Category Archives: psychology

by | September 7, 2026 · 2:08 pm

Walking into Silence: What pilgrimage taught me about uncertainty, and trust

There are moments on a long walk when you stop thinking about where you are going and simply walk.You simply hear the rhythm of your feet. The landscape changes slowly. Your breathing settles. The noise in your head begins to diminish.I experienced something of that on a recent walk on the Pilgrims’ Way, from Winchester.

But before I took my first steps, I went into Winchester Cathedral. I sat down and was silent during a morning prayer ceremony with only a handful of people. For a few minutes I sat in that extraordinary building, surrounded by centuries of history, and thought about all the people who had come here before me.

Wonchester Cathedral

People who had stood exactly where I was standing and wondered what life meant.I set out on this walk with contemplations from the great Mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich.

Julian lived in fourteenth-century England, during one of the darkest periods of European history – the Black Death.She knew all about illness, death and uncertainty. During a serious illness in 1373, when she believed she was dying, she experienced a series of visions that became the basis of her Revelations of Divine Love. And from Julian came those extraordinary words:

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Julian said this living in a world in which almost everything was not well, and at the same time offering hope. She was saying that we may not understand what is happening in the world but we can still trust that love is deeper than suffering.

That is a very different kind of hope. We cannot plan and control the journey. Life happens in unpredictable ways while we try to protect ourselves against uncertainty.When we’re young, we often imagine that if we make the right choices, life will eventually become predictable.

People and pets we love become ill and die. Relationships change and fail. Homes and jobs change. Your body begins to remind you that you are not going to be here forever.

You begin to realize that you cannot control the journey. You can only walk and adapt to circumstances beyond your control.That thought stayed with me during the first hours of my walk during the unspoilt Itchen valley. 

The first kilometres are always slightly deceptive. You are still thinking about the destination. You look at the map. You calculate how far you have to go.

But gradually, something changes.

You stop thinking about the end.

You begin to pay attention to the next step.

And then the step after that.

That is one of the great gifts of walking.

It brings you back into the present moment. You hear the birds. You stand in awe before ancient trees. The Pilgrims’ Way takes you through landscapes that seem to exist outside ordinary time. There are stretches where ancient trees form tunnels over the path.You walk beneath them and suddenly feel very small.

The trees don’t know your worries. They simply stand there and some of them have been standing there for hundreds of years.And I found myself wondering how many people had walked beneath those same branches.

Medieval pilgrims walked these same old paths, possibly with the same questions as pulgrims today. And now they are gone.

The trees remain and there is something humbling and comforting about that. 

In the bigger order of things one lifespan is fleetingly small. The gravestones around the chapels, some dating back to the 12th century, are a stark reminder of that. You walk into a chapel after several hours on the trail and the experience can be almost startling. Outside, the modern world continues.

Inside, time seems to have stopped. The stones are old and the light is different.

And these are the moments when the boundary between the ordinary and the sacred really does feel a little thinner.A thin place isn’t necessarily a destination to an ancient sacred site but something that happens within.

St Augustine wrote about discovering God not by endlessly looking outward but by turning inward.Meister Eckhart later spoke about becoming empty — letting go of the endless accumulation of thoughts, desires and attachments that fill the mind.

And Julian of Norwich arrives at another extraordinary insight:beneath everything is love. Three different voices pointing towards the same thing. Turn inward. Become quiet and listen.

The longer you walk, the less important the things that seemed so urgent that morning can become.

You begin to notice the magic of life. The small things. The movement of leaves, the creaking of tree branches, the smell of moist earth in the forest, the taste of juicy wild blackberries and thoughts.

Not the thoughts you are trying to manufacture, but the ones that rise naturally when the noise becomes quiet.

That, too, is pilgrimage.

  • How do you deal with uncertainty?
  • How do you live when you don’t know what happens next?
  • How do you cope with the things you cannot control?

Julian’s answer is surprisingly simple. 

Certainty says:

I know how this is going to turn out.

Trust says:

I don’t know how this is going to turn out, but I can take the next step anyway.

That may be one of the most important lessons of a pilgrimage walk.

You don’t need to see the entire road.

You only need to see enough of it to take the next step and keep walking, leaving everything behind you but they remain as memories.

Perhaps that is what happens on all journeys.

And perhaps the same is true of the people we meet, the experiences we endure and the questions we never will answer.

So I keep coming back to Julian.

“All shall be well.”

I don’t hear those words anymore as a promise that everything will work out exactly as I want it to.

I hear them as an invitation to trust.

To accept that some things will remain unresolved and that life contains suffering as well as joy.

Beneath all the noise, all the uncertainty and all the attempts to control life, there may be something much more subtle.

Not travelling towards a place where you hope to find the sacred. But discovering that the sacred has been travelling with you all along and that all shall be well just by taking the next step.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | September 1, 2026 · 5:46 pm

When Things Fall Apart

The very first small things that go wrong often tell us far more than we realise. They can pinpoint the beginning of the slow decline of a company, a neighbourhood, a town or even a country.

