Laughing Through The Pain: Navigating Wellness

From Electro Beats to Inner Peace: Wouter Tavecchio's Journey to Spiritual Rejuvenation

• Richard Blake • Season 1 • Episode 16

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Wouter Tavecchio, the CEO of ID&T, founders of Tomorrowland, is the visionary entrepreneur who transformed the electronic dance music scene with Q-Dance and ID&T . He takes us on a heart-stirring odyssey from the pulsating epicenters of music festivals to the tranquil shores of self-discovery at the Mandali Retreat Center. Imagine stepping out of the world of non-stop festivity to embrace a life centered around wellness, community, and serenity - Wouter's story is a testament to this profound transition, and it's one he's eager to share with us.

Venture with us into the enchanting terrain of Lago D'Orta, Italy, where Wouter and his team have sculpted a haven for spiritual rejuvenation - the Mandali Retreat Center. Here, the dance of life slows to the rhythm of nature, and every detail is steeped in the philosophy of sustainable living and inclusivity. Wouter guides us through the challenges and triumphs of creating a space where individuals from around the globe come to find peace, offering an intimate look at how the land's energy is harnessed to enrich the soul.

And what of the tangible impact of such a place on today's world? Wouter doesn't shy away from the pressing mental health crises facing our communities, especially among the youth. He sheds light on the powerful collaborations with academia, innovative mental health initiatives, and the potential of MDMA therapy to transform lives. Amidst the backdrop of our conversation, the simple yet profound practice of gratitude emerges as a beacon of hope. Join us for an episode that is not merely a conversation but a bridge to a more mindful and heartfelt way of being.

Wouter Podcast Notes

2.08 - Link to Q Dance 
https://www.q-dance.com/en/

04.05 - Link to ID&T
https://www.id-t.com/

05.53 - Link to The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
https://www.amazon.com/Tibetan-Book-Dead-Complete-Translation/dp/0143104942

13.14 - Link to Working with People
https://www.workingwithpeopletrainings.com/

15.20 - Link to Mandali (retreat centre)
https://mandali.org/

19.59 - Link to Path of Love
https://pathretreats.com/

21.03 - Link to Eco Psychology
https://www.amazon.com/Ecopsychology-Craig-Chalquist/dp/0981970656

26.40 - Link to Rupert Spira
https://rupertspira.com/

27.06 - Link to Richard Schwartz
https://ifs-institute.com/about-us/richard-c-schwartz-phd

48.20 - Link to long study on MDMA assisted therapy and Rick Doblin\
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10660711/#:~:text=One%20such%20pharmacological%20drug%2C%203,reduction%20in%20PTSD%20%5B1%5D.

49.13 - Link to Netflix - How to Change your Mind?
https://www.netflix.com/title/80229847

52.43 - Link to MDMA trials in the US
https://nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02886-x

54.05 - Link to Feely App
https://www.feely.se/

Find us on Instagram
Richard @The_Breath_Geek
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl_gOq4wzRjwkwdjYycAeng
Webiste - www.TheBreathGeek.com
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Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to Laughing Through the Pain Navigating Wellness with me, andrew Esam, my co-host, richard L Blake, and today we have Wouter Trabekio. Wouter is an entrepreneur and in 1998 he founded Q-Dance, the biggest festival brand in the Netherlands. After merging with ID&T in 2006, he became CEO of the resulting company until it was sold in 2012. Bringing people together to celebrate life has always been a thread running through Wouter's work, not only in the festival industry, but also by helping people find their inner peace at the spiritual retreat center Mandali that he built in Italy. Wouter, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Speaker 2:

Rich. How are you?

Speaker 1:

doing.

Speaker 3:

I'm good. Thanks, yeah, I'm good. Hair's down today, as we've noticed. Yeah, it's a bit out of control, but we're going to work with it.

Speaker 1:

So kicking off, Wouter, we've obviously heard a little bit about your journey in the festival event space Sounds like a bit of a wild ride. Can you talk us through that a little bit?

Speaker 2:

event space sounds like a bit of a wild ride. Uh, can you talk us through that a little bit? Yeah, me and my friend wilderick, who I also found at montalewith, we started organizing parties in 98 very small ones, like everybody does at the end of their school, high school, then they throw a party and then we made some money on it. And then we wow, this must be a nice job to have. So there was only 50 people there. Then we did a bigger one for 200 people.

Speaker 2:

Slowly but surely it felt like this could actually become a field we could work in. And then we did one for 400, 800, 1,000. And then we went to the Chamber of Commerce battling who was going to write their names down, because you would have to get a lot of mail. So I said I'll be the one just write my name down, and that meant in retrospect that I was the founder of the company. Wow. And so that was a lucky guess from me to go to the Chamber of Commerce that day, because it ended up after a couple of years that we actually had something going there with Q-Dance, which stands for quality dance.

Speaker 2:

We had the strategy of quality is the best strategy, so we just wanted to give the best parties. We're not out there to make money. So we lost a lot of money in the beginning, but we had a lot of fun. And up until the day that we had a lot of fun, and up until the day that we had maybe 3,000 people in the venues, it wasn't a profitable business. But afterwards we earned some money and with events, if you go from 3,000 to 6,000, all of a sudden you can earn hundreds of thousands of guilders back then, or euros.

