SusanneSteines

Susanne Steines

Born 1969 in Giessen, Germany

Academic journey

After graduation in High School in Germany I was invited to the “Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes”, a foundation for the highly talented, which was back then recruiting students not only upon baccalaureate grades but also upon teachers’ and school directors’ recommendation and upon a weekend of selection talks and tests. I declined in order to stay completely free in my future ways. Questioning the highly competitive school system and the early stages of specialized education in Germany’s University System, I decided to study anything that interested me — philosophy, linguistics, neurolinguistics, psychology, art history — but keeping my main focus on German and French literature. In the area of art and painting I found school curricula most detrimental to the free development of one’s own ideas and signature style — one’s own handwriting. I took private classes in portraiture and oil painting. While working for various newspapers and publishing poetry in magazines, radio, and public readings, I took a chance and travelled to Mexico with the goal to study Latin American literature. I was immediately captured by the creative power of this country and ended up spending several months a year in Mexico before finally settling there.

Personal/spiritual journey

Writing and painting since early childhood with both hands (ambidextrous), I seem to be destined on a journey of balancing, exploring and bridging the two brain hemispheres. As early as high school I had developed a strong interest in neurological research literature on the two hemispheres and their different functions. Trained in German schools and universities in the efficient and logical reasoning of the left hemisphere, I felt always a strong wish for developing the qualities that come from the right hemisphere such as dancing, music, creativity, imagination, a sense of “seeing further” and not limiting my interest to the knowledge of the “hard sciences”. I found in Mexico a culture that seemed open to a more complete and holistic way of learning than European culture. Here I quickly connected the dots of knowledge that my life had exposed me to — between literature, art, philosophy, anthropology, psychology and neurology. In Mexico I encountered the ancient Mexican (Toltec) knowledge about the realities of the left and right halves of the body. In an astonishing way much of what I had learned along my academic path fell in place with the ancient knowledge of the Toltec and brought me to look closer at the concepts of synchronicity as described not only by Toltec wisdom but also by Judaism and other ancient cultures.

Since 1994, the year of my first trip to México, my paintings focused on expressions of synchronicity and multidimensional realities beyond the perception of the rational half of the brain, allowing words and letters to drift into signs and moments of mere energy. I began to engage ever more in reading academic research on those topics after a decisive incident of my life: A life threatening brain injury in 2005, which gave me an experience that many would call an “out of body” experience, led me to focus more and more on the unknown abilities of the brain and on the linking of cutting edge studies/research of the brain with the spiritual wisdoms of many different cultures, above all the Toltec.