Fight for your Soul

What is Sovereign Soul Academy?

Sovereign Soul Academy is a training space for inner warriors – a place where the body, the subtle energy field and the soul are trained together in one truly holistic system.

We, as a world society, stand at a threshold, we could say we´re watching and participating in a collapsing old world. However, this crisis metaphor can easily give us the wrong idea of what´s happening and what´s coming. The present situation is a complex mix of old-world structures, which are being streamlined into a sort of digital version that can then be teleported into the future. This phase of societal development is natural in the sense that our next frontier is no doubt outer space and quantum computering, and for that we need, on one level, a more streamlined order of things. Our main problem is, contrary to what many think, not this. Instead, the problem is the lack of development of the human being, alongside this Space/Quantum-Age fast approaching us. This academy is for developing the human capacity, to meet this future adequately.

So, what is this human capacity that needs to be developed, which I´m here talking about? Imagine yourself in a not so far future, where you will be Quantum-Scanned every time, you interact with anything or anybody. Quantum-Scanning (and other similar quantum technologies) is not happening now, since the quantum computer has not yet been launched, but it will be very soon. When this happens, the next thing will be an active scanning, meaning whatever is being scanned can and will be manipulated and changed according to the will of the scanning entity. What will it scan? Basically, what we will call “everything”, including your thoughts, emotions, and inner impulses and convictions. It will scan your bio-energy field, brain waves, heart impulse and what not, and map this in an instant, to show the scanner “who you are”, then manipulate and change according to desired outcome in the specific circumstance.

There is no turning back from this sci-fi future, and neither should there be. By embracing our future without vain resistance and, equally important, without the prevailing present nihilism, we can see what´s now being asked of us, as human beings. We now need to master our bodies, minds and emotions on an energetic level, to withstand the downside of this future, otherwise we will absolutely for sure see the dystopia come through of robotic humans, whose energy fields are being literally controlled (and of course actual robots), and them taking over, while our real human civilization is phased out, so the dystopia can run its full course.

As the main training method in this academy, to master ourselves on an energetic level, we use the ancient old Taoist Internal Arts. This energy-method does not need a modernized version to be functional for our use now, and is in fact, on the contrary, the most advanced energy-method in existence. However, there is indeed a sort of modernization process going on, but it happens in the way it is taught by the teacher and in the process it´s acquired by the student, where every single individual must take this task upon himself. To truly understand this fact, is not so easy when not already immersed in it; through acquiring proficiency in this system, you will yourself modernize the system inside yourself, and much of the learning pains are precisely this adjustment you will make yourself. The reason the Taoist Internal Arts are uniquely possible to module this way, is because they were made this way to begin with, as a universal system of sorts, or you could say a non-system. In more practical terms it means that this method utilizes the natural laws of nature on a very deep (quantum) level, which our bodies and energies are part of, and the old masters realized that nature/physics is based on a Yin/Yang polarity.

This polarity of Yin/Yang holds true for all levels of development, in all areas of life, and thus a method based on this simple yet illusive principle can be upgraded endlessly without changing its core. Furthermore, since we inhabit the same bodies as humans did thousands of years ago, we can use the exact same bodily methods as them and the modernization happens instead inside our energy fields and souls. In these mentioned spheres it’s primarily the complexity we can go beyond the old masters, not so much the depth (they went very deep). We need, like the old masters, to absorb the Yin/Yang theory and apply it to both our modern life-philosophy and to our training. We are in essence simply continuing the practice the old masters did in their lifetimes, where they themselves also needed to continually “modernize”; only have in mind that this “modernization” never did, and still does not, mean there is no standard or curriculum to strictly adhere to.

It´s important to emphasize that the main methods in this academy is Internal Martial Arts, thus techniques are most often, but not always, rooted in actual martial body movements. Any potential student should have no problem with having body movements founded in martial arts; the short version is that it helps one defend oneself and it grounds the movements onto functional and recognizable forms. It´s not, however, necessary to practice with physical combat in mind and we do not exactly do sparing between opponents. Sparring is rarely a good idea with the internal methods, but instead what´s called shadow boxing, with or without a partner, we do as default.