Speaker 2:

So it turned into a business. We hired some people and then slowly, slowly but surely, it really grew into a bigger brand and I had a marketing background. So I stepped into a field of a lot of cowboys just doing parties and I brought some knowledge to the field of how to actually brand something. So we segmented and we positioned and we had the tone of voice, sound, logos, style and we we thought we had something outstanding there and in retrospect that really worked you mentioned, so I um, it's a brand, so are you doing many different types of of festivals and dances and things like that?

Speaker 2:

yeah, so q dance what I just spoke about is the company I founded, and then Q-Dance. We thought it would be nice if all the brands the festival brands or the event brands themselves had a Q in the name. So one of our events is called Defcon 1, and instead of writing it with a C, we wrote it with a Q. And another event was called House Classics instead with a C, we wrote it with a Q. And another event was called House Classics, instead of with a C, with a Q, and Climax, instead of with a C, with a Q. So we had a sort of an endorsement of all our event brands with this letter Q. So this made it into a sort of a family brand.

Speaker 2:

And so in 2006, we merged with idnt, which was back then the the biggest party company in the netherlands or event festival company in the netherlands. They were heading down, losing a lot of money. We were just on our way up. Uh, the ceo and founder of that company was another of one of my best friends and he asked us to merge and we did, and he left afterwards from his ceo position. I took over the ceo position and I was 30 back then. So, uh, we had 140 people in the company. So I was quite young and, um, it had its upsides and its downsides to be a young ceo yeah, what's it like working with your friends as well?

Speaker 1:

I imagine that brings extra bit of heat to some scenarios.

Speaker 2:

But imagine, the highs are pretty high, yeah I would say it allows more heat, because if you're just there with a business partner, you want to, yeah, be professional, but with a friend there you can also get emotional. And we always felt that was an advantage we had, because we went deeper into the matter and also asked each other how do you feel about that, instead of just what do you think. And as a result, we said I'm only going to do business with friends. So for us it worked. But it doesn't mean that we didn't run into each other. Obviously we did, but there was a larger field of what we allowed each other to say and to feel.

Speaker 1:

And so, how did your journey into wellness or being begin from that kind of festival party start?

Speaker 2:

or being begin from that kind of festival party start. I attended a retreat in the Netherlands after having read the book, the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which was given to me by my brother-in-law, who is a hardcore Buddhist, I would say he did a three-year retreat and then afterwards he gave me the book. Then I was 26. I started trying to do the meditations that were offered there and really taking a sort of a deep dive in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition which is still my root path, I would say and started visiting retreats of Sokyal Rinpoche, the author of the Tibetan book of living and dying. But, as you might know, it's also a very broad tradition with very strong instructions on how to meditate, how to inquire, how to do analytical meditation. So I felt a little bit like I can't get a grasp on it. I'm not a monk. I cannot do this while I'm at home. So I get very demotivated reading into it. I thought, ah, this is too much for me, too much for me. So that led to when I was 30 and I became the CEO of ID&T. It led to me not knowing anymore whether I wanted to be in business because I read this book. But I also felt like I'm never going to get a monk, become a monk. So both worlds didn't really apply to me somehow and we made quite a few bucks back then so I could do whatever I want.

Speaker 2:

I traveled the world, I had the car I always wanted, I had bought a nice house and I didn't know what to do to get happy and to become less anxious. So what do people do when they can buy what they want? They don't feel like a spiritual path that I had ran into can help them. So my friend said why don't we go to India? Apparently, people go to India with these kind of issues. So we did and we booked a two-week silent retreat and that was the first real hardcore retreat I did and that changed my life. That changed my life After a couple of days of going to the front desk to ask the people please let me get out of here. They were trained, so they kept me there a couple of days. And then the fourth day, all of a sudden, the inner silence that I brought there anyway, I felt it and I saw the garden, I saw the Himalaya mountains and all of a sudden a sort of veil was pulled from my eyes and will never forget that.

Speaker 3:

I will never forget that it changed my life valter, that, uh, that that transition from the spiritual stuff, from the, uh, the festival stuff, do you see there's like parallels and overlaps between people's desire for ecstatic states from things like festivals and the kind of the pilgrimage as well. Most people have to travel a long way to go to a festival. Where do you see those, uh, those crossovers?

Speaker 2:

yeah, um, what I feel is this is from a personal experience perspective is that, uh, I had experience of transcending myself on the dance floor. So I was there with like-minded people, with a mass of like-minded people, maybe tens of thousands, sometimes listening to the same music that we all love in the weekend. So there's no stress, there was no yesterday, no tomorrow. So a less active mind, maybe Maybe due to a couple of beers or a little MDMA or a joint, but just in a different frequency altogether. And I had experiences on the dance floor that I really transcended this narrow-minded space I used to feel during the week and that became a sort of an addiction to really, yeah, be bigger than my personal self and that was really the natural high. Sometimes I also felt when I went to events, also without beers or joints or ecstasy. I just was lifted by the frequency of the mass or joint or ecstasy. I just was lifted by the frequency of the mass. And that was really very important in my younger years to experience that.

Speaker 2:

And then going to the retreats of Sokyal Rinpoche, this author of the Tibetan book of living and dying. I went to his retreats and one of his trademark practices was to rest in the nature of mind and since he's a Rinpoche and is very experienced and that tradition is all about that, he sometimes sat in front of the room and scanned the room while resting in the nature of the mind, and a couple of times the first couple of times I missed that I was like, okay, he seems to be relaxed and I'm also, but what's the big deal here? And then, maybe the fifth or the sixth time I remember I was in Australia he did it, but when he scanned the room he also looked at his students and he crossed my gaze and at that moment when he did, the whole room went white. I had a sort of a very Satori-like experience, an opening, an awakening experience in that specific moment, which lasted quite a while, where I completely transcended my person and my character, my ego, and that was one of the other very special moments I had in the beginning of walking this path that I thought, wow, this is very comparable to what I experienced during the event.

