From party to purpose...

A spiritual entrepreneur's journey of healing and awakening with Ayahuasca & kung fu

Where to start with this…?

Usually my blogs flow through me like I need to get something out of my system, but this time I specifically want to point out a couple of things that came to my awareness on the journey to become an entrepreneur and take it into the spiritual territory that has become such a hype these days. So I want to make sure I cover as much as possible in this blog, to bring as much clarity as I can from my own journey and perspective without judging the world around me. Although I do have to point out some very sensitive points that will possibly trigger people who will read this.

Let me start with my own journey…

I started to become more aware of personal development in a very unconventional way for most of you. When I was younger, the first experience was at the age of 14. I was unrightfully punished by a teacher that didn’t like me. So she sent me to a detention class on a Wednesday afternoon (I guess for people from the US it’s study class after the regular hours), I joined a couple of classmates before entering this class. They went to smoke a joint, before entering school. I didn’t have any experience with substances besides the tobacco and alcohol abuse I knew from my dad’s life. Back then I was scared and curious at the same time, so I decided to go with their invitation to join them for a smoke. This weed came from a coffee shop in the Netherlands, and I can assure you that it was very strong for somebody that never smoked weed before. I just started to smoke tobacco myself, but this was a whole new experience. We needed to finish it fast to make it on time to the class, which was not the smartest idea, hahaha.

As soon as we started to walk, it started to hit me. I felt very heavy, my eyes were dry and probably very red (which is typical to recognize somebody that has smoked a joint) and all my senses opened up in ways I had never experienced before. Hearing so much more, starting to see geometry and simply impossible to have normal interactions with people in a clear state. Imagine you would eat a bunch of mushrooms and then step into the classroom to follow math, any language, history or chemistry. That’s just crazy… For me it was French. But in this class it was all mixed up depending on which teacher assigned to this extra class, you would be in a huge place with multiple classes together each doing punishment work for that specific teacher.

As soon as I sat down and opened my books, I noticed that I couldn’t even focus on the letters and write. The letters started to float around and became characters from a cartoon. I could hear every pencil writing in this big space that was an echo of one huge mixture that collected each move and sound in the space. God it was so hard to focus and at the same time I had an awesome experience that apparently would lead to where I’m standing today.

Living with my mom I was raised as an Atheist, religion was never a part of our family, spiritual concepts neither. So I was always very skeptical when it came to concepts of energy and belief. Later on I discovered parties and other substances when I was 17 years old. By that time I wasn’t living with my mom anymore, my dad was never really present to guide me through life so I was alone by myself from a very young age. I left home when I was 16. The freedom to explore life on my own terms would lead me to some very difficult situations that would open up so much without having a structure to understand what was happening to me.

I used to abuse Marijuana for years, to avoid the pain from the past and to cope with the world around me. I didn’t like my life back then and questioned myself constantly. I was already very introverted as a kid and this behavior only amplified that for me. When I turned 18, I left school without finishing my end terms. In a way it was a relief to finally be away from school and start to learn from real life. I was hopping in and out of different jobs often, mostly focused on just surviving and going to parties from Friday to Sunday. Which was the relief of all the obligations and expectations of the world around us.

By this time I entered a social circle with many musicians and artists in the underground scene in Belgium, Tekno parties, Hardcore music and the Psytrance world. The use of substances was so common here that it wasn’t something to shy away from. During this time I also got introduced by a friend in the moon calendar of the Mayas and she gave me a book about mindfulness. So stay with me because it will be a lot of things that are connected and happened at a similar time.

So while floating around this scene during the weekends I started to explore mindfulness with basic breathwork and read books on Buddhism, which brought me to look for a school to learn kung fu. I was also diagnosed with scoliosis and had a hard time working. Everyday my back was killing me. So the use of Marijuana helped me to relieve the pain and mental stress I had. And know that since I can remember I wasn't happy in life, it only happened later that I realized I was living in a depressive state for the majority of my youth. You can read more about this in a blog where I wrote to the Shaolin temple in Yunnan to become a disciple.

