Veronika trusts our inner wilderness

Some conversations don’t just leave an impression—they rearrange something inside you.

We have these beings inside us that want to belong. With this practice, we can bring in these vulnerable, immature inner beings and discover their potential.

-Veronika Bond, writer, philosopher

Some conversations don’t just leave an impression—they rearrange something inside you. My conversation with Veronika Bond was one of those. From the moment I encountered her work, Synchronosophy, I felt an immediate, almost cellular recognition. Veronika’s writing carries a profound trust in life's intelligence, an embrace of uncertainty not as failure, but as the very ground of transformation. She refuses rigid frameworks and instead offers something wilder, something symbiotic and deeply alive. Within minutes of our conversation, I found myself unexpectedly emotional—because this wasn’t just an intellectual exchange. It was an invitation to turn toward the places in ourselves that long to be understood.

Over the course of our talk, we explored how Synchronosophy arrived in Veronika’s life as an unbidden "mental download"—a model of human consciousness that was less about fixed truths and more about subjective experience. We talked about the ways early wounds shape us, how trauma isn’t just something to be "healed" but a generative force, how even our smallest irritations are signposts pointing toward dormant potential. I shared a deeply personal event from when I was five and a half months old—one that, even all these years later, continues to surface in unexpected ways. And Veronika, in her wisdom, reflected back the power of these early imprints, how they shape our sense of trust, our capacity for belonging, and how they live in us as creatures in the wilderness of our consciousness, waiting to be met with curiosity instead of fear.

This conversation is one I will return to again and again. It challenges the way we think about personal growth—not as fixing or transcending, but as an ongoing process of integration, a spiraling journey of becoming. If you are drawn to the mystery of human consciousness, if you sense that your wounds—and even your smallest triggers—hold more than just pain, but also possibility, I cannot recommend Veronika’s work enough.

Note to listeners: Veronika includes an addendum at the end of the transcript, offering further insight into one of my questions. Her additional wisdom is generous, precise, and clear—you won’t want to miss it.

Transcript:

Kimberly

Okay. okay. Well, my tears are done. I don't know why I'm so emotional, but I just feel so deeply resonant with your work, Veronika. And it is truly, truly an honor to have you here today. From the moment, the very moment, I think the very first chapter I read in Synchronosophy that you've been serializing over on Substack, I felt an immediate resonance.

And you carry a deep trust in life's intelligence and are in some ways not rejecting, because that's not that none of your work is about rejecting, but understanding that those rigid frameworks no longer serve us. And you instead are favoring something wilder, something more symbiotic, something deeply alive. And I see your writing as an invitation—similar to some of the unfixed work that I do—to step into uncertainty and not as like a failure of control, but as the very ground of creativity and transformation and deep listening. So I'm thrilled to introduce our listeners and watchers and readers to your work. I already know people that are like, in fact, I just had a meeting the other day with an old family friend who is like quoting your work. She’s obsessed with it. Because I forward your substack chapters to people.

So I just am thrilled to begin and to back everybody up because this is a lot. In in 1999, when Synchronosophy first arrived, and I know it probably wasn't called that it first arrived in your life, not as something you were really looking for, but as something that found you.

You described it as almost kind of like a mental download and was answering a lot of questions that you didn't yet know you were even asking. So take us back to that moment. What did it feel like to receive something so unexpected and how did that shape your path ahead?

Veronika

Yeah, unexpected. Yes, I have never had anything like that before or after. So the only way I can describe it is as it happened then. And it was really like... Yeah, I was writing... I had a practice of writing morning pages. I think listeners are fairly familiar with that. You write three pages and that's it. And then you're allowed to get on with your life. Only in my case that didn't happen. After the three pages, it suddenly started pouring in. I somehow knew that it was important. I didn't quite understand what it was about, although I had an inkling, it was sort of an intuitive knowing, but not really fully grasping. I mean, that took years, that took decades even. I'm still in the process of fully understanding actually.

I then very quickly understood that it was a specific model of human consciousness, but not as a general as, “this is how it is for everyone.” My very specific focus was subjective experience. So this is human consciousness from the perspective through the lens of subjective experience. There are literally – as I since discovered – there are hundreds of models of human consciousness, which I didn't know. I was not looking. I mean, I would have thought this is very presumptuous to even look for that. But I knew it was that. And I knew it was from the perspective of subjective experience, which is very different from the scientific perspective, where you always are looking for the theory of everything and the ultimate truth and that kind of thing. It's not that.

But what I discovered then was that if you go deep into something through subjective experience, you connect with subjective experience of everybody. That's why you can discover the universe in a grain of sand, for example. It is exactly like that. And not only was it just a subjective experience, it was also a very specific moment in subjective experience that then became the practice.

Kimberly

And can you describe, just to back up for people, what is the practice? I know it's very deep and rich, but what is the practice? And I know you were even saying you were practicing it on yourself last night. So let's give it kind of a concrete example.

Veronika

Okay, well I did not invent this practice, I have to say first, because I had a training in classical homeopathy and also in psychosynthesis, which I did in parallel. My particular classical homeopathy training was very much focused on the mental states. So even though we were taught normal case-taking and then to prescribe a remedy, there was always this focus on the mental state. And the practice in psychosynthesis if people are not familiar with that, it comes from the transpersonal psychotherapy framework, but it is mainly used not as a therapy but as a work on yourself.

So I had used that before because it was familiar, that was how I was trained. And I used the homeopathic approach, which has nothing to do with remedies. It is the philosophy that any symptom—and a symptom I very broadly would describe as anything that goes wrong in your life, anything that you don't want, that is an irritation, let's say an internal turmoil, a turbulent reaction to something that happens on the outside — it's your personal irritation, so it's yours. Never mind what happens on the outside. It's yours. So you claim that as yours.

That principle is a big part of the practice, you just don't question that ever. If it happens to you, it's yours. It's yours for the taking basically. And that is very different from what I would call the allopathic approach, where you always blame something outside. In homeopathy, we don't look for this causation from the outside. We look for unique responses: ”isn't that interesting how this particular system responds in this particular way?” And this is how the classical homeopath will find the remedy.