Speaker 2:

I just forgot about myself. So I felt and this is what I felt, and I'm sure you've felt that too, in experiences with either medicine plans or breath work or deep meditations is that there's this space where you're not so identified anymore with the person and you're just part of a bigger field that you recognize yourself to be, and so this is what I feel. Uh is very similar, although people ask me uh so from festivals to retreats, it's like uh I I sometimes say yeah, from heart music to heart, um, and on my business card it says for all your parties and retreats. So for me, I got used to to spending time in both spaces, but I'm not a businessman, I'm not a spiritual leader or teacher. I like to be somewhere in between.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, as you've known from working with people, I spent a fair bit of time with the Osho community and Osho's thing is about enjoying life. Zorba the Buddha he has this analogy of this man who can enjoy the pleasures of the world, the pleasures of the body, and transcend and be meditative. And I also think many traditions, they all have ecstasy as a part of their, uh, their practice, like the whirling dervishes. They're getting into these altered states, these ecstatic states from dancing around, and I think maybe it's just our Catholic Christian background, where everything's more about repression, that we think, oh, you can only connect with God if you're repressed and do it via the priest, but that's, that's not everything, is it? And then also you mentioned about people going to festivals and having these ecstatic states and healing processes without drugs.

Speaker 3:

It reminds me of this recent Conscious, connected Breathwork study they did, where they did holotropic breath work or they were just breathing passively, but they measured people's altered states so on a scale like one to five. They went around every 15 minutes being like how high are you? How altered is your state? One, two, three, four, five, please give us a thumbs up or fingers up. And of course, the people in conscious, connected breathing had all the way up to five out of five, you know off with other dimensions. But what they were really surprised about was in the placebo group, some of the people who were just breathing normally had quite high measures of altered states. They said, I'm feeling high, I'm feeling altered, and the authors of this study were saying, wow, we're really surprised about this. But what it's a testament to is the power of evocative music and social contagion. So if you go to a festival and everyone's high and you're not taking any drugs, you will get that social contagion as well. Definitely, yes, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Definitely, I was going to ask you about this so then that led you to mandali.

Speaker 1:

Can you talk a bit about what is Mandali?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So there's a whole period in between, obviously, that, coming back from India, we started to follow the teacher that taught this specific silence retreat and we followed her around for a couple of years and she rented places all over Europe but also in India, and we went to all these places with her. We followed her for seven years with a small Sangha group and halfway through we said, oh, you're renting all these places, don't you want to build your own, or at least have one center? It will save a lot of time and effort in the organization of energy because you're focused on what you're best at, and that's teaching. I said, yeah, but I don't have that kind of money and it's not going to happen. So we said we also don't have that money, but we have a big company who knows what's going to happen in the future? So let's just start looking for places. So we went to france looking at old mansions, old farms, old castles, abandoned castles. We went to spain, italy, back to the netherlands we were because we were based in the netherlands, and then we dropped the idea because we didn't have that kind of money, but then still, we thought it's actually a really good idea to do this.

Speaker 2:

But I was the CEO of event companies. I was like I'm going to build a retreat center and go to the bank and lend money or sell my shares. My parents thought already that I was part of a cult following this woman around and I had been part of a cult and I did this crazy ayahuasca retreats and the breathwork stuff, so they thought I'd lost it. My friends outside of the party business thought I'd lost it. So we were like are we insane thinking about this? Are we insane thinking about this?

Speaker 2:

Until the day we got a call from a broker, a real estate person in Italy, that said why don't you come here, look around here in the lake area in the north of Italy? And we went to a very specific lake, lago D'Orta, which is a more pristine, smaller lake, the most western lake, and he showed us around and we looked at some places. They were completely not what we liked. So we thought, okay, this is not gonna happen over here. And then that same day he called us back when we were almost on the way back to the airport. He said guys, something happened. There's this big, new, high up place and very old hotels for sale are. Are you interested to have a look. Because we were on the way, I said, yeah, but please come, because this won't be long on the market and it's really beautiful. So we went up there, uh, rebooked our flights and as soon as we stepped on the land we thought this is a really special place, also energetically. You just sometimes feel when you're in a place like, oh, this has it, this has it all, and for us it did. And then we went through the old hotel and then we came to a cliff and had this really most amazing view and then we thought, well, this is it, this is it.

Speaker 2:

And then we realized, shit, this lady that is selling is asking asking €600,000 for it. We do have money, but it's invested in our company and are we going to sell shares for it? So we said, no, let's call one of our rich friends and ask him if he wants to lend the €600,000. So he lent us the €600,000. And our idea was to start with a couple of youths NTPs and then do some smaller circles and groups and then see how it will play out. But then, a couple of months later, we started the talk of the sales of our company to SFX, which was an American initiative by Bob Sillerman, a very rich, billionaire guy who wanted wanted to do a sort of a roll-up in the international dance industry and bring all these companies together through the stock exchange, and back then we were the biggest electronic music event company in the world. So after a lengthy process we sold the company for 100 million euros, and this is when we got in a lot of money.

Speaker 2:

And then we thought let's build a retreat center and we were working together with this lady and this lady had been traveling all over the world she's also on.