On top of all this I was also having a very hard time with intimate relationships. The first memory of my life is my mom and dad fighting in the kitchen, yelling at each other and my dad holding my mom against the wall in a fierce state of aggression. So I’ve always known my parents to be separated and never seen a healthy relationship during my childhood. While growing up I used to visit my dad every two weeks on the weekend. The first years that I can remember of that time were the worst of his alcoholic years. Every weekend we spent our time at the bar, me just wasting time and him drinking himself to a huge mess everyday. I even needed to buy cigarettes for him in the morning because he wasn’t capable of getting out of bed or the couch before he had anything to drink. In the mornings when I woke up he was often watching porno and also at night when he was back home in a very drunk state. This was my first contact with sexuality and what I learned about intimacy between people. Completely unaware of how this can influence a child’s perspective later in life. Not that he was only watching porn, we also watched a lot of movies and the love for movies is something that I still carry today with me.

So to mention this to give you a brief insight of all the things that have been happening I hope to give you a deeper understanding of what I’m trying to express here. All these things during my youth made me into a person that was very silent and observant most of his life. Lot’s of things I couldn’t understand back then, but today these experiences have given me a very deep understanding of how things work out and how behavior of a person is developed in the experiences they went through as a child. Doesn’t matter how bad it seems when they become teenagers and adults, they all have a reason or origin in an earlier stage of life through parenting and environment.

So back when I was 18, the parties, Amphetamines were very common to go on for the long weekends. I’ve always been very mindful of not going wild on any substances but I used to get some here and there to pull through the long weekends. While I was exploring mindfulness I became more aware of myself and the changes I went through on substances and away from substances. I learned that I was able to open up, have conversations and show love to friends and strangers at parties when I was under the influence. So I started to try and apply this in my days during the week. Knowing that I can be so open under the influence it must be possible also without amphetamines. And it worked, I started to use them less often at parties and tried to let it come more from myself than the use of all the options we had back in those days.

Work wasn’t also the best back then, because of the parties it took almost the whole week to recover to go back the next weekend. So I started to sell Marijuana to earn enough money while I wasn’t really able to work. In this way I had more space to explore my own consciousness and life without the obligation to go to work. The use of substances are not only good for social actions but they also get you very sexually active. Although knowing that I was actually scared of interactions with girls. I often felt misunderstood and I wasn’t able to communicate about it like it should be possible in a healthy way. I was ashamed of the situation I came from and I wasn’t even able to understand this for myself. All I knew back then was that porn was a good way to release this urge and if I wanted to connect with girls in a way that I wouldn’t need to be ashamed of sharing intimacy I went to prostitutes to be open and explore sexual interaction.

There was one girl just a couple of years older than me from the Netherlands that also loved to smoke weed and so we connected often thanks to the profits of me selling Marijuana. She was gentle and very patient to show me that it was all ok and that there was nothing to be scared of. For me it was a nice thing, because I wasn’t really connected on an emotional level and still it felt like a safe space to explore without the fear of being judged. This gave me motivation to leave the red light district behind and try out normal interaction with girls to find my own intimate connection. After years I really felt like understanding this better and better. And being able to have intimate relationships.

Between all of this I also had the time to explore my own consciousness and learn to meditate while working my scoliosis away. I could tell you so many crazy stories of all these years, but that’s not the point of this blog. This went on until I turned 22, when I officially stopped the crazy weekends and decided to make something decent of my life. Around my 18 years of age I also learned about psychedelics and started to grow my own mushrooms.

My mom was living in France when I was going through this phase. Once I visited her for a week and she took me to see a healer who learned from the North American natives on how to use a drum and take people into the dream space. Back then I didn’t really experience anything, I was living too much in my head to be able to get out of my thoughts and critical thinking. So a couple of days later my mom wanted to take me to another healer who had his own crystal shop up in the mountains close to the black forest in Germany. As I walked into the shop I started to shake and sweat like I was sitting in a sauna while coming down from an alcohol addiction (memories of what I’ve seen with my dad). This was something that I couldn’t explain back then.
As soon as I stopped at one of the tables in the shop I noticed a round stone from the Himalayan region with an amazing Turquoise stone in it. As soon as I held this stone in my hands I started to relax and be able to breathe deeper which calmed me down and helped release the shaky feeling.  A bit further I found a Tiger eye that helped me to ground and balance my energies away from nervosity.