What I was interested in, apart from my own inner work, I was also working as a homeopath at the time. So I was interested in cutting out the remedies. Because I thought if the remedy is information, why can't we go straight to the information?

I was also working as a simultaneous interpreter at homoeopathic conferences at the time. So I saw all the great homeopaths on the circuit, from America, from South Africa, from all over the world. And I saw how quickly when working with a client, people start looking at them through the lens of the remedy. You can almost see the mind bubbles, “Oh there's Arsenicum coming up… and there's Aconite coming up” these kinds of things. And I thought, No, I don't want that. I don't want to lose the connection with the person.

I also had the practice of psychosynthesis, which is working very much with the imagination. So what I did last night, I can tell you what I did last night. The first thing I always do, whenever I feel upset, is tune into the emotions. I tune into how do I feel? Sometimes I put words to it but I don't need to, and of course I’ve done this now for 25 years plus, so it's very quick, I'm straight in there, I know how I feel and then I amplify that because I want to know really what it is, why is this such a big deal?

From the emotion, and that's the psychosynthesis part, I translate this—because I'm a translator, so I see these as inner languages – then I translate the emotion into an image. And it is basically a story in the mind. It's like an internal movie going on, right? So I translate my emotional experience into this internal movie — it could be something like this: I feel very upset, very scared and helpless. And then I spontaneously have this image coming up of being in the ocean on a life raft, there's nobody else, I'm all on my own.

It’s important that it has to be spontaneous. It has to really come from within. It's not an external image you choose so-called ‘consciously’ or with awareness. It's not intentional. You have to let it come from a deeper place. And that image, if you're familiar with the practice, once you tune into that practice you notice that just the image coming up immediately provides a relief.

Because you say, Oh! I'm on this life raft in the ocean. It makes perfect sense that I'm upset! You don't connect it with something that happens externally. It's all inside. You’re getting a sense of coherence, and that instantly makes you feel better.

Kimberly

Yes, that makes so much sense. Wow. So you wrote about how back in the 90s, you know, we were infiltrated with a lot of self help books and about like how to get everything you want. And this is very different than that. And in a way, you even were like, I can't handle any more of this type of content. And I was at that same place where it felt like world was telling me how to fix myself, how to fix myself, and I had to finally let all of that go and turn toward the discomfort, which in a way is kind of like what you're saying. So tell me a little bit about what that was like for you when you've turned off the self-help books and had to just pause. What was it that you were turning toward?

Veronika

Well, I was turning towards myself. For me, it was not a physical, well, it was physical as well, but it was really in the context of relationships, I had a complete life crash.

I came out of a relationship which became so disastrous that I had to basically flee for my own life. I became a refugee from my own life and with two small children and death threats, but the funny thing was, I never saw myself as a victim. I somehow knew unintentionally I had gotten myself into this.

So I took full responsibility. I never looked for external help really, although I did receive help. I had angels coming into my life in those moments. They turned up out of the blue.

But what I did was that I took responsibility and immediately asked myself the question, How could this possibly happen to me? I was completely surprised in some way because that was not on my radar in my whole family. I don’t come from any kind of violent background. It was all very gentle and very naive in many ways.

So that’s what happened. I described it in one of the early chapters. So I had been in a couple of relationships before that, and I could see how it had happened, I understood patterns because that's how I'd been trained in classical homeopathy. I knew about life patterns. Then I thought, this is obviously a life pattern, which I didn't recognize from my family. My parents were happily married. My grandparents, everybody was happily married apart from me crashing all the time. So I couldn't understand it.

Then I got to this point where I thought, it’s finished. I reached what I call the ‘point of enoughness’. You reach that point where you say, this can't go on. I was at the point of feeling suicidal, but I had two small kids and an older son who was living with his father at the time. And because of them, I couldn't just throw in the towel. It was really my kids who energetically, and through the responsibility, that pulled me through. It felt of course disastrous, and I felt so ashamed, also in relation to my family, I didn't want anyone to worry about me.

So I think the biggest feeling I had to confront was the shame. That was almost bigger than the fear.

Kimberly

If I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying that you were obviously exiting a bad situation, but also in that process turning towards yourself, which meant you had to, you weren't going to avoid those negative emotions anymore, which you're saying was shame. Instead embracing and diving straight into them.

Veronika

I never avoided my emotions. I don't think I ever did that, but what had happened was that I was always trying to make things work for others. I was very much a ‘people pleaser’ and a ‘rescuer’. I was easily fitting around other people, I was always strong, and my resources were very attractive to other people. And I was always in relationships where the guys were emotionally much weaker than me.

I was always supporting them, then they demanded more and more. And in the end, I was in a situation where I was with someone who was probably in quite a disturbed kind of place. But I had no experience of that, so I didn't recognize the early cues. In retrospective, of course, I could see it all. But when I was in it, I remember suddenly thinking, ‘my God, this is how women get into these situations. I never thought that would happen to me.’

Kimberly

Right.

We talk about trauma and you actually write about trauma as well in a different way than it's talked about. And I think trauma can sometimes be that veil that keeps us in these cycles. And so when you write about trauma, it's more of like integral to the human experience and part of shaping consciousness is what you say is sort of a nonlinear system.

So how do you see trauma as a generative force rather than something to be healed or resolved?

Veronika

Well, I think it needs to be healed and resolved as well. But in my particular experience, I didn't have a terrible childhood. I did not have an abusive father. On the contrary, I had a lovely father. And I didn't have any violence or terrible things happen to me in my early years. But what did happen, in my whole family and also in previous generations was that the emotions were not acknowledged and that even though it was this perfect family and perfect childhood, you couldn't be yourself. You had to fit into this perfection and if anything went wrong, I always blamed myself. My conclusion was always, ‘there must be something wrong with me.’