Speaker 2:

Sanyasin was part of the Osho community in the very early days Not as early as the people of Path of Love, but maybe 15 years I would say 15 years younger and she had seen so many centers that she was very capable of helping us to say, okay, these are the logistics of a good center. People want to have single rooms Food is very important. Thick walls rooms food is very important, thick walls a lot of stuff that many retreat centers in the world but that most of them are not. Uh, we're not luxury, but we are high quality. It's a not-for-profit foundation that we run it with, so we're not in this business to make money. Uh, we got so money, so much money in from this uh sales that we okay, we put half into a project that's going to be of benefit to others and with the other half we're going to try and make more money. So this is how it came into existence.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I love that mention of the energy of places. One of the modules I did in my PhD was called Eco-Psychology and it is the psychology of place and it was taught by this guy he's written a few books, called Craig Chalquist, but he talks about how there's a place out here near where I live called Concord. So it's Concord, like the airplane, but people pronounce it Concord and for some reason there's so many fights in this place. There's always people fighting. It's always on the news. There's been a fight, a mass fight, and there's something in the name there of Concord. And he also talks about the Bay Area where we're living. It's the biggest estuary in North America and what is an estuary? It's a mixture of seawater and freshwater and that is what the Bay Area is. It's so diverse. There's so many people from different races and things like that, from all around the world. But then also you mentioned the actual energy of a place.

Speaker 3:

Andy and I were just in Sedona, which is famous for its vortices, and I'm you know I'm open to these types of things, but I start with a bit of skepticism. But andy and I did two vortex hikes and then we went back to our friend's house and, um, he gave us all a beer and I I drink beer fairly regularly. I'm not a massive drinker, but, um, I'll drink on an empty stomach quite normally, but I had this one bit it. It was fairly strong, it was like a 7% IPA, but then I just got the worst acid reflux I'd ever had.

Speaker 3:

We went out for dinner. We went out to this really nice steak restaurant and we were sitting down ordering and I was just like I had to say to Andy's friend can you please take me to the chemist? I feel absolutely terrible. So he rushed me to the chemist and then I was just like I'm just going to lie down in the car. I fell asleep in the car for three hours while they were all having steak and I came out. I had a bit of a fever. I slept it off, but I've never had a reaction like that before or since and I think it's probably quite a lot to do with those vortexes and the teachers that come to our place in the beginning when we had bought the land.

Speaker 2:

So we thought in okay, although we are sensitive to the energy, we do want to have people that actually know about this stuff. So we brought in a couple of shamans and people also with real machines to. Apparently they can I don't know what they measure, it's not my field but they can measure both with pendulums but also with a little bit of electrical machines to sense the frequencies that are over there. And they all said, wow, this is such an amazing power spot because the energy of the lake goes here and it goes up the mountain and then it goes up.

Speaker 2:

And we felt like sure, of course it's like whatever, but it's nice to hear right that after you have bought a piece of land, that people say this about the land and then only maybe after a couple of months, when we met the mayor, he said, yeah, this place. Look there, 200 meters from us, this is where a huge Celtic energetic ceremonial space was 3,500 years ago. So this has been a place designated in time, according to him, to have a center, and this place has just been waiting for this work. And, andy, I know you're coming in the end of September. I hope you feel it that what all our guests and teachers feel is that there feels like there's a sort of a existential support for the work we offer over there, not just because we offered it from a not-for-profit space, but also because the land seems to be really designated to this, to do this type of work over there.

Speaker 1:

I've said it, I've said it before it's just, it's incredible what you're doing over there. Can you, can you talk a little bit more about the kind of retreats you offer there?

Speaker 2:

and yeah, sure so um, straight from the get-go we said, uh, it's not an easy business a retreat center. Mostly they're in the season also that people want to do it in summers. And uh, sometimes you have a larger group and sometimes you have a smaller group. So we took our entrepreneurial glasses and thought, okay, how can we make a model for a retreat center that will actually work? And for this we raised our own program, which is called the Mandali Experience, which is a really low threshold entry retreat where you have two meditations, two yoga classes and a sharing circle every day. Now we added some breath work, we do some hikes, some cold and warm therapies, but it's very basic. And when we opened our center we just had that and one or two yoga bookings and we said, okay, this is the Mandali experience. We booked a few teachers, six people showed up and we have 70 beds. So it's okay, this is a pretty bad start.

Speaker 2:

But the next Mondali experience, we had eight people. And then, like with our events, it was already paid for. We didn't have a bank loan on it. So we thought this place will be here, we've got the time, we didn't have a big team yet, so we'll just and we chose not to do marketing. We said this is such a good place will sell itself. We don't want to do it, go into sales of it, we just have to focus on the quality of the program. So half of our program now is the mandali experience.

Speaker 2:

We have around 3 000 guests per year and half of it is the mandali experience and it's most our most successful program. We always sell out 60 beds with the mandali's experience. And then the other half of the retreats are retreats that are teachers from around the world that are looking for a retreat center and want to bring their students to a center. So we're very happy for now. For instance, now this saturday starts a retreat from rupert spira, who's a non-duality teacher, pretty famous, has a huge international following. We have Buddhist retreats. We've got Kalu Rinpoche coming. He teaches a little bit on yoga at this time, but we've got therapy work with the Working With People group. We had internal family systems from Eric Schwartz.

Speaker 3:

Richard Schwartz.

Speaker 2:

Is it Richard Schwartz?

Speaker 3:

I'm reading his book at the moment.

Speaker 2:

Just loving it.