The other day, after a walk in Dorset, we decided to stop for coffee in a nearby locality. It was by no means a bad area. In fact, we chose it precisely because it seemed quieter and less crowded than the place next door.

Perhaps that should have been our first warning sign.

We went into what appeared to be an upmarket restaurant. When we ordered coffee, the waitress asked whether takeaway cups would be acceptable because they were apparently out of clean mugs. We agreed. Then we waited. And waited. About ten minutes later, the coffee finally arrived, and the cups were only half full.

I asked for some brown sugar. The waitress returned with a straw.

They were out of spoons.

It was almost comical, but then we noticed a customer being served the wrong meal. Curious, we looked at the restaurant’s Google reviews.

That was when the pattern became apparent.

The ratings had begun falling sharply about five months earlier. The comments told a familiar story: owners apparently turning up intoxicated, increasingly long waits for food, staff arguing with one another, customers being ignored and orders repeatedly getting wrong.

None of these things, taken individually, would necessarily destroy a restaurant. A broken coffee cup, a missing spoon, a delayed meal or an unhappy employee can happen anywhere.

But collectively they tell a different story.

They are symptoms.

What struck me was how quickly a perfectly viable business can begin to unravel once small failures become normal. Standards slip. Nobody taking responsibility. Customers become frustrated. Good employees leave. Management becomes reactive rather than proactive. The remaining staff become demoralised. More things go wrong. And eventually customers stop coming.

By the time the doors finally close, the collapse may look sudden.

But it wasn’t.

It began months or perhaps years earlier, with small things that nobody considered important enough to fix.

Ernest Hemingway captured this remarkably well when he wrote:

“Gradually and then suddenly.”

He was describing bankruptcy, but the observation applies to so much more than money.

Think about a neighbourhood. The first street lamp stops working and isn’t repaired. Then a pothole appears and remains for months. Rubbish begins accumulating around overflowing bins. Graffiti isn’t removed. A vacant property deteriorates. A once-busy shop closes and isn’t replaced. Public spaces become neglected.

None of these things means a neighbourhood is collapsing.

But they can be early indicators that something underneath the surface is no longer working as it should.

The same is true of companies and institutions. A missed deadline. A call that isn’t returned. A customer complaint that isn’t taken seriously. A manager who repeatedly behaves badly but is protected because of their position. A small deterioration in standards that everyone notices but nobody addresses.

Eventually, people stop expecting things to work.

And that may be the most dangerous stage of all.

We become accustomed to dysfunction. We explain it away. That’s just how things are now. We make excuses for poor behaviour. We lower our expectations. We tolerate what we would once have considered unacceptable.

And once a society, an organisation or a relationship begins lowering its standards, decline can become self-perpetuating.

Relationships are no different.

A friendship rarely ends because of one isolated irritation. More often, it is a succession of small disappointments: the phone call that never comes, the promise that isn’t kept, the insensitive remark that goes unchallenged, the recurring behaviour we keep excusing.

We tell ourselves it doesn’t matter.

Until it does.

Small resentments accumulate. They become a reservoir of unspoken anger. And then, one day, something apparently insignificant triggers an emotional outburst that brings years of accumulated frustration to the surface.

To an outsider, the reaction may seem disproportionate.

But the outburst isn’t really about the final incident.

It is about everything that came before it.

This is why we should pay more attention to the small things.

The first broken street lamp.
The first pothole left unrepaired.
The first customer complaint ignored.
The first promise broken.
The first time someone behaves badly and we decide it isn’t worth confronting.

These are not necessarily signs of impending collapse. But they are signals.

And signals are useful precisely because they give us a chance to act before the damage becomes irreversible.

Things rarely fall apart all at once.

First, something stops working.

Then another thing.

Then another.

We adapt. We excuse. We tolerate.

And eventually we look back and wonder how everything changed so completely.

The frightening thing about decline is that it is often almost invisible while it is happening.

The hopeful thing is that the same is true of repair.

A pothole can be fixed. A lamp can be replaced. A customer can be listened to. An apology can be made. A standard can be restored.

Sometimes the difference between decline and renewal is simply whether somebody notices the first small thing that has gone wrong, and cares enough to do something about it before its too late.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | July 14, 2026 · 2:51 pm

What We Lose When We Stop Reading

I recently came across a thought-provoking article in The Atlantic that stopped me in my tracks. It reported that, in 2022, fewer than half of all adults in the United States read a single book of any kind. Even more striking, the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day has fallen dramatically—from 28 per cent in 2004 to just 16 per cent in 2023.

These figures tell a story that extends far beyond changing reading habits. It invites the question: What happens to a society when it loses the habit of sustained attention, deep reflection, and the companionship of books?