I was constantly negotiating the inner and outer, even though I didn't know that at the time, of course, but I can see it on photos. I can see that probably I lost it at the age of three or something like that. I can see at the age of three, I still have this open face, trusting the world, to a point.

Although I already knew. I already had moved three times by the age of three, my parents had already emigrated to the Middle East. And that's where I spent my childhood. So I can see how it's all entangled and I do believe that we all carry ancestral trauma. I can see that my parents and grandparents, the previous generations, they didn't have the tools to work through this. I mean, it was only in my generation, in the late 20th century really, that trauma became even a thing.

It was also the idea that—trauma is something terrible that happens to someone in a war or something—so I never saw myself as someone who had anything to do with that. It was like ‘trauma happens to other people’.

But what I experienced, I don’t think I'm the only one — I think there are quite a few people, you see it in the literature, you see it in the trauma memoirs. It's quite a new genre. Of course I've read a lot of that, and I continuously read these kinds of books, that people realized gradually that this is something that affects all of us. It's a collective thing.

I know it about my grandmothers. My uncle, son of my paternal grandmother, he joked that his mother always apologized for being born. What is that? I know that both my grandmothers, they were middle class families living in big houses, they were business people and all very Christian, a particular religious group they belonged to, everything was very orderly and they had staff in the house and they were well-to-do people, and the women were kind of head of the household staff, right? They were not suffering, but they were very clearly a step down from the man of the house.

Kimberly

So I'm experiencing, as I listen to you, sort of all of these oppressive roles or these rejections of our emotions that our ancestors have experienced. And we do that because it's scary. We want to fix the trauma and we want to avoid the negative experiences and Synchronosophy as you describe, instead of trying to avoid these negative experiences, they are there to teach you. We are supposed to lean into them, embrace them, dive into them. So can you, and people are gonna be like, what, that's crazy. I don't wanna embrace them! So how do you guide people to navigate that inner wilderness without getting lost?

Veronika

Yeah, well, I can't work with everyone. Some people can't do it. Especially there are people…, or maybe I should say in the past when I didn't have the full understanding that I have now, it was also harder. But I've experienced people who said – if I only suggested embracing the negative emotions – immediately there was a: No way! You mean I have to take responsibility for what he did to me?

That kind of thing, it is this blaming. And of course with Synchronosophy you don't blame. It's not about blaming. I always explain that. If someone is not willing to even look at their own emotions, either not willing, or not able, you can't judge that. It is, to a lot of people, it's very, very scary.

I think I had the advantage that—I was born like that. I'm very comfortable with my emotions. I was never allowed as a child to express my emotions, but I somehow was able to handle that. It was a very gentle kind of perfect childhood in some ways, very sheltered, very unusual in many ways because I grew up in a boarding school with 40 plus Palestinian boys and my four brothers, and there were no girls so I didn't have any friends. I never had any friends until the age of 12.

So that to me was normal, as it is always, our strange lives are normal to us. But I think that contributed to having an intense inner life.

Kimberly

That's what I was gonna say. I'm imagining you did have friends. They were just in another realm.

Veronika

Yes, totally. So I was comfortable with my inner life, I think, because of that.

Kimberly

So how do you guide people when they are willing to do this, but there's still some fear around what if this just blows it up? What if it gets bigger? What if? How do you work with people's fear?

Veronika

Well, I always encourage people to start small, because the small irritations should not be underestimated. I encourage people to listen to their emotions, as if they were coming from an inner child.

I now understand the overall theory that the subjective human consciousness or this individual human Consciousness is a living organism. That's the first thing. It's not produced by the brain. It is a living organism, and the brain is part of that.

So it is totally inside out and upside down. But that's also not my invention. I have later discovered that it is actually also the theory of the Vedic science of mind. So the ancient Vedic science of mind sees it exactly like that. And somehow, even though I didn't know that, I'm not a Vedic scholar, I hadn't read any of that stuff. But I discovered it later, and I must have tuned into that.

When it came through this download, this mental download, that I describe also in the book, all this information came and I just wrote it down without understanding. Then it took me years to unravel it, but I knew intuitively to trust it.

I just trusted it and used it as my personal guidance system. And it has never, ever failed me so far. So when people ask, How do you know? And of course people did ask immediately. And how do you know it's true? I say, it doesn't matter. It's a model. If it works, it works. And so far it has worked.

Kimberly

Yeah, yeah. Right. And you did use yourself for years as the primary person that you were testing this out on. Is that correct?

Veronika

Well, I had plenty of opportunity.

But also during that time, I was already with my husband, Josh. And so we had already met because I had obviously resolved my ‘destructive relationship pattern’, as I call it.

I also worked with whoever wanted to work with me. I worked with groups, I worked with individuals, I worked with friends, with clients who came for homeopathic treatment. If there was a clear homeopathic remedy indicated, I would prescribe that, but otherwise I would just work with them like this. And I saw that the results were very similar to giving a homeopathic remedy.

Kimberly

When I read your work and you talk about, like you said, this is not some construct from the brain, but an actual, almost like a wilderness. You've described it with all the creatures in the wilderness. And that's been really helpful for me. Like when you talked about trauma, you said that it includes a “nurturing dormant potential”. And so in my mind, I picture almost like this little critter who's just full of kisses and hugs and warmth. And that it's latent, or even you said sometimes it's “frozen in the permafrost.” Can you talk a little bit about that wilderness?

Veronika

As you were talking and I'm thinking of someone who I worked with maybe last year, a couple of years ago. And she didn't know anything about this, but she was completely open to it. And she was also on some kind of medication. So I was cautious. But she was, I think when people are willing to go into their emotions or meet their own emotions, not everybody can do it. If they can't do it, then I just say, ‘Well, maybe we can do something else or I can recommend something else. But I don't work with them, if they can't do it. It is really important that people are willing to actually feel, even just a little bit, how they feel in relation to something that upsets them. If you can't do that, then I take that as a guideline and say, Well then maybe this is not the right thing. Because it's powerful. And it is a wilderness and I don't want people to get lost in it.