Speaker 2:

We've got, but also yoga from Sarah Powers. So in the beginning we had smaller teachers because they couldn't guarantee to sell out the place. We had people bringing in 15 and 20 people. But as soon as we had some of these more world renowned teachers and they put it on their websites other teachers see that and they call us. So now we're fully booked. We don't have any bed left.

Speaker 2:

So we're considering to build a new center on the same mountain, a second mandali, because if we would have a magic wand and put a second, then it would be full within a month. Because there's so many inquiries from teachers and so many inquiries from guests that will easily be filled up. And that's mainly because I would say we offer a very good quality but for a not-for-profit price. So you can have a retreat for 13 or 1400 euros for a full week, including food, accommodation and teaching, and that's if you look at the market. Most of the centers I would say nine. Nine out of ten centers are commercial initiatives and god bless them as well because they are in the same field. But we're not trying to make money here, so we have that advantage towards others.

Speaker 3:

That's awesome, yeah, and Mandali sounds a lot like Mandala. What does the name actually mean?

Speaker 2:

I don't know. I hoped it was the plural of mandala, but we were trying to find a name. And I like to draw mandalas and I've been doing that for a long time and while drawing a mandala I was like mandala. Now look, type on the internet there are a million mandalas. So if you just change one letter, mandali, then it becomes unique.

Speaker 2:

And mandala center, center of the cosmos, center of the universe, center of yourself, center of a drawing Starts from the center. So it felt very appropriate and mandali sounds also a little bit Italian, so it's a little bit playful. And we used the seed of life, which is the center of the flower of life, this flower of life drawing. The center of that is the seed of life. And we took out the inner part of the seed of life and just put that on top of mandali and there it is. So we didn't go to a designer, we just made that up ourselves and, uh, now it works. It's pretty simple, straightforward, but it does have this, um feel the name mandali. Uh, that it's not just a hotel or something. We're in a space we hope at least you didn't.

Speaker 3:

I don't know if you said already, but whereabouts is it exactly?

Speaker 2:

so when you fly to milan, uh, the north of italy, you would drive, uh, west or northwest, so it's one hour 10 minutes from milan if you would fly into milan or pensa, and it's the most western lake, is called lago d'orta and that's the most pristine one still. So it doesn't have the infrastructure for mass tourism, so they're just a few small hotels and small campings, and whereas if you go to lago di como, lago major, which are the more famous, bigger lakes, it's completely dedicated to tourism for the summer. So we're just away from that, on a small lake which is not filled up by the rivers that flow into it, but which is filled by a source, so it's warmer, more clear. So it's a very nice, sweet, pristine, original place in northern Italy. Pristine, original place in northern italy.

Speaker 2:

Uh, yep, and people always ask us how did you find this place? And I want to tell one, one nice story, because although we're spiritual guys in the sense that we love listening to wisdom teachings and doing some western psychology work, we are always also a little bit critical, maybe even skeptical, because it's not like science. There's so many bullshit people out there. It's not like in science. You at least have these methods right, you know that this is true and in this world you don't. You just have to feel.

Speaker 2:

And then, in finding this place, our teacher called Kali. She took us to a church there and she said let's pray, we go to church, let's go into the church and let's pray to the Holy Mary. This is a Holy Mary area, to help us find a place here. So we went with her in the church and we sat down to her. She did her prayer, we sat next to her Okay, deodric, let's just accommodate and do this as well, please help us find this place. And she was like oh, this was such an important moment and I felt her and she's going to help us. And we were like, okay, great that you feel that.

Speaker 2:

So afterwards we got this phone call from the broker saying, oh, something just came in. And then she already started it's our prayer. Yeah, sure, you never know. But then we drove up the mountain and then we there was a perimeter around the land and we drove towards the land and we drove towards the front gate and next to the front gate there was this huge, three, four meter high Mary statue pointing at the land. And she said, yeah, this is it. Look, she's pointing at it. I already know we don't even have to see it. She helped us so I was like, okay, that actually happened.

Speaker 2:

And we really felt for her. It was like, of course, this is the way it works. You just ask and then they give. It says so in the Bible and we're like okay. And this is just one of many stories that we had there that felt like, okay, there's some sort of an existential support for this work that needs to happen. And we also feel like we don't own anything there. We're just instruments in this manifestation. And that feels really great. It's amazing.

Speaker 1:

Incredible. And can you talk a bit more about what else you're putting out there, walter, obviously Mandali is full all year round, and what other projects are getting you excited in the kind of well-being space?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so there are not so many people out there at the moment if you look at 8 billion people on the world that are investing in spiritual real estate. So, if you look back in time, with churches and mosques, there's apparently 83 000 churches in the world and 40 000 mosques and 10 000 synagogues and I don't know how many temples, but almost 200 000 huge spiritual buildings in the world. Who is building them now?

Speaker 3:

Just you.

Speaker 2:

Why did we stop building them? Why did we stop? Why is that? I don't have a clear answer to that. Maybe because we're so greedy and we just want to have a high return on our real estate. But when these buildings were built, it was not to create a return. So we feel like we're a little bit of a unicorn. We're not just the only ones, but there are not many out there that have the interest to build real estate with a purpose, purposely designed for spiritual world.

Speaker 2:

We decided to say we're open to all traditions, we're open to all kinds of people. So if you step into a church, you know what you're stepping into. Same with a synagogue or a mosque. But if you step into Mandali, this place is there for everybody with teaching. We try to make it lineage-based, so we love to have it lineage-based the work we offer. So I think this is one of the reasons we're so easily filled is because it has this motivation.