The decline in reading cuts across every age group, gender, and education level. The result: basic reading skills are eroding. In an era of information overload, short text messages and textual fragments, our capacity for sustained attention — the kind longer, complex works demand — is shrinking.

The article quotes Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, who argues that people aren’t forgetting how to decode words. What they’re losing are the higher-order skills of comprehension and synthesis — the ability to hold a complicated argument in mind long enough to weigh it.

Why reading matters

This isn’t just about nostalgia. Deep reading trains a particular kind of mind. Following an argument across three hundred pages — tracking its turns, holding contradictions in tension, revising your judgement as new evidence appears — is a rehearsal for democratic life itself. It’s the same muscle you need to weigh competing claims in an election, or sit with a problem that has no easy answer. Skimming a headline or a ten-second video trains the opposite reflex: snap judgement, then move on. A society that reads less doesn’t just know less. It loses practice in the patient, the uncomfortable work of changing its mind.

Reading also builds something harder to measure: the habit of inhabiting another consciousness. A good novel forces you to live inside a character’s way of thinking for hours at a stretch — to feel why they act as they do, even when you’d choose differently. That’s a rehearsal for empathy that no summary or excerpt can substitute for. Lose the habit, and you don’t just lose stories. You lose the practice in imagining anyone unlike yourself.

Are we, then, entering a post-literate society — one growing less able to grasp complex issues, and, in plain language, more susceptible to loud, brash voices peddling simple answers to complicated problems?

Is a free, democratic society itself at risk when a growing number of people become functionally illiterate, or simply hand the work of thinking in complexity over to someone else?

Photo by Nitin Arya on Pexels.com

Literacy forms the foundation of a free society

For most of human history, literacy belonged to a small educated elite that ruled over the masses. The ability to read and write opened up a whole world to millions and became the foundation of a free society. It changed consciousness. It changed the political order.

“More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness,” wrote Walter J. Ong, the historian and Jesuit priest. Neil Postman went further, arguing that reading and writing were the preconditions for philosophy, modern science, history, and academic life as we know them.

I’ve been fascinated by books since childhood. I grew up in South Africa in the early 1960s, in a country without television, where a trip to the cinema was a rare event. In that rigid, joyless world inhabited by Calvinist doctrine, I found refuge in books.

They became my escape, carrying me far beyond the streets of my hometown in rural KwaZulu-Natal. I must have read King Solomon’s Mines half a dozen times, wandering in imagination through the vast African interior.

Later, it was the classics that held me — thanks to our English teacher, Andy Towert. He had a gift for breathing life into prescribed texts and for setting essay questions that were anything but safe. His entrance into the classroom was a performance in itself: he’d toss his bag into the air, sending it into a perfect somersault before it landed square on the desk. From that moment, he had our full attention.

Towert didn’t just teach literature — he ignited it. He made us believe that books weren’t relics of the past but living voices, speaking directly into our own lives. Those hours were never mere diversions. They were seeds of a lifelong calling, planted quietly within the narrow conformities of a small-town childhood.

Some books have changed my life outright. Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage sent me on my first walk to Santiago and more than a dozen pilgrimages since. Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth and John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara reshaped how I think about lived, experiential spirituality.

Early reading and teachers like Andy Towert planted the seeds of my own writing life. Having just finished the manuscript of my fifth book, I can’t imagine stopping. While writing my novel Sages, Saints and Sinners, I became so immersed in the two central characters and their love story that I fell for them myself — and was almost sorry to have to bring their story to an end.

So pick up a book. I did, once, in a small town with nothing else to offer — and it changed everything.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | June 24, 2026 · 8:53 am

The Age of Everything—and the Hunger for Meaning

We live in an age saturated with ideologies.

Whether political, cultural, religious, or social, ideology is always trying to tell you who you should be and how you should behave. It defines identity by drawing boundaries between those who belong and those who do not. In a world that feels fragmented, uncertain, and complex, ideology offers certainty—but usually at the cost of curiosity, nuance, and human connection.

Almost every ideology shares another trait: it idealises the past.

The drumbeat is that there was once a golden age when people were happier, communities were stronger, society was safer, and life was somehow better. History tells a different story.

As I write this from London on a beautiful summer day, the sky is blue, the air is fresh, and birds are singing in the park outside my window. It is easy to forget that only fifty years ago, many of Europe’s great cities were shrouded in traffic fumes and industrial smog.

Go back further, and the contrast becomes starker still. Few of us would choose to live in the Middle Ages, when life expectancy was dramatically lower, disease was widespread, famine was common, and countless women died in childbirth while men perished in wars or from illnesses that are now treatable.

By many measurable standards, humanity is living through an era of extraordinary progress. Millions have been lifted out of poverty. Freedom has expanded across much of the world. Medical science stands on the threshold of breakthroughs that may one day conquer diseases such as cancer.

