About us

About me: Heiko Gärtner

Childhood and youth

Heiko Gärtner was born on 12th of March 1979 in Neumarkt and grew up in a small village called Postbauer-Heng. In the first years after his birth he explored the world around him step by step and acquired new skills. Especially speaking and walking proved to be practical. But just when he had mastered both of them really well and was sure that nothing more stood in the way of his freedom and his urge to explore, he was suddenly thrown off balance. He was sent to an institution called kindergarten, where suddenly everything was regulated and predetermined. Here he could no longer simply play in the mud when he wanted to play in the mud. Because for everything there were now times and rules, which became even stronger with the change to school. Instead of being able to explore the world and life with all its secrets, he now learned other things that adults believed were more important for our society. This included, for example, that it was good and important to worry. When you were worried, you were actually always on the right side. And the best part was that you could actually worry about everything without the risk of making a mistake. He learned from some doctors that it was good to worry about whether you were developing properly. After all, you could always be too big or too small, too fat or too thin for your age. He learned from his mother that one should always be concerned about whether one had enough to eat, while his father's concern was more about whether one always had enough money. This brings us to the second important lesson on which the whole world seemed to agree: money is important! You can't do anything without money! Not even the earth will rotate if we do not ensure that it is paid for regularly. Money was, so it seemed, the real center and meaning of life. If you didn't do something for money, then you might as well leave it alone, because then it wasn't worth anything anyway. So the most important thing was to get a good high school diploma with which you could get a good job that would give you the necessary money you needed to survive or live. From this point of view, life was actually quite simple. You just had to do what you were told and put a good face on everything.

Training and working life

But Heiko was not the type who simply suppressed his feelings and told himself that he would be happy in a system whose meaning he could not see. The question of which profession to choose made him desperate, for there seemed to be no satisfactory answer. Only much later did he learn that he was not alone in this. For example, studies show that in Europe and in the USA, around 85 percent of people are dissatisfied with their job and do not like or even hate what they do. In China and Japan the amount is even higher and climbs up to 94 percent.
The seemingly insoluble conflict in his head overloaded his circuits and he got a short circuit in the form of meningitis. This led him to finally decide on the only possible path and accept an apprenticeship at his father's insurance agency.
In the weeks that followed, as his training became more and more routine, he had to admit to himself that he was standing exactly where he had never wanted to stand: He was about to enter a profession he didn't like and which I would probably still pursue until he was 65 years old. So how should he handle it?
First of all, he found two intermediate solutions that should keep him afloat for the next time. On the one hand, he tried to shift his life as much as possible into the leisure sector and thus threw himself into nightlife. Together with his best friend at that time he jumped from dance floor to dance floor, visited every festival, the more extravagant, the better. Finally, he even got to the point where he earned more money as a show act on stage than he spent on party life. But all this was of no use as long as he could not find at least a little fulfillment in his professional life. He succeeded in doing so when he was allowed to get a first taste of the hazard class assessment department during his training. There were experts there who could predict exactly when a person would get which disease based on external characteristics and certain events in their life. With that the inner tracker in Heiko was immediately triggered and came to life again. Heiko learned more and more about this topic and finally became an expert in the field of anamnesis and diagnostics, who could read people like other read books or magazines. But still there was one thing that bothered him and that was that he could never fully absorb this work. His job was to use his diagnoses to calculate the rates that the people had to pay for their health insurance. So his knowledge was not used to help someone, only to take more money from him. That could not have been the goal. At the same time, Heiko also felt for himself that everyday insurance life was making him ill overall. The business plans that needed to be fulfilled increased tenfold within only eight years and so came the point where he found himself ending up in burnout and decided that it could not go on like this. The shrill alarm bell of tinnitus was already ringing in his head when he was ready to leave the supposedly safe rock of the insurance world and take the leap to freedom.
In the years before, he had already broken out of his daily work routine again and again and had undertaken various long-distance journeys that had taken him to all corners of the world. In this way, step by step he had been able to gather more and more experience for a life with and in nature. He spent months on research trips and expeditions in Iceland, canoe tours through Canada and came into contact with the native peoples of Thailand and New Zealand. The ability to live self-sufficiently in nature fascinated him so much that he finally completed a part-time training as a wilderness mentor and survival expert. At the same time, he pursued his passion as an animal photographer and nature filmmaker and lived for several weeks surrounded by thousands of sea birds in a breeding colony.

Retraining for your dream job?