Speaker 2:

And now we said a little bit inspired by some of the words that Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist teacher, shared on his deathbed, saying the next Buddha or the next Jesus is not going to take form of a person, it's going to take form of a community of like-minded people that live in harmony with nature and with each other. So we find that very inspiring and he said that's very important for the survival of humanity to have that view. So we looked into, because there have been so many communities around the world and so many have failed, and most of them that have failed have been, uh, based on a teaching of a guru or a very strong constitution. Okay, this is the way we live here, or this is the teaching that we, that we follow here. So we thought, okay, let's stay away from that. Uh, we're here close to a very small village, kwarna, so Sopra it's called, and it used to have 700 people in that village, and now there's only 250 people. Like many Italian, but also Mediterranean, of these villages high up in the mountains. They are dying out. All the younger people that are born there, when they're 18, they leave, there's no jobs and they go to Milan and the bigger cities, and this happens throughout Italy, but also throughout other countries around the Mediterranean.

Speaker 2:

So we went to the mayor and we said, listen, you have this challenge of at least making sure that the 200 people stay. But he said, yeah, but there's 73 on average, so in a few decades probably nobody will be living here anymore. And then we said we actually want to build more centers here. We have this idea of repopulating your village with people that actually want to work in our center but are looking for a house because it's high up, so you actually have to live there, but are looking for a house because it's high up, so you actually have to live there. So and he already said that we've been seen a decline since the 1940s, since the second world war started and just until the day you started, and in the last years we already saw people moving back here again because something is happening there, there's this center, so a few of our teachers moved there, a few of the is happening there, there's this center, so a few of our teachers moved there, a few of the employees moved there, so now there are 15 people more than there used to be a couple of years ago and we said we think this can be a few hundred people.

Speaker 2:

So we started buying pieces of land around Mandali, we started to buy houses, we started our own food garden, our own animal sanctuary, we're digging for water, putting solar panels, just to start, put some mules here and there and just to start attracting both families that want to have a nice vacation and have a house that we, if they're not there, we can rent it from them because we need accommodation, but also teachers that want to move there, but also people that want to be part of a community and just live there and work with us. And we don't know where this is going. We laid down a 30-year vision. We were very inspired by one of the talks of the Dalai Lama that we went to a couple of years ago in Brussels, in Belgium. He said today and the next two days we're going to talk about the strategy for Buddhism for the next 500 years. Okay, that's completely different than they do in politics, but also in the corporate life they speak about three five-year strategies. And in politics, but also in the corporate life, they speak about three five year strategies and in politics is four years. In business I'm used to talking about five years because who knows what's going to happen in 10 years, but um, why not say in 30 years?

Speaker 2:

We hope that there are going to be 800 people here and what we saw on the internet and doing our research a little bit into communities is that below 300 you don't have enough people to make sure everything is there and you can take care of each other, but above 1200 people you need all kinds of outside resources. So we said let's stay in the middle and we go for 800. And now people are moving actually there. So, um, they're looking into the houses. The only thing we have to manage is these italian people that are actually living there right now. They're saying are these dutch taking over here? So we really have to be very smart in informing them and telling them what what is happening.

Speaker 2:

And so we organized Qigong classes, breathing sessions for these older people. They have lunch with us and it's really nice. So we're very close to the mayors and to the communities. So this is the big dream and, yeah, us buying these pieces of land is also like we did with Mondali. We don't know what's going to happen with these pieces of land, but it feels like something's going to happen. And this is the type of entrepreneurs Wilder and I are. We just trust that if you really are motivated and also benefiting others, then there is some sort of unseen existential support out there that puts the traffic lights on green. I hope.

Speaker 3:

Yes, I've spent some time at some of these communities around the world and, as you mentioned, they really struggle and what I found was there is there's a core group of people there who live there. That's their life, then there's they rely on tourists. So I went to this place, I did a month-long breathwork teacher training at this place in costa rica and what I found was I felt really unwelcome by all the sort of the locals there. They weren't locals, they're from america and england and europe. But, um, it just shows, even in these like conscious communities, this idea of like tribalism, racism, xenophobia, nationalism is is just so ingrained in our human, in the human experience.

Speaker 3:

As I look just the same as other people, but and I'm very open-minded and I'm learning about breathwork they to them, I was an outsider and toxic to their community and I also found like there's just this like sort of undercurrent of anger in a lot of these places, a lot of these people, they, they don't fit into the mainstream, so they find another community, an alternative community, and I guess when you are some someone like that, maybe that creates some kind of resentment to people who they perceive to be in the right, the, the mainstream. But, yeah, we just found that people were just so angry and rude and nasty and um, yeah, uh, but then the irony is those people relied on me and my tourist money to keep the place going. So, um, I hope yeah, thankfully, I know you've got a bit more money to do those types of things, but, um, have you come across any of those kinds of challenges?

Speaker 2:

um, yes, I would say yes, not necessarily only because we're doing spiritual work, also because I noticed that people from this village that are working with us are very protective of Mandali and they see everybody coming in as a potential threat to what is there now. So they see it as a threat to the harmony that is there. So, managing and creating an open space, even amongst our team of 25 people for this is a new person, I don't know if it's a Italian culture, I don't know if it has to do with the type of work we do, but we do feel they're very defensive. So, from that space, yes, we notice it, but we also notice that if we introduce them and we didn't do that a couple of times then it goes wrong. But if we do it, then it helps. But we don't want to introduce 800 people in the next 30 years. So that's going to be that. That's definitely going to be a challenge.