And yet something seems deeply unsettled.

Why does grievance feel so widespread? Why do anxiety, loneliness, and depression continue to rise? Why do so many people feel disconnected in the most interconnected age in history?

Perhaps because meaning cannot be manufactured by prosperity alone.

A healthy life is not one without difficulty. It is the capacity to navigate life’s inevitable cycles of gain and loss, joy and sorrow, certainty and doubt. Yet the world around us constantly sends a different message—that happiness depends on external validation, social approval, achievement, possessions, or carefully curated identities.

At the same time, many of the institutions that once offered a framework for meaning have lost credibility or struggle to speak in ways that resonate with contemporary life.

Deeper questions surface as a result:

  • Where have I come from?
  • Where am I going with the years I have left?
  • Who am I beyond my career, income, gender, age, or social status?
  • What remains when the labels fall away?

These questions have come up repeatedly in my podcast conversations, workshops, and personal encounters over recent months. Beneath the noise of current events, I sense a growing hunger—not for more information, but for wisdom. Not for certainty, but for deeper understanding.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S. In the coming weeks, I’ll share more about Letters from the Threshold, a Sunday letter where I explore many of these themes in greater depth. For those who find value in thoughtful reflection and deeper inquiry, there will soon be an opportunity to subscribe.

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by | June 16, 2026 · 10:01 am

The Marketplace of Meaning

For most of human history, meaning was inherited. People were born into a family, a culture, a faith tradition, and a set of expectations. Whether one agreed with them or not, there was a framework.

Today, meaning has become a marketplace where thousands of voices compete for your attention. Coaches, influencers, therapists, spiritual teachers, political commentators, podcasters, and self-help experts all offer explanations for why you might feel lost and promises for how to find your way.

Many provide genuine value. Some are insightful guides. But the sheer volume of competing narratives creates a new problem: paralysis. When everyone claims to possess the answer, how do you know whom to trust?

The Seduction of Certainty

Human beings have always been uncomfortable with uncertainty in times of rapid social change, economic instability, political division, and technological disruption; certainty becomes a highly desirable product. But the individuals who gain the largest audiences are often not those who ask the best questions but those who provide the simplest answers.

Complexity rarely goes viral. Certainty does. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that simplistic explanations rarely survive contact with reality. The world is too nuanced, human beings too contradictory, and life too unpredictable to fit neatly into slogans and soundbites. Discernment and depth require patience.

The Difference Between Guidance and Dependency

There is nothing wrong with seeking wisdom from teachers, mentors, therapists, or spiritual guides. The problem arises when guidance turns into dependence. A good teacher helps people think for themselves. A dangerous teacher trains people to stop thinking altogether and to blindly follow.

One of the quiet tragedies of modern life is watching intelligent, capable people gradually surrender their own judgment. Every decision must be approved by the guru. Every life choice must be interpreted through the framework of the therapist. Every uncertainty requires external validation. The result is often a dangerous form of mind captivity.

The same pattern can often be observed in dysfunctional relationships, where one partner gradually surrenders their independence and begins to define their identity entirely through the other. Decisions, values, and even self-worth become filtered through the relationship. What may initially appear as devotion can ultimately become a loss of self, replacing personal agency with emotional dependence

Outsourcing the Work of Living

Perhaps the greatest temptation of our age is to outsource the difficult work of self-examination. It is easier to follow a celebrity’s life than to confront your own. Easier to consume endless content than to sit quietly with uncomfortable questions. Easier to adopt someone else’s beliefs than to wrestle honestly with your own doubts and issues of faith.

Yet purpose is not something another person can hand to you on a silver platter. No influencer, teacher, author, or spiritual leader can ultimately answer the questions that belong uniquely to your own life. That is something you can only discover.

They can illuminate the path, but nobody can walk it for you.

Living With Questions

I suspect that wisdom is less about possessing answers and more about developing the capacity to live with important questions.

  • Who am I becoming?
  • What matters most?
  • What kind of life is worth living?

These questions can only be revisited repeatedly throughout life. Perhaps maturity begins when you stop searching for someone who will think for you and start cultivating the courage to think deeply for yourself. Not in isolation, but with humility. Not with certainty, but with curiosity. Not seeking a guru to follow, but seeking the wisdom to discern.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S. In the coming weeks, I’ll share more about Letter from the Threshold, a Sunday letter where I explore many of these themes in greater depth. For those who find value in thoughtful reflection and deeper inquiry, there will soon be an opportunity to subscribe.

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by | June 1, 2026 · 8:54 am

Embracing Self-Love on the Camino de Santiago

While walking the Camino de Santiago, I sometimes encountered pilgrims who seemed to confuse pilgrimage with an act of self-punishment. Despite their bodies sending unmistakable signals—painful blisters, swollen joints, and deep exhaustion—that it was time to rest, they would continue pushing forward. Determined to conquer the path at all costs, they ignored their physical limits until, inevitably, they were forced to abandon their journey altogether.