For Heiko it was now clear that his new professional career would have to aim in a completely different direction. He had now already got to know where you go when you have a job that means nothing to you and that doesn't give you a sense of meaning but makes you a lot of money. Now it was a matter of finding out how he could pursue his vocation and do an activity that really fulfilled him.
At first, the answer to this question seemed to be perfectly clear to him, because at the moment he quit his job at the insurance company, he had already been offered one of the few training positions for national park rangers that existed in Germany. The job seemed perfect, as it allowed him to live and work in nature without any stress, while at the same time contributing to the environment and the preservation of special habitats. Highly motivated, he completed his training, although he had to live in a bus in the parking lot of the academy for financial reasons. In spite of everything, or perhaps because of it, he completed his training as the second best of his year in all of Europe. This should have opened the doors of all the Nationarks to him, but unfortunately this was not the case. As it turned out, this professional model was not about qualifications or awards, but only about relationships. Strictly speaking, it had therefore already been established before the training began who would get the available positions in this area and who would not.
So Heiko had to look for an alternative solution and came across a bird of prey station at the southernmost end of Germany. The job fascinated him for two reasons: On the one hand, he had the opportunity to work with majestic birds of prey and to get to know them at close range. On the other hand, through this work he was able to contribute to the conservation of rare birds and thus make an important contribution to the protection of species. For this reason, it was also okay for him that, as so often in this field of work, one earned almost no money, but was more of a volunteer helper. But even here, it took him barely a month before he discovered that behind the façade of the poor, selfless animal protection project "wildlife bird sanctuary", there was a tough and well-running business that secretly sold the coveted saker falcons to Arab oil sheikhs for a lot of money. This was done on the quiet, of course, and did not stop anyone from keeping the project running with donations, grants and volunteer work, because the money generated through the oil sheikhs never arrived at the wildlife bird sanctuary. This circumstance, together with a constant unforgivable misbehavior of his boss, made sure that this appointment was only a short guest appearance for Heiko. And as much as it disappointed him, the lesson he learned from it was important: The attempt to find a profession within the existing system, which was also his vocation, was doomed to failure! If he wanted to pursue a profession that would take him further and give him the opportunity to make a real contribution to creation, instead of ultimately supporting what he actually wanted to change, then he had to create it for himself.

Wilderness mentor and survival expert

So he decided to found his own nature and wilderness school to create a place where all the development he wanted for himself and the world could take place.
For this to succeed, he first had to become active on many levels at the same time. On the one hand, he needed a functioning and effective marketing strategy that ensured that he did not have to hold his courses on his own. Secondly, he began to train himself in everything that somehow had a connection to nature mentoring. He learned intuitive archery, trained as a mountain and cave rescuer, became a climbing trainer, high ropes course trainer, canoe guide and much more. In order to keep his head above water for the entry phase, he also started working as a freelance trainer for other organizations working in a similar field and before he knew it, he covered even more kilometers in a car for his new job than he did when he was working in the field for the insurance company.
The next few years were filled with a colorful range of different orders, which were spread all over Europe. He gave team trainings and company coaching in Lower Bavaria, worked with mentally conspicuous children in the Altmühltal, looked after criminal and drug-addicted children in the Eifel, gave individual seminars in Poland, organized survival training in Austria and led expeditions in Iceland. Over time, he increasingly took on the role of a wilderness gate, but also that of a survival expert.
For two years in a row he spent almost all of December in northeastern Poland, where a young man had asked him to prepare him for life in nature. For the first time he could now really teach as he always wanted to. Not according to a textbook and a seminar plan, which regulated everything and left no room for individual needs, but according to the old, Indian method of Coyote-teaching. In this particular form of teaching, the main purpose of the mentor was to guide the student through specific questions and tasks so that he or she could find out everything he or she wanted to know and be able to do. The coyote is known for his unpredictability, his tricks and jokes, with which he irritates others again and again and thus always lets them rise above themselves.
These were exactly the qualities that were needed as a wilderness mentor and which gave Heiko the most pleasure in his work. In this way he did not have to stand in front of the blackboard like a teacher, but could go on a discovery tour together with his student. They built themselves igloos to find out how warm it could really get in them, tested whether it was possible to cross the half frozen rivers in a grass boat, followed the bison tracks until they were in the middle of their herd, and tried out how long you can stand it in a standard three-season sleeping bag at temperatures of minus 30 degrees Celsius. Thanks to these survival trainings, unexpectedly in the first years, especially the winter became a particularly adventurous time, while the summers became more and more routine with children and youth courses.

