Christophe Zufferey

Psychologist FSP

Personal development – Mindfulness and Mental Preparation

Only where you’ve been can you truly lead others.

I like to say, I was born in a vineyard. As far as I can remember, as a kid I would always follow my parents, one season after the other, taking care of the grapevines.

I first considered this task a chore and never expected to find myself meditating on it years later. It’s only after I finished my studies and acquired quite a few years of experience in human sciences (mostly in psychology and criminology) that I became aware of the natural laws and forces that rule upon life. And I realised Winegrowing planted that seed in me.

Life tends to shakes a little (sometimes more than that) with all the joys and challenges it brings us, as if it was trying to remind us to ourselves. At the dawn of my 40’s and after having worked on very different themes with different populations, my academic and professional career had led me to understand, through human science models, the impact that misalignment and loss of grounding has on us.

Striving to find answers to the deep problems of our society outside of myself in order to make the world a better place, I gradually realised that the answers I was looking for were to be found within me.
At this very moment, the meaning of Mahatma Gandhi’s famous quote “Be the change that you wish to see in the world” became crystal clear to me.

The Change

I then felt the need to come back to the Earth, to ground myself more deeply in order to draw from it the resources necessary to make my own change happen.

So I naturally moved towards bio-dynamic agriculture. Beside this, I followed the Star blowers, who initiated me and accompanied me during two complete cycles on the way of self discovery. Through rituals and shamanic drum trips, I slowly grew conscious that we are part of a whole.

I flew from direct revelation to direct revelation and finally realised that I alone was responsible for what was happening to me – both positive and negative – and that I therefore had the power to create my own reality. With this in mind, I became interested in other explanatory models of life. This is how I became interested in bio-resonance, which taught me that everything is only resonance and vibration; in quantum physics, the infinitely small, which opened up the field of possibilities; in ancestral wisdom such as Ayurveda, which made me aware of my body and my feelings; in mediumnism, the most introspective technique of all, which embodies the dialogue between the different worlds. All these experiences have brought me back to a fundamental truth: that of knowing oneself in order to open the door to self-indulgence, which in turn opens the door to self-love in order to better love others and life as a whole.

It is through the care given to the Earth and the return to oneself that I understood the importance of feeding my verticality as a human being. Verticality is part of the axis of the world (the axis mundi, i.e. the link between the Ego and the Id) and it feeds the current of Life.

“This is how VERTUMNÔ was born, symbol of the origin, the change and the rhythm of the seasons”