There is a saying I learned from another pilgrim on the way. “If you don’t learn to approach the path with humility, it will teach you humility.”

Others approached the Camino very differently. I remember older pilgrims, some well into their eighties, who walked slowly and with intention. They moved at their own pace, stopping occasionally to admire the landscape, sitting quietly in contemplation, or choosing to walk only half a stage in a day. Rather than measuring success by distance covered, they seemed to delight in the journey itself. Remarkably, many of these pilgrims completed the entire 800-kilometre route to Santiago. Even more striking was the vitality they radiated. They appeared youthful, not because of physical strength alone, but because they had learned the wisdom of walking in harmony with themselves.

Pilgrimage offers many lessons about life, but one of its most important teachings is the often misunderstood art of self-love.

Modern psychology increasingly confirms what many spiritual traditions have taught for centuries: self-love is not a luxury but a necessity for human flourishing. Research on self-compassion, pioneered by psychologist Dr Kristin Neff, shows that people who treat themselves with kindness during times of difficulty tend to be more resilient, emotionally balanced, and motivated than those who constantly criticise themselves.

Contrary to popular belief, harsh self-judgment, especially negative self-talk, does not produce stronger or more successful people. Instead, it often leads to anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, and emotional exhaustion.

Self-love, in psychological terms, means relating to oneself with the same care and understanding that one would naturally offer a good friend. It involves recognising one’s limitations without shame and acknowledging one’s worth without needing constant external validation. Such an attitude fosters emotional well-being and enables people to respond more constructively to life’s inevitable challenges.

These findings resonate deeply with the teachings of the 13th-century mystic Meister Eckhart. Eckhart believed that what turns human beings into compulsive graspers—unable to let go of possessions, status, relationships, or beliefs—is ultimately a lack of trust. Beneath our attachments lies a profound insecurity, a fear that we are somehow incomplete or unworthy.

For Eckhart, self-love and trust in the divine are inseparable. Compassion arises from confidence in the goodness that lies at the heart of existence, while compulsive striving grows from the belief that we are fundamentally lacking or flawed. The person who learns to “let be” and at the same time allows themselves to be is expressing a deep confidence in the creative source of life.

Eckhart writes: “If you do not know how to love yourself, how is it possible that you will love God? There can be no love of neighbour without love of self.” To love oneself, in his understanding, is not an obstacle to spiritual growth but one of its essential foundations.

Such ideas were controversial in Eckhart’s time. Many theologians were preoccupied with sin, moral regulation, and the strict enforcement of doctrine. God was often portrayed as an authoritarian ruler who rewarded obedience and punished transgression. Shame and guilt became powerful tools of religious instruction—a dynamic that continues to influence some religious traditions today.

The divine potential in every person

Yet Eckhart offered a radically different vision. Rather than beginning with fear, he began with trust. Rather than emphasising human depravity, he pointed toward the divine potential present within every person.

This brings us to an important distinction: self-love is not the same as ego.

The ego seeks validation, superiority, and control. It constantly compares itself with others and measures its worth through achievement, status, or recognition. Ego asks, “How can I become more important?” Self-love asks, “How can I become more fully myself?”

The ego is rooted in insecurity and therefore always needs more. Self-love arises from a deeper acceptance and therefore has nothing to prove. The ego separates; self-love connects. The ego grasps; self-love releases. The ego seeks to protect an image; self-love nurtures a living reality.

Far from encouraging selfishness, genuine self-love often leads to greater compassion. People who are at peace with themselves generally have a greater capacity to listen, empathise, forgive, and care for others. They are not depleted by the endless struggle to earn their own worth.

The spiritual path, whether on the Camino or in everyday life, invites you to confront your fears, loosen your attachments, and ultimately learn the difficult art of letting go. This includes letting go of the false stories you tell yourself about who you should be.

At the heart of Eckhart’s teaching is a beautiful image. The essence of the divine, he says, is “birthing”—a continual process of creation and emergence. Life is not a static state to be achieved but an ongoing unfolding into what we are meant to become. We are not passive observers of this process but active participants in it.

Perhaps this is one of the Camino’s greatest lessons. The journey is not won by those who push themselves the hardest. It is completed by those who learn to walk with wisdom, humility, and kindness toward themselves. In learning to love yourself, you discover that you are not separate from the sacred journey but part of its unfolding.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S. Over the years, my own Camino journeys have inspired two books exploring the deeper inner dimension of pilgrimage and transformational walking: Deep Walking for Body, Mind and Soul and the newly revised edition of Walking on Edge. Both reflect on the Camino not merely as a physical journey, but as a path of inner change, reflection, and rediscovery.