Work as an extreme journalist

The more successful the Wilderness School became, the louder other voices in Heiko became, which again caused him to change course. To show other people how to survive in certain extreme situations and how they themselves could get a deeper connection to nature again was all well and good, but over time his own personal growth fell a bit by the wayside. Thus, the "extreme situations" in which Heiko could apply his survival knowledge were ultimately only scenarios and case studies. No matter how big and unusual the challenges he set himself, it was always a matter of "what if this was real?”
But was he honestly a real survival expert when he did not even know about himself whether he would even survive in a real, real extreme situation, instead of a faked one? This question plagued Heiko for many months until he finally had enough and decided to find out the answer. So he prepared his first massive wilderness adventure, which had no seminar character, but really sent him out into the real world. For three months he wanted to walk 3300 km through Europe with nothing more than Stone Age equipment and without a cent of money. A bold project, but it achieved the success he had hoped for. He was able to get to know himself as a survival professional in real situations, exploring his own limits and expanding his skills. When Franz joined him a few months later and from then on became part of the Wilderness School, they started to create even more unusual projects. So they travelled the country as blind people and lived on the streets with homeless people, drug dealers, prostitutes and other border crosser. They were concerned on the one hand with their own learning success and on the other hand with providing information about those areas of life and our society about which we otherwise know very little. Through this work in combination with their increasingly unusual and tough survival and wilderness courses, they also attracted the attention of the press. More and more word got around that Heiko was generally considered the toughest survival trainer, and so he was invited as a wilderness expert to programs like Galileo, “Welt der Wunder”, TerraXpress and even to a Japanese documentary show.

Training as a medicine man and setting off on a trip around the world

The more they immersed themselves in life as survival experts and wilderness mentors, and the further they looked behind the curtains of our society, the more they became aware that they could not continue to live like this for much longer. They were in a system they just didn't fit into anymore and which they knew would make them sick and destroy them in the long run. That they would leave society was no longer a question of "if" but only of "when" and "how". Only they still had no concrete idea what such an alternative life could look like. There were many ideas about possible options, but not yet the spark that got the ball rolling. Somewhere they needed a little inspiration. And this came shortly afterwards from a side they least expected.
A few weeks after the completion of the blind project Heiko received a call from an old friend and mentor he had not heard from for a long time. It was a medicine man from Oklahoma, for whom Heiko had written a documentary about his life with the Aborigines some years before. Now he was in the process of organizing an international meeting of medical people in Austria, where healers and medical people from all over the world would meet regularly over a period of one year on a remote alpine pasture to pool their healing knowledge. The idea was to create some kind of acupuncture points of healing in the world, from which the old knowledge could spread again. The shaman insisted that Heiko should also attend the meeting and after a short persuasion they also agreed that Franz should accompany him.
The more time the two spent with the medicine people, the clearer the picture of a direction in which they could take their journey became. Without saying it directly, but with unmistakable clarity, the medicine people finally asked them to embark on a Medicine-Walk, a traditional healing journey, and to gather medical knowledge from all over the world. So that Heiko could understand what such a journey was all about, his mentor gave him a copy of an old diary as a farewell gift.
It was the diaries of Stalking Wolf, an Apache scout who was sent out by his clan at the age of 18 to gather the knowledge of all remaining Indian tribes in Northern America. From that day on, he wandered North America on foot for 62 years without ever getting into a car or touching a single cent. He recorded all his knowledge and experience in these books. So after all this time they finally had an answer to the question of how they wanted to get out of the system. They would set out on a medical journey, just as Stalking Wolf had done, in order to reassemble knowledge long forgotten as wandering, nomadic researchers and discoverers. They would become itinerant healers and mobile philosophers who explored life itself and who allowed themselves to be driven by the flow of life to help, work and change where it was needed.
But before the real start could be made, there was still about a year to go from that point on, which was characterized by preparations, reorientation, planning and organization. They found sponsors, arranged press appointments, found partner projects to work with, set up their first rods, put together equipment and made sure that the Wilderness School could continue without them. The closer the day of departure approached, the more tasks seemed to be added. In the end, they worked almost 24 hours straight, swapped sleep for coffee and ate in front of the computer. Even the Christmas holidays were used to set up and test the new pilgrim carts. Then it had come, the great day of departure!
And since then they are now on their way, as wandering researchers, as modern, digital nomads, to travel and discover the world on foot.

