My Story

 

I walk with the name Hymnj, a contemporary medicine man, spiritual teacher and father based in Cape Town, South Africa.

 

 

 

 

 

I facilitate peak transcendental encounters of the primal and the divine, awakening higher states of consciousness and awareness to access flow, presence and greatness in people’s lives. I invoke, I empower and hold space, nothing more; the rest is up to you. I specialise in unique and bespoke contemporary shamanic offerings, including sacred plant medicine ceremonies, primal breath-work, ecstatic vocal activation & sound healing, and integrative wise counselling. I hold space for people’s life and spiritual initiations through these tools. My passion is working with those who are genuinely seeking to shift their lives, unfold their highest potential from a spiritual context into an actualised reality and, in the process, bring about a New Earth.

The Story-Healer

What I have come to understand through my life’s work in the various roles I have played as an activist, dancer, theatre-maker, coach or facilitator is that what ultimately shapes our living experience and our future are not just the actual past events and actions that have occurred but most significantly how we have narratively framed them. What makes human beings such utterly unique and powerful creators is our storytelling for there are a myriad of ways we can chronicle our journeys, it’s all a matter of how it is related in terms of the power of our perspective.

Spiritual awakening as such, is about the ability to gain the most optimal narrative perspective (understanding) about the nature of our existence and then living into it as a practice. Therefore, the craft of story-telling is decisive: the expression of our life force, the vitality of our bodies, the joy and love of our hearts, the quality of our relationships and our capacity to attract abundance are either constrained or liberated by our story. Suffering cannot exist without a story; likewise, generational cycles are ultimately passed down or broken through our stories. Story is not just how we make sense of our world it is actually how we create, invoke, affect it and then pass it on. We derive our meaning, whether positive or negative, from our stories, which generate our sense of worthiness, which has everything to do with our capacity to self-regulate, manifest and act powerfully in life. The practice of telling and retelling our story, whether in our thoughts or our sharing, is the cartography that maps our future path. In every moment, we are buying and selling stories as we weave our reality, it is simply a question of whether we are doing it consciously or unconsciously. People who live whole-hearted and extraordinary lives are all essentially masterful and authentic storytellers.

This is why I call the gold thread of my life’s work ‘story-healing’ for it is the sacred human art of re-crafting our future by understanding and consciously choosing how we want to meet our death. In its purest essence, it is the nature of what I believe our souls will remember about our life’s journey and the ancestral echoes that we will leave behind in the hearts and minds of others.

The Medicine Calling

Over a decade ago, I made a momentous decision to depart from my flourishing and acclaimed career as an award-winning theatre director and writer. I embarked on a profound quest, driven by the desire to unearth the elusive treasure of transformation and embodiment. Despite outward appearances of a life that many aspire to – substantial income, globe-trotting performances, and the autonomy to chart my own creative course – I harbored an unsettling sense of inauthenticity, pretense, and even emptiness within my existence. This dissonance had begun to wear me down.

I had been residing within a superficial façade of a grand life, while my true self was obscured in the shadows. My struggles with depression, low self-esteem, and anxiety were concealed beneath the veneer of success. Eventually, the cumulative toll of this discord began to manifest in my health, personal relationships, and professional pursuits.

My journey towards a profound transformation led me to the sacred ashrams of India and extensive training with two of the foremost personal transformation organizations in the world. Along this path, I encountered the profound teachings of Eckhart Tolle, which initiated a profound shift within my psyche and set a series of transformative events into motion.

However, it was amidst a unique plant medicine retreat known as the Gathering of Tribes, nestled along the banks of the enchanting Spitzkoppe mountains in my home country of Namibia, that I experienced an awakening of both profound and terrifying proportions. This spiritual awakening altered the trajectory of my entire life. Within that sacred space, I underwent a symbolic death of the self and a monumental shift in my existential perspective, forever changing how I perceived the world and my place within it.

It felt as though the roof of the self-imposed prison that had defined my existence had been forcefully removed, revealing the vast expanse of the universe. I engaged in profound dialogues with the divine and beheld the universe in all its splendor. Words fall short in conveying the enormity of what I witnessed and experienced during that momentous time. My voice erupted like a volcano of divine light, channeling magnificent energies through me.