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by | May 17, 2026 · 6:01 am

The Lost Art of Stillness: Awakening Your Inner Self

In an age shaped by scrolling screens and shrinking attention spans, something profound is happening beneath the surface. Recent studies suggest that nearly two-thirds of young people struggle to remain engaged with content lasting longer than a minute. Yet, paradoxically, this same generation is searching intensely for meaning, transcendence, and spiritual grounding. The hunger for depth has not disappeared. If anything, it has become more urgent.

The difficulty is that our modern world is designed for speed rather than contemplation. We are conditioned to expect instant answers, simplified narratives, and constant stimulation. But the deepest truths of existence cannot be reduced to sound bites or algorithms. Mystery does not reveal itself in haste.

The ancient mystics understood this well. They approached the human soul with reverence, knowing that the divine cannot be encountered amid endless distraction and noise. The sacred unfolds quietly. Only in silence, solitude, and contemplation does the veil begin to lift, allowing fleeting glimpses of a reality greater than yourself.

As the 14th-century mystic Meister Eckhart wrote:

“Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.”

Those words may be more relevant now than ever before.

You did not arrive here by accident. Your very existence is astonishingly improbable. Consider how different your life might have been had you been born in another country, another culture, another language, another body, or another century. None of those things were within your control. And yet, within the boundaries of circumstance, you have been given the extraordinary freedom to choose how you respond to life.

Your external conditions shape you, but they do not define the deepest essence of who you are.

It is by fully entering the depth of life’s journey that you awaken to purpose, resilience, and meaning. But this awakening becomes difficult when the mind is continually fragmented by external distraction. Much of the anxiety and emotional exhaustion of modern life emerges from this loss of alignment — a growing disconnect between the soul and its deeper calling.

We lose ourselves when we settle for the illusion of safety in mediocrity, silencing the inner voice that calls toward courage, creativity, and transformation. In doing so, there is a drift away from the very source of vitality.

Nature has always offered a path back.

The silence of mountains, forests, rivers, and open skies reveals something ancient and expansive. Birdsong, wind through trees, flowing water — all of it speaks of an intricate web of interconnectedness that modern life often obscures. In nature, you are reminded that you belong to something far greater than your schedules, anxieties, and ambitions.

It is no coincidence that many of humanity’s sacred places are found in forests, caves, deserts, and mountain summits. Nature slows our breathing, quiets stress, restores attention, and gently reconnects you to the rhythm of being itself.

Perhaps this is why time spent in nature often feels less like escape and more like remembrance.

To live well is not merely to chase future goals or external validation. It is to recover the lost art of presence — to live not only to achieve, but Living to BE.

And perhaps, in the stillness that you so often avoid, you may rediscover the deeper purpose for which you were born.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article you might be interested in reading: Sages, Saints and Sinners Get it today on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and where all good books are sold.

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by | May 4, 2026 · 5:44 pm

Lessons from the 14th Century Plague

There are places where history feels very present and where the emotional residue of another age still clings to stone and air. Puig de Maria, rising above the town of Pollença, on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca is one such place. It is not simply an old monastery, but built as a human answer to a dark time.

In 1348, as the Black Death swept across Europe. Suffocating fear was everywhere. Death arrived without logic or mercy, dismantling the illusion of control that underpinned medieval life. It is in this context that Puig de Maria was conceived: not as an architectural ambition, but as a cry to the divine.

The decision to build a sanctuary on a mountain summit high above the town was not accidental. It carried symbolic weight. To ascend is to separate—from contagion, from chaos, from the unbearable proximity of suffering. But it is also to draw nearer to God, to meaning, to the possibility that fear can be held within something larger than itself.

In Sages, Saints and Sinners, I return to a question that refuses to stay buried: what becomes of us when certainty collapses? When the structures we trusted—faith, order, meaning—no longer hold, who do we become? Set against the desolation of the 14th-century plague, a time when vast stretches of Europe fell silent and entire communities vanished, the novel steps into that rupture. It is not only a story of loss, but of what emerges in its wake—of the fragile, defiant ways human beings rediscover courage, meaning, and even love when everything familiar has been stripped away.

Some retreat into despair. Others are in denial. But there is a third path, rarer and more demanding—the transmutation of fear into courage, and anxiety into love.

Puig de Maria stands as a physical manifestation of that third path.

The people who built it were not free of fear. They were defined by it. And yet, instead of allowing fear to contract their world, they expanded it vertically. They climbed. They carried stone up a mountain in the midst of plague, and in doing so, enacted a radical defiance: fear would not have the final word.

There is a discipline in the refusal to be mentally captured by catastrophe.

The monastery that emerged—first a chapel, then a place of ongoing devotion—became more than a sanctuary. It became a container. Within its walls, fear was transformed. Ritual, prayer, and community gave structure to what would otherwise have been overwhelming. The unknown was met not with paralysis, but with presence.

This is the essence of transmutation. Not the removal of darkness, but its reworking into something that can sustain life.