The inner world is a wilderness mainly because we are not familiar with this part of ourselves.

When I work with people, I don't know what's going to happen. And that's what I love about this work. I don't know even when I do it myself. I don't know when I do it with my own family, with my kids. I'm greatly blessed, they trust me with this. I've worked with my brothers… which is actually quite incredible…

So there is this complete trust and I feel very humbled when people work with me like that. I think when people work with me, they know, Oh, I'm not alone in this inner wilderness.

A lot of it is about knowing the right questions, what to ask next. And I do that quite intuitively.

It has taken me years to figure out how to explain that, because I can't sit with everybody who wants to do this work. What I wanted to do really with this book – what I've been trying to do for the last 25 years – is to convey this in such a way that people can do it themselves. That it is an empowerment technique.

Kimberly

It is! It is and it feels that way when I read it. I don't read your chapters and go, Now I have to call Veronika to do a session. It feels like it's very much….well, I mean, I'll give you a little example here. This is kind of a personal example, and I'm not asking for therapy here. But it is one of the things I've worked with. I have an incident—

Veronika

Go ahead.

Kimberly

When I was very young, pre-verbal, six years old, sorry, six months old, maybe even younger, I think my mom said like five or five and a half. And she was out with my dad and they'd hired a babysitter through the university. And long story short, they came home, she was passed out drunk, my brother was upstairs sleeping and I was cold in a diaper, not crying, not sick or comatose or anything, but not crying anymore, even though was freezing cold. It was Michigan. And I know that after probably a period of crying out and being like, “I need something!” where something in my system said “Nobody's there.” And I know there's been from very early on this “by self” attitude that like no one's going to ultimately be there for me and this especially has been coming up as I'm in reading you and around, you know, the launch of my book and all that stuff where it's just like, can I let this in with

Alisa Kennedy Jones

wanting to help me and help the vision get out there and it keeps on pushing up against “Are there other people out there that believe in me? That are going to catch me and hold me?” And the good part of the story is when my mom came home, she saw me and she instantly grabbed me and breastfed me and took me to the hospital. I had been hit across the face apparently I had a bruise on the face but I wasn't injured and I was offered lots of love and all of that, but there is some initial thing my—

Veronika

You had that experience. And we all have these kind of experiences at a very young age, I believe. Sometimes maybe already in the womb, sometimes we carry it over from something that happened to the mother or father, it doesn't matter. Grandparents, uncle, it doesn't matter. It is we're all connected in this web of consciousness. But something like that is a very significant experience.

And you might find if you did this kind of work or if you are triggered by something small, I always say to people, look for when you're triggered by something small, when you have an overreaction to something small. That is much more interesting than a big event and a big reaction or a small reaction or saying to yourself, ‘Didn't I cope well with this big event?’ That's completely uninteresting because you're coping well.

What is interesting is when you're not coping well in relation to a small event, when you're crying your eyes out over whatever, a broken cup or something. For example.

Kimberly

Right, right. And then you can feel maybe the transformation. For me, I go back to that image of the little girl or the little infant that's like, I get it now, no wonder. And then it's no wonder. Yeah. And it sort of dissolves it. It's not, I'm not running away from it. And I can let myself feel the like cold and the anxiousness and all of that but it's like there's it's held almost in something bigger and gentler or maybe like that nurturing dormant potential like you said?

Veronika

What you're describing, that is part of the process. That is not the whole of it. Of course your organism completely remembers this whole thing. But your memory is not able to reconstruct that.

It is from what your mother told you, right?

*(see further explanation in the addendum)

Kimberly

Yeah.

Veronika

So, what we do in Synchronosophy or the practice is that we try to really get to it from the inside rather than the external explanation. This happened, no wonder I must have felt this and that and the other. Of course that makes sense, but the interesting thing is how did you really subjectively experience it? What is still inside you? How did that affect this organism that you are?

That is your consciousness. How did this affect you? And that is very specific. And what interests us, and how we get to the dormant potential is that we then translate that experience into a belief. So if I go back to this example of being on my own on a life raft in the ocean, then I might feel—I can't say never, but sometimes I have to suggest things to people and then I always say to them—Well, you just see whether this resonates or it doesn't. And people then can tune in, people sometimes don't find the words and then they tune in and say, Oh no, this is not how it is. And then I say another word, an alternative, Oh yeah, that's what it is. Or there maybe something better? So we work very precisely with this, What is your word for this?

Which is a little bit similar to the felt sense from, if you're familiar with the technique of focusing. So that comes from Eugene Gendlin, he worked closely with Carl Rogers in Chicago. He was a philosopher and developed this technique called focusing. It's brilliant. And he said, no, I don't want to sell this as a technique. Focusing is for everyone. And I feel the same with Synchronosophy. Synchronosophy is for everyone. I love that, Focusing and the felt sense, I was introduced to that during my university years.

And you tune into how you feel and then find a specific word for it. Does it feel like this? You can find information about that online, I probably have provided some links or I can send them again. It is very useful to work with different techniques so that you specifically find out what is my felt sense in this?

So if you tune into you being five and a half months old and being there not taken care of, your basic needs not met, and tuning into that felt sense… But I think because it's in you, and you're aware of it, you're aware of the story, I would just suggest to wait when something triggers you.

Kimberly

Yeah, yeah. Well, as you're even talking, this is the small example—it's longing. I mean, it's just longing for contact. And my poor kittens are the victims of this longing because I am a grabby cat owner and they're like, they're very obliging. But you know, Dave is so much better at just kind of letting them have their space. And I have this like, “I need you now!” And so it is a daily encounter with that longing. And the belief I would assume that is with that is that, well— I'm not sure because right now in my life, it's fulfilled. The longing is fulfilled, but maybe that it's, Oh, it’s too much.

The belief is that my longing is “too much”, at least with my cats, you know, and my husband, they're all like, okay, no more human contact for a bit. But I mean, this is just fascinating to work with. And this feels like it's turned over to me and I feel responsible for that.