The call of these sacred medicines resonated within me so profoundly that I had no option but to devote my entire being to the shamanic path.

I have since been walking this path, guided step by step, year by year, through the challenging and extremely beautiful terrain of self-discovery and healing. It’s been a rough and confronting ride working through my identity of stories. During this time, I experienced a very tumultuous marriage and divorce as well as my business partnership which ended on less than amicable terms. I had to relinquish many of the comforts, security and associations I once identified with. There were times when I lived in my garage, renting out my apartment to make it through the months. It was a masterclass in forgiveness and surrender and a time when I was guided and taught by the most beautiful medicine brothers and sisters. Nothing has made more sense to me as a path, and I have felt held every step of the way.

In a journey of hundreds of deep-diving ceremonies over the years, I have since faced hair-raising initiations and manifested powerful contracts forged in the sacred ceremonial fires. Each contract I have manifested into the world through the projects and endeavours I have weaved and initiated, from healing the sacred masculine and confronting the toxic culture of gender-based violence through the Just Men project to guiding people through the pathways of radical forgiveness in the Journey of Stones and birthing the global contemporary shamanic community that is Wake Circle.

Rebirth

In this medicine work I have been called to train in, I have held demons in my arms until they surrendered to loving tenderness and sobbed like babies. I have sat in the holiest inner sanctum of God’s temple and witnessed the unfolding of multidimensional worlds and dimensions that have left me speechless for days. Tears of joy and wonder have rolled down my cheeks as my heart has opened in ways I never dreamed. My eyes have glimpsed the absolute wonder of this universe in ways my mind in reflection, can now barely comprehend. I have often conversed directly with my spiritual father, whose face dwells in the skyward constellation of Orion. I have felt the energies of an ancient tiger-like spirit moving, growling and singing through my body. The ancestors I have channelled and received messages from strange inter-dimensional beings who do medicine and energetic healing work in various realms and worlds.

What I describe clumsily in words merely scratches the surface of the realities I have perceived and the portals I have accessed. From these initiations, my soul’s calling to sing, channel messages, and fully embrace the role of being a spiritual father has emerged with the chant of two syllables: Hymn Jay (Victory of God’s song). This is my life story re-birthed.

I now live in an entirely different paradigm of existence, and a distinctly different type of abundance flows in my life. I have become a father to the most beautiful and wondrous being I have ever laid my eyes upon. I have a gorgeous sacred feminine partner who is the most phenomenal mother to our little girl. I have taken the custodianship of a humble but magical piece of land to create our home and temple for my new family and to unfold our collective medicine calling. I am doing the work I absolutely love and was always meant to do, for I get to hold sacred space for people’s life and spiritual initiations and sing channelled heart songs that transform lives and reignite the flame of divine presence in their eyes.

Integrating all this into my human experience is not without daily difficulties or challenges, I do not seek to claim any mantle of enlightenment or even of becoming a shaman or a guru of any kind. I am a man navigating the rough road of life and learning to be human, I am battling my shadows and minding my triggers like everyone else. What I do know with my entire being is that I am in the right place, following my spiritual path step by small step, doing exactly what I am meant to be doing. One day when I do transition, I will leave this earth deeply satisfied, knowing I have spent my life force well. I find myself at the point in my life now where there is nothing to prove, no validation to seek, no permission slip to earn, only to savour this magical life I am living, to unfold my mission and serve as I am guided.

A New Path

I get to live in profound gratitude for the wonders I have experienced in this physical body and the difference I make in people’s lives. I want to share this possibility with others through my music, counselling and medicine work. I believe it is never too late to change the very course of one’s life and, for that matter, the entire course of this world when we are willing to take charge of our core stories. I believe each of us has a spiritual calling and soul mission to unfold and will live restless and conflicted lives until we find and authentically meet it. Transformation, evolution, embodiment, and awakening is an inevitability for each and every one of us; much like a train heading to a destination, when we are ready and willing, it is simply up to us to get on board.

I know and trust that those people that I need to work with, those who are ready to take on their lives, will be guided to me at the right time. If one day our paths cross, I look forward to our meeting so that we may receive each other through the eyes of our souls.