Walking up to Puig de Maria today, the path winds in steady, deliberate curves. It is not a punishing climb, but it demands attention. There is a rhythm to it—step, breath, step—that mirrors something older than the path itself. Pilgrimage is never only about arrival. It is about what is shed along the way.

Halfway up, the town below begins to recede. Perspective shifts. What felt immediate loosens its grip. By the time you reach the summit, something subtle but unmistakable has occurred: distance has been created, not just physically, but internally.

This is the overlooked power of sacred geography. It externalises an inner movement.

At the top, the monastery remains austere. A tower and thick walls. A chapel that holds silence rather than spectacle. There is no excess here, no attempt to impress. It was never meant for comfort in the modern sense. It was meant for clarity.

And clarity, in times of crisis, is everything.

In our own age, fear has taken on different forms, but its structure remains familiar. Uncertainty, fragmentation, and a sense that the ground is less stable than we were led to believe. The temptation is the same as it was in the 14th century: to collapse inward, to narrow, to protect.

But Puig de Maria offers another template.

Climb.

Not away from reality, but toward a broader vantage point. Build—not necessarily in stone, but in practice—structures that can hold anxiety without being defined by it. Create spaces, inner and outer, where fear can be acknowledged, but not enthroned.

The plague did not end because a monastery was built. Suffering was not avoided. But meaning was forged in the midst of it.

And meaning is what allows endurance to become transformation.

In Sages, Saints and Sinners, the figures who endure are not those who escape fear, but those who metabolise it. They refuse its finality. They insist, against all evidence, that love and courage remain alive.

Puig de Maria asks a question that is as relevant now as it was then:

When fear rises, will you descend into it—or will you climb?

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article you might be interested in reading: Sages, Saints and Sinners Get it today on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and where all good books are sold.

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by | April 13, 2026 · 8:29 pm

Awareness Over Calm: Redefining Emotional Mastery

On one of my earliest pilgrimage walks, I began to recognise something I had long resisted: the very emotions I was trying hardest to suppress—pain, anger, and fear—were not obstacles, but the raw materials of transformation.

Along the spiritual path, there is a subtle temptation to numb or transcend these feelings prematurely. I knew that tendency well: the quiet disappointment of relationships that had unravelled, the lingering anger of unmet expectations, and the helplessness of facing forces beyond my control.

But what if anger and fear are not barriers to a higher life… but thresholds?

Anger is rarely mere volatility; more often, it is power without direction.

Fear is not simply weakness; it is awareness, contracted and constrained.

Both carry energy. And energy, when understood, can be redirected—into clarity, into creativity, into new beginnings.

Anger tends to arise where a boundary has been crossed, a value violated, or an expectation left unmet. Fear emerges at the intersection of uncertainty and attachment. In both cases, something within is signalling: pay attention—this matters.

To elevate consciousness, you do not bypass these signals. You learn to read them, to work with them, and ultimately, to transform them.

Consciousness Is Not Calmness—It Is Awareness

Elevated consciousness is often confused with a calm mind. But true elevation is not the absence of disturbance; it is the ability to accept and remain aware within it.

When anger flares, the unconscious mind reacts by blaming, defending or attacking. But the conscious mind takes five steps back and observes:

What exactly am I protecting? Where is this reaction coming from? Is this moment echoing an older wound?

This shift—from reaction to observation—is the first act of transmutation.

Awareness creates space. And in that space, energy begins to reorganise itself.

The Alchemy of Emotional Energy

Transmutation is not suppression but transformation through understanding and intentional redirection. And, here is how it works in practise:

  • The moment you feel anger or fear rising, resist the urge to respond immediately. Let the emotion fully surface without feeling shame or labeling it as “bad.”
  • How does the energy feel in your body physically? Do you feel their grip in your throat, gut or chest?
  • Ask yourself the question: What is this emotion trying to teach me? The anger may be totally unrelated to the incident and come from a deeper, buried space. Fear may reveal the path to go, but you are still stuck in your comfort zone and finding it safer to stay in a place you know.
  • Redirecting the energy is the inner alchemy that turns the emotion into conscious power

Abundance Begins Internally

Abundance is often misunderstood as the accumulation of things and material status. But externally driven abundance is fragile because it is often driven by the fear of scarcity.

Unprocessed anger creates conflict, and unresolved fear creates procrastination. The mind is locked in fear, flight and freeze mode preventing creative flow of ideas, relationships and opportunities that come from the prefrontal cortex of the brain in a relaxed mindset. You make decisions from clarity rather than insecurity with internal coherence naturally attacting external expansion. Abundance is not chased but comes naturally as a result of flow energy.

Happiness as a Byproduct, Not a Goal

Happiness is often pursued directly, which paradoxically keeps it out of reach. But happiness can really only be appreciated if we have experienced the pain, the loss and the disappointment. Happiness is not the absence of difficult emotions but the acceptance and integration of them. If you are no longer controlled by fear and anger, you will feel empowered.

