From a young age, I’ve had a deep hunger to know myself at the deepest level and to become comfortable and joyful in my own being. I did not know what that would look or feel like back then, I only knew I did not have it.

When I was sixteen years old, my already overactive thinking mind started to spin more and more out of control. I knew I could not live with myself that way, I needed to find a way out. I went to some internet forums in search of any method that could help me. This is where I found Tony Robbins' NLP-based self-help program called Personal Power II. And I got hooked right away

For the next three years, I spent hours every day working with these powerful tools of transformation to change almost every aspect of myself. But even though I changed most of my patterns of thinking, my self-image, and my habitual emotional response to situations, and even though I consumed all the self-help books and audios I could get my hands on, I did not end up feeling like my authentic self. I ended up feeling more like a 19-year-old copy of Tony Robbins. Because instead of uncovering my truth, I had taken on all the ideas and values from Tony Robbins and “programmed” them into my mind.

I woke up one morning at age 19 and realized that the tools I thought were the highway to everything in life, were actually not bringing me what I really wanted (which was deep contact and ease within myself). I was lost again…

When I was in the business world, one of my gifts was my ability to read a room of people. Somehow I was often able to tell with good precision what was going on under the surface in any situation, and to know when something was “off”. Together with great communication skills, this was a real superpower. But it also had a high price. It was often hard for me to focus on deep tasks in the presence of others and I could easily lose my connection with myself if I stayed too long in social situations. I used to be a bit of a social chameleon, becoming the person I sensed that the room needed or wanted me to be, and often losing myself in that process.

It was only seven years ago that I finally found the right tools and modalities to help me mitigate the downside effects of this sensitivity, and making it even more of a gift and superpower today. I know now that this sensitivity and malleability is something I’ve had from the very beginning of my life and that it has deeply affected me, my upbringing, and how I have chosen to navigate life.

On paper, I grew up in what should be one of the safest environments on the planet, on a small peninsula on the Swedish West Coast. But many things in my childhood environment, including an abusive neighbor, made my childhood very unsafe. Severe childhood traumas put me in a constant survival mode from before the age of six. As a young boy, it was not safe to tell anybody what had happened to me, and because of that it also wasn't safe for me to know, so I suppressed it all. I was only in deep therapy work 25 years later that I got to uncover and understand what my childhood had really been like and the horrors I had to survive as a young boy.

After realizing that NLP and Tony Robbins could not take me all the way home to myself, I started to study psychology at the University to see if I could find any answers or clues there. I heard about Mindfulness and meditation and found the American Mindfulness teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn. Early in one of his programs, I had a profound experience. I dissolved into what felt like pure consciousness, outside of time, to a place inside myself that felt like home. This glimpse, even though it soon disappeared, gave me the motivation to keep meditating as much as I could. Because this was the experience I had been looking for, to feel at home in my own body and being.

I attended four silent 10-day Vipassana retreats and after that decided to just keep meditating at home in my apartment. For the next two and a half years (between the age of 21 and 24), I meditated about 8-12 hours per day, EVERY DAY.

All this meditation did help me still my overactive mind (which was great), but it didn’t help me feel authentic, whole, or come back to the experience of being at home in myself.

Coming out of all that meditation, I was drawn to exploring the external world. I joined a then-unknown Swedish consulting company as a business developer and come to play a key role in building this company into the most successful consulting company in the Nordic Countries. During my 5,5 years at the company, we scaled it from 130 to 850 employees, with good profit, and without external capital. In a later Mergers and Acquisitions role, I bought and successfully transformed three companies, and started up new business ventures in new cities.

Financial success was never my primary goal. My goal was self-development and creating as much value as I could for others while I was growing as an individual and professional. Thanks to my success in this company though, before the age of 30, I had entered the top 1% of income earners in Sweden.

As an explorer who loves pushing the edges, I outgrow my hometown and home country (Sweden) when I was 27 years old. I managed to negotiate a deal with the consulting company I was working for which allowed me to do 75 % of my work remotely (long before Covid). This enabled me to travel and work from wherever I wanted in the world for 4-8 weeks, fly back to Sweden for meetings for a couple of weeks, and then fly out somewhere else. It was an extraordinary lifestyle, allowing me to explore and make friends in many new parts of the world. And I’ve been living out in the world pretty much ever since.