Veronika

It's totally okay. It's great because I can, we can use you as an example. So the important thing is not to go too much through the head, through what you already know. But to really stay with the experiential.

Kimberly

That's true, I'm fine being used as an example.

Veronika

And what I do when I work with people and that is what I'm trying to encourage people to practice with themselves. You don't have to go through the whole process. There are, as you probably have read, there are eight faculties. So we go deeper and deeper — there is no hierarchy, they're all equals— but there is a certain sequence and we always stay with that sequence. So there's the outermost, which is the body as a faculty of consciousness, and the innermost is the will. And the process leads through all the others, but in order to resolve something, you don't always have to go through all of them.

What I did at the end of the book, I presented it to complete the cycle. I took the whole circle, the circle of inner elders, as I call it, to go through that sequence. It is significant to go through that sequence and to stay with your own experience during the process, because we are so much trained to look outwards, to give it an intellectual label, to use causation. Oh this happened and no wonder I feel like that. That is not what we're looking for.

We're not looking for causes, and we're not looking to eliminate causes. What we're looking for is the really subjective, the pure experience of what you really feel. And that is the one that is going to guide you to your innermost, to the next deeper and deeper layer. So at first the external adverse event, as I call it, the adverse event will trigger something.

If it doesn't trigger you, it's not your adverse event. You forget it, you don't even notice? It doesn’t affect you. So if it is an adverse event that triggers you, then that's your adverse event. It doesn't matter how big or small, but preferably it's a relatively small one. We're looking for so-called irrational reactions to a relatively small adverse event, and they are the best because they're not, they're not immediately life threatening. You don't immediately have to call the emergency vehicle or something. You can actually go through that either by yourself or with someone who's also familiar with it. And I think it's great if two people can actually do an exchange because then one person can hold you on the trail, so to speak, and the other person can just let themselves go through the experience.

And I've done that many times, of course, with Josh, my husband, but also sometimes he's done it with me. And I would say, Now, I need you to do this for me. Because I also sometimes need someone and you're the one who I know who's most familiar with this, like it or not, you've got to do this now.

Kimberly

It's reminding me of—this just totally flashbacked when you were talking—when I lived at Findhorn in my early 20s, they had a dance studio and I had been a dancer my whole life and had just graduated from college and no longer had access to a dance studio. And nobody was ever using the dance studio at Findhorn. And so I would go in there in the mornings. And one of the things I started doing was “dancing a quality” instead of, and the one that really was good for me was “longing.” Not as “longing to fill”, but just dancing the experience of longing.

And what you just—this feels like what you were saying. It's not removing the cause. It's not any of the fixing. It's just being in the experience of the pure quality. And it was very joyful. I mean, it was, it was everything, but ultimately it felt very freeing to let myself feel that feeling.

We live in an anthropocentric era. Everything is hierarchical. It's even hard to not talk in hierarchical terms when we speak. But for you, everything is on a horizontal playing field. Can you talk a little bit about how your concept of consciousness lives in this horizontal plane and how that differs from what we typically live in?

Veronika

I'm not sure whether I would call it horizontal, but it is from the outer to the inner, or inner to the outer. So it's like a torus. I see it like a torus and it's moving. It's like this moving torus. And so the inner can become the outer and the outer can become the inner. So we're in constant movement.

We’re not static. That's why I also don't talk about homeostasis, for example, because that is static and it doesn't exist. Because we are constantly in movement, otherwise we would be dead. Static is no longer alive. Life is moving. So that's the way I see it, and I feel it that way. I actually feel myself and my interactions with people in that way.

I see humans as this—we all are this cell of consciousness, you could maybe imagine this like an energy body, like an energy bubble. It's not like I can see that. I don't. Sometimes I do, but not normally, I don't see your energy bubble right now, for example. So, no, I'm not one of these people who has these visions all the time. I'm also not a designer who could represent it, I'm not qualified to do that, but at some point someone will be able to make a visual representation of this.

I don’t think it's too difficult, and I have seen some visual representations which are very close to how I see it as well. So if we see ourselves as an energy bubble and this is a cell of consciousness within, imagine eight billion people on the planet, all cells of consciousness, and we're constantly moving through and alongside and in and out of each other. We're actually interacting, we each have a semi-permeable membrane, there are no fixed boundaries. So no wonder we sometimes have difficulties with boundaries, right? Or no wonder we are influenced by someone else's energy. Or no wonder we have this very clear in our minds, “Oh when I meet so and so, I'm going to tell them such and such” and the moment they come and start talking, your whole narrative changes, and you start telling them something that they want to hear… Where did that come from? You know, that's where it comes from.

Kimberly

So this practice of Synchronosophy can have tremendous contributions to the larger cultural shifts, I would imagine.

Veronika

I would think so, and I actually see the individual as a microcosm, and that's why if we focus on one specific event and one adverse event and our so-called non-rational reaction to it, or overreaction to it, that is significant because that is one of these immature inner creatures sending a message, saying, I'm ready, Hey, I'm ready, look at me, look at me. And then I go there and I go through that process and I take it through the imagination and it can be, it could be through dance, for example.

That would be, and I have done that sometimes, my daughter who is also much more a performer and she has done process work, she uses movement much more than I do, she's also an artist, she uses drawing, you can then translate the movement into a drawing. We did interesting exercises, we'd sometimes exchange ideas like that. So the idea is to switch channels, you take it into the movement and then it becomes, as you say, becomes joyous. And why does it become joyous? It's because you allow this inner being to have an expression. It's like you are becoming the parent who is discovering this five-month-old baby on the floor. And you are both. You become both.

Kimberly

Yeah, yeah, that's so beautiful. That's, it's in a bad is truly where I this is this is the medicine that the world needs right now. With all the posturing and power and to be able to imagine the fragile inner beings that are looking, just looking to be held in compassion and given voice.

Veronika

And then what happens then when you have given voice to this fragile, vulnerable, being, then you get to the potential. So you have to get there first, because every immature being, all it wants is to belong.