As a secondary approach, and as secondary training methods, we embrace other methods beyond Taoist Internal Arts, which can be said to be transformative, especially European methods we might not even know have these deeper elements, will be included. The European frame is to limit ourselves somewhat and because it helps to build internal roots, identity and self-knowledge for westerners, and because it´s what I personally know most about. However, for example Tibetan Buddhist methods, which are very useful to learn, will be included, and who can ignore Indias legacy of spiritual knowledge either! Then there is the heart teaching of Christ/Christianity which is invaluable to spiritual skill proficiency for any serious practitioner. I call all these “essential tools to survive a crazy world”, and I don´t see how anybody can go far without an essential toolbox of spiritual skills.

Thus, this academy broadens up its horizon in this particular way, and it also does it when it comes to how wide the teaching reaches towards the edges of the frame of an idea of an academy, in our part of the world, without being a cult of sorts. This because there will also be philosophical talks, which will be part of the training for the students who wish to fully participate and develop to full potential. It is my experience that identity and herein worldview, is a continuing development and refinement alongside the more transformative and ultimately spiritual side of the practice. In other words, if you don´t continuously restructure and reinvent your identity you will be without agency (in the best of the cases) and equally without philosophy you will be a lost person without a map. Now, please notice and ponder why there seems to be very few, if any, valid identity methods nowadays that can help the student enter the famous emptiness of the void (a stage on the spiritual path) and come out again with a healthy and functioning identity that corresponds to the new level of insight, gained through this stage of the journey. And then please ponder why there seems to be very few, if any, philosophers nowadays who can give us a vision of “who we are” and “where do we come from” and “where are we going”, aka the big questions. The answer to these lack-phenomena arises from the same place, when one can see with clarity the spiritual history of humankind. It takes some effort to sort out a lot of confusion and to track the history, but it is not only possible but also vital to do so. This is why we at the academy will have philosophical, historical, psychological, sociological and more talks and discussions, so as to track what these modern subjects have been missing of spiritual contend the last many decades. Here to mention that the new age spiritual movement, while being open to especially eastern spirituality didn’t have a very objective view on themselves and what they met from the East.

Some of the essential tools utilized in this academy, besides the Internal Arts, are:

• Maps of development – how individuals, cultures and values evolve, and why so many conflicts are developmental collisions. We go through these maps together, as talks and discussions.

• Archetypal lenses – how we can forge identities both everyday normal healthy understandings of ourselves, and also larger more heroic identities that are rooted in our history when mythic figures laid the foundation of identity itself, thus placing identity in its proper place, as cosmos´ subjective side that can never be ignored or left out, but instead must be played out by humans. We play out archetypes when useful in practice.

• Health protocols – acupuncture theory and acu-massage, various meditation methods for health and vitality, sitting qi-gong and nei-gong, and much more will be taught as part of the practice.

• Historical & Philosophical upgrading – there is an epidemic of wild unrooted speculation on historical and spiritual matters that spills into the view on the present situation and also the future and it´s science-fiction character. These mind pathologies have their origin in a lack of, especially, philosophers nowadays to guide us, leading to everyone having to create their own philosophy and from there scarce history knowledge most often is being distorted to fit. The confused understanding of the past and present is then projected into the future and then the result is a mess of really ungrounded ideas that is very disturbing for the mind. We have talks and discussions about these topics.

• Yin/Yang theory – this has a special place in our academy, since this is the theory which accompany the main method we use, the Taoist Internal Arts, and since it is the code of the matrix we are living in, in Taoist thought. Below is given a description of what Yin/Yang theory is, but keep in mind that this description is very short relative to the subject`s complexity and that according to Taoists the final understanding is beyond words. The way we will encounter this theory in the academy will be manyfold, and importantly the theory will always have to be embodied in the literal sense; there are no purely intellectual Taoists. From a teacher/student perspective you can be certain that nothing will be taught, which has not been lived first and thus we are talking about a lived philosophy more than a theory.

