About the Healing Voyage Website and Weblog

Hello, I am Preben Ormen, the creator of this website I call The Healing Voyage.

The Healing Voyage reflects my way of thinking about life, healing and well being. I have created this site just as much for my own personal benefit, if not more, than for anyone else's. Writing about this subject helps clear my own thinking about subjects, situations or issues that concern me. I make it public in the hope that others may find a useful tidbit her and there.

The heart and soul of the site will be the Healing Voyage Weblog. A weblog is the Internet term for journal; simply an outlet for words bursting to come out. It'll be interesting to see what appears.

Besides ruminations, I want to add essays and feature stories from time to time. These you'll find in the Library as they appear.

A little history

I have been nurturing the idea of a weblog for quite a while. Some time ago, I made a first fledgling attempt with Matto Grosso: Words from the bewilderness. The technology for weblog publishing wasn't quite where it is today and I was grappling with some practical issues. That aside, and more importantly, I struggled with my own grey matter.

It's hard to write on demand. With a weblog out there for all to see (if they ever looked in my direction) I felt pressed to feed the beast. Given that I work for a living, it was clear that I only had a very limited amount of time for this. My ideas were interesting, but maybe not so practical to implement. I tried to do too many things and wasn't focused enough.

As you will find out, I also appear on the web as the Digital Norseman. This site's flagship draw is a pictorial documentation of the building of "Munin", a 40 foot half-scale replica of the Gokstad Ship, a Viking Ship from around 890 AD on display at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, Norway. I had the honour of being the chairman of the BC Viking Ship Project and helped the project from inception through to the launch. Building up the Digital Norseman site took a fair amount of time: I put up literally hundreds of pictures with a text description showing every step of the building process.

In addition to this, I put up another site called the Coaching Voyage. Sounds like a relative to Healing Voyage and you are right. It was the first step in a new direction for me. Not too much of a departure from my day job as a consultant where I try to help companies get better. The Coaching voyage was about helping people get better. But it was a continuation of who I was at the time. I struggled a little with it; something wasn't entirely right.

In the middle of all this, I suddenly had a serious health crisis in my immediate family which took my attention away from most everything else. This is the time in my life when I came in contact with healers and the healing arts as something other than an intellectual amusement. I will write about this in more detail at some point, but suffice it to say that this period is like a quantum leap across a vast abyss of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

For that reason, the Healing Voyage is far more personal than the Coaching Voyage could ever be. The need for healing is more fundamental and important than coaching. I am quite excited about exploring how to make self-healing possible and more accepted as a way to improve well being for all of us. I am a trained coach and naturally see how coaching can contribute in some areas to what I am embarking on. However, I consider that more as an affirmation that the old saying is true: "All roads lead to Rome". Your road may not look like my road, but we'll both of us get there just the same. The Coaching Voyage is like a fork in the road. The Healing Voyage is like plowing into America during the dog watch on the way to India. Not news to the Natives, perhaps, but surely a life changing experience for the navigator version 1492CE. I like sailing metaphors; better get used to it quick.

On top of all the other things going on in this period, I went on a very demanding out-of-town project for nearly a year and didn't manage to stay with to-do list and keep writing. So I closed the first weblog down. I saved the content and maybe I'll republish it. Some of it was OK. My most visited story had over 800 visits. That's not to say it was read every time, but I can hope, can't I?.

Into the present

Over the past few years I have been on a journey of personal discovery and growth. I have worked with healers, given and received treatments and gotten formal training in various aspects of the healing arts like Reiki, Therapeutic Touch and Healing Touch.. At various times in my life I have practiced martial arts, Qi Gong, and Yoga. For a period of almost two years, I did some form of energy work everyday. Despite the seriousness of the situation, I felt remarkably well physically and mentally. Now that the acuteness of the medical issues is a thing of the past, I have found myself drifting away from the good practices and habits I had started to develop. I want back what I had in a trying time if you can understand that. The is what the Healing Voyage is all about for me.

It is fair to say that so far I have received more than I have given. The Healing Voyage is my attempt to restore the balance somewhat. I would like the Healing Voyage to become a forum for healers and those who are healing. A source of information about complimentary healing modalities and a place to share thoughts and experiences.

I am pursuing further formal training in the healing arts, specifically Healing Touch. I am preparing for the Healing Touch Level 4 course in Banff, Canada in March of this year (2004). The journey from Level 4 to Level 5 and final certification is a tough one, there is so much to do, so much to learn. I want to use the Healing Voyage to keep myself focused and to share glimpses from my personal Healing Voyage as I go through this learning process.

The motto for the Healing Voyage is "As is the moment so is all". I chose this not in a very conscious way, it just appeared out of nowhere all by itself. I am by training a very logical and structured thinker: left brained all the way. This is a useful trait as it helps getting things done. The down side is that too much of this, and creativity suffers. Lately I have been working more consciously on hearing my instincts and really listening to what I am picking up. I am slowly gaining confidence that my instincts are wiser than my linear logic more often than not.

You must have heard people talk about how we should live in the moment and how everything is perfect right now, just the way it is. This is a very Buddhist way of thinking, but grates a little on a lot of people here in the West. We need to move past that resistance. In my current thinking, everything builds from the present moment. How we are today can be traced back to the past because what we did in the past determined how we became in the present. What we do in the present determines how we will become in the future. The only time available to act is the present moment. You cannot act in the past and you cannot act in the future. Thus, if a change is necessary, now is the perfect moment. Indeed, it is the only moment. Everything is perfect now because it makes change possible by making you or I believe. Ergo; as is the moment so is all.

So there you have it: I have launched my ship. By doing so I have set up the intention and let it loose in the cosmos. Now I step back, detach myself from the outcome and leave the greater wisdom to its own devices. Time will tell its own story. Look for it here. Know that you are welcome and visit often.

Credits and thanks

Thanks as always to Jennifer O'Donovan at Old Fashioned Clip art for wonderful black and white scans from a bygone era.

The Healing Voyage is made on a Mac, specifically on an iBook with an Airport card. This gives me a wireless Internet connection at home which is insanely great after plodding along since 1995 with a 75mhz MacIntosh Performa 6200 CD. The Performa was a great machine and was all I used to build my Digital Norseman and Coaching Voyage sites which at the time of this writing get some 5,000 unique visitors per month between the two of them. I am a Mac addict and fine with it. Thanks Apple.

I maintain the site with BBedit.. Thanks BareBones Software.

The Healing Voyage weblog is powered by Blogger, but hosted on my own domain at www.digitalnorseman.com. Thanks to Blogger and now Google, the new owner of Blogger.