At that moment we decided to go to the counter to pay and leave the shop. The man behind the counter was staring at me like he could see things that none of us were able to notice. He asked if he could touch me. I said “of course”, so he did and looked deep into my eyes and told me that I was a very old soul. That it will be my choice to do with my life what I want, live the regular life or become in essence what my soul had to offer. It was free of my own will to choose this outcome. Leaving the store I felt very weird and this kind of broke my own belief system from an atheistic point of view… Together with the psychedelic experiences, the breathwork and meditation practices that I was using to explore my own consciousness, things slowly started to force me into the feeling that I had to go deeper in myself and that life wasn’t really what society taught me. I started to question more and more and with working with crystals and combining them with my own cultivated mushrooms, whole new worlds and concepts started to open up to me.

Back then it was almost impossible to find information about these things on the internet. I had to search in libraries and look for just a handful of resources where these types of experiences were discussed. I couldn’t even share this within my social circles, because people there were still using it as a recreational way of escaping their reality. The only books back in those days were the book of Carlos Castaneda and his encounter with Don Juan that gave me a sense of how these states of consciousness were more than just the influence of an “intoxicating” substance. And a bit later Terence Mckenna his book, ‘Food of the Gods”. This led me down a whole new path.

Over the years I started to discover that this was becoming more and more a common thing that was talked about on the word wide web. But in Belgium, even till today people regard it still to be taboo. It only works when you believe in this stuff. But this didn’t hold me back from continuing my research. Even with everybody telling me that I was crazy to continue with what I was doing, I was growing out of my depressive state. Thanks to meditations, breathwork, using crystals and having a monthly ceremony with my own mushrooms under a full moon. I started to take the magic dose that Terence mentions, 5 grams of dried mushrooms for one session. GOD! Did they take me to some very weird and dark places! But they always gave me exactly what I needed to see for myself. And so by the time that I turned 22 I was way better off than I ever was. I started to get a sense of direction in my life and wanted to make something good with it instead of wasting it on parties and running away from reality.

Many of those friends I still know today, even till today they still don’t fully comprehend the choice that I made. Even though they find it nice that I found my own unique way. It is still very obvious that many of them doubt the things that I practice. This took me to follow a course on life coaching in evening school, while working as a volunteer in the local animal shelter. But again I didn’t finish my course, I got the opportunity to work officially as a paid partner in the ngo which was a dream job to me. Not far from there was also a really good kung fu school which connected perfectly to my job at the shelter. Working with cats and dogs, I had so much more love for animals than humans. I always had the feeling they understood me better than any human I had met. So to be able to work with them and be around animals 6 days on 7 was way too good of an opportunity to say no. But I had to let go of my course. So I left this path for a while of self development and focused more on being a part of the team. At the end of my career there we got in trouble with the media and another shelter that got jealous of the support we were about to get from the city. So they infiltrated our team with volunteers to film our work. After that these volunteers disappeared until one day we had news and radio stations rolling into the shelter to question us about the abuse of our animals.

Know that during autumn and wintertime and the time we go towards spring, the cats always had serious waves of influenza and of course we did all that we could to take care of them. Some of the cases we need to react very very fast to be able to get through the situation. But often we had to take over tasks that were only allowed to be done by a veterinarian. Which we weren’t at all, but it was basic care for emergencies that were easy to learn and made a world of difference instead of waiting for a vet to leave the animals to die.

Well they managed to create a video cut & paste with their own story on top of it. And they used specific images from those weeks to fit their story. Without mentioning anybody specific, this was all a counter reaction because we got support from the city and the other shelter didn’t. This whole situation was to go to court and be questioned. This led to the fact that we weren’t able anymore to do our work efficiently and to agree with the terms in court they had to let somebody of the team go. With the way things went down here I completely lost my trust in regular media. It was disgusting to witness how they build their story around sensation and don’t even make an effort to research their story before getting it on the news.

Family didn’t support me and I kind of spiraled away in another black hole. Kung fu disappeared, I lost my enthusiasm and passion for my work. And started to look for a big break. They still had to release one of the workers with the situation in court, so I was the one to go because they became aware of the way I felt about the whole situation. I just finished my contract and left the ngo. So after years of researching around psychedelics, different religions and spirituality it became clear to me that I need to find a place where there were still some original roots to ancient knowledge of working with plants. Ayahuasca kept on popping out in me searching for more wisdom, so at the end of 2016 I finally booked my flight for the first time alone. One month and a week to Peru to finish my tour in Iquitos for almost 3 weeks. 2 weeks at Dreamglade retreat center to connect with Ayahuasca in a secure way and one more week to come down from the experience in the jungle before I needed to return to Belgium.