That's what it wants. So we have these beings inside us that want to belong. So with this practice, we can bring these vulnerable, immature inner beings in by discovering the potential. And you say, OK…, there are different questions you can ask. That's the practice. You have a range of possibilities how to go through that door and also to integrate that potential and to activate it. In the end we don’t just close the cycle but take it around further because it's not a cycle, it’s going around the spiral to the next level. And that is where the integration happens.

Whenever you integrate just one element in this way, that contributes to the whole. Because it's not like you're doing this to just ‘this part of you’, because there it's not ‘a part of you’, it's one of your inner creatures, and every inner creature affects everything.

It’s the same principle, how we can work with individual, apparently small things, we can make these transformational shifts, and then, bit by bit, not in a linear fashion but in the way how any life grows really. How does life grow? It doesn't grow linearly. It always grows in spirals and this is the spiral of growth. You're not actually doing this, all you're doing is giving a little stimulus here and there. So you give another little impulse and then you leave it, and then another little impulse and then you leave it so you don't push—it's like a swing. If you keep pushing, you're pushing further away. You have to let it come back. You have to let it complete the cycle. That's also very important.

Kimberly

But this is just so profound, I love that you brought up the word part because you said it's not a part of you. And you just wrote about that a few weeks ago. And I'm guilty of that. It's how we talk about this part of me and then this part of me and even some of the voice dialogue that was the therapy that I did a lot of where you talk to different parts of yourself. And and your image of the torus, the spiral helps sort of smooth that out because it's too compartmentalized otherwise.

Anyway, so I'm I want to ask you, gosh, this is just such a conversation. We have like six minutes left. We can go over a little bit. But I wanted to ask you, how has

You've been working with this since 1999. Is there anything that surprised you or changed since you first began? I know the whole thing is evolving, but is there anything that's really surprised you along the way?

Veronika

Well, I would say it surprises me all the time because I really never know what's going to happen. I think that is surprising to a lot of people when I say that. But for me, the biggest kind of bugger, my immature inner creature was to feel inadequate. Always. As a child, I always felt that, and I was actually thinking about that yesterday, if I had been born and brought up in the current transgender, gender dysphoria kind of atmosphere, I probably would have been put into a program for transgendering. Because I wanted to be like everyone else. And everyone else in my surroundings was male.

Even growing up in an Arabic culture, my parents had four children because the word in Arabic for child and boy is the same. I didn't count. That didn't feel good. It just, I wanted to be there too. I was there but it always felt like I was kind of an afterthought, that's just how it was.

But I do believe that these irritations – because I started with the question, What is the good reason for negative experience before I received this mental download – I would say now that it is the negative experience that makes us alert. I don't notice my toes when everything is fine, but I knock my little toe and then I notice it. It is the pain that makes us notice.

So that is one thing. The other thing is that if we notice these little negative things and start working with them, then it doesn't have to become so bad. The only reason why, in my humble opinion, we have this huge mental health crisis and all these terrible situations and violence and whatnot is because so much has been suppressed and neglected for so long. And we can experience this in our own life and we can experience it in the collective.

But the only experience we can really work with is our own. I can't go and sort out the world. It's not my job. But it's my job to sort out my own stuff. What was the biggest surprise – or what is continuously is the biggest surprise – is that working with this map of the inner landscape, almost every single time it teaches me something new.

Only recently I came, only a couple of weeks ago, I came against this inadequacy again. And I'm just as exasperated as everyone else when that happens. It's not like, great, there we go again. I think, Not again! I feel that too. I'm not just enlightened, meditating, whatever, floating somewhere above the ground. No, it's right there and it feels painful and it feels irritating. And that's how I want to feel it, because if it didn't feel irritating, it would be nothing.

So I felt this inadequacy yet again. And my first reaction is, of course, I don't believe this! And it came while I was writing the chapter on the sense of unknowing. I was writing about that and then I thought, you know what? This is what I'm going to do with it this time. So I was doing something different from what I usually do. I didn't try to fit it somewhere into a box, where it's kind of cozy and comfortable. No, I just let it be with a sense of unknowing.

And I, I wouldn't say I sat with it because I just live my life and do whatever, and that is the beauty of this practice also that it's not a separate practice — well, sometimes you have to take a little bit of time out, of course, to do an exercise. But once you get used to it, it flows very naturally in and out of everyday life. You also don't need to do it every day. I call it practice on demand. You only practice when something irritates you. Otherwise, you can forget about it.

It’s a tool that you have. It's just your special little power tool box, your toolkit, and then you can pull it out whenever you need it. And what I did there was just hold it. I said, okay, inadequate. I don't know what this is about. I just accept and I'm just holding it in this sense of unknowing. After some time, and it took a while. But I wasn't consciously thinking about it all the time. I just did other things. And then after about 48 hours, I had this sudden revelation. All of a sudden I felt this is totally okay. Of course I'm inadequate in lots of things, and why wouldn't I be?

It suddenly felt completely different than it had ever felt before. Before it was always, oh my God, I'm still not good enough. I added my familiar old story that always made me feel miserable.

That is how we add the story that makes us actually feel miserable. It's not the thing itself. It's always the story we add. And that's why we need to go into and through the story.

Kimberly

Yeah, the image I had when you were talking was of a seed. And you know, it's just under the surface, it's been planted. I would, if there was a quality that a seed might experience is inadequacy, because it's got this tough shell. It needs the sun and the rain and the seasons and all these other things to line up, but it's not going, Gosh darn it, I'm so inadequate. It's just in waiting and experiencing that feeling and that's sort of what you, in those two days where you decided to sit with it, I was just picturing this little seed just waiting for the rain.

Veronika

So there's a lot in that experience. It's also what you say with the seed, absolutely. There has to be the opportune moment. And that is what I call the Kairos or the Kairotrophy. The Kairos is the opportune moment. And then we nurture the organism in the opportune moment. It's like your body, you don't stuff all the food that you need for your whole lifetime into this body and then that's it, you're done. That's not how it works!

