The first time I had a spiritual experience I was 28 years old. He had just suffered a small accident with his work car, which slipped in the snow and ended up on the edge of a ravine. At that time, he was going through a stressful and intense professional period; he was a nature animator in an association in Hérault that offered children and their teachers the opportunity to leave the classrooms to meet living beings.
But I worked with three people and my workload was too heavy. This ravine was also a symbol of my daily life. After my car accident, I came home dazed. And the first thing I did, without knowing why, was Google “shamanism.”
I saw that a shamanism festival was being held in the Dordogne and I decided to go there, I felt attracted. There I participated in shamanic drumming trips to which I was very receptive. We were a group of several people guided on this trip by a shaman from Quebec. For the first time in my life I interacted with the spirit world. I was in an altered state of consciousness, like a waking dream. On my first trip, I saw the world below and the world above. A first spiritual door had just opened.
“existential questions”
I grew up in a modest, atheist and very politicized family. Therefore, this path to spirituality was not at all obvious. My family is leftist, my grandfather even called himself an anarchist. We never went to mass and I always heard my father say religion. “that it was all nonsense”. When he was a child, a priest explained to him that his father died because God needed him by his side. Seeing his mother alone with five children, he decided that all this made no sense. When I was little I already had existential questions, but they remained unanswered.
I was the first in my family to study, even completing a doctoral thesis in biology-ecology. During my studies I became aware of the ecological crisis and the extinction curves of species. I felt despair and a lot of anxiety when I realized that everything was being destroyed. After years of documenting the disaster, the investigation seemed like a cold ivory tower. Out of step with my aspirations.
So, after my defense, I wanted to do journalism and worked for Fakir (magazine created by François Ruffin in 1999) in Amiens. It was after this experience that I retrained to work in early childhood education in nature. He wanted to reconnect humans with nature. For a year and a half, I loved introducing children and their teachers to stories about plants, trees, and animals.
You have 62.41% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