Coming back to Belgium flipped my life upside down. The jungle was so amazing, I was crying like a child when I stepped on the plane to come back home. Once back home, my life started to crumble down… I wasn’t prepared for all of this. I couldn’t share any of my experiences with people without being crazy. While being with a whole group in the jungle that supported this work all of sudden being back in a world where it was just some fantasy. This was my first start of integrating some very deep work. And I really don’t have the space to share each and every detail. Otherwise it would turn out in a book, so I really need to make an effort to make this fit for a blog. But support was very poor. So I had to figure my own way through this.

A little bit more than one year later I decided to go back and stay away from Belgium. I couldn’t stay in the illusions that Western society was feeding me. It felt like going crazy and having no community in sharing these insights. In Peru this was more than normal to talk about these things, so I couldn’t find anything better to book a ticket with my last money to California to go trimming at some weed farms to collect a starting budget for my new life in Peru. There was an opportunity to help to build up a community deep in the jungle South of Iquitos, in Contamana. This experience is a whole story by itself. When I was staying at this place, close to the border with Brazil I had a dream about Ronald Joe Wheelock. I never met him before, but I was in that part of the jungle with one of his previous students. In that dream he invited me to visit him and to learn from him. So I left the place to head back to Iquitos by boat to meet up with Ron in real life. And so I ended up working with him at his center helping the groups during the retreats.

This was my last time in the jungle as a visitor, the next time I would go back to open my apprenticeship with Ron. So I went back to Belgium after almost 6 months to find a job and save money to open an apprenticeship with him. I started to become more grounded and went through very deep purges and initiations to get to this point. Was it fun and a ride on a fluffy cloud? FAR FROM! That’s the point where I want to get to with this whole story, again in a nutshell. But I learned all these spiritual concepts through experience of dying and rebirth over and over and over again… And still this was just the beginning.

Nowadays, you see so many people selling this work as the one and true medicine. Like it is a magic pill that will cure all your ailments and problems. People serving Ayahuasca without any proper education and this makes me worry. Because this is the image that the majority of our society holds for these kinds of treatments. Other spiritual teachings are being used as memes and facebook posts, so many coaches and other lightworkers are selling their work from the perspective of light and fluffy love on pink clouds without any proper initiations. They just read some book and bring some teachings to gather to predict themselves as high priests and priestesses because they had a memory coming back to their attention or had an insight of the divine in ceremony and got a messiah complex. Spiritually bypassing everything that doesn’t feel good or isn’t high vibration, because they don’t want to deal with their own shadow side and all of a sudden after 3 weeks in the jungle you see them starting retreats or doing ceremonies back home serving this medicine to other people without the proper training. And this just….. Pfff. I can get really frustrated about this stuff. Because they do way more damage than good and don’t respect the traditions that cultivate these ways of life.

It is damn hard work to get to the point of holding space for somebody else. Even for myself it took me years to get a green light from my teacher to drink on my own and even longer to get a green light from the plants themselves to start to work with other people. Still today I don’t serve Ayahuasca to others. I do help with purging and cleansing through different methods. But when I do work like this and I have Ayahuasca with me, I drink and work with the people. But I don’t serve it to other people. So many healers in the jungle do dietas for years and years on back to back one plant after another before they even start to serve and drink Ayahuasca. Only this is not so common in the modern world.

I really question myself how it is that people are so quick to sell their spiritual services without the proper initiations and the work on themselves. Nowadays on social media this topic already by itself is dividing so many people while most of them don’t even comprehend the full spectrum. For me it was years and years cleaning and cleaning before I even started to help others. Now today it has been almost 7 years since I went to Peru for the first time and still I wasn’t sure how to apply this knowledge and wisdom professionally. Because it is very hard work, it takes a tremendous amount of honesty towards yourself and courage to face things for what they really are. Break your illusions and layers of programming one after another. Arriving many times at a point that you might think like, “Ok, now I got it, now I understand”, just to be prepared to be broken down all over again to even deeper layers of cleansing and clearing.

In 2021 I discovered more about the connection in sacred union (twin flame), which was still foreign to me. Because of my past I didn’t really believe in the one and only perfect love of my life. But again, the plants had a whole other plan for me. You can read a bit more on this part of the story on my website and how I was gifted with the lovely lady that I call my wife today.