Kimberly

Okay. One last question, because I just this is just thrilling. And I love how, thank you for, you know, sharing your own personal journey with us too, and letting me share some of mine because I feel like it'll help people feel like how applicable and powerful this is. But speaking of Kairos.

Your very first post in the Synchronosophy series was published on the anniversary of your brother Jacob's death and sort of an unplanned but amazing synchronicity. So tell me a little bit about how life presents these right moments for us for transformation.

Veronika

Well, as I said, when we notice something that's irritating, when we notice something that's painful, I mean, when Jakob died, that was obviously very unexpected. He was my youngest brother, I have four brothers, and he was the youngest.

He left home at the age of 19 and then became an adventurer and went traveling and actually never came back. All we had from him was letters and some artwork. He was also very creative, very artistic. And then he sailed across the Atlantic with some other buddies who he met along the way, from Senegal to Brazil or to Martinique first. And then in the end, well he died in a diving accident and he drowned on the 12th of January and that is of course a significant date always and I was in the process of starting this series, this publication and then I suddenly realized it's the 12th of January. Suddenly it felt really important to share that moment because after he died at first I of course I went through the cycles of grief. I went through the complete disbelief and that can't possibly be true. And then the anger and how can someone who is so brilliant and creative and beautiful and healthy and young and the whole life in front of him, how can he just disappear? That was to me impossible. I couldn't, it's like my mind just couldn't integrate it. But a few days after he died, he appeared to me. It wasn't a dream, it was just, I suddenly, I had this presence. I was at the time also pregnant with my youngest daughter. And so that was when the grief hit. His girlfriend at the time was pregnant with his son.

And were two other, two other of my sisters-in-law were also pregnant. And so we had four children born in that year. So it was a significant year in our family, I would say. It was quite extraordinary.

Well, when he appeared to me, it was like there was his face and it was in this golden light and with his big smile telling me that he's okay, but also now it's your turn. And what it meant to me was that he was one of these rare people who really lived life on his own terms. He decided he was going to go to Africa. He had planned to come back, but then sold his ticket and just continued. It was quite a spontaneous thing and I think he did what he had to do. What it meant to me was that whatever my little life I was stuck in, I had to step out of that.

It meant that I had to find my own path. Not that I follow his, of course, but it was about giving me a kick up the backside to follow my path. The other significant synchronicity that happened there was that he had sent me—we exchanged letters, it was before the internet— so I had received a letter from him not so long before, where he told me that they're expecting the baby. And I had told him about mine. And he sent a drawing. And I had given that drawing to a framer. It was on the back of the letter, and I'd given that to someone to have it framed. The drawing showed him, I'm sure it was him. It was a figure standing on the edge of the world, and with another figure in the ocean and pulling him out of the ocean. That was really, I think he had seen his own death before it happened.

Kimberly

And that, my goodness, I just got chills. So this was a very powerful initiation in your life, yeah.

Veronika

It was. But then that was in 1987. So it took another 12 years before I started this writing. That also empowered me to take a few steps I needed to take. It was then, I realised, this is my life and I have to do what I have to do.

Kimberly

And what beautiful things that have come from that. know, extraordinary, extraordinary work that you've brought into the world and are bringing into the world because of some deep, deep pain, and not just through your brother, but through all the ancestral and your marriage and the offering—I see it almost as if the seed is unfurling now.

Veronika

I think that is how it is for everyone. And it is continuing. I still don't know what's going to happen with this. And that's the beauty of it. I would say it has, the work has transformed me, obviously.

When I write, I also have become a writer in the process. I wasn't really a writer before. I was a translator. I was a literary translator, but it's very different to write your own work.

Kimberly

Oh you're very prolific. You're an amazing writer and it's complex, but so accessible at the same time.

Veronika

But yes, I can write like this because I trust the process. I actually, when I start a post and with my previous issue of course, if you feel inadequate, you are also a perfectionist, the two go together, as you probably know. So, and with that, I would have never been able to write like this. I would be exhausted.

But because I completely trust the process, I am in constant dialogue with this writing.

It is almost as if it is writing through me and I have had times with Synchronosophy where I said Okay. Enough! I've done enough now, get a life! I'm talking to it and saying Why does it always have to be me writing about this?

Kimberly

Well, you're receiving the call and the opportune moment is, you I've always said—I'm a bad strategizer and I love that you reframed that for me because for me, I think it's just that I have to feel that opportune moment. I can't force something. So.

Veronika

Yeah, yeah. And there's something really important about the opportune moment. It's also what is called a sensitive phase. think it was Maria Montessori who called it sensitive phases in children. I think it was her. That, you don't, also in Steiner schools, Waldorf education, you don't teach children something that they're not ready for. These things are really important. And that is Synchronosophy as well. So you observe, find these sensitive moments, the growing and the unfolding and the maturing process doesn't stop only because your body has grown up, kind of…

Kimberly

And it's so much more easeful. I feel a grace throughout this whole conversation, I feel a grace. And even the kind of grace that says, Well, it's I’m not excluding anything. I said something earlier about you're not doing this, but this and you're like, Well, actually, you're doing that too. It's so inclusive.

Veronika

Yeah. And if something is not integrated, it's only because either it's still somewhere in the wilderness or in the permafrost, it's not ready. Or it is ready, but you're not ready and you haven't understood it yet.

And that's what I kind of wanted to say with the writing of this book, even though I already have the book, I've written it, I published it 11 years ago with all the workbooks and everything. But this time, the writing itself teaches me new things.

And that is the beauty of it, that it is really writing through me. It's not channeling. I don't know really how to explain it, but it's really a very interactive process for me.

I go into it, I kind of know what I'm going to do, I have a kind of outline, but it's also very fluid. It's like if it doesn't go further, then I say, Okay, there's probably something that I haven't quite understood, so I take a step back and then let something else take over. So it is really like that. I don't know exactly what the book will be until I've written it. And I love that.

