Foreword

After my last traditional partnership had fallen apart, I heard a very clear inner voice: Nils, that was your last relationship of this kind. You will never be able to have something like this again. You must now find out what the new way is.

At first, I rebelled against this. After processing a great deal and once the worst of the pain had subsided, I tried my luck on several dating platforms and apps. Yet not a single date came of it – quite unlike my earlier years of being single.

So I had no choice but to follow the voice. What is the new way? How am I meant to live my relationships now? I felt a deep inner longing for a partner, and at the same time a great fear of stepping out of the traditional relationship system. In general, I was very anxious back then – which, combined with high sensitivity, is not exactly helpful.

At the time, I also had no clarity yet that the traditional relationship model was created and enforced by warlords and popes, in order to better govern people and create more order. Over many centuries, we have anchored this way of thinking and living into our minds and into the collective social consciousness as the only functioning model.

Day after day, we typically see almost exclusively this one model – in all media and in our surroundings. We constantly reprogram it into ourselves, making any exit seem nearly impossible.

I never liked the term “open” relationship. Open to what? It sounded insecure to me. Emotional safety was very important to me in my relationship life. The polyamory crowd always seemed to be chasing the next dopamine hit. When someone suffered from jealousy, many held the view that it was their own responsibility to deal with that fear and pain alone. I found this perspective selfish and fundamentally wrong.

At the same time, I sensed that the urge to see one single soul as our perfect counterpart must inevitably fail. Sometimes the weight of expectation placed on a partner becomes too great. For others, the relationship or the sensual connection grows dull and stagnant, and they find no way out. Or after a few years, deep honesty with each other is lacking – often even honesty with ourselves. When we’re afraid of possibly losing our partner, this has consequences for how we handle honesty and authenticity. Over the years, we often adapt more and more to suit our partner without even noticing. Only after a separation do we have the chance to feel again who we truly are.

So what was the new way? And how could I feel safe within it? Human beings are mammals and need one another. My wishes were therefore not so extraordinary at all: in order to truly open wide, I need stability that I don’t have to question every single day. I need trust, honesty, cohesion, and the shared carrying of challenges – in the form of mutual support with any emotional or even entirely practical difficulties.

It was while writing the book Ayana, High Priestess of Sanuela that my inner journey of exploration began. In that intuitively written, fictional story, there was a woman who could not decide which of the two men close to her would be better suited for a relationship. She felt something for both of them, and those feelings were not comparable with each other. She faced a dilemma that she could only resolve near the end of the book.

At its heart, that book is about energetic healing through hugging-meditations – something I only came to understand in the course of the intuitive writing process. Something that has always troubled me: if long embraces with another soul feel truly wonderful, why do we usually not allow ourselves this outside of an established partnership? And what about holding hands? It has become a symbol of mutual ownership. Yet the feeling of it is something like a mini-hug – and therefore a deeply healing experience that, within our conditioned social system, we withhold from one another.

I sensed that I needed many more new stories and books to explore these things and, in doing so, find new paths that felt safe, good, and right.

And I knew: if I, as a highly sensitive and back then very anxious human, could find new practical paths, then perhaps other people could also feel safe and comfortable with them too.

This book offers an overview of stable relationship networks and the essential skills, tools and social competencies we need in order to become fully human. In the coming age of robotics, the time for this has never been more urgent.

Anyone who, after reading, wishes to discover and experience this in practice is warmly welcome to visit Finca Sanuela. Here we hope to share these and other intuitively explored practices and ways of living.

Much LOVE, Nils