About Mikael Hedman – SWEDISH BUDDHA
Actually, it's not about me. This entire website is for you.
Here is a brief presentation of my person and background. If you want more, you can soon listen to a story about my path on Spotify. If you remain curios, just send me an email.
Overcome obstacles
From an early age I was fascinated by challenges that required me to overcome mental and physical obstacles. I grew up in Gothenburg close to the sea and as a teenager I bought a kayak. Without ever having paddled before, I set out late at night from Välenviken to Marstrand to cover 30 miles on my own.
When I arrived a little tired in the shoulders around lunch the next day, I felt the freedom that opens up inside when you leave the confines of your old life to discover a greater world. The exquisite nature experience and the physical challenge were just the silver lining of the kayak trip. In hindsight, that trip was a foreshadowing of how my life would turn out.
Vegetarian diet and machine guns
The military had always attracted me as the ultimate arena for ultimate challenges with life at stake. I wanted to cross the impossible line of what is possible and I became an elite soldier. My fighting spirit paid off and I earned a commission as an officer, noted for my unusual methods of forming soldiers. In parallel, a strong curiosity about the essence of life grew more and more uncompromising and began to demand all of my attention. I stopped eating meat out of compassion with life. One afternoon, amid the mix of machine-guns and vegetarian food, I went up in camouflage uniform to a group of spiritual people with a different outlook on life and was introduced to their monk. He suggested that I was on a spiritual path and that I probably had no choice but to follow the feeling. The truth in his words made me put aside everything to find the ultimate answer about reality and myself.
Mystics and tech billionaires
I planned to find the answer among wise books while living in a shed I secretly built at the far end of the coastal archipelago. I meant to eat herring and live like a hermit, but life had other plans in store.
At twenty-three years old, I received a permanent residency permit in the United States and landed in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It became the starting point of an intensive journey of discovery over fifteen years among desert mystics, tech billionaires, and martial arts masters at break-neck speed.
It's not about me
Back in 2021 I distilled it all into a Swedish Spotify story together with a book and this website, so that those interested could find me. Since then the story has been played almost twenty thousand times and almost a thousand people have participated in reatreats, group meditations, and individual calls. Now I am translating the story to English and making myself available to you with the help of this website. But the purpose is not to tell my story – the important thing is your inner development. For me, there is nothing more beautiful than contributing to the peace and self realization most people long for.
Well being and Enlightenment is so simple and natural that all the wise books, popular speakers and meditation techniques actually miss the mark, because what we seek is so close that we do not see it. One must be guided there by someone who is the reality waiting to be discovered.
It is about you
Along my journey, I have had invaluable teachers who have shown the way to deeper self-awareness. So it's not me who's important - it's your development and what's happening inside you that counts.
Now it is up to you to act decisively and make contact. Frist consider what you want and what you need. Perhaps you don't even know, that's ok. Difficult feelings are not an obstacle - they are the way in. If you want my help, we'll see to it happening!