Speaker 2:

So one of the ways we want to do that is to make sure that nobody owns anybody else's property or food. Everybody has their own thing and if there's a fire, we call the firemen from down at the lake and the police from down. We're not going to play police or government. There's no boss, everybody. You're your own boss. You're just part of a group of like-minded people.

Speaker 2:

I'm very sure we'll run into a lot of challenges, but if there's nobody no judges, nobody deciding, or they can just call the police then you're just in society. We don't pull the towing bridge up and say, okay, I've been to these places too where I didn't feel welcome. Oh shit, I should have dreadlocks or I should wear this type of clothes. I really didn't feel welcome. But I'm sure we'll run into it, but we're not in a rush. So so far, with these somewhere in between 15 and 20 people that have decided to move there, we have our lunches and dinners together, but this is the core group you're speaking about, so we're not going to have lunches and dinners together with 800 people. So I'm curious to how that's going to play out. I don't know, but I know the challenge is there.

Speaker 1:

And can you talk a little bit more about the projects you're working on outside of Mandali? I know you're putting some really cool projects together with, say, like University of Amsterdam. Yeah, I'd love you to speak a little bit about those.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so in the Netherlands we have one and a half million people that come to our events, so that's a really large event company. And at a certain point I was contacted by a professor from the University of Amsterdam through a friend of mine, his wife's brother. That said can Professor Levi-Vandamme? Professor Lévi-Vandamme give you a call because he has interest in? He works with younger people. He creates all kinds of tools to help younger people in the range 16-24 with their depression, anxiety, because there's apparently I'm going to talk about this a pandemic of depressed young people which is really an underestimated problem in the world. Now I know a little bit more about it. It's like unheard of how big that wave of depression and anxiety and suicidal people, very young burnouts, is coming at us. It's really terrible. Anyway, he approached me and he asked can we have a brainstorm? I've got an idea Because he said, from our research he looked into it.

Speaker 2:

One of the areas of research we did was gratitude and it's mentioned in all these wisdom traditions and we actually did studies on it if it actually works and if we can use these methods and techniques and adapt them to make them, put them in an experimental setting and see if we can do the way you described in a scientific way, if we can prove that paying attention to gratitude on a daily basis actually improves your well-being. So he did that. The results were very positive, outrageous positive, and he said can we use your one and a half million people to bring this knowledge, slash, wisdom to them and let them benefit from this that we found out? So we created a gratitude booth for our events. You can step into it and you can say what you're thankful for. We added hundreds of movies and we're going to put it out there now. We just finished this project and then I already saw the edit when it came out of the edit suite. You just look at it for 10 minutes. You become so happy.

Speaker 1:

It's so nice.

Speaker 2:

It's so nice, sounds so good, yeah, to hear people say what they're graceful for, even when they come in. I'm so happy with my hamburger. It's also nice Go out for this hamburger, or the sun or my mom that brought me here. But also very deep ones when my sister died, my father was my best friend. It's like all the levels but it's also positive. So we did quite a successful job together.

Speaker 2:

And then he came to me and said and this is what I wanted to share, because it's the main thing I'm interested in and working on was he said there's been a long study in America into MDMA-assisted therapy and Rick Doblin is the head of that MAPS organization and after decades of work he really proved that MDMA-assisted therapy works very well in the space of heavily traumatized people. So they worked with war veterans and after following a certain protocol, a MAPS protocol that he designed, after only three sessions with, in between, very good follow-up, people 80%, 83, I believe really high percentages don't hold me to the numbers really high percentages of these people were cleared in the sense that they could re-enter society, and that was amazing and it even came to a Netflix documentary. I believe it's how to change your mind. But you don't only speak about mbma, but also about lsd, I believe, and ayahuasca or other substances. And this professor, he he called me and said I'm in contact contact with Rick Doblin because we have the idea to launch the first ever international study into testing if it works, also for PTSS people under 18.

Speaker 2:

But since it's a prohibited substance anyway, that's a very tricky field, right? Okay, maybe if we do it, then at least we do it with older people, because you have to have an okay from the parents that they're going to use an A-list drugs on a younger age. So it's got a lot of hurdles and everywhere I go I get a no because people don't want to burn themselves on this type of work. But if I just have the money, I can put the people in place and we can start to study. So I said, okay, that's a very nice story. Uh, I don't think our m, our festival business, would have been so successful without. So I owe a lot to it. And so let's do a fundraiser.

Speaker 2:

And I did a fundraiser. I sent out a letter to many people in the party industry. I said have you ever used MDMA? And I knew they would have to say yes, do you think this could be beneficial in therapy? And they all said yes.

Speaker 2:

So come to this night. We're going to try to raise money for the professor and we had a very nice setting. Rick Doblin was on the screen, we had quite a few nice other professors that spoke, some people from our industry and the main act of the evening in retrospect was this young guy that did it already underground. That is not legalized yet, but he went to a therapist and he wrote a letter to read out to the whole audience that he did a couple of MDMA sessions which completely changed his life. So we got in a lot of money and we hired the first uh, he hired the first people. We're now training four therapists and selecting 14 children and next year we're going to start the study.

Speaker 2:

So but this is a very lengthy process but it has to start somewhere, right. If this is not in a year or something, but eventually somewhere down the line, we have a sort of a uh, a milestone that we say we want to have the first mdma clinic in the world for younger people. So you can just step into it obviously with you have a letter. You have to have a letter from the doctor, probably it's not going to go. I'm going to go to do some MDMA therapy today. Probably not, maybe in 30 years, I hope, but the first step will be hopefully. The doctor says you can do EMDR, neurofeedback, all sorts and forms of psychotherapy, but you can also do MDMA-assisted therapy, so to get it in that field. So that's a very important project, uh, I'm busy with. Do you want to say something about it or ask something about it?

