked deeper questions than others did. So I wanted to know the why behind the why what people are doing or how things work. And it was also some at an article really resonance resonate with how the world is working. And at that time, I just had a feeling and I'm talking about my early 20s, mid 20s when I was studying aerospace engineering and in this process of Who am I to figure this out. And I couldn't really find that much resonance with my peers also with my friends in the deeper conversation. So it was always about why are we here? What Who am I and what am I to do here and I didn't realise that was about purpose because I was never trained in my family system, nor in my educational system to go discover who I really am.
Agi Keramidas 3:09
Dan told me that one of the milestones in his journey was when he joined for the first time a group of men who wanted to improve their relationship with women. And this led him to learning about the concept of the mastermind. And then it started his personal development journey.
Daan Gorter 3:30
And in that I met a guy who told me about the concept of the mastermind of the book of Napoleon Hill. And he said, walbro we need to start a mastermind group with other men to get together to set goals and to grow. And that was the first time in my life I meet somebody with a growth mindset, I would say, oh really wanted to evolve himself. And starting that journey and my relationship with women opened all of the gates because I wondered who I am. I went to look for Oh, I'm a man. If I want to feel strong and confident I need to know what my purpose is. So that started the quest for purpose. It started the masterminding it started surrounding myself with people who were wanting to get better at what they're doing.
Agi Keramidas 4:11
The next person we will listen from today is Bart Hoorweg. Bart has a background in high tech engineering and robotics. And he told me that he got into this field because he wanted to understand how the universe works. So here's Bart sharing his story about this.
Bart Hoorweg 4:34
I grew up in a small village near Amsterdam, went to high school and Amsterdam and after that, I went to the east of the Netherlands to do my university study and mechanical engineering, and later mechatronics. I would say that the study direction came forth from a deep eagerness to understand how the universe works. And first off this is what was the record more outworks? Understanding like how do things work, and really intrigued with how do things work. So this, this quite naturally leads you to start studying something in the technical domain and mechanical engineering it's, well, it's directed on designing stuff that works. So that was a very sensible choice to make. And after my, my my master in robotics, which took it even deeper, and so to say, and also my interest in technology, and the role that I see see for technology and in improving our lives,
Agi Keramidas 5:49
you might have seen so far some similarities between Daan and Bart. And you will also probably find some similar elements when we hear florists and Alexander and their stories. But there is someone who has a completely different story. Giulia May, one of the original co founders of Gaianet has a very interesting and uncommon in many ways, nomadic background, here's her telling her story about how she grew up in a hippie community.
Giulia May 6:25
More than half a century ago, I'm born in Italy, and my parents were like this fresh hippies in that time. So in many ways, what you see happening today was happening in that time as well, in kind of a different version, but the energy was quite similar. So when my parents moved back to Belgium living because they both were studying at the University, still, they started a community, a commune for the children for us. And so we lived in a big house with a big garden. And besides the fact that there were many families living together, and there were a bunch of kids present, they also aimed to give her a very special education. So it was an anti authoritarian period. So basically, that meant that we were completely free to do whatever we wanted to do.
Agi Keramidas 7:36
The way Giulia was educated made an impression on me and ask more questions about this fascinating topic of anti authoritarian education, as she called it.
Giulia May 7:51
What is also remarkable is that the adults in that time somehow managed to really educate us without any frame of religion of political politically coloured information. So it was very open. There was also No, nothing going on around role descriptions, like you are a good girl. So you're supposed to be like this or that these are boys, that was completely open. But also, and that's one of the things that I appreciate the most is that you were never told, like, you're good, or you're bad. We were never punished. So we were not, like put on a pedestal like, Oh my God, you're so amazing, or a good girl, nor punished. So that created like an inner space that was very free for just expression. So next to studying and learning and because I loved that from a very young age on, there was also a lot of play we were always playing.
Agi Keramidas 9:13
The next person we will listen from is Floris Moerkamp, one of the core contributors of Gaianet. Floris, described himself as a sceptic, someone that goes on contradictory paths. So here's him sharing some elements of his background,
Floris Moerkamp 9:33
and always walking quite a few different paths in life that seemed to contradict each other. And that's something I really liked. It's also the term shadow sceptic sharmin, came from you notice like, seemingly contradictory terms and I just love to kind of go in between those and see what I find. So, like, after like a year of university, I dropped out To just work, basically, and start shooting my career. And that's also when I kind of discovered self development in a way. So I started to realise like work on my own little personality is what I thought back then I really create, create myself in a way.