 

The paradox: duality and oneness

• Yin and Yang appear as two polarities,

• but through various acts of transformation, they reveal themselves to actually and always be expressions of one field, one Tao (Tao=way/god).

• It is possible to go very, very far in an analysis of any subject, using the yin/yang theory, and this is essential to learn.

• However, the Tao is a mystery, as we would say god/the creator/great spirit or whatever is.

The old masters who were most respected in ancient Imperial China were not only “enlightened” in some consciousness sense. They were instead those who, and this is unique among all the world´s spiritual traditions, could also clearly:

• feel and see and analyze the movement of yin and yang in everything,

• understand how these dualities arise and resolve through complicated transformations,

• live and learn from a place where oneness and polarity are both honored simultaneously.

 

A European Search for the Same Principle

Sovereign Soul Academy has a second mission alongside training the Taoist systems: to rediscover the internal arts of Europe, the forgotten ways European cultures have worked with body, energy, paradox and transformation/spirituality.

These European lineages are scattered, often unconscious, unfortunately most often watered down over time and rarely framed as “internal arts”. However, there are clearly traces of real depth in the following examples:

• Dances:

  • Flamenco: tension and release, stamping and stillness, masculine and feminine current, the deep “duende” that tears the heart open with majestic pride.

  • Tarantella / Tarantism: trance-dance as healing, shaking out poison and trauma.

  • Greek/Balkan traditional dances: high-stakes solo dance with the soul exposed, and for groups: circles, lines and spirals which regulate group energy, ground emotion, and rehearse belonging, but can also, like the solo dance, go high-stakes.

• Entertainment and ritual:

  • Ancient theatre and tragedy: crafted catharsis, where the community feels and discharges unbearable tensions together and for the few makes them transform heavily charged emotions into spiritual energy. On a mundane, but very powerful level, theatre shaped the public to become citizens of Athens, a legacy we carry with us today, as an internal art of democracy, which we now no more fully realize how works.

  • Commedia dell’arte: masks and archetypes that reveal hidden-drives and -patterns through play; an Italian street comedic theatre which in flashes could expose shadows with hilarious light.

  • Carnival traditions: temporary inversion of roles, release of shadow material, chaos in service of re-ordering, sexual tantric energy cultivation, and Dionysian frenzy.

  • Bullfights (ethics aside): a stylized dance with life/death; courage, beauty and brutality intertwined; in peaks functions as a gateway, a threshold, a Janus doorway.

• Specific transformative methods and myths:

  • Catharsis work: from Greek tragedy to modern therapeutic practice – using sound, movement and story to purge what is stuck.

  • Icon osmosis: contemplative exposure to sacred icons and imagery, allowing them to shape the inner field. Orthodox Christian spiritual method still in use today certain places.

  • The “Rocky Balboa” idol transmutation and similar modern pop culture stories: modern myths so powerful it can transmute states of mind, heart and even the spirit on collective levels. In this category we can place extraordinary music bands and songs as well.

  • The Olympic spirit: the ideal of Arete – excellence, honour, fair struggle culminating in connection to gods, by for a moment in (moral) victory to become a god yourself – as a spiritual practice hidden inside sport. Originally a funeral rite for warriors who had died in battle, where a sword-fight was reenacted as a shadow-fight; here we see a direct European equivalent to shadow-boxing of the Taoist Internal Martial artist, where the final fight is with oneself. Now a sadly misunderstood and thus underappreciated internal art of Europe which has been captured and dumbed down by mass culture. But however much we lost, we owe the concept of sports itself to the Olympics, which is actually - war transmuted into play.