When I came out of my 2.5-year period of intense meditation in my early 20s, I had lost or let go of ALL of my previous friends. It happened gradually (not dramatically), simply because of my new priorities and my personal transformation (I changed a lot during this time). Having been quite a popular young man the years before that, this was not an easy process. The meditation years felt like a long lonely walk through the desert. Something told me to keep on going, to keep transforming, and that my true life was waiting for me on the other side of this transformation. And that was true. On the other side, I have built amazing and beautiful friendships that have lasted for over 10 years.

Still to this day though, I allow friendships to form and dissolve organically. Without holding on to old things for the sake of holding on, it's wonderful how much space there can be for new wonderful people to enter my life.

When I was around 25 years old, I realized that Tinder did not work for me and that the girls I had access to dating were not the kind of girls I wanted to have as a girlfriend. I knew that I deserved a 10/10 woman as my future wife and I also wanted to be surrounded by the highest quality female friends. That was something I didn't have at the time. There were obviously things I needed to learn.

I found a group of dating coaches that seemed to have decent integrity and a real appreciation for women, something that was very important to me. And I spent a lot of money to go and learn from them. No sleazy tricks or games, but real understandings about women, dating dynamics, sexuality, conversation skills, and most importantly how being present, embodied, direct and honest can take you a long way.

As a result of my growth, I had many beautiful romantic adventures with wonderful women all around the world, and I gained the most amazing female friends and collaborators. And eventually, I found true love.

One of the most beautiful and healing things in my life has been to be in a truly intimate relationship with my partner Talia, where unconditional love and truth have been the north star for our shared and individual navigation. It has been a sometimes very challenging but also deeply rewarding shared journey so far.

At a personal development workshop I was attending, one of the support coaches said to me "You don't need anything they are teaching you here, you just need to go and see my teacher Judith Blackstone". I had never heard about this woman before but there was something in this man's presence that intrigued me. It seemed like he had found what I was looking for.

After my first five-day retreat with Judith Blackstone, I knew in my bones that I had finally found a teacher and method that could guide me all the way home to myself (and explain why I wasn't already).

Judith taught me that for us to feel whole within ourselves and experience deep contact with other people and all of life, we need to cultivate deep contact with ourselves throughout our whole body. She also explained that the reason most of us are not having this deep contact with ourselves throughout our bodies is because of the protective patterns we’ve created as children in relation to our environment, to stay safe, be loved, and be seen. She also taught me about how trauma affects us, and how even small traumas can affect the way we are experiencing life as adults because of the way we are still constricting our bodies in these held protective patterns we formed as a response to the traumas.

Most importantly, she taught me that there is a dimension of ourselves that has never and can never be injured, no matter what we have been through. And through the guided practices she has developed, called the Realization Process, we get to uncover this truest layer of who we are, the deepest dimension of our being, and our most authentic selves.

After having taken most of the trainings Judith offered for five years, I ended up as one of the senior teachers in the Realization Process organization. I’m still using these guided practices for myself daily, and share them with other people as part of my work.

You can learn more about the Realization Process here

It was also this work, the Realization Process, that helped me uncover and heal from the childhood traumas which I did not even know that I was carrying.

When the Covid-pandemic started, I was in San Fransisco with no plans of flying back to Sweden. But as SF went into lockdowns and the world closed its borders I did not have much choice but to fly back to my apartment in Gothenburg, close to where I grew up. I got Covid on my flight back and got totally knocked out on my return to Sweden. The world stopped with the Covid lockdowns, and in these circumstances, memories of what my childhood had really been like started to surface.

I had already been working with a world-class therapist for six months prior and had been using the Realization Process practices for a few years, so I had a steady foundation to do this deep healing work. And over the two years, I went into a deep healing journey, needing to heal from a childhood that was not safe at all. That involved abuse of many horrible kinds. All before the age of six.

I'm at an exciting season in my life where I get to bring together all the things I have learned over the last 19 years of personal and business explorations. The vision of this BEING MAN platform has been living in me for five years and it's exciting that the time is ripe for this platform to come into the world.

Being an explorer at heart, even if I already have 20 years of experience, it feels like the adventure of my life is just getting started, with so much more to discover and explore. I deeply enjoy learning and exploring life while also holding space for other men to do the same. In this, we are all equal. The journey continues…