Speaker 3:

yeah, I was just thinking yeah, I know mdma is so, uh, I think it's just passed through phase three trials in the us, so very soon it's going to be used in clinics. I just never thought about using it for children or young people, but I'm very aware of how much young people are suffering and things like that. But to do it in children I think is really brave and really exciting. So I really hope that goes well, because I know a lot of children who are suffering out there. So, yeah, best of luck with that. I also wanted to ask about your, your gratitude study. Did you do any follow-up measures? Did you find, uh, when people were doing the, the gratitude, they felt better in the moment? But did you, was there any follow-up how they were doing like a few weeks later or anything like that?

Speaker 2:

no, on the event we didn't do the study was conducted by himself before. So he did the study and as a result of the study, he said okay, we want to make a sort of a gimmick just to make it very accessible to people. But the people that came to our events we didn't do a study with, they just went into the booth, left their gratitude behind, we made a video of it and and basically that's it the study he did before that and a very interesting outcome of these studies and and also very beautiful to read and to actually understand why it's so important to be grateful every day. It is such a effective sort of medicine. He created also a bunch of other tools, like feely, which is an app that measures your emotions every day for young people. So they just go over 30 questions and with a five-point scale emoji you can say I'm very sad, I'm very happy, and then 30 questions and throughout the time these young people they noticed yesterday I put a I feel like shit emoji here and today it's like very good, what changed? Nothing changed. This is just being apparently being a human being. So they get a sort of a distance from their emotions and understand that they are not their emotions, it's just passing through them. So it has this effect that for younger people, that they get less attached to how they feel, instead of more attached to how they feel.

Speaker 2:

So very smart ways of creating tools to help younger people, and we're in very broader talks with him to launch a platform which is called Bidu. Bidu comes from being and doing, because we seem to be human, doings, whereas we're human beings and to help these people, you actually don't have to stop doings, whereas we're human beings and to help these people, you actually don't have to stop doing. No, there is a doing here, but there also has to be space created for being. So we're creating day retreats, week retreats, courses and online communities in the app space. To go into the prevention space, because most of the care provided by the government is focused on the ones that have fell over the cliff and are in need of help, but 80% of the younger people are on their way to the cliff and there are no instruments almost no instruments focused on that large group to prevent them to fall off the cliff. So we felt that's a very good space to focus ourselves on and the prevention of this depression and anxiety yeah, that's awesome.

Speaker 3:

Um, yeah, the prevention thing. China is obviously not a very popular country, but I do have one of my best friends raising children over there and he's a school teacher and he shares how wonderful it is that the government restrict the children's social media usage. They're only allowed a certain amount on tiktok per day. They're only allowed a certain amount on computer games and things each day and, yeah, social media is such a big hot topic at the moment. But yeah, we've also got to find the remedies for people when they do get harmed and fall off the cliff and also growing up into a.

Speaker 2:

I remember my daughter asking she's 16, she asked me Daddy, do you think I can grow old in this world? I was like, of course. I said yes, of course you can grow onto this world, but what they get from the media is not like a picture that you can. I don't know, but it was different. I don't know if it was different, but I didn't have access to so much information. They have access to all the information all the time and somehow we as a humanity choose all the time to put emphasis on the negative news and very little time and space for the positive. I'm happy you guys are here because I looked over your podcast titles and it's all very good, but mass media are mostly focused on the negative stuff, so it's the social media is a very important denominator there, but also this bad news all the time is. What this professor shared with me is that's a very negative outlook on the future they have but you can share that edit of that gratitude video, I'm sure everyone would love to watch that, yeah it's

Speaker 1:

absolutely epic yeah, um, and we, unfortunately you're not really on social media, are you, valter?

Speaker 3:

we usually ask guests where to follow them, but I think it's well worth everyone looking up mandali m-a-n-d-a-l-iorg, but anything else you want to signpost, I know, know you like to keep a low digital footprint so I don't want to call you out.

Speaker 2:

No, I would recommend people to let other friends know that you make this podcast Awesome. That's good enough for me.

Speaker 1:

I'll talk to loads of people at your festivals. Bore them senseless about this. Use it as a marketing ploy.

Speaker 3:

It's a great way to pick up women, andy? I think yeah, possibly.

Speaker 1:

Check out my podcast. No, valter, it's awesome to speak to you. Mate, I could talk to you all day. Thankfully, I'll probably have the opportunity over the next few weeks, but yeah, we like to. On this podcast, we like to highlight light in the world, and definitely you are a shining example and putting so much good out there. So, uh, thank you. Thank you so much for that and thanks for coming.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for the invitation and I really appreciate it, and richard as well. Nice to meet you, richard. Maybe see you one day in real life I would love to be part of your breathwork sessions and who speaks really highly of you. So thank you for hosting this and having me today awesome.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much, valter where do they find us rich?

Speaker 3:

we are on instagram at the breath geek and at andy esam and richard l blake dot com, and you can find our podcast, this podcast on all good podcast hosting sites laughing through the pain, navigating wellness. All right, thank right, thank you everyone. Thank you listener, thank you Andy, thank you Valter.

Speaker 1:

Bye-bye, cheers Bye.

Speaker 3:

Cheers, see you.