I am Eva Flood from Sweden, a psychologist with a private office in the town of Linköping. People come to me with all kinds of problems but mainly I do body focused psychoteraphy helping people to process and release trauma. An important part of this work is to support and develop the ability to feel and stay with unpleasant feelings and bodily sensations, such as fear, shame, quilt, anger and pain, long enough for the feelings and sensations to be processed. Equally important as therapy continues, is to activate, feel and stay with pleasant feelings, like ease, joy, pride and courage. When these inner states are activated and felt, neural circuits are being produced and strenghtened in the brain and the nervous system. The more often and the longer these pleasant feelings are being felt, the stronger the neural circuits. It is like doing emotional work out, (re-)learning to feel happy, safe and proud. It takes practise and repetition. I love my work! Some of it I bring with me into Happy Global Heart - but here I move in much wider circles than in my work as a therapist.

I am also the mother of three sons. They have taught me profound things about joy and love, each one in his own way and for that I am forever grateful. Two of them have passed on. My journey through that has been challenging, but also deeply evolving. When my second born son passed, two days old, in 1993, I was struck with pain and sorrow - and left with a question that would never cease to resound within me: Where did he go?  A small window opened to something I had not before explored or hardly even thought about. I had no (at least conscious) experience of spirituality. To tell you the truth, I was afraid of it. And I had no interest in religion or going to church (I still don´t).  And now it was there, the question about something that I could not perceive with my physical senses or understand with my intellect. For years the window was ajar, whispering to me to come and look, and sometimes I did, but for long periods I didn´t hear the whisper (i e I didn´t listen). But I did a big job taking care of myself, my children and my life with what I knew to be true for me at the time.

In 2013 my eldest son passed, he made the choice to leave, which was a total shock to all of us around him. This time I went all in. Windows and doors were thrown from its hinges and in my undescribable pain, sorrow and devastation I started exploring and searching any- and everywhere I could find something that resonated with me. So many questions occupied my mind, questions that women and men have asked since the dawn of self awareness: Where did my boys go? What happens when we die and what comes after that? What is consciousness? What is the meaning of life? Is there a deeper meaning to my then seemingly endless suffering? Why me? Am I supposed to learn something from this? What is life on earth for? If energy cannot be destroyed, only transferred from one form to another, as the Law of Thermodynamics states,  where are the loving energies that my sons radiated while alive? What is energy? How does quantum theory relate to life and death? Through the years I have found many answers and certainly gained a bigger picture and more questions have risen on the way! Today my wounds are healed and my life is exciting. I see it as an adventure, where I am a part of something far greater than myself, a benevolent force that my intellect cannot grasp but my heart can feel. And it is much more concrete and present in my life, than I would have guessed ten years ago (if someone had asked me to!). To me, it is very much about staying true to who I truly want to be and do what I can to become that new me. It is a daily practise of peeling away layers of conditioning, beliefs that I never chose consciously but rather absorbed from upbringing and culture, beliefs that are now limiting me.

I see science as an important and necessary way to explore and gain understanding of life´s complexity. It is a language of our time. But it has its limitations. For me personally, inner experience, wisdom and spirituality is equally important and necessary. And I am very inspired by people who bridge these two dimensions.  To me, a truly scientific attitude consists of a genuine curiousity and an open mind, as unbiassed as possible, to everything in our multifaceted existence. I think many people would agree on that definition. How can it be then that the scientific world, or major parts of it, are placing everything that is or seems mystical or spiritual, in a mumbo jumbo box, considering it not worth exploring? Fear, I guess. The same kind of fear that I had.  From my view, for science to be truly scientific, it will have to replace this fear with curiousity.  I have a wish, and reason to believe, that that is happening, little by little, science making friends with wisdom.