Agi Keramidas 10:22
one of the cofounders of Gaianet is Alexander Keehnen. And when I asked him about his defining moments in his journey, he explicitly stated there were four of them. And before I let him share these four with you my own thoughts on this is how much someone who is bonded and reflected on the journey to be able to pinpoint those four milestones and describe them with such clarity. So here's Alexander talking about his defining moments.
Alexander Keehnen 11:03
I grew up in a small village in the Netherlands and that was really yeah, fixed mindset village. So to say, parents, family, neighbours, everyone. And I was 23 I moved abroad practic Republic and they're via, via I got in touch with my first self help book. That was, for me a key defining moment, I didn't know that self help books exist. I didn't know that how to books exist. Second big one was to quit my corporate job and really start walking my own path. I was really good in corporate life. You know, I was I was young, I was rising star, I got promotions, I got good performance ratings. People love me I find thermal network all the results. So felt it must be so much more. The third, big one was exemplified by the book of Michael singer, the surrender experiment. Wow, that book that really, really got me I read it in one and a half day straight, amazing story, the life story of Michael singer from the 70s until the 2000s, where he decided to just surrender, fully surrender and instead of letting the mind define what needs to happen, so initiating all kinds of things, he started to live in response to the universe, waiting what comes his way. And when he gets a sincere request from the heart, He does it because he feels the universe is asking me to serve here. And the rest of the time, he just wanted to meditate. And that completely flipped my mindset upside down. I was always initiating What's next? What's next? What's next pushing for moving forward? That's what I learned in so much literature, corporate life, etc. But the surrender experiment explained to me that that's not how this game works. That's not how life is designed. So one January 2019, and decided to surrender. Let's play this game. No more thinking no more worrying, no more unnecessary initiating. Just sink down into the moment. Finally, the fourth big personal development switch happened when I had my first Iosco ceremony.
Agi Keramidas 13:31
I find Alexander's journey and milestones. Fascinating. And we will come back to this topic of Ayahuasca and plant medicine a little later on. So now that we've heard a bit of the personal journey and background, from the people behind guiding it, to create even more context into the story, let's look at their spiritual journey. I asked Bart Hoorweg about his spiritual journey. And he gave me a very interesting answer, starting from the Western philosophy that focuses on on the mind to the eastern philosophies. where consciousness has the central role. Here's Bart.
Bart Hoorweg 14:25
I would say it has to do with the wanting to understand life and the truth about life. And this exploration started with looking more at philosophy, especially Western philosophy, which I found quite intriguing, but at some point, I also felt that it was limiting in the sense that it felt a little bit too mental and too abstract. And it didn't help me understand. What is my role in all of this? I mean, this is the most central thing That I know that I experienced that the consciousness from which I live. Why Why is that not being talked about in the more Western philosophies? or Why doesn't it have a more central role. And because I wanted to understand that part, I was more drawn towards Eastern philosophies that actually puts consciousness at the centre of life and the rest flows from there
Agi Keramidas 15:27
in terms of spiritual journey, Gulia May had a very intense spiritual awakening when she had a near death experience at the age of 24. Here's is discussing this.
Giulia May 15:43
For me, the first moment things started to change is when I when I was 24, I had a near death experience. And so I didn't know really what happened to me. And so I started to read about it about other people's those testimonials. Elisabeth Kubler Ross, who was an amazing inspiration. And that started to let's see, reignite my very sensitive, psychic kind of child experience that I had, where I was very close to. Yeah, the spirit world and the animal worlds and the plants and the whole very fairy tale kind of experience that I had as a child.
Agi Keramidas 16:39
And here's Alexander Keehnen, and again, talking about how he started his spiritual journey.
