As a mystic, I have but one aim: to know God. Not the God talked about everywhere, but this incredible thing that moves the universe. Further still: to dissolve myself calmly into that. This is my purpose.
~ Alejandro Jodorowsky
The long read for my slow souls & poetic hearts . . .
My name is Rikke. My roots are Scandinavian, and although I fled Norway as soon as the threshold into adulthood would let me - and never returned - there is no denying that my soul is of the north.
My bones long for nearness to mountains and wild expansive terrains, my blood feels more alive in the cold and in the snow and my spirit needs a good yearly dose of that deep inner wintering and solitude that my people source their creativity from. I feel most at ease in misty and rainy wild landscapes, in the liminal spaces where the seams between the known and unknown dissolve, and we can be left suspended in the holiness of the question of being.
Simultaneously there is a starving artist rocknroll soul living in me that enjoys devouring a city’s underground cultural scene in my Dr Martens boots, leather and faux fur and more chunky silver jewelry than seems reasonable. She likes to sip Mezcal in art galleries and stomp her boots in sweaty dark basements. She doesn’t get as much time out as she should (and as she did in her 20s), being now so often in remote locations barefoot and living out of campervans, but if you landed here on this page via my DJing, now is a good time to redirect you to my Soundcloud page where you’ll find everything music related…
In my life I have followed the thread of my creative impulse from being a young ballet dancer in Norway, to training and working as an actor in London - investigating the human psyche and condition through storytelling - to following shamans into the jungle of Peru, to further investigating the nature of consciousness and coming home to a sense of the sacred through embodiment, yoga, meditation, Tantrik philosophy, earth-based feminine wisdom traditions and the ancient ways of ceremony and ritual.
I would call this a path of devotion to the sacred and mystical orientations of reality - that guided me from existential despair & disassociation into wonderment & depth of presence, and into an unshakeable yearning to make contact with the source of existence.
To feel and know this thing they call God within.
But in that I want to be very clear - I am not interested in a spirituality of transcendence but rather one of profound immanence and intimacy with reality as it is. “This is as God as it gets” I remember a scholar-practitioner of classical Tantra told me, to encapsulate the foundational teaching of non-dual traditions. As someone who spent most of my younger years battling depression and existential angst, I remember when these words landed for me. What if there is nothing wrong with me, or what if I'm not meant to escape anything at all, but I could recognize God right now. here. And it is really core to my work - how can we experience the recognition of divinity right here, in our messy, chaotic, conflicted experience of life and living?
Right in the heart of our grief and ecstasy is the secret to all that is eternal in us. How can I taste God in this teacup. How can I practice intimacy with Her. Right here in the mess of things. Inside my confusion and my curiosity. I am interested in practices of awakening and mysticism that begin from our body - this sensory organ of the divine - and I am interested in the descent into the subtle realms + into source from the portal of our body.
As a double Scorpio (sun + rising) born in the year of the Snake, I am well traversed in the inner underworld - (Scorpio being ruled by Pluto, the planet of transformation, death and rebirth. Pluto = the greek God of the Underworld) - and so themes of transformation, death & rebirth, intense mystery and magic, all lay an often silent foundation to the work that I share.
And because of my own direct experience I know a fair share about navigating the sacred in the depths and in the dark. You could say I was destined to be initiated into this field, and to function as both apprentice and guide in the murky dark waters of the spiritual inquiry…
The way that I hold and facilitate containers shapeshift as I evolve and study and experiment, but it will always begin in the body and will include elements like dance, intuitive movement, somatics, meditation, subtle-body practices and ritual, and through this I hope to wake up a felt-sense discovery of the sacred, and our freedom within it. In the everything and in the nothing. And facilitate ways to tenderly dissolve the barriers and separations we have built up shielding us from our capacity to experience God/ Goddess/ Mystery directly through our body,
now,
between our thighs, in the nucleus of this very experience,
however mundane or sublime.
'Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows' ~ Rilke
After sharing this work for almost a decade in London, I have for the last five years lived on the road on my own personal pilgrimage following a trail of feminine mysticism, sacred wells, Black Madonnas and the Magdalene mysteries through Europe, and traveling the world offering retreats, teacher trainings, online courses and deep rituals.
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Thank You
I am eternally grateful for my teachers, guides and lineage holders on this path. With a thousand infinite bows to the lineage carriers of the Trika lineage of Kashmir Śaivism Tantra, who through impossible chapters of conquest and colonization carried - often in secret and at great danger to their own lives - a wealth of scripture and practices that is arguably one of the most extensive and rich bodies of research into the nature of consciousness that we have access to today. The way that this has been co-opted and misused by the spiritual materialism of the west is something that I will always be committed to letting myself be humbled by and pay respect and reparations to.
And to the women of my own ancestral lands, who through their own witch hunts and persecutions carried on the thread of the Mystery Teachings and the healing, oracular and magical arts of working with plants, dreams and communion with the long exiled spirits of the invisible realms. May we remember what they could not erase of you.
And to the many mystic poets, not only of Sufism but of all mystic traditions (most of them alienated, sometimes even executed, by their own religious overlords in their lifetime) whom have experienced intimacy with the Beloved and have given us the written cookie crumbs to evoke our own Knowing, Feeling and Seeing of Him / Her / Them within our own innerness.
To the stewards & keepers of the sacred wells, miraculous springs and the altars of the Dark Earth Mother including the Black Madonnas that are dotted around the whole of Europe, who through centuries of patriarchal erasure have kept the channels open to Her.
And of course to the many wisdom carriers of the earth based traditions, of whom there are too many to mention here, and to the intelligence of the web of Livingness I owe my everything.
...Of the stream that I am an off-shoot of, I would like to mention just a few of my root teachers, Adyashanti (on awakening and True Meditation), Tara Judelle (of Embodied Flow and BodyMindCentering), my long time companion and teacher Leila Sadeghee, Sianna Sherman and Hareesh Wallis (scholar-practitioner of the Kashmir Śaivism Trika lineage).
It is my deepest prayer that we all come to know and taste our innate freedom and ecstasy of Being. And to That I am in utter servitude.
xRikke