Inner Mastery

Mastering your emotional life is not a single breakthrough—it is a discipline, forged through consistent inner work. Anger, fear, and pain do not disappear; they remain part of the human condition. What changes is their authority. They no longer govern you.

With time, you develop the capacity to recognise these signals early and to redirect their energy with intention rather than reaction.

You will still feel anger. You will still feel fear. But you are no longer ruled by them. Instead, you cultivate the ability to transmute: fear into courage, anger into clarity and grounded compassion, pain into recovery—and, ultimately, renewal.

In that space between stimulus and response lies everything: the depth of your awareness, the breadth of your capacity for abundance, and the quality of the life you create.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article you might be interested in reading more in “Deep Walking for Body, Mind and Soul” published by Morgan James, New York. Get it today on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and where all good books are sold.

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by | April 6, 2026 · 2:32 pm

When the Crowd Roars: Why Independent Thinking Matters

There is a single man standing with his arms crossed in defiance while surrounded by a sea of German dockworkers raising their arms in the Nazi salute. The image was taken on 13 June 1936 in the port of Hamburg and rediscovered decades later, in 1991, when it quickly spread around the world.

The man was later identified as August Landmesser.

The occasion was the launch of a naval training vessel attended by Adolf Hitler—a ceremony designed to project unity, obedience, and ideological conformity. Against this backdrop, Landmesser’s refusal to salute stands out as an act of rare moral clarity. It was a small gesture, almost understated, yet it carried immense personal risk—and ultimately, tragic consequences.

The individual who stood against the crowd

Landmesser’s story is not one of abstract heroism but of lived contradiction. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1931, reportedly to secure employment. Yet his life took a decisive turn when he fell in love with Irma Eckler, a Jewish woman.

Under the racial laws of the regime, their relationship was forbidden. He was expelled from the party. Still, they remained together and had a daughter in 1935. Their refusal to separate led to their arrest in 1938. Landmesser was imprisoned, later conscripted into a penal military unit, and is believed to have died in action. Eckler was deported and murdered in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1942.

Seen in this light, the photograph is no longer simply symbolic—it is deeply personal. Landmesser’s defiance was not ideological theatre. It was the visible expression of a man whose life had already been shattered by the system he refused to endorse.

The individual mind versus the herd mind

The image endures because it captures a perennial tension: the individual conscience set against the force of the collective.

Crowds possess psychological gravity. Individuals who, in isolation, might act with restraint and judgment can become unrecognizable when absorbed into a mass. We have seen modern echoes of this dynamic in events such as the January 6 United States Capitol attack, where ordinary citizens were swept into a collective surge that overrode personal responsibility.

Western societies place a high value on individual freedom and self-expression. Yet beneath this, there often lies a spiritual disconnect that makes the pull of belonging all the more powerful. Identification with political movements, brands, cultural tribes, or even sports teams can take on a “religious” intensity. The need to belong can, under certain conditions, eclipse the capacity to think.

When consciousness gives way to the collective

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, who studied the psychological undercurrents of totalitarianism, drew a sharp distinction between the individuated mind and what he termed the collective unconscious.

He warned that as groups enlarge, consciousness tends to diminish. The ethical and reflective capacities of the individual are diluted, replaced by something more primitive, more reactive. In his words, the psychology of large crowds tends to descend to a more instinctual, even “animal” level. What emerges is not an elevation of shared wisdom, but often a regression into emotional contagion.

This is not merely a historical observation. It is a recurring human pattern.

The modern amplification of the herd

We are living through a period of accelerated change where vigilance and discernment are no longer optional—they are essential.

The digital ecosystem has intensified the dynamics Jung described. Large segments of mass media and social platforms no longer function primarily as vehicles of information, but as engines of emotional activation. Content is optimized not for truth, but for engagement—often by triggering fear, outrage, or tribal loyalty.

Distortion, simplification, and conspiracy narratives thrive in such environments. The line between information and manipulation has become increasingly blurred.

There are early indications that major platforms are beginning to acknowledge their role in this landscape. But structural incentives remain largely unchanged.

A practical line of resistance

Landmesser’s gesture invites a question that is as relevant now as it was then: what does it take to remain inwardly independent in the face of collective pressure?

A useful starting point is deceptively simple:

When you encounter a piece of information that provokes an immediate emotional reaction—pause.

Ask yourself:

  • What is the source of this reaction?
  • What intention might the communicator be pursuing?
  • Does this information serve clarity—or does it seek to agitate?

These questions create a small but decisive space between stimulus and response. In that space, the individual mind can reassert itself.
Sometimes it simply takes courage to refuse to roar like the crowd, to stand still, and refuse to follow.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article you might be interested in reading more in “Deep Walking for Body, Mind and Soul” published by Morgan James, New York. Get it today on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and where all good books are sold.

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