Communication That Is So Much More Than Words

The Power of Community and Communication

She sits in her room in her new home in Brandenburg, overlooking the high trees in her garden. The sun is flooding into the room. Sabeth describes the atmosphere as, “soft, lazy and slow, the seeds of the trees are floating in the air like snow. We live in an old stone house and in the summer it’s really cool inside. I was outside in the sun before, working with my horse Svipa. Now it feels good to be inside but seeing the sun shining outside. There is a nice transition between the heat outside and the inside coolness of the house.”

Our conversation takes us on a journey through her time in university, her dedication, and her passion for her intellectual path. And how life took a rather unexpected turn. We talk about her vision; the dream of a space for community, learning, and healing. For Sabeth, communication has always been an integral part of her life and it is so much more than words for her.

A tangible space for holistic experiencing and learning

“What I’m really interested in is creating a very tangible space for holistic experiencing and learning. I feel the space itself and especially how close it is to nature is an important aspect for me, as well as the culture of being together. My new home in Brandenburg is a huge house from 1806 which I bought together with two friends a year ago. Right now, we are in the phase of exploring and experimenting with communal living and co-creating. For the future, we want to offer spaces for creative people and formats that find their own questions and answers for what a good life is about. Already now many friends visit us and get inspired by the place itself: an unpolished house, old and new, rough, and romantic with a lot of space for visions to be alive and hands to work together. I want that people can come here and be inspired to reconnect to what it means for them to live a good life.”

She says, “Moving to the countryside (only having oven heating) is a process and a wild experiment. I do believe that we need places for such experiments that bring dreams into tangible forms. Life is there to be explored and maybe we fail, and then we try again, or we try differently, but to dare to dream and act upon it touches me a lot.”

Communication is so much more than words

“I feel a great calling to support people in connecting to their dreams and their resources. Especially in challenging times of their life such as experiences of grief and loss. I do believe that we find great wisdom and power in the hard times of our biographies. With my work as a Pantarei Practitioner and as a Nonviolent Communication Facilitator I want to help people connect to this inner richness. And by that, enlarge communication with ourselves and others.  In the end, it always comes back to how we relate to the world. All relationships are communication and communication is so much more than words.”

“I was always interested in meeting people in existential moments of transition and change.”

Sabeth grew up in the countryside in Germany and moved to Berlin Prenzlauer Berg when she was 16. For her, it was a huge transition and she really enjoyed it. After High school she studied Media Science and Philosophy in Berlin and Istanbul. “I was on a very intellectual path. I wanted to become a teacher at university, and I was about to enroll in a PhD program after my Master’s degree. But already during my studies, I struggled with being and working so much in theory that I started thinking about becoming a midwife.

I remember that I wanted to be in contact with existential situations that are very fundamental. Being a midwife or doing something like that would get me in contact with life itself, I thought. I never truly considered being a midwife. For me it was always a metaphor of being interested in something ordinary and daily, but still very existential and fundamental. After university, I started working as a project manager at a cultural institution. Already then, the dream of moving outside of Berlin became bigger.

I’ve always been drawn to nature and I was very inspired and influenced by my good friend, an older woman who lived on a farm in a remote and rural area in Norway. I used to visit her farm at least once a year. And since then, over the past 10 years, it has become a big calling for me to move to the countryside and create a different kind of living space there.

 “Through touch, I can sense my clients and the surroundings.”

A few years ago, Sabeth came in touch with the Pantarei Approach and was instantly drawn to the approach and the training. She is now working as a full-time practitioner in Berlin and in Brandenburg. Her eyes sparkle when she says: “For me, the Pantarei Approach is very much about cultivating a culture of being present. Being present for yourself, for others, the collective, and the environment. The Pantarei Approach has taught me to find my own way, to listen to my heart, and to align my actions in life with that.”

The importance of acknowledging transitions

“The topic of transitions for me touches so many different aspects. Transition is something that happens naturally to all of us all the time. And for me, it needs time, space, and awareness. Change happens anyway, but I’m interested in what happens when we give it space. And when we find different ways of getting in touch with what is in transition. What is it that transforms into a different state and what’s my part in reshaping it? Oftentimes we don’t have control over what happens. So it’s also about learning to lose control and recognizing that we are able to shape so many things in our personal life.”

Being aware that things are moving

“For me, transition happens in a sacred space, where there is awareness for a topic that needs time to unfold. To be able to be present, to be felt, and to be seen and sensed in its profoundness and in its complexity. I think if I’m aware of transition I don’t overstep my boundaries and what’s present for myself. And if I’m aware of that, I can also deal with unpleasant feelings and in the end find strength in them. Sadness and grief can ground me because they can tell me what I really love and be a guide to what is important in my life. I think being aware of transition brings depth and guidance to our life.”

“Sometimes we simply need to learn how to get in touch with feelings that are culturally not as accepted and labeled as bad, such as anger, sadness, boredom, or even grief. For me, it is magical to find the resources in these hard and difficult feelings. When we look closer at our problems or difficulties, feelings like passion, joy, love will be there too. There is so much richness in us. In the end, this is what healing means for me, letting go of the idea of getting rid of a problem. Rather, befriending it and finding different perspectives. And I think this is what makes us fully alive. And with this feeling of fully being alive, we cannot tolerate things that don’t serve us anymore in our own life or even in society.”

In these wild and uncertain times, what do you think people need right now?

“I think people, especially now need to get an embodied sense and awareness on how this time has influenced them. To be at all able to connect to what happened with us individually and globally and to digest that. To feel the frustration, to feel the fear of maybe losing a parent or a person close to you, the overall loss of normality as we knew it before, and the uncertainty of the situation. It’s such a wild mixture of contradictory feelings and experiences.

From my perspective, the Pantarei Approach can support people so much right now. One of the greatest gifts of the Pantarei Approach is to look at things that are present simultaneously without creating hierarchies between them, but first bring them to a safe surface to be felt and looked at. Already this offers the possibility of digesting. We can observe and realize what the consequences for ourselves and our close surroundings are, and from this safe space of sensing, digesting, and integrating we can find the first steps for action. It brings a very real aspect of creation and I think that is needed now. So many of us stopped creating and dreaming and wishing for something, but the world needs that.”

Last thoughts you’d like to share?

“As a Pantarei Approach practitioner, I want my clients to reconnect to their essence. For me, this means, to all their wishes, experiences, shadows, and strengths. Working with the body shows me again and again what it means to embody and to really sense and feel ourselves. And how much this can create change in our lives. When I meet a client I listen to their experience, but I also touch their wishes, their love, their sadness. I touch their capacity to let go, to invite, and to integrate and heal. It is a great journey to accompany people in that way and learn together what it means to be alive and to be present.”

Sabeth gives one-on-one sessions in Berlin, Brandenburg, and online.

You can get in touch with Sabeth via her Website http://sabeth-kerkhoff.de/ or write her an email

in**@sa*************.de











 

By Lena-Philine Zinser

Photos by Johannes Berger