When I was 15 I spent months in bed, crying over the extinction of species.

My mother called it a climate depression. I now call it my first dark night of the soul.

It broke my heart open, and sent me searching. I found a book on my parents’ shelf: The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. I read it until almost every sentence was underlined. I wrote notes by hand and kept them in my wallet for five years, something to reach for when the darkness crept back in.

That was the beginning of 23 years of Buddhist philosophy and practice. Not as a belief system, but as a daily discipline.

My parents were deeply political people. They raised me to believe that being alive means doing something with it. My mother put it simply:

“Push the little corner of reality in a better direction than when you got here.”

I have tried to do that in every chapter of my life since.

I lost my father when I was 20. Then I threw myself into the work — two master’s degrees, environmental planning and then environmental policy and regulation at the London School of Economics, a seat in Copenhagen City Council as a Green Party politician and climate spokesperson. I made what I’m still proud of: the most ambitious climate plan our local government had seen, and the implementation of doughnut economics accounting in a genuinely new way.

Then the month I got elected, my mother was diagnosed with cancer.

I ran my political campaign and watched her die at the same time. She was the most precious person in my whole life. Losing her cracked something open that politics could no longer fill. She was part of the reason I had gone into that world. With her gone, I started to ask harder questions about where change actually comes from.

Because here’s what I kept seeing: the politicians we collectively elect are a reflection of our collective consciousness. And that consciousness — mine included — was still running on fear, scarcity, separation. No amount of policy changes that from the outside.

So at the end of my term, I left.

I didn’t leave for a holiday. I left to go all the way in.

I spent a year in a deeply healing tantric, somatic, trauma-informed certification — learning to work with the body and the psyche at a level I’d never accessed before. Then I moved to Costa Rica and built an off-grid container home. I lived close to the land, close to community, close to something that felt true.

Then I came back to Denmark to birth my daughter.

The first days postpartum broke me in a way nothing else ever had. I punched my fist into the wall. My whole body ached from exhaustion and grief. My identity shattered into pieces I didn’t recognise. My body — softened by years of tantric practice — suddenly traumatised and shut down.

So I went to work. On myself.

In the tiny pockets of time during maternity leave I did a practice every single day. Reconnecting with my body. Waking up my energy field. Building — for the first time with total certainty — a connection with something I can only call spirit. I took a six-month sabbatical. We used every cent of our savings. My family thought I was losing it.

What I found in that state of consciousness is more beautiful than anything I have ever experienced. Blissful. Expansive. Certain. And it just keeps deepening.

After a while we moved back to Costa Rica — and then made the deliberate choice to leave for good, rather than contribute to the gentrification pricing locals out of their own home. We came back to Denmark and joined an intentional community: nine families, shared land, chickens, a garden, CrossFit together on Tuesday mornings, wine in the yard on a random Thursday night. A village. The kind of life I’d been theorising about for years, finally lived.

That’s what I teach from. Not a concept. An actual life.