alexander coulon

I was born by caesarean, I was not so heavy or in a difficult position but in those years it was a classical way to proceed. My mother tried once to breastfeed me but quickly gave up.

The first memory that I seem to remember is my baby bed in the middle of the bedroom with white sheets hanging above it. I vaguely have an image of my parents giving me a bath, the brown colour of the carpet covering the side of the bath tube.

 

When I was three or four, coming back from my kindergarten, I remember the emotional shock of my mother discovering that we had been robbed, I remember clearly looking at the entrance drawers open and my medicine laying on the floor; I remember myself asking my mother what happened.

I remember Felix our cat, black with white legs, he loved playing in the garden and one time he peed in the fridge, where he used to steal food.

I had a “Au pair” from England that was looking after me during the days while my parents were out working. After she left us, our neighbour next door, a mother called "Mamadé", took care of me; I use to watch a lot of television in her house and to read comics in the empty room of one of her grown up sons. I remember having a weird and sad feeling in her house.

 

At five years old, my parents are divorcing after many unhappy, unfaithful years. I moved out with my mother and we went to live in an apartment. I felt relieved that their fighting stopped.  I'm very happy when my father comes to pick me up, even though I see him only two week-end every month.

 

At six years old, my nice Waldorf school closes because of mismanagement and my mother moves me in a state school; in a very rich neighbourhood of Brussels so I can have a good education in "good company". It was a terrible shock. From then on, I never enjoyed studying until college. My clothes and my social behaviour are betraying the fact that I am not coming from a rich family. I was never part of the main group of friends. I started to step away from the group and became an observer.

 

At the end of my sixth year, my mother and I are moving in a Buddhist centre in Brussels. We moved there because, Sofia, my mother is more and more involved in Buddhism and is working as a volunteer for the centre. We will live there untill I’m 12 years old. It will be the closest to any type of religious education that I will received.

My mother was born in Chile, from a Jewish mother and a Christian father. She was raised after the death of her father in a Christian monastery amongst the nuns. My father, Philippe, was born in Belgium from an atheistic artistic left wing family.

 

Around seven years old I remember being blessed by Kalo Rimpoche. He told to my mother or to me, I don’t know anymore, that I have very special eyes and that I am a very special child. I gave him the white silk scarf that he put around my neck and then he pressed his forehead against mine; I still have the feeling of a flash of light passing into my head.

 I start to have a lot of souvenirs from my life from then on. I remember very well this Buddhist centre and the people connected to it; also my friends from this time,

One time, my father comes to pick me up in school, I am playing with a yellow plastic race car which I am completely sure that my father gave me for Christmas. The woman keeping me said that it belongs to our school and I try to remind my father that he gave it to me, but he keeps saying that he doesn’t remember it. I feel completely betrayed by him.

I am not living those school years as something very joyful.

 

When I am ten, my mother introduces me to a new man that comes to live in our life, he is an Argentinean traveller that she met in the street in Spain after having done there a vippassana retreat. She is in love with him and they are having a child in the same year, my brother Oliver. This man has a very unstable behaviour and it is very disturbing me even though he is nice to me. He leaves the house and my mother after only two years. My mother has now another child to raise alone and a big debt of few hundred thousand Belgian francs to pay back to cover his debts.

 

I will be asked to be very active in helping her out with my little brother.

My father has a girlfriend that is much younger than him; she is very unfriendly with me, even jealous sometimes. I have few crises with my father about it; ultimately he leaves her to protect our relationship.

 

Around my twelfth year, we leave the Tibetan centre. I start loving to read and this passion will never leave me. I’m wondering why are we here on earth, what is the sense of life, what do we have to do?

I change school and after a year my social life start to improve, I make more friends and I am being appreciated.

 

Around sixteen year old I read “the Steppenwolf” from Herman Hess and then “Siddharta”. I start to have the feeling that there is something much bigger than what I suspected about life; it is somehow the beginning of my spiritual path.

I have sometimes anxiety attacks, I may lay on the floor for a long time, feeling like a bathtub being emptied of all the water.

First girlfriends, first big drinking and around seventeen years old, smoking pot and cigarettes. Becoming anti-establishment, unwashed hairs, army shoes, long woollen sweaters.

