On my journey, I have met people who have boldly moved forward in deep faith in God and achieved great things – for example, families who moved with five small children to an African country in order to follow God's calling.
I myself am not such a person of great faith, and I have deep respect for these role models.
I also know many people who have turned away from the path of faith. I do not presume to fully understand the various and complex reasons behind this.
However, it may be that some lost the sense that their faith journey was bringing them closer to God inwardly.
This has often made me sad - and from that sadness, an added motivation emerged to search for a concrete and feasible inner path.
After several years in a kind of monastic phase - during which I worked with mobile teams and various activities - I returned to normal professional life and to the local community.
During that period of monastic lifestyle, the inner and outer aspects of religious life were clear and tangible for me, but that clarity suddenly seemed lost.
The less the external circumstances were aligned with the life of faith, the more important it became to have a clear inner path in mind.
Yet at that time, I couldn’t find such a path anywhere.
This gave rise to a renewed motivation to discover a clear inner way and a spiritual practice that would continuously lead me closer to God.
In the following phase, I withdrew for a longer period from public life. In the mid-1990s, I began twelve years of part-time psychotherapeutic training alongside my job.
During this time, and through almost twenty years of professional work as a systemic therapist, I deeply engaged in the study of the human psyche.
At first, I was enthusiastic about the psychological approaches and methods, but eventually, I became disillusioned.
I encountered a limit - one that prevented both myself and others from achieving the transformation we hoped for.
Something essential was still missing – life of faith and psychology were not enough.
During this time, I remembered the mystical experience of my youth, which had revealed to me the power of mindfulness.
In 2006, I developed my first workshops on mind-body unity with mindfulness meditation. But since I could not yet present the path in a complete way, I encountered many objections.
At the end of my strength, I experienced a burnout in 2008, which made it impossible for me to continue actively for seven years. This was a very difficult time for my family. My wife and especially my children suffered greatly during this important phase of life. It was also a time of health and financial crises.
During this period, I had to realize that the psychological perspective and exploration of the psyche had only taken me halfway into the depths.
Several times, I received the revelation through dreams and intuitive insights: "End of therapy."
My next attempt to explore and teach the inner path to God began in 2015 with a seminar series in Austria.
I planned to structure it in three workshops:
- Improving the mind-body unity state
- Working on the mind – freeing and opening the heart
- Prayer – turning to God with an open heart
I conducted workshops 1 and 2, but I got stuck while developing the third. I studied a lot about prayer but hadn’t yet had a breakthrough myself.
Again, something essential was missing.
Then, unexpectedly, we received an early inheritance in the form of an apartment from my mother. But it soon became clear that we would sell it in order to find a house dedicated to inner work.
We hit a wall in our unsuccessful search for a suitable house.
In a moment of intense prayer, I handed the decision about which house to buy over to God.
The next day, I received a phone call from an acquaintance asking if I wanted to buy his house. And so we did.
Since the house was almost 100 years old and in need of renovation, and we barely had any money left, we began to renovate the house ourselves. The project lasted seven years.
It was a phase of intense work - earning money and pushing the renovation forward. After work, there was hardly any time or energy left for anything else. We lived socially withdrawn.
To cope with it, I immersed myself in daily meditation and prayer. That time became my “desert time” - similar to how many mystics in history retreated into the desert or to a mountain.
There, God revealed to me the missing insights and gave me the experiences I have shared in this book.
Conclusion
The experiences along my life’s path have repeatedly shown me how essential it is to have a clear inner path in view.
An outward lifestyle can temporarily conceal the fact that this inner path is unclear or missing.
But without the deep experiences that are essential for a spiritual journey, we become empty inside.
Neither knowledge, methods, nor experiences in the psychological or religious realm alone opened up this path for me.
Something essential was always missing.
This path led me more than once to my human limits and into seemingly hopeless situations. There, I was challenged to go deeper and to entrust myself more and more to God.
Only when I admitted to myself that I could go no further with all my knowledge, methods, and efforts could God reveal the way to me through His grace.
Only then did knowledge, insight, experience, and grace finally come together as one.
Today I can say with certainty:
It was not I who found the path – it was shown to me by God.
We cannot find our way to God by our own strength. Only by trusting in Him can we be led to the goal.