Who & What?

What exactly is Flowfeather?

Good question!

For me, Flowfeather is both a way to create my own Thoughts and ideas about nature and creatively express our connection to it, as well as an attempt to inspire you as a reader to give nature more space in your life again.

Why?

Because I have made the experience of how much the Nature can help us to deal with stress more calmly, to increase one's own resilience, to go through life healthier and with more energy and to find inner peace in a hectic world.

And I think that's something we can all use!

This is exactly what the name is supposed to express: Flow stands for the to be in the flow , for inner peace and serenity. For resilience and one's own inner center.

And Feather – the feather – stands for the Nature as a path to all these things.

If you want to know more about the history and meaning of "Flowfeather", then be sure to check out the Flowfeather Manifesto at. There you can learn more about the background of the name.

Natural Flow?

Flow is actually a term that comes from psychology and was coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian psychologist (read more about this this blog article through).

But I use the term a little more broadly here at Flowfeather. For me, flow is a state in which we live in harmony with ourselves and the world around us.

When we are in the flow, things are easy for us and it just "runs smoothly".

Of course, there are problems in our lives even then, but we know what to do and have the necessary resources to deal with the problems in a creative and solution-oriented way. We then face the challenges in life with inner peace and serenity.

In Taoism (often also: Daoism) one would say that we follow the River of Life .

"Natural flow" means that this is actually our natural state – or rather: should be. Because in our modern times, we have mostly forgotten this and lose ourselves in the jumble of our thoughts and worries and the stress that arises from them.

We don't follow the flow of life, but constantly fight against it and are surprised that life somehow seems to rush past us.

But "Natural Flow" also means that nature is a wonderful way to rediscover this feeling of flow in life. Because in nature, everything automatically follows the flow of life.

Concrete:

If we strengthen our connection to nature, spend time in nature regularly and align our thoughts and actions with the natural principles of life we find our way back more and more to this natural state of flow.

And that's exactly what Flowfeather is all about here.

Ok, you already know what Flowfeather is. But who am I?

Allow me to introduce you, Carsten Meyer!

In the manifesto just mentioned, you will learn a lot about the values behind Flowfeather and about what I stand for and what is important to me in life.

Here I would like to say something about my career and the most important stations in my life, so that you also know how I actually came to "Project Flowfeather".

Let me start with why the topic of people and nature is so close to my heart.

Grizzly Adams and the Wild Living Room

Most nature-loving people say that they enjoyed being in nature even as a child. And it was no different for me.

I grew up in a small village with a (very small) forest directly on the neighboring property and other (larger) forests in the vicinity. Many happy memories of countless hours out in the forest and in nature come from this time.

But I have at least as many fond memories of many Saturday afternoons that I sat in front of the TV and watched the Series "The Man in the Mountains" .

Back in the 1970s, there were exactly three TV channels (if the weather cooperated, we even had four 😅 on some days) and "The Man in the Mountains" with Grizzly Adams, who led a life in nature in the Canadian Rockies, was one of the highlights of the program (here you can watch a Trailer on Youtube to the series).

I was so enthusiastic about nature and the animals that I acted out the stories afterwards in the living room of my parents' house.

I guess that my enthusiasm for the North American landscapes has its origin there. And – together with my Cycling experience – probably also led to me later becoming a biologist.

Studies, wolves and an American dream

I studied Dipl.-Biology in Münster, Osnabrück and Umeå (Northern Sweden). During these very exciting years, in which I was able to live out all my interests in ecology, zoology and behavioral science, I had the unique opportunity to go to the USA for three months.

There I was able to visit many of the beautiful national parks in the USA and Canada and then did an internship of several weeks in the Wolf Park, Indiana .

Both have had a deep impact on me.

At that time, I had the feeling that I had arrived. Arrived in a landscape in which I felt at home and which breathed and embodied a form of spirituality down to every fiber that I could not have imagined.

At the same time, the intensive contact with the Wolves in Wolf Park an extremely enriching experience for which I am still grateful today.

The first time I had the experience was that animals (especially wild animals) have a real personality of their own. An independent, unmistakable and individual personality, as I had only attributed it to humans until then.

The experiences in the USA led me to finally look for a topic for my diploma thesis where I could work and research "properly in the wild nature".

I found what I was looking for at the SLU (Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet) in Umeå (Sweden), where I was to observe and study jays (the Nordic variant of our jay, which, as I was to learn, also have an individual, independent personality) for six months.

And then my life took a pretty dramatic turn.

End of a phase of life

During my diploma thesis and even more intensively when I developed a scientific research paper (pdf as file download), I suddenly realized that science was not my approach to nature.

As much as I had been interested in biology in the years before, when I really worked scientifically for the first time and noted down the behavior of the jays I studied every 30 seconds and then statistically evaluated it, it was clear that this was not my way.

Instead, I often found myself much more interested in photographing the trees and the wonderful landscapes in northern Sweden.

I simply lacked the creative, intuitive and – as I now know – also the Spiritual access to nature .

As if this realization wasn't hard enough to digest, at the end of my studies there was also the end of a relationship that was very important to me at the time.

The end of the story was that after a few months, in which I could no longer bring myself to do absolutely anything, I threw myself completely into work and invested every free minute in my diploma thesis, in the research paper and in the preparation for my diploma exams. At the end of the story, I was stuck in a severe burnout .

I had no idea how my life was going to continue.

The Harz Journey

Fortunately, at that time (in the early 2000s) the opportunity arose to spend a six-month Internship in the Harz National Park . There I had my first contact with the topic of forest tours, which I conducted for school classes and hiking groups at the time.