My Vita

1979: Birth
1982: First attempt to explore the world on his own. Fails due to acute protest by parents
1984: Extensive adventures in the forest together with uncle Rudi, who also gives lessons in building natural pipes.
1985-1989: Primary school and first study projects as a naturalist in the local forest (to the chagrin of the local librarian)
1989-1993: Attended the Neumarkt grammar school
1990: Completion of the first self-built table soccer
1993: First major break from the system due to early school leaving and 6 months of "idle time".
1993-1996: Change to the Realschule with graduation
1996: Start of training at Allianz / Unconfirmed world record in paper clip snake building
1997: Start of a part-time career as a show dancer and event organizer
1999-2003: In-house training and further education in body language, gestures and facial expressions, reading of micro gestures and face signs, profiling and behavioral research by Samy Molcho and Hans D. Schittly, among others.
2000: Trip to Thailand and first meeting with Shaolin monks and natural healers
2001: Expedition to New Zealand with visit of the Maori. Learning the ritual fire dance of the Maori and afterwards beginning of a part-time career as a fire artist
2002: : First expedition to Canada including a canoe tour through the Youkon-Teslon-Teretory and a hike through one of the largest ice areas in the world.
Spring 2003: Start of the extra-occupational training as a wilderness educator and wilderness teacher
Summer 2003: First photo expedition to Iceland with a 14-day stay in the bird rocks 2004-2006: Further expeditions to Iceland
Autumn 2005: Certification as wilderness teacher and wilderness educator
2005: Double life as an insurance specialist by day and forest man by night.
Autumn 2006: Exit from Allianz and transfer of own general agency to the partner. Start of training as a nature and landscape conservationist and as a national park ranger.
Summer 2007: Completion of training as a nature and landscape conservationist with distinction as the second best graduate of the year at European level including dusting off a damp handshake from Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.
Spring 2008: Work as a falconer in a wildlife bird sanctuary
Summer 2008: First job as wilderness teacher and seminar leader / Development of the “wilderness school Heiko Gärtner”
Summer 2008 to summer 2009: Several expedition trips to Iceland as expedition leader
August 2008: Training as archery guide with certificate
Autumn 2008: Training and certification as hunter and trapper
2008-2009: Training as a mountain and cave rescuer and voluntary work with the mountain rescue service of a mountain area in Germany called “Fränkische Schweiz”.
Winter 2008: Implementation of the first winter extreme camp in Poland at -30°C
Winter 2009: Implementation of the second winter extreme camp in Poland at -30°C
Spring 2010: First time working together with Franz Bujor
Summer 2010: First project as an extreme journalist: As a Stone Age man, hiking 3300km on foot to Spain to test how good a survival expert you really are.
2011 until today: Activities as TV survival expert for NDR, Pro7 Gallileo, Welt der Wunder, Nippon-TV, Terra-X-press and others
January 2012: "Life on the street" - homeless project as extreme journalist
2012-2013: Participation in regular, international meetings of medical professionals and training in energy healer specialty "Presence Healing" under the leadership of Darrel Combs.
July 2012: "Get in tune!" Project for the blind as extreme journalist
Summer 2013: Unofficial training as sauna celebration leader in Hungary
October 2013: Publication of the book "Detecting diseases at a glance”
November 2013: Transfer of the Wilderness School Heiko Gärtner into the competent hands of a self-trained team of trainers
January 2014: Beginning of nomadic life and the five-year migration on foot and without money through Europe
October 2016: Publication of the book "The natural healing power of nature”
Since January 2019: Second phase of the "longest charity walk in the world and an attempt to visit every country and every continent on foot.

Why did you give up your social life?

Even as a child, I noticed that I was a rebel who did not like being pigeonholed into a drawer where he did not belong. For me, school was always above all a place that kept me from learning and researching. I could not understand why I should sit here for hours on an uncomfortable wooden chair listening to the soporific words of my teachers, when there was a world out there full of riddles, wonders and secrets, all of which wanted to be discovered and explored. No sooner had the school bell rung than I scurried out into the woods and took a close look at everything that was unknown to me. Countless times I caught worms, beetles, mushrooms or plants and stomped with my muddy boots into the little library around the corner. Horrified, the librarian stared at my table, on which the forest dwellers then crawled around, while I looked up books to find out who they were.
But the older I got, the tighter the grip that held me down and pushed me into a social pattern that did not fit me. In my case, however, it has always been my body that first showed me that I was moving in a direction that did not take me to my destination. During my school days I already felt this through meningitis and kidney colic. The former led to the fact that after graduating from school, I initially stood there without any hope of finding a training place. If I am honest, this was exactly what I wanted to achieve. I did not want to learn a profession that I already knew I would not like and would not make me happy. Of course, I couldn't admit this to myself at the time, because after all, you had to have a secure job.
Out of this sense of duty, I didn't give in to the pressure and thought about what life might have in store for me if it deliberately kept me from a "normal" job. Instead, I took the path of the least resistance and took the only job I could get without problems despite the meningitis. So I became an apprentice in my father's insurance agency. I completed my apprenticeship, became a permanent employee and finally even took over the management in cooperation with my partner. In the process, I discovered that although I didn't like the profession itself, I was still a very good salesperson. I discovered two talents that make my life easy despite this aberration. The first was my power of observation. I simply point out all the little details that most people simply overlook. Thus, I was able to read every person like a book, because we always show our true core with micro gestures and face signs, even if we like to hide it.
The second was the ability to explain things vividly, vividly and plausibly, so that they became comprehensible and sounded plausible to everyone. On the one hand, this enabled me to give everyone everything I wanted. Insurance, for example. Because I could first recognize what a person needed, or what he wanted, and then I could explain my product to him in such a way that it exactly matched those needs. On the other hand, I was also able to help people with worries, problems, fears or illnesses in a really sustainable way, as I was able to recognize what they were missing and also explain to them clearly which ways out there were. However, as long as I worked in insurance, the first option inevitably prevailed and an important part of me did not want to allow my talent to be abused in such a way. And since the first illness as a signpost had not brought the desired success, I now received another indication in the form of tinnitus that it was time to give my life a meaning, which consisted of more than earning money and partying.
This relationship of the inner clock, which repeatedly made me understand with suffering, illness or pain that I had strayed from my path or was acting against my own heart, remained from then on. So I kept taking smaller and bigger steps, which brought me closer and closer to what meant real freedom and meaning for me. I quit my job at Allianz to become a national park ranger, later founded my own wilderness school and worked as a nature and wilderness expert for various television stations. But the more I tried to find my own place within society without letting it bend me, the more I realized that this was not possible. I had to make up my mind. Did I want to continue to live within society and pay for the benefits it offered me with the price of my honesty, health, and purpose in life, or did I want to be myself and accept that I might have to leave behind everything that had dominated my life? Well, the answer I have chosen is known.