One of the most amazing experiences I had in my life happened around this time. I was one night ridding my bike under the rain. It was very difficult, I had a long steep road to climb. The wind was in my face, it felt really cold. The cars were passing by me very fast, I could see the drivers at ease, in shirt, warm in their cars. Then I thought to myself: ok, it is cold it is hard but it is what it is and I’m here, just here. Then I felt suddenly connected with the whole universe, it was like I was looking in the stars and being on earth all over. I felt so good and self content. It didn’t last very long, I tried to capture the feeling and it flew away.

 

At eighteen I travel to the small city of Buxton in England in order to study English and journalisms. First real sexual relationships, more and more drinking, lots of party, some tries at harder drugs. Lots of marijuana and hashish. Being stupid, lots of fun. It feels like a black hole in my consciousness and memory.

 

Nineteen years old I come back to Belgium, I prepare my self for studying in a cinema school. I discover Carlos Castaneda. It is a very big revelation. I read "the doors of perception" from Haldous Huxley.

 My mother, as part of an inner work which she started in a process called “the Forum”, comes back after a seminar and reveals me that my father is not my biological father. She then explained that she had an English lover nineteen years ago and wanted him to be the father of her son, even though she knew that he will not leave his family and that she will stay with my “social” father. I felt like someone just pulled the carpet under my feet, I was very mixed up for few days, understanding that nothing is certain in life, that even pillars of certitude like fatherhood could be changed. Started then for my father Philippe a harder process; he never suspected anything like this and he got very surprised and angry. Paradoxically this will get me closer to him, because my problems of identification with him, the fact that I didn’t really appreciate whom he was, slowly vanish.

I already knew my biological father, as a friend of my mother, I started then to write him letters.

He lived in the USA with the same wife he was with when he had this relationship with my mother.

I started as well my first long term relationship which will last for two years.

I entered in a cinema school to study film editing. I will experiment in those four years with a very artistic life style. Lot’s of art, theatre, dancing show, films, teachings, parties, more drugs…

 

At the age of twenty five years old, I leave Belgium and start travelling the world (with an exception of six months and then two year, I will never come back to live in my birthplace).

First stop: half a year in India. Meeting with yoga, meditation, vippassana, taste for travelling and love story with India and through India. At the end of this trip, on the plane to Thaïland, I will be introduced to my future wife Maureen. Few years later we will as well get engaged in India.

When I return to Belgium I go to meet in the south of France a spiritual teacher, Arnaud Desjardin, whose books I had been reading for years. It is an amazing meeting for me, it is the first time in my adult life that I meet a living awakened person (that was my feeling) who lives on such a different plane. I will be going back another time to his ashram where I will as well meet Lee Lozowick another amazing master.

 

 At twenty-eight years old I get married twice. One wedding in Brussels and one wedding in Israel, my wife's homeland.

In order to get married in Israel I have to meet rabbis and proved them that I’m Jewish. I have to find different kinds of proofs and create a little story. Everything is fine but they tell me that I have to get circumcised (britmila) in order to have a religious ceremony in Israel. I meet with a moel (the person responsible for the circumcision) in Belgium and we make an operation in the hospital, with a surgeon. Only after the operation is finish, we realised that I did take place on the 22d of July, seven days after my birthday.

 

Twenty-nine years old; me and my wife are going for a two weeks retreat with Andrew Cohen, another spiritual teacher. I still don’t know what I feel about him but it was a very strong and meaningful experience.

 

Thirty years old, I immigrate in Israel. Very, very, hard first year in Israel. After half a year we move from kibbutz Usha to live in Sawade, a small Bedouin village next to the Kibboutz Harduf.

 

Thirty-one year old, I start working with people with special needs in Beit Elisha. Thirty-one and a half my wife give birth to our first son, Thomas. The first two weeks after the birth I experience a wonderful opening of the heart, I’m very grounded in the present, past and future don’t matter anymore. When I have my son in my arms I feel that my heart stretches to the end of the universe.

​Thirty-two years old, we move in Harduf.

 

 The end of my thirty-three’s, my wife gives birth to our second son, Matanya. The house birth is beautiful, holistic and joyful; another of my greatest experience in my life.

 

At thirty-five I understand that I want to learn biography advising and I start this new chapter of my life.

                 

At thirty-eight my third son Beeri is born.

 

I'm now 41 years old.