--- title: "George Mensink on Death, Sound Journeys, and Healing the Soul" url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/george-mensik-on-death-sound-journeys-and-healing-the-soul/ date: 2026-01-02 modified: 2026-07-03 lang: en author: "Perseus Arcane Academy" description: "Introduction I recently had the pleasure of talking with George Mensink after receiving a recommendation from a mutual friend. This allowed us to have a discussion about the possibility of..." categories: - "Interviews" - "Uncategorized" tags: - "Runes" - "Shamamism" image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/OIP-1.webp word_count: 3207 --- # George Mensink on Death, Sound Journeys, and Healing the Soul ## Introduction I recently had the pleasure of talking with George Mensink after receiving a recommendation from a mutual friend. This allowed us to have a discussion about the possibility of George sharing his approach to practice via a course on Perseus. This was a fruitful discussion and it always a pleasure to talk with other practitioners. In today's interview you get to see some of his background and views on practice. If you enjoy this interview, then please leave us a comment and share the post with those you feel would be interested. --- ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/image-1.png) ## Interview ### Death, Nursing, and a Life Shaped by Farewell **PAA: You’ve been an ICU nurse for over 30 years, and in your book Als het Licht Uitgaat you share more than 50 short stories about your experiences with illness, dying, farewell, and grief. How have these profound experiences with death – both in your personal life and in caring for patients – impacted your spiritual outlook and the way you approach healing others?** Death and me go hand in hand. It is like Cheyenne describing the Harmonica Man to Jill in Once upon a Time in the West: “there is something, around him, that has to do with Death”. It is almost the same as my mentor Ann told me: “Death and you walk hand in hand”. Ann was a good friend and a mentor, she passed away this year. As a young boy I can remember I dug up a dead mole with my neighbour girlfriend, just to watch and observe it. The mole was found dead by my father and he buried it. I was so curious I dug it up and watched it. I can remember I was fascinated by it. A dead animal. It made me wonder and think about what death was. I was about five years old at that time. My mother died when I was 13 due to an auto immune disease, my guardian, the sister of my father, my aunt, died when I was 18. I was very attached to my mother and after her death I had some problems with the girlfriends my father was dating and was sent away to my guardian and we had long conversations, so she became very important to me as well. And she was killed in a car accident when I was 18. My brother committed suicide when I was 33 (he was 27) and my father died when I was 37. So I had my share of death in my personal life. Somehow these experiences helped me when guiding people to the end of their life and it was a great help when I supported the relatives who were in the process of loosing a lost one. As an ICU nurse I was involved many times when a treatment was ended and sometimes people were fully conscious and aware that life was going to end. Fast. It often led to deep discussions about life and what will come after. And of course: was life worth living? What are the true meanings of life? At work it is something I am quite good in. It is a combination of knowledge about anatomy/pathology, human knowledge and empathy. Through the years I have learned to feel the patient and their family and know how to guide them through the end. One of the things I have learned is that all the earthly things are relative, but at the same time valuable. Life must be lived. Preferably to the max, in my opinion. Don’t postpone, do it and do it now. Later is something that does not always come. ### Runes, Myth, and the Circle of Life **PAA: Your recent book Runenliederen is a collection of songs/poems that, using the ancient runic script, “sing the circle of life from beginning to end.” What drew you to the wisdom of the runes and Northern European mythology? How do the runes and their stories inform your understanding of the life journey or the soul’s path?** I wrote Runenliederen (working on an English translation) inspired by the old Rune poems. I found it a challenge to capture the energy of the Runes of the Old Futhark in a poem. First I wanted to write a book about how to learn them, but there are many good books about this subject, so I wanted to have a different approach. I started my artistic career as a poet, so this approach to capture the energy in a poem came natural. For me the Old Futhark symbolises the circle of life. It is round. So the last Rune, the Othala offers the foundation for the energy of the Fehu rune to come to life again. I was drawn to the Runes for a couple of reasons. At first because I wanted to learn and understand them because I was a great Death in June fan. Horrible maybe, but that was the start. Then I learned more and more about the Runes and I became fascinated by them. They represent energy, they represent the phases of life, there are amazing stories how they reached the life of man. What is also very important to me as a sound healer is that they have a sound. Understanding the Old Futhark gives you the understanding of life. I don’t use Runes for divination, I use them to create mantra’s, for healing, for focus, for support, for whatever I need them for. During our Cacao ceremonies I use the Circle of the Runes for inspiration to the guided mediations. My teacher Linda Wormhoudt also learned me to write the Runes on my body. I always have Runes written on my chest and during performances me and my partner write the runes also on our arms and sometimes our forehead. It feels like a tribal thing, but a right thing to do. Again it offers focus and strength. I love working with them, writing them on branches and wands while singing them. It feels it helps making a deep connection with the divine powers. ### Writing as Spiritual Craft and Magical Focus **PAA: Writing has always been important in your journey – you’ve mentioned it was your first love, and you’ve written poetry collections, blogs, and articles that were published in various magazines. How does your writing connect to your spiritual work? Do you find that writing (whether poetry or storytelling) offers a different way to heal or inspire, compared to your music and shamanic practices?** Writing is important for me, because it helps to organize my thoughts. It helps getting them clear. Poetry helps me to offer a shape and a sound to my more abstract thoughts and emotions. Abstract thoughts like dreams or things that are not possible to describe in a more common method. Poetry offers freedom in writing. I like that. It is like magic, you write words and they form a text. A story needs something like a story line, poetry doesn’t. It needs just words, emotion and a rhythm. Words are magic. When you write something down, even if it is total nonsense, it becomes true. You can see the words, on paper or whatever material you wrote them down. Even spoken words do their magic. I often see patients enter our unit with a complaint, walking straight and full of life. When they get a fatal diagnosis, what happens: they leave broken, head down, empty of life. There is not much difference between the patient before and after the hearing of the diagnosis but the words. The knowledge of going to die breaks him. Words have meaning and words are true. Words work. My writing of the magical essays and books helps me to organize my way of thinking, working and teaching. It helps me focus on the why, how and when in what I am doing with the magic I do. It supports my shamanistic practices. Something else I learned after I had written my first English book, Journey throught the Wheel of Death, is that people take you more serious when you have written a book. Somehow it shows the dedication people like to see. I like writing, so it is an easy way to put myself out there. I like writing on social media because of it’s temporary aspect. Somehow I feel that not all writing should be saved for eternity. Sometimes it is for the moment. And not for the moment a year later. I like it when I write something, people read it, and then it vanishes. Text can be right for this moment and not right for the next. As I said, I love the power of words and when you make them disappear, you make them even more powerful in that right moment. Words in the form of a spell, mantra, poem or song can contain magic. I love the aspect of repetition what can be found in the mantra’s, so I use it quite often. A combination of words, chants and a more intuitive way of singing (without words) is a strong thing to work with. While singing, especially runes, I do this while exhaling, so the energy of my breath is into the words or runes I sing. The challenge is to create the right combination of sounds, words/runes to work with. Besides this all there is always a story. People come to you because they heard the stories about you. It is the same when you do a ritual, the story around his ritual should be sufficient, it must be the right story to give the client the right treatment/ritual. With words you create the setting. Words and ambience. It is all very important to the ritual work I do. My teacher always joked, “It is all theatre” and it is, but then a very serious theatre. ### YslashY: Sound Journeys, Elements, and Sacred