Why don't you follow a profession anymore?

Our word "vocation" in its origin is actually derived from "vocation" and should therefore be the activity to which one feels "called". Our vocation is the one where our heart rejoices at the top of its voice! It's what makes us get up early in the morning full of enthusiasm, that this is what makes us tick, what we can fox into, what makes us horny and awakens our joy of life. Unfortunately, this idea of an activity as a vocation has probably been lost at some point in the course of human history and has turned into the opposite. Our current professions are mostly compulsive activities that give us little or no pleasure, that we would not do if we did not need the money we get for them and that often wear us out, make us sick, annoy us or make us puke. In addition, most professions are not only harmful to us, but also to our entire planet and all its inhabitants. Almost everything we produce today is made with the help of chemicals and toxins that pollute our environment and therefore ourselves. This has now reached the point where, year after year, we consume an average of about one and a half kilograms of pure poison through food, water, air and skin contact. And of course we expect the same amount to the animals.
A survey in the USA has shown that about 85% of all people cannot stand their job and have already internally quit. I myself did not need to feel inside myself for long to realize that I clearly was one of them. So I decided to go back to the source and ask myself what my true calling is. In my case it is the promotion of healing and development, as well as the exploration and discovery of all kinds of connections.

Why is it so important to you, not to be fixed to one place?

The subject of freedom has always played a major role in my life. I don't like to be locked up, be it spatially, emotionally, mentally or spiritually. The world is boundless and I want to feel this boundlessness in my everyday life. Besides, our world is far too beautiful and too diverse to simply not look at it. As a digital nomad I have the opportunity to perceive our planet as a whole, with all its beautiful and unpleasant sides. When I like something, nothing stops me from staying for a while and exploring everything in detail. However, when I get to regions or places I don't like, I know that after just one day I will move on again and probably end up in more beautiful places again. What's more! It even happens that we refuse invitations to hotels or castles and simply move on if we find that we do not like the place, for example because it is too loud or because the people there are not friendly. If you are firmly tied to a place, you are always forced to make compromises, at least in our current society. As a nomad, no one forces me to do this. I can take them if I want to and if I feel that it makes me feel better. But I can also always choose to just go and spend a few days in my tent out in the forest, for example. This makes it much easier for me to recognize what is wonderful for me and what is harmful to me than if I am integrated into a fixed, social structure.
But that is only one aspect.
When I am in one place for a longer period of time, I always have the feeling of stagnating and more or less stagnating. By hiking we have a daily, fixed routine that ensures that we always have at least two or three hours of free time a day. So we can just let things work and get a healthy distance to everything. This has already helped us with many difficult decisions and tricky situations. Because it often turns out that a situation is not as complicated as you think at the beginning and that you create most of the problems yourself in your own head.

Why did you give up sedentary life?

I realized at some point in my life that there are two kinds of people. Some of them could be called place keepers. They feel especially comfortable when they are allowed to stay in one place and usually miss it already when they go on holiday for a few days. They love to build a cozy home and often have a personal relationship to the plants, animals, people, but also to objects and places in their vicinity. In a way, they create a small world around their home, in which the whole big world is reflected.
These people are sedentary from the bottom of their hearts and it breaks their hearts when you travel out and force them to move somewhere far away. They watch over, protect and guard the place where they live as if it were part of them and thus ensure that it grows and flourishes. This is their way of extending love.
But then there are people who feel, even as small children, that they are called out into the unknown by an inner voice. They love to explore new things and would love to be somewhere else every day. Holding them in one place for a longer period of time, without them being able to go exploring at least in between, feels like a prison to them, and they always have the feeling that they just have to get out.
These people are nomads at heart, and they find their life's work in researching and acquiring new knowledge, which is then deepened and developed by the settled people.
In our society we unfortunately have little room for nomadic people and often we even have the feeling that the two types must be enemies or cannot understand each other. They actually live in a perfect symbiosis, as each needs the other to grow and develop. The nomad, who is also known as the wind man by many native peoples, runs the risk of losing himself without the sedentary and of becoming completely unsettled, disoriented and restless. Without the nomad, the sedentary, who can also be called an “earth man”, is always in danger of stagnating and getting stuck in old, entrenched patterns.
Neither type is better or worse than the other, and neither of the two ways of life is right or wrong. The crucial question to ask yourself and answer honestly, however, is: "What type do I belong to?" Only when you know this can you make a firm and unquestionable decision for your life path. In my case, I realized for myself that without question I am a wind man, i.e. a nomad, who would be bound to a place for a long time. This has not only been the case recently, but has accompanied me all my life. As a child I was constantly out and about with my judo tournaments. Later I worked in the field service of the insurance company and covered many thousands of kilometers a year throughout Bavaria. Then I lived in a van during my further education and as a wilderness school director I was again more on the road than I was at home. All these were not conscious decisions, it just happened because something in me always wanted to live like a nomad. If you look back at your own life so far, you can look for similar patterns that will tell you whether you are nomadic or sedentary. When you know this, you only have to live by it and you will find that many things will change just by doing so.

