Sabine Lichtenfels
I’m a theologian, peace activist, author and co-founder of the project. I head Tamera’s Global Love School as well as our department for spiritual ecology, Terra Deva.
Background
I was born in Muenster, Germany in 1954. At 16 years old, I already had the vision of establishing a peace village. With my friend Charly Rainer Ehrenpreis, I met Dieter Duhm in 1978. Together we founded the “Bauhuette” project in southern Germany.
In 1981 I co-initiated the project’s social experiment, researching on building community, healing and freeing love from fear. By exploring my own processes in love, I began to understand how to overcome the historic war between men and women, and how to build lasting trust in love. For this reason I increasingly became an authority for questions of building community and healing of love, both within and outside the community. In the early 1990s, I led the project’s “Erotic Academy,” an early version of what’s now called Love School.
Since the 1990s, using my abilities as a medium, I’ve explored ancient matriarchal and early temple cultures in Portugal, Malta, Crete and other places. Through this I’ve gained insight into a fascinating, primordial – and at the same time, trans-historic – vision of human culture in peaceful cooperation with all beings and powers of life. I call it the “prehistoric utopia.”
In 1992, I started leading desert camps to find the right place for creating a first Healing Biotope. We visited places worldwide to figure out which land was calling us. In 1995, I came across the land in southern Portugal and clearly knew that this was the place. I received the name “Tamera” in a meditation, and was soon joined by Dieter Duhm and others in founding the community. Ever since 2000, I’ve dedicated myself to peace work in a number of crisis areas around the world, principally Israel-Palestine and Colombia. In 2004, I started creating a stone circle at the center of Tamera, a piece of geomantic art and ceremonial place, in collaboration with Marko Pogačnik and Peter Frank.
In 2005, shaken by the threat of war against Iran, I went on a solitary peace pilgrimage for several months, without money, from Portugal to the Middle East. This became the first of a number of “Grace Pilgrimages,” where I’ve guided people from different nationalities and religions into a communitarian experience of radical reconciliation. They led to the first annual “Global Grace Day” on November 9th. Following this I was nominated by a Swiss initiative for the Nobel Prize as one of the “1000 Women for Peace” in 2005.
I’m the mother of 2 grown-up daughters, one of whom serves as a next-generation leader in Tamera.
What Motivates Me
As a young woman I was already driven by the question of how love can be freed from fear and jealousy. My dream was to build a community where we can show that another life is possible. Today, I can still say that love is guiding us to the deepest system change. When I face what people, animals and the Earth currently suffer, I know that war and destruction will only end if humanity transforms its operating system of fear to one that allows love to enter. Behind all the horror, there is an original sacredness of life that wants to be recognized again. By building communities of trust, we can reconnect humanity to this source.
My Role in Tamera
For the past few years, I’ve been engaged in training people in conflict resolution, building community and peace work in crisis areas. This led me to found the Global Love School together with Benjamin von Mendelssohn, as well as creating Marisis, a landscape park, and “Terra Deva” our department for spiritual ecology and communication with all beings.
For more information, visit my website and subscribe to my Facebook page.