Alexander Keehnen 16:47
Spirituality is something that I've been pushing away most of my life, just like the environment I grew up in. So there wasn't much space for that. But as I started with the health toolbox, when I was 23, so like 13 years ago, and a couple of years in, I started to understand, first of all, how the mind works, limiting beliefs versus empowering beliefs. And secondly, more about how the universe works. And so the evidence was piling up, that there is a spiritual side to the thing, there's a material side to this world and the spiritual side, you can be as stubborn as you want, and your mind can completely block off that spiritual side your entire life doesn't make much sense. It's just denying the truth that's there. So underway over those years, I started to open up to the idea that potentially I will be opening up the spirituality at some point. That's how it started slowly.
Agi Keramidas 17:50
And that's a very interesting point that Alexander made there that you can be as stubborn as you want, and pushing spirituality away. But it doesn't make any sense to deny it, because there is overwhelming evidence that it is there it exists. And now let's also hear from Daan Gorter about how his spiritual journey started.
Daan Gorter 18:19
So I guess that was the start for a journey that just never ended. And that brought me to where I am today, which in the end, like I studied aerospace, I came in contact with medicine from the Amazon, I drank Ayahuasca for the first time. Before that, I had no sense of soul or energy of spirituality, I thought it was all mumbo jumbo. And I was called, let me experience my soul, my energetic body. And that was such an awakening for me, to a reality beyond the material world, I was studying the material world through mathematics and, and logic, and this was something else. And that opened an even bigger box of curiosity and brought me on a journey to travel to the Amazon and get into tribe building and get into medicine work with Ayahuasca.
Agi Keramidas 19:08
During the interviews, I noticed that I huascar was mentioned as an important part of the spiritual journey for many of the guy and co founders. So I asked them specifically, what role did plant medicine and more specifically ayahuasca play in their spiritual awakening. And here is, but first.
Bart Hoorweg 19:37
I don't know in what way it has helped me but it has opened me up at least to the fact that there's different states of consciousness. That's what it helps you. It helps you to experience different states of consciousness. And it helps you understand at least that you're not your thoughts and your emotions, but there's something beyond that. Because indeed, it helps you to to dissolve more easily and to access these these other states of consciousness.
Agi Keramidas 20:06
similarly to what Bart said, Here's Floris again, a core contributor of Gaianet, saying how psychedelics changed his perception of reality.
Floris Moerkamp 20:19
Discovering psychedelics really blew my mind. It was like the first first thing that really, really, really changed my mind or really changed my perspective on reality. And I just, I couldn't explain it, you know, like, naturally I'm, like, really sceptical and scientifically minded. So I really dive into the topics I am interested in. And this was just one of those magic fields that I just grew and explained. So I kind of just kept going back into it and trying to figure out what was going on, you know, tried to explain it away with neuro psychology, etc.
Agi Keramidas 20:56
And I think now it's time to go back to Alexander's fourth milestone moment and let him continue that story.
Alexander Keehnen 21:06
Finally, the fourth big personal development switch happened when I had my first Iosco ceremony. I saw Iosco come up in the distance over years, let's say started to hear about it hear people talk about it and my mind. My mind was slowly getting convinced that even though it feels scary or different, or have judgments against mind altering or expanding substances, I saw that, yeah, there's a deeper, deeper level of, of purity and it is safe. And people like, almost everyone who knows about it is super, super positive about it. So I realised again, it's only my mind. That's in the way. And when I got the first invitation, and I attended the ceremony, yeah, magical things happens. I connected with myself in an entirely new way. I healed a couple of old injuries like physical things in my body. And I I call it a meeting with my higher self.
Agi Keramidas 22:16
I will conclude this section on a psychedelic plant medicine. With Alexander's comment, when I asked him his thoughts on what role I Alaska played in his spiritual journey,
Alexander Keehnen 22:32
I was I hadn't even linked that to spirituality necessarily. For me, it was really, it's in touch, we say face for them in the middle, so it expands the minds. Well, to me, that sounds like a good thing. You know, the mind is a prison in which we live. So if we can extend expanded, there's more space.
Agi Keramidas 22:55
Before the conclusion of this second part of the feature about Gaianet, there is one more topic to cover. So far, we've talked about the background, the personal journey of the people behind Gaianet, and also their spiritual awakening, and in some of them how plant medicine helps them into it. Throughout my conversations with all of the people behind Gaianet, and also when I interact in the online platform of Gaia net, there is a phrase that is been used, and that phrase is living from the heart. It is a very beautiful phrase. But what does it mean? We'll hear from Bart, Daan and Alexander, telling us what does live in from the heart mean?