What motivated you to change your life so dramatically?

One of the main reasons why we often do not choose to live our dream, but rather cling to any compromise solutions, is our inertia. We humans tend to remain in the state we are in at the moment. If we know that we would like to live by the sea, but live in a city inland, we often do not move because we are unsure what to expect. We are afraid of the unknown and therefore prefer known suffering to an uncertain prospect of happiness and joy. Thoughts like: "At least here I know my way around! What if it gets worse there? I don't even have friends there" often keep us from making the most important decisions in life. So did I. Part of me had long since become comfortable having a well-paid job with the insurance company, and shifting my life to recreation, or later working as a wilderness mentor. But I always had an inner motivator who immediately told me when I had left my life path or acted against me. In my case, it consisted of a body of suffering in the form of tinnitus and other illnesses, or limitations, which became noticeable whenever I surrendered to comfort and, against my intuition, my heart's voice.
In theory, everyone has such an inner motivator, but we have sometimes buried it so deep within us that it hardly reacts at all, so that we can sometimes run in the wrong direction for decades before we realize it. Or else we do not understand the whistleblower and consider our suffering to be something evil or arbitrary, which hits us from outside without us having any connection to it. In both cases, it is often difficult to free oneself from an unpleasant situation, so it is often helpful to find a partner who will take over this part.

Why do you want to walk?

For me, travelling means first and foremost to perceive the world from different perspectives. When I am sitting in a car or even on a bicycle, and I am speeding through the landscape, I miss many important details that help me to see the connections. In my opinion, getting to a destination by public transport is a bit like watching a movie while pressing the fast-forward button. Of course, it's practical because you save a lot of time and can compress a film that would normally take two hours to just 15 minutes. And of course, you also get an impression of what the film is about when you fast-forward. You can see the characters, can tell if it is more of a love movie or an action thriller and you probably even know how it will end. But still, you missed a lot of what makes the movie as such. In order to really perceive it, to follow the plot and character development and to experience the tension, you simply need time. And I take this time for hiking.

Why do you live without money?

Already for many years before our trip around the world, the question came up again and again in me, if it would not be much easier and more pleasant, if one simply leaves out this annoying paper, which one can neither eat nor drink and which does not even burn well enough to warm one in winter, and lives his life without it. When you consider that we have made money into a kind of God in our society, to whom we are in bondage and for whom we are willing to harm, even kill, ourselves and others, there must be something very liberating about that, isn't there? In my life I have spent many hours in the woods, observing all kinds of animals. None of them had ever been stressed, worried or anxious about the future or about securing their existence. In the Icelandic cliffs, thousands of birds had lived peacefully side by side in the narrowest of spaces in the cliff caves, and not a single one of them had had to pay rent. No squirrel was ever worried about not finding all his buried nuts again, as his work would then no longer be financially viable. No fox thought about whether he earned enough money to be able to afford a juicy mouse in the evening.
If you were to dump a box with a billion euros in the middle of a forest and invite every single creature to take as much as it wanted, you would still find the money largely unchanged after months. Maybe the wind would have sprayed it a little and maybe some birds had taken some bills as nesting material, but otherwise nobody would have any interest in it. Only we humans would pounce on it with a greed that can even make us stab our best friends in cold blood if we were in danger of going empty. Isn't that completely absurd? How much easier could our world be if we were to revert to the same system that kept the animals of the forest together in peaceful coexistence?
The more I thought about it, the more sensible it seemed to me to abandon our modern means of payment, and so we finally decided to give it a try. And I can say that we have had very good experiences with it, which I can only recommend to everyone. It's not so much a matter of really boycotting money completely, but rather of experiencing much more that you don't die even if you don't have any. This experience has helped us to put the value of money back into the right position. There have been periods in my life when I've been chasing money like a junkie chasing his next shot at redemption. And then again there were phases when I demonized it and blamed it for all the evils of this world. In truth, however, it is neither one nor the other. It's a means of payment, nothing more. It is a tool with which one can both create and destroy, just like with a knife or a hammer. You just have to decide how you want to use it. And you have to realize that unlike what we often hope for, it can never give you security. If there is one thing we have realized, it is that a person with a lot of money can end up on the street as quickly as a homeless person with little money. What it gives you is freedom. It is a tool that opens doors to new possibilities in our society, which we often do not have without. That is why I think it is so important to clarify and cleanse his inner relationship with the means "money". And for a certain period of time or for one or the other, even for a life without getting along is very helpful and valuable.