• Warrior traditions:

  • Spartan legacy: the yang counterpart to Athens as Yin, in relative terms (Athenians where fierce warriors themselves). We have less physical artifacts and institutional legacies from Sparta compared to Athens, but back in their times Sparta was rightly regarded as the backbone of those virtues that made Athens/Greece special, thus many of the great Athenian philosophers, for example, praised Sparta as the true birthplace of philosophy, because while they spoke little, every word carried weight and was uncorrupted, like the Spartan warrior himself. The main European warrior traditions can be traced back through Sparta to the Roman army and from there throughout Europe.

  • Viking legacy: the Vikings had many vices and they lived in rough conditions that even the big empires of Europe, at the times, felt was not possible to conquer, but most importantly for us, they had one of the few very direct internal art methods of Europe, that we know of, in their Berserk. Odin, the main god in Norse mythology, was the protector of the Berserker warriors, and a shapeshifter himself; the Beserk was an induced (with mushrooms or without) trance-like fighting madness (shapeshifting), which mobilized internal forces of such magnitude that a berserker singlehandedly could take out whole groups of enemies. The saying went that “no enemy blade or arrow could find its place." A more controlled and more spiritual berserk is to be found in the Taoist Martial Arts as well.

  • European sword schools from Spain to France and beyond: highly refined embodiment of timing, distance, line, presence, and they furthermore clearly possessed body principles that resemble Internal Arts. I believe there is much more to these sword practices than we know of today, possibly through the Christ impulse combined with bodily principles and more. We see it in the knights as well. Most likely it even existed in antiquity, with a different internal set-up (e.g. Dionysos), and could perhaps also be found in the Roman Gladiator schools. These are disciplines worth of serious research for Internal Martial Artist.

Inside all of these above and more we can look for the same yin/yang logic & principles, and Taoist-level intelligence: Reawakening European Internal methods and European Internal Identity.

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The vision of this academy is therefore two-fold:

1. Train the Taoist internal arts deeply and honestly until proficiency,
   so that the yin/yang structure of reality becomes something you can feel in your bones.

2. At the same time, study and reawaken the European internal identity –
   the ways in which Europe has always had its own internal arts:

   • in how we dance our pain and joy, and transmute them,

   • in how we stage Dionysian catharsis and carnival,

   • in how we tell stories of transformation and heroism,

   • in how our warriors, mystics, artists and athletes have shaped their inner world.

The aim is not to “colonize” Taoist arts with European content, nor to abandon them for something local. It is instead to let them speak to each other:

• to see where flamenco already knows what Tai Chi Chuan knows about grounding and fire.

• where Greek theatre already understands what Qigong knows about energy through the inner organs.

• where the Olympic ideal already mirrors the discipline of the mind in Xing-Yi-Chuan.

• where Commedia dell’arte masks reveal universal archetypes, even better than any Easter system ever did.

In doing this, we:

• honour our Taoist teachers and lineages by taking their principles seriously;

• and we stop pretending that Europe has no inner lineages of its own.

There is a European history of internal arts without us that nonetheless runs through us, whether we know it or not. The severe and repeated purgings of esoteric knowledge in European history, such as the inquisition and the modernist dry-mind-tyranny have buried much Internal knowledge (though also purged superstition). Part of the philosophical work of Sovereign Soul Academy is to bring that history back into consciousness:

• so that European practitioners do not feel spiritually homeless,

• so that we can integrate Taoist wisdom without erasing our own roots,

• and so that our identity in this coming quantum age can be both globally connected and deeply grounded in the lands, stories and bodies we actually come from.

In short:

• Yin/Yang gives us a clear lens for how cosmos moves.

• Taoist internal arts show how to embody that lens, as a gold standard.

• European transformative arts remind us that we, too, have always been trying to live that paradox of duality and oneness – in our dances, our dramas, our warrior codes and our dreams.

 

This academy stands where these streams meet.

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