Bart Hoorweg 23:54
in our heart, that's where we are connected to ourselves. And that's also the place where we can truly connect with others. This is also the place where this deep knowing that we are one resides, at least for me, when I look at what comes from my heart is just pure beauty, that the mind can come up with all kinds of other things that are demeaning to others or judging or bringing you stories of fear or all these kind of things. But when I listen to my heart, it's pure. That's the place where my love comes from. And where I can radiate that love.
Daan Gorter 24:33
My limited understanding of what this means because it's still a great mystery to me. That there is wisdom and intelligence throughout our whole body. Even your little toe has wisdom. There is that there is there is consciousness there is actually brain cells inside your heart. So your heart has brain intelligence. The same as in your in your guts in your digestive system. There's a lot of neurons in there that send the information to the brain and back, when you are confronted with things in your reality, and I think it's about listening to your body intelligence, I think that's a more easily understandable term than Listen to your heart or follow your heart or. But it's important to bring in the whole body wherever you are in relationship to somebody else. And when we are working in creating together, and to speak out what we feel. And then to identify together as a group. what that actually means is that a fear coming from a programme from a belief, or is that something we are sensing, which is a weird term, but we are sense making together as we are expressing what we are feeling also. And there, I think that's like, Listen to your heart is listen to your feelings, not just to the mind, and the logic and all of that. And I think the most important thing we found with guidance, we're not going to get there with our mind, when we're thinking about these things, we're only getting forward when we listen to what we feel. And that's beyond the mind.
Alexander Keehnen 26:04
Again, this is pure science. Everything is energy and vibration. The images we see and the things we feel, they are an illusion created by our brain. And so our ability to find our best path through space and time, is about our ability to communicate and understand with the energy and vibration around us. The heart has an electromagnetic field that is 5000 times stronger than the brains. And the heart also carries the brain inside. So again, lots of science, find heart math, as an institute heart math Institute, amazing research, again, science metrics devices, shows how the heart is way more intelligent than the brain in ways that the brain cannot comprehend. So there's again to get to any Do you know being willing to let go if you're in minds, your your limiting beliefs, and opening up to the idea that the heart knows and understands more. What it comes down to, for me personally, is that I train my mind to understand that my heart is in charge. So when I'm facing choice, then one of my first intuitions is to ask myself, what do I feel? What does my body say, my heart, but also my bodily intuition. And so understanding that where we are in life is the result of our choices, and starting to put our heart in charge of those choices instead of our mind. For me, that's the core of what this is really about living by the heart and thrusting that whatever happens from there is beautiful, and writes in so many ways that you cannot comprehend yet. It's the hearts that's in charge when you choose.
Agi Keramidas 28:10
This concludes the second part of the feature about Gaianet, in the third and last episode, we will delve deep into gannets mission, vision, future, and, most importantly, what we can do right now.
Bart Hoorweg 28:35
You have this quote that says that the secret of change is to focus all your attention not on fighting the old but on creating the new. And I think this is really true. This is really true. And this is so important to realise that in order to create something new, it doesn't help to fight the old. the only the only way to really create something new is to, to dream up. There's no reality and then focus your attention on bringing it into existence. And I think it's in the end, it's so simple. I think it's it really is so simple, that we all have to shift our attention towards that which we really wish to create, towards the world we really wish to live in.
Giulia May 29:20
And so if we're there to start dreaming, and I think that that is really the first step, start allowing ourselves back to dream of a better world, allow ourselves to fantasise about it. How would I feel in a completely different world
Daan Gorter 29:43
and the more people have experiences with their true self, with their, I would say, indestructible Bart with their infinite that that part of consciousness that is alive within them, and they know and experience through direct experience not through a guru or book or reading. But actually experiencing this sense of oneness. Yeah, that's that's the end of individualism and consumerism and materialism that is recognising that all of this around us is alive. And all of this is vibrating and resonating with each other.
Agi Keramidas 30:26
To get involved go to www.gaianet.earth