It's an adventure. As well as the inner world is an adventure. There's always so much to discover, but also this, the creative process. I just think, just wish I could, I could transmit that to everyone because it's, just such a beautiful thing. It's of course different for everyone, different mediums. It can be dance. It can be textiles, and I've also done some textile but I knew always that textile —although I can do it and I'm reasonably good at it—but it's not like the writing for me even though it was much harder for me to get through with the writing. That was much much harder.

Kimberly

Wow. So when you so would you recommend those that are listening that are like, okay, how do I, I want to start and is that so what's the process now? It lives on Substack, do you people to go back to the book you just held up on the zoom screen or—

Veronika

I don't want anyone to do anything. I don't want to tell people what to do. So what I'm planning to do first, I have to take a little break because it's pretty intense, even though writing is fun. It's also pretty exhausting. And I think my dear husband is also happy when I take a break because he gets nicer food.

But the next step for me is I'm going to write volume two. And it will be about the practice. So the Synchronosophy that lives on Substack now is the background. There's so much more I could say to every single chapter, of course. But that's not the point.

The point is to get these snippets out, and then it means to you whatever it means to you. But you can always go back to it and check against it because of course it comes from a place where it's already been digested and where it's explained in a way that relates really to everyday experience because that's where it comes from.

What I will do next is I have these workbooks, which are very beautiful, and I'm going to go through the whole map of the Noctarine, the map of consciousness, as it came to me originally, and I will go through all these individual faculties, through all these nodes, and because they're like portals into the inner world, every single one.

I hope that I can do it in a fun way because I think it has to be fun. It has to be an exploration. It has to be not something that you have to force yourself to do, but that you look forward to doing.

I also want to encourage people to find what their own channels are. I had a question the other day, I think it was Jamie Millard who asked, and why are there eight faculties? And I said, yeah, well, this is how it came. It's also, it doesn't have to be like that. If you have another faculty coming in and say, well, hey, she's forgotten one. Well, invite it in! It's fine!

Kimberly

Yeah. I love that. Everybody's welcome.

Veronika

Everybody's welcome. Also my practices are not necessarily someone else's practices. I was talking about it the other day, we have a little community project where we meet once a week and we were talking about visualization and how to some people it comes easy and I'm one of these people who is very visual and I can I just close my eyes and see stories in my head. But other people don't.

You don't have to do that. It doesn't have to be visual. You can do a drawing or you can have an association. You can just say, what does it remind me of? Then that reminder, that already creates a story.

That connection. So, and that's what I want to do in the practice part. So Synchronosophy is the foundation. This is where it came from. This is why it came through me. Even though I still sometimes think Why, but Okay, it did. It wanted to.

So it did and there it is and so I continue with it and I continue to dance with it.

Kimberly

So beautiful. Veronika. I have to wrap this up, but I want to just say, In my perfect world, these eight Noctarines that you step into, I want you to pair with an animator and do these like five minute beautiful animations of them—that's how I picture it. It's like, it has to be animated in these little short videos, that would be my dream come true.

Veronika

I think that will happen. I actually have an animator in the family, but we haven't spoken about this, but I do have, and it doesn't have to be him. It's actually the long-term boyfriend of my daughter who lives in London. So he is an animator. So I have access to animators in my life, but I don't want to suggest it to anyone. It can also come from somewhere completely different.

So that's how I see it too, I love that you feel that it resonates with you because when I started writing, I didn't know. I'd been writing for 24 years, on and off, of course, basically in a void.

I had some websites which are no longer functioning and I had a few followers and some are on Substack as well but nothing significantly grew and I think it just wasn't ready. And when I started to write again and I talked to some friends and they said, why don't you try Substack? And I reluctantly turned to Substack and started. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I totally see it like that it will find its own people. That's not up to me. When you write a book, it's your baby, and this baby is already 25 years old. So, I think it's time for it to leave home.

Kimberly

Time to put it on a train.

Oh man, I love you, Veronika. This is just extraordinary, extraordinary work. And it's such an honor to have spent this wonderful hour and a half with you today.

Veronika Bond

Thank you.

Addendum by Veronika

During our conversation you mentioned a traumatic experience at the age of 5.5 months and connected this with an overwhelming sense of longing. I failed to answer your questions, Kimberly, in a coherent way, because this is not the type of situation I usually deal with in Synchronosophy and the associated practice.

I work explicitly with the subjective experience. The entry point is always an adverse event with the spontaneous emotional response to that event. In this situation, the adverse event happened so early in your life that a conscious personal memory is unlikely. What you remember is the story of the adverse event as told to you by your parents. That’s not your own subjective experience. It is what you have adopted as your story about that experience.

The sense of overwhelming longing which you associate with the event may well be related to it — within our living organism of Consciousness everything is connected — but it is unlikely your initial immediate spontaneous emotional response. So the connection between the longing and the event is made via a rational external more ‘objective’ route, because the human mind is always in search of explanations to achieve coherence, which reestablishes the internal equilibrium.

The adverse event itself must have been terrifying and totally overwhelming for you at barely 6 months old. The overwhelming sense of longing is most likely a compensatory secondary response which the organism produces in order to cope with the initial very real threat and terror. For you in that moment it may well have been a near death experience.

In order to return to the original experience, which will be raw and primordial and intense, and possibly scary, I would suggest to go through this experience with a trusted qualified therapist or other companion to hold the space for you. The emotional experience is still within you. It is stored within the bones, nervous system, every fibre of your body, and it can be accessed through the emotions and the body.

The emotional experience will provide some release and relief, but the primary purpose of emotions is not to act as a vent to let off inner pressure. The emotions are primarily messengers. So you need to receive this emotional message, which is currently covered up and protected under this blanket of longing. It is perhaps the blanket your mother wrapped you in as soon as she found you…?

Lift that blanket gently and preferably in the presence of someone who can hold the space for you.

When you have received that message you can use this information and follow the sequence of the Concilium of Inner Wisdom described in chapters 24/25 of Synchronosophy.