What does a "typical day" in your traveling life look like?

The nice thing about being completely free to travel and having no obligations is that you can ask yourself this question every day anew and answer it differently. Of course, we have certain routines and rituals that we try to follow every day. This includes our daily hike, our workout, our creation time, in which we work on books, projects or research topics, our eating ceremonies, the movie or series evening, the massage and relaxation time and the meditation and visualization phases. But we do all this because we want to do it and not because we are obliged to do it. If a day looks different and there is something exciting to discover, for example, then perhaps one or the other routine will be cancelled and replaced by something spontaneous. This could be caving in the Balkans, a trip to a ski resort, a visit to a thermal spa or simply an afternoon at the beach or on a flower meadow. Maybe it's just a funny iridescent earthworm by the wayside that you invite to a photo session lasting several hours. Every day is new and each brings its own quality. But this does not mean that the days that are completely quiet and absolutely "typical" cannot be particularly beautiful.

How would you describe your relationship with Shania?

At the beginning of our relationship, Shania and I decided that we would enter into a mirror partnership in which we would advance each other in our development processes. Our relationship serves to realize that everything is one, that I am Shania and that she is Heiko. This refers to all areas, in everyday life as well as in sexuality and togetherness. To make this work, we have some clear rules. Among other things, this includes speaking the truth. This means that we are always and in every respect absolutely honest with each other and share all our feelings, thoughts, worries, doubts and fears with each other, no matter how ridiculous or absurd they may be. Because everything that goes on inside us is important for the relationship as well as for us and can be an important clue that makes a big step of development possible.
Another important factor for a "holy relationship" in which both partners merge with each other and thus lead each other to enlightenment, is that everyone accepts and lives out his or her own qualities. In our society we tend to see gender only as a kind of label that no longer has any meaning for us. So we try to achieve that men and women become equal and thus both become neutrals. In my opinion, this is one of the biggest relationship killers of our time. Because men and women are completely different in their biology as well as in their soul plexus, their emotions and their energetic body. They are two poles that complement each other, which they can only do when one is completely in its masculinity and the other is completely in its femininity. The qualities of the male part are active, giving, activating, while those of the female part are passive, receiving, allowing. Only collectively can something come of it.

What fears kept you from leaving?

The things that blocked me the most and prevented me from leaving much earlier were mainly existential fears, fear of failure and feelings of guilt. Could I really live freely as a nomad? Were my abilities sufficient for that? What if I got sick and had no money to get treatment or be brought home? How would my parents react to my leaving? Could I really do that to them? These and many other doubts were almost constantly haunting my mind. Strangely enough, one of my main fears was that I would no longer have a medical system available. For some reason, allopathic medicine had made me believe too deeply that I could not live without it. How had they managed that? Already from my insurance time I knew that every second German dies from the consequences of cardiovascular diseases and every fourth German from cancer. Worldwide, one person dies of diabetes every 10 seconds. So how could I get through life sheltered without medicine? On the one hand, of course, I knew that it was precisely the stress of working life and nerve-racking social structures that triggered these deaths. And, yet I was afraid that it might hit me because of my escape. So I took out a five-year travel health insurance policy in advance. Better safe than sorry. After all, anything could happen! But interestingly enough, it was the foreign travel health insurance itself that reassured me and told me that I did not have to worry too much here. Surprisingly, the health insurance, which was only meant for long-term travelers, cost only a tenth of what I had paid for my regular health insurance before. As much as I was happy about the cheap rate, it also gave me something to think about! How could it be that there was a health check needed, when you wanted to get a health insurance in Germany for which you still had to pay hundreds of Euro ech month, while for a long term trip you could get a monthly rate for about 50 Euro without even being seen? From an economical point of view, this only made sense if travelers got sick ten times less than sedentary people. If this was true, it showed our everyday way of life in a very bad light. And it suggested that the insurance operators were fully aware of this. In addition, I didn't really trust the conventional medical system at all, since I knew first hand that the methods used here were in most cases purely symptom treatment, which in the long run did not bring a cure but rather an aggravation.
But also the fear of starvation, thirst, cold and loneliness lay like huge stones in my path. That's why it had been so important for me to start slowly and take one step at a time. Living in Poland for a month and being able to brave the cold brought enormous reassurance. So were my three months as a Stone Age pilgrim. When we realized during the homeless tour that it was impossible to starve in our society if you didn't fight off the many offers with a fly swatter, it was clear to me that I was getting ready for the huge step into freedom.