Many people believe that this is the ultimate love and everything will be the best you’ll ever have known. The craziest sex of your life and so on.. But I’m gonna spare you the rumbling on that topic. Well for me it was like starting all over again with all my previous work. So many things I cleared out and managed to heal. Only to notice that I had to go over many of those topics again. Living so long by myself I was forced to review my whole setting on life again. Because now it is happening in a family dynamic with a wonderful lady that has been on her own journey through life with horrible life experiences riding her way back to harmony and balance. Mastering her own knowledge and flipping it into wisdom from deep traumatic experiences. Which all of us have till certain degrees. Even with our sexuality, before I thought I learned all about it and managed to be secure and comfortable with intimacy, both of us needed to go through it all over again. Like doing the big spring cleaning after the usual cleaning on a regular basis.

The same goes for spiritual entrepreneurship. This is deep work and while going through starting your own business there are a whole other bunch of layers to go through only to get to the point where you can guide people from your own experience and not from theories we’ve picked up here and there. This is like a life worth of experiences that we can now apply after more than ten years of deep personal work. While starting this business in the past year and a half, sacred reunion and leaving everything behind it was a whole other cycle of deep work to only get to this point of what I can offer and help other people with.

Now I just got to the point in my life where I can confidently say that my search for the big questions is done. I know which path to walk and how my way of service will flow. Does this mean that I’m done learning? No, far from, I’m just at the start. In essence this is what life is to me, it is a never ending opportunity to learn and grow. Now I just gained the clarity of the direction that I need to walk and so a whole new story begins. I will still continue to diet to learn from plants, maybe to be able to serve Ayahuasca to other people one day. I just started my discipleship at the Shaolin temple in Yunnan from scratch again, even with all the experience I already had from the past. New master so new foundation with the knowledge that I already have from the past. Now today I can start to properly help other people through their own hell working their way back to the full spectrum of their being. Not giving them the illusion of only positivity and light but the nature of life and the blessings of seeing the full spectrum of the experiences that we call life today on our planet. Even knowing how many different crazy titles I could give myself because of roles that I had in other life times. Today I still need to go through all these experiences as Nick and so this is the name that I chose for my current lifetime and I will honor what has been given to me in this current story that is still being written today.

After this whole journey I decided to rewrite my whole website from a place of clarity that I gained after 33 years of living again on this planet. I never thought I would share this story with the world, but now I felt the need to do this. Because I really want to emphasize that this work takes a lot of courage if you come from a very dark past. It’s not just a ride on a pink cloud with unicorns and rainbows…

What is your experience? Did you also find yourself at points in life where you went over and over again in loops of crunching old habits and rebuilding yourself from the core? How far do you want to go to heal yourself and get back to remembering who you truly are in a soul’s essence?

I’m gonna leave it for now at this point… Feel free to share your thoughts on this blog. I love to interact with all of you who wish to talk about their own story. This is the reason why my intake sessions are free. Everybody deserves a safe space to have somebody listening to them without being judged. I also offer card readings in various ways for different situations and me and my lovely wife Debra (Lemairesoulcrafts) also have our own magazine where we offer this space for people that like to read stories like this or even share their own experience and work they do. This is the effort that we wanted to do with all the censorship and crazy amounts of information that go around these days. We also have individual coaching and mentorship and combined services. Both of us have our own unique capacities and abilities to bring a bigger picture together and through our own life experiences we are not scared to for the darkness that can arise when somebody has serious stuff that they want to work on.

You can check out my website here: www.sapitodelaforesta.com
And Debra’s website here: www.lemairesoulcrafts.com

For the release of my new website I offer 50% at different services

and so is Debra offering a big reduction of 44% on her soul portraits and spirit guide portraits.

My point is that I’m helping others to integrate life experiences that have been very difficult and heavy. Debra has her own experiences and through her connections and clairvoyant skills, she is very strong with reading the soul history of other people that want to learn more about that path and why you are in a situation that you experience today. Both of us combine our skills to give you the information you need and help to ground it into your daily life. With proper guidance and support that eventually will lead to a supportive community where we all can embrace the full spectrum of all our life experiences from a perspective with gratitude, no matter how dark it has been in the past.

Thank you for reading this all the way to the end. This wasn’t easy to share and go through the memories again, but again, a beautiful recap and insight for myself on the long road I’ve already walked and now bright and full of joy to see what is ahead for my own future. I believe we all have the capabilities to create this for ourselves and that is where we want to help you with. Are you ready to go for it? Let us know, we would be honored to be your guides.

With love and gratitude,
Nick

Amituofo