In fact, many elements of today's forest tours were already present in these forest tours at that time. Forest bathing Although forest bathing was still largely unknown in Germany at that time.

The time in the Harz Mountains, which I called "The Harz Journey" in the headline in reference to Heinrich Heine, was very important to me for another reason.

Especially on the weekends, there wasn't much for me to do in the Harz Mountains at that time. I had a small 2 bedroom apartment where I couldn't and didn't want to sit all day.

That's why I have often been out and about in the forests in the Harz Mountains for a long time.

Looking back, it was above all these many hikes through the forests of the Harz Mountains that got me out of my burnout, which I was still in at the time*. During this time, I experienced first-hand how profound the healing effect of the forest on body, mind and soul.

In addition to Grizzly Adams and the Rocky Mountains, these personal experiences with burnout and the healing power of nature are certainly other reasons why I am so enthusiastic about the topic of "Natural Balance" today.

*if you personally suffer from burnout, please be sure to seek professional support. Spending time in nature is a wonderful help on the way out of burnout, but it is no substitute for professional accompaniment.

Further stations...

Already during my studies I worked as a web developer for an environmental database ( UfAZ ). After my internship in the Harz Mountains, I followed up on almost a year of further training as a Multimedia App Developer at Siemens Business Service in Bonn.

My plan was to use multimedia – a brand new trend at the time – to develop and offer educational software in the environmental field. However, our class was finished 😅 just in time for the dot-com bubble to burst, so I had to give up my planned career as a developer of multimedia learning software.

For some time I was self-employed and focused on Internet projects in the environmental sector developed and supervised (including for GreenMediaNet, a media agency for ecological projects, which later became the " Foundation for People and the Environment ".

In the end, I decided to become a teacher and did another (shortened) course of study, this time in Lüneburg. After many years at various schools in southern Hesse, I now work as a Biology and Physics Teacher at a secondary school in Lower Saxony.

… and training

My job as a teacher is to teach. However, that doesn't mean that I'm not an enthusiastic learner at the same time. In fact, I'm still interested in so many things that sometimes (often) I have to be careful not to get bogged down.

Out of this motivation, I have been intensively involved with the topic of Nature & Coaching and completed a whole series of training courses on the subject.

These include:

• Course instructor forest bathing ( Bundesverband Waldbaden e.V. )
• NLP Practitioner (DVNLP, EANLP, INLPTA) and NLP Practitioner Coach (DNLPCV)
• NLP Master (DVNLP, EANLP) and NLP Master Coach (DNLPCV)
• emTrace® – Coach
• CQM – User (Chinese Quantum Method)
• Huna – Practitioner
• EFT & TFT Tapping Practitioner
• Animal Communication (Penelope Smith)
• Forest Guide Training Program Harz National Park (during my time in the national park)

All this, together with my knowledge as a biologist and my personal experiences in intensive contact with nature, flow into the content here at Flowfeather, so I hope that you can take away a lot of inspiration and insights for yourself.

Last, but (for sure) not least: Jacky

Maybe you're my dog Jacky already on the site NATO's tuot gut! met. I had already written it there, but I want to repeat it here again, because the time with Jacky is just such an extremely important time for me that I like to write 😍 about it several times.

Jacky has been with me for more than 13 years now. In these many years, we have hiked thousands of kilometers together through nature (I did the math, it would have to be almost 20,000 kilometers in total).

Without Jacky, I might have forgotten over the years how important nature is to me. Simply because such things often get lost very quickly in the stress of everyday life.

Because in the stress of everyday life, it seems that there is never the time to go out into nature.

But not so with Jacky 😀!

And so I have been out and about with Jacky in the forest and in nature every day for many years. And that has anchored my love for nature so deeply in me that I will be grateful to Jacky for it for all eternity.

Often we have met during our Hikes through nature somewhere on a meadow and just sat there for a few hours and looked into nature.

Sometimes a fox came by, often we watched deer or roe deer. In the sky, kites or buzzards made their rounds.

These are experiences that have been deeply imprinted in my memory and that I will always remember very fondly.

Flowfeather is therefore somehow Jacky's project and message to the world. Because without Jacky, Flowfeather might never have been created.

Sounds exciting? Then move on to the page " Reconnect ", where you will learn exactly what the connection to nature is all about.

One more word about the images used on Flowfeather:

I use my own images, stock photos and AI-generated images as image material. For some, the latter may be at odds with a website that is about nature and the connection to nature. Therefore, I would like to briefly explain my thoughts behind it.

I don't see Flowfeather as a call to "back to nature". Development continues to progress, just as a river always flows forwards and never backwards. That's why I'm not interested in replacing technology and progress with closeness to nature, but in bringing the two into harmony. In other words, to live and experience the connection to nature in a modern world. The same applies to the topic of spirituality, where, in my view, it is a matter of finding a modern and personally coherent form of spirituality instead of copying the spiritual practices of other – mostly original – cultures.

In my eyes, AI-generated images are almost a symbol of this approach: Using modern means to make old, traditional wisdom and principles of life practically tangible and tangible for modern times – that's exactly what Flowfeather is all about. That's why AI-generated images don't contradict the topics here on Flowfeather for me.

What do you think about it? Feel free to write me an e-mail or a comment under the respective posts!

P.:

If you are interested in the exact origin of the images used: In the imprint you will find detailed information about each individual image, including whether it is an AI-generated image or a photograph.