How did you prepare for the journey?

To be successful as a digital nomad, it is very important, that you do not change your complete life in a second, without thinking about the consequences. It is a process, that needs to be planned and prepared carefully. Because everything that you can build up during this preparation time will make your life easier later on. Many of the tricks and knacks with which one can build up an online business as a digital nomad were completely unknown to us when we started our journey. Otherwise, we would have approached the matter differently and would have made things a lot easier for us once again. Thus, thanks to my time with the insurance company and thanks to my still existing wilderness school, I was able to build up a financial safety cushion for us, which was fed by renting and leasing my old apartment and the wilderness school. It was a cushion that we did not touch, but which we could always have fallen back on in an emergency. But beyond that we started our new life relatively naive. The blog we set up was at that time nothing more than a pure travel diary read by our friends and relatives. But it brought us neither money nor other advantages. On the other hand, we benefited from my reputation as a survival expert, which enabled us to win a number of sponsors for us and the social projects. To sum up, we have tackled some points completely correctly before our trip and completely ignored other important ones.
It was important to establish cooperation with the aid projects in order to give our trip a sense and an official character. This and our media presence enabled us to get the sponsors on board, who, among other things, supplied us with a large part of our travel equipment.
What would have been even more important to be able to travel with even more ease as web nomads is to develop a sensible concept for an online presence right from the start, which should also include the question of how money can be earned with such a homepage. We have had fantastic experience with affiliate marketing and writing paid articles.
Furthermore, it was important to complete the old projects, to take care of a cheap travel health insurance, to cancel all unnecessary old contracts, to get a free credit card and a free current account and above all to plan and structure the travel equipment well.

Within our herd Heiko takes over the following tasks:

- Gruppenleiter und Gesamtausrichtungskoordinator

- All-in-Overview keeper

- Photographer and cameraman

- Life theme finder

- Complex thematic organizer

- graphic designer

- food snipper

- Pizza with topping coverer

- Emotional guardian and problem field expert

- Work-Out Trainer

- Material procurement expert

- Danger situation assessor

- truthfinder, face reader, profiler

- Future planner

- Motivation Coach

- Expedition Mobile Developer

- Sauna infusion celebrator

- Come back to awakeness and order caller

- Ambassador for sacasm and stupid comments

My vision:

Every being in the universe has to fulfil a certain task, which has been given to it by creation to give meaning to its life. Through this fundamental law of Mother Earth, everyone contributes their part to the greater whole, or more precisely to the expansion of love. Thus, all holy scriptures as well as our modern quantum physics have recognized that our world consists of only one energy and one consciousness. Some call them God, others love, all-consciousness or primal energy. But no matter what name we want to use, we will always realize that their highest aspiration is to permanently enlarge and expand themselves and thus paradise. My vision for our society of civilized people is therefore that we recognize that everything is love and that we are one with everything. Only then will we be able to stop playing the role of the destroyer, who is always hurting himself because he thinks he is separated from everything else. We believe that we are the body we are in and how we identify with the thoughts that haunt our minds. True happiness, however, means recognizing that this is not the truth. It is only a dream reality that we accept in order to be able to extend love. If everything is one, then inevitably everything is also God, which also makes us ourselves a part of God. Thus, we can neither die nor suffer, since death and suffering are only parts of the story we play. When we realize that we are really the author who writes the book of life and not the characters he draws in it, from that moment on we come to enlightenment and can be completely free and carefree. This is how we then extend love. My vision is for more and more people to realize who they really are, and thereby go from being a destroyer to a love-expander.

My wishes

I wish for a life in complete freedom, lightness and agility, where I feel that I am one with everything and where I can enjoy every day with fulfillment and accept every challenge as an opportunity for growth with gratitude.
In concrete terms, this means that I will travel through every country in the world in a large, comfortable and soundproof expedition vehicle, together with my world tour herd. We will continue to hike and explore this beautiful planet slowly with every step, but we will also have a base station in the form of our mobile, so that we will always have our retreat where we can research and develop, but also relax and recuperate. We will have a sauna and an infrared cabin with us, where we can relax and simply enjoy life, while detoxifying and healing.
Also, we will have photographic and film equipment with us to document the beauty of this world, as well as the abstruseness and peculiarities. This includes a drone and an action-cam with Steady to see the world once again from a completely new perspective.
My wish is that our books and our internet pages become more successful every day and reach and inspire more and more people, so that all our research results serve not only us, but all human. Resources such as food, money, electricity, water and heat will always flow in such a way that we do not need to worry about them, but can always feel and use the natural wealth and abundance of Mother Earth without harming her.
We will explore the remotest corners of our planet, getting to know the most extraordinary animals and plants. Every day we are getting more in our power, becoming more agile, stronger, more flexible and wiser by the second, so that our pain bodies like the tinnitus, the hip pain and our tensions can dissolve naturally.