Highden mystery school – part 2

Every morning began with a meditation in the center of the mandala, at the so called Freedom Stone. Even that, however, unfolded in several layers. What you saw on the outside was only part of what was actually happening.

We as participants formed the inner field, the Templars.

Around us was the outer field, a group of people who had completed the training before and were now energetically supporting us. They were present to carry the process and hold the space. They also took care of logistics, the maintenance of the estate, our meals, and many of the mystical and theatrical experiences.

Above that was the facilitation team, also called the temple holders. They meditated in exactly the same place as we did, but one floor higher in the building.

And above that was yet another layer, the dark triad. Three people who consciously maintained connection with the Dark, the source from which everything emerges.

While we meditated in the center of the mandala, all of these layers were active at the same time. It felt as if everything we were doing was supported by a complex yet beautifully tuned energetic field.

Perhaps the most impressive part is how carefully everything is designed. The longer you stay there, the more you begin to notice that truly everything has been thought through. And at the same time a large part remains mysterious. I have the feeling I may have seen half of it, and probably understood even less.

But that is exactly what makes it a real mystery school. Some things cannot be explained. They have to be experienced.

The Journey from crown to base, and back again

When you drive onto the Highden estate, the training actually begins before you even reach the house. The long driveway is marked by a series of stone gateways called the Gates. They look a bit like open fireplaces or portals, with words, symbols and images embedded in them. Each gate represents a chakra.

So as you drive up the lane, you literally travel through the chakra system.

At each gate there is poetry that matches that particular chakra. If you walk past them consciously and take the time to read and feel, it becomes a kind of inner journey. Step by step you move through different layers of yourself, even before you reach the house.

At the beginning of the training I did not notice this immediately. But because I love walking, it helps me process things, I walked that driveway back and forth quite often. Eventually I walked it several times every day.

At some point I realized that by doing this I was walking through all the chakras every day, from Crown to Base, and then back up again.

And although every gate had its own meaning, I noticed that one of them touched me the most, the Base Gate.

The Base Chakra is about our most fundamental layer, survival.
Survival mindset.
Survival fears.
Survival focus.

It is the place in us where the fear lives of not having enough, of not being safe, of not surviving. It is also the place from which many of our daily choices unconsciously arise.

But the message of the Base Gate was not that we should stay stuck there.

The invitation was to move from there.

Not from a constant focus on survival, but towards a place where your soul can truly land in your body.

When that happens, something fundamental shifts. You no longer live primarily from fear or control. You no longer need to constantly focus on survival. Space appears to truly be present in your body and in life itself.

I walked those gates three times every day. Sometimes consciously, sometimes simply because I enjoy walking. But every time it felt as if I was moving through an inner journey again.

From surviving to living.
From fear to presence.
From head to body.

And somewhere along the way I began to understand that the entire driveway is actually a symbolic map of the path we all walk.

Three layers

One thing that was completely new to me during the training was the idea that our consciousness has three layers.

The first layer is familiar to all of us, the personality.
This is our ego, our body, our emotions and thoughts. It is the part of us that lives here and now in the world.

The second layer is the soul.
The soul continues beyond a single lifetime. It moves through experiences, learning, evolving, and gradually bringing more love and awareness into the world.

But something in that explanation always felt incomplete to me.
If the soul naturally moves toward love and growth, where do the darker aspects of life come from? Why do people sometimes act destructively? Why do we all have shadow sides?

During the Highden training I heard, for the first time, about a third layer.
It is sometimes called the Dark, the Monad, the Void, or simply Life itself.
Not good or bad. Not beautiful or ugly. Just pure life force expressing itself in many forms, without judgment.

So for me it now feels like this:

• Personality, the human story
• Soul, the evolution of consciousness
• The Dark or Monad, the source of life itself. To me it feels like raw, unfiltered truth.

Whenever I touch that level, even briefly, I feel a deep calm and a deep knowing.
The place everything comes from, where ultimately everything simply IS.

Balance and integration

During the training I began to look at my own spiritual strengths and weaknesses in a new way. The model of a quadrant of dark and light, masculine and feminine energies helped me see where certain qualities in me are strong and natural, and where other qualities still ask for attention. Often they were in completely different areas than I thought…

Many spiritual and psychological traditions speak about two fundamental energies that exist within every human being: the masculine and the feminine. The masculine is often associated with direction, structure, and action. The feminine with feeling, receiving, and connection.

Both energies have a light side and a dark side, two different kinds of energy. Each quadrant has healthy qualities and “Shadow” qualities. This refers to the parts that have become unconscious or can fall out of balance when a quality is suppressed or exaggerated.

When these energies are balanced, they complement each other. The masculine provides direction and focus. The feminine brings depth, connection, and creativity. But when one energy is suppressed or becomes dominant, it can appear in its shadow form.

For me, this framework became a mirror during the training.

Light Masculine
The light masculine represents conscious strength and direction. It is the energy that helps turn ideas into reality.
Many of these qualities feel very familiar to me. Initiative, leadership, structure, creating projects, bringing ideas into the world. Much of my life and work has been driven by this energy. It is also the part of me that helps transform inspiration into something practical and tangible.

Dark Masculine
The dark masculine represents raw power and the ability to cut through illusion. It is the energy of decisiveness, courage, and standing firmly for what is true.
In my own life I recognize this as the force that allows me to take bold steps, to move through resistance, and to act even when things are uncertain. It brings intensity, clarity, and the willingness to confront what others might avoid.

Light Feminine
The light feminine represents connection, intuition, and aliveness. This energy brings softness, creativity, and emotional depth into relationships and into life.
During the training I realized that this energy is something I am learning to allow more consciously. Especially the qualities of openness, receptivity, and simply being instead of constantly doing. I have been protecting my ‘princess’ and now I am slowly allowing her to show up more in the world.

Dark Feminine
The dark feminine represents deep emotional power and truth. It is the energy that feels everything fully, sets boundaries, and is not afraid to go into depth. It is also the energy of the ‘witch’, a woman who stands fully in her power and is connected to instinct, nature and life force. It holds a kind of honesty and strength that comes from within, rather than from control.

I realize that I have s strong intuition and already know a lot of these things, I was just afraid to express them and fully stand for them. I have been living ‘undercover’, because in the past women haven been repressed and punished for expressing this type of power.

The goal of personal growth is not to avoid one side, but to consciously learn to recognize all four energies. The shadow often arises because certain qualities once felt unsafe to express or were socially rejected.

When these parts are reintegrated, more freedom appears. Strength connected to the heart, and sensitivity supported by inner strength.

And for me, that was one of the most valuable insights of the training: not that one energy is better than the other, but that real balance comes from learning to consciously move between them.

These ideas were not only discussed during the training. They were also experienced through rituals and ceremonies that allowed these inner dynamics to become visible.

Sacred union

The whole week we had been building toward a ceremony of sacred union, where we marry our inner partner, whatever that may be. For some people it is love. For some people it is head and heart. For others it is matter and spirit, personality and dark side. It is different for everybody.

I was feeling all this pressure to feel something, and my heart closes when there is pressure. Everybody was having big feelings and big insights, working toward the ceremony as if it were their wedding day. I was feeling nothing.

So the morning of the ceremony I stood up in the circle and told everybody that I felt as if I were in the reality TV show Love is Blind, where you have to marry a person you just met, with cameras, expectations, beautiful decorations, and everyone else doing it.

I announced that I would walk away at the altar. Not because I was saying no to love, but because I was saying yes to myself and to integrity.

I went to the ceremony in the rose garden. Everybody was dressed up. It was beautifully decorated, very sacred. I had prepared a speech about integrity and about the fact that I cannot fully open my heart because I do not trust them, I do not trust me, I do not trust the universe.

When it was my turn and I walked up to the altar, down the aisle covered in rose petals and decorations, I felt somebody walk next to me. It was my dad. His energy was just there, unmistakable.

I realized he has never walked me down the aisle because I never got married. And he never will, because he is in the final stages of Alzheimer’s.

Then they played music, a random song somebody had chosen: ‘in dreams’. That is the song I have picked for my father’s funeral! It expresses so much love. And I cracked. I started crying and could not stop.

In front of everybody, I told them what was happening, that my father was giving me the huge gift fathers are supposed to give their daughters at a wedding; their presence and their love.

For me, thinking of my dad became a shortcut to open my heart. When I think of him, I can open my heart, even though it hurts. There is so much love.

So instead of my rehearsed speech, I stood there with tears in my eyes, completely open, and told this story and showed everybody my heart.

I did not really get married. But I did not walk away from the altar either.

It became my ceremony with my dad. We shaped it in the moment, in a magical way, completely unexpected, and it was super powerful.

Dweller

After the wedding, after a moment of union, commitment, or inner alignment, something unexpected often happens. Just as we stand on the threshold of transformation, shadows begin to surface. Sometimes these shadows appear symbolically, as a figure or creature known in the esoteric teachings as the Dweller on the Threshold.

The Dweller is not an external enemy. It is a living composite of our own past: the accumulated patterns, fears, instincts, and unresolved energies we have carried through our lives. It is the crystallised memory of survival strategies, emotional wounds, habits of thought, and unconscious reactions that once protected us but now limit our freedom.

In a deeper sense, the Dweller represents the entire weight of the personality history, not only from this life, but from previous incarnations as well. It is the sum of unfinished business that has gathered around the soul over time. Because of this, the Dweller knows us very well. It knows our weak points, our doubts, our guilt, our pride, and our hidden desires.

This is why encountering the Dweller can feel so convincing and overwhelming. Its voice often sounds like our own thoughts. It whispers reasons to remain where we are: to stay safe, to avoid risk, to postpone the next step. It reminds us of past failures and warns us not to cross the threshold again.

Yet the Dweller appears for a purpose. It emerges precisely at the moment when the soul is ready to move forward, at the threshold of a new level of consciousness. In the initiatory traditions, facing the Dweller is part of the process of transformation. What has been hidden must become visible; what has been unconscious must be brought into awareness.

The encounter is therefore not a punishment or a setback. It is a mirror.

By meeting the Dweller with honesty, courage, and awareness, the old patterns lose their hold. What once stood as an obstacle becomes material for transformation. The shadow begins to release its energy back into the life of the soul.

Only then can the next step be taken.

The threshold opens.

Soul Initiation

The entire six week training at Highden slowly builds toward one central moment, the soul initiation. It is not a ceremony that someone gives you, but a process in which you ultimately choose your own initiation.

The weeks leading up to it consist of two parallel movements. On one hand there is an intense process of personal development. You get to know yourself better, old patterns become visible, and different parts of yourself are given space to integrate. At the same time something begins to form at the group level. The group slowly grows together into a kind of field in which everyone supports and mirrors one another.

These two processes strengthen each other. Your own development nourishes the group, and the group lifts your personal process to a deeper level.

The initiation itself was shaped in that same way. Everyone chose their own form of initiation, but we did it at the same time. Because of that it remained an individual process that was held by the collective field.

We were invited to spend 48 hours alone in the forest surrounding Highden. Many people also chose to fast during that time.

My first reaction was actually very clear, I am not going to do that. I wanted to stay in the house. My nervous system needed rest. No extra stimulation, no extreme challenge. My plan was simple. Stay in my room, walk during the day, meditate, and simply eat. For me that felt like a beautiful initiation.

But on the morning of the initiation we were invited to first go into meditation. We could ask the Void, the essence or deeper source layer that we had worked with throughout the training, what we truly needed.

The answer came immediately.

“Your nervous system needs down regulation. But comfort can also be a trap.”

It was so clear: I knew I had to change my plan.

So I decided to go into the forest after all. And also not to eat.

If you know me, you know how big that decision was. I once wrote a blog titled “When hunger is older than this life” , and that says almost everything. I have enormous willpower, except when it comes to food.

So for me it felt as if I had to defeat a kind of inner monster.

The first 24 hours were mostly physical. Hunger, fatigue, a body that protests. But after that something began to shift. My body became weaker and my mind felt different. It was almost as if I entered a light psychedelic state.

There was no big lightning flash of insight. No dramatic revelation.

But many small things happened.

My dreams were different. Instead of escaping, running and hiding (dreams I had since childhood), I was trying to find ways to stay. Thoughts arrived in a different way. There were more and moments of clarity.

At one point I was walking in the garden and came across an olive tree. Immediately I felt a wave of emotion and a deep connection with Italy. There were more small moments like that, moments that suddenly carried unexpected meaning.

When everyone returned after those 48 hours, it was almost tangible that something had changed.

The final week of the training felt completely different from the weeks before. People were softer. Calmer. More present. It felt as if many of the personality layers had moved into the background and the soul had come more to the front.

Everyone had overcome something, seen something, or let something go.

But it was not only mental or emotional. It seemed as if something had also physically shifted in people.

For me, that last week could easily have lasted much longer.

Because this is actually the way you most love to meet people.

Not from ego.
Not from role or personality.

But from soul.

And precisely because we had gone through this journey together, everything became stronger. The personal initiation was deepened by the group, and the group in turn was shaped by all those individual steps.

They were six intense weeks.

But perhaps even more important, they were six weeks in which I caught a glimpse of what it feels like when people truly meet each other from soul to soul.

Is this something for you?

After reading all this, you might be wondering if this could also be something for you.

If that is the case, I would recommend reaching out to Highden and exploring whether it resonates with you. At the same time, it is good to know that this is not a place you simply step into without any preparation. It helps if you have already done some inner work and developed a certain level of self reflection.

For many people that path, for example, runs through trainings with ISTA, where you gain a lot of insight into yourself and into group processes. Many people who later arrive at Highden also pass through that space. At the same time, there are also people who come to Highden through other paths or traditions.

Within the mystery school itself there are different trainings, each with its own quality. These qualities are called Rays. I personally knew nothing about this beforehand. In the end it is not so much about understanding everything, but about feeling whether something resonates with you.

If you are curious, the best thing to do is simply take a look at the website. Read what is there, let it settle for a moment and feel whether something in it touches you. If it does, you can reach out to Highden for a personal intake.

It is important to understand that this is not a sensational or quick experience. It is a significant investment of time, energy and attention. You spend six weeks on the other side of the world, fully immersed in a different environment and an intense process.

But if you feel that you truly want to take a step beyond your personality, towards your soul and your soul mission, then as far as I know Highden is one of the few places in the world where such a process is held in this way.

And perhaps that is ultimately what a true mystery school is about. Not spectacular experiences, but slowly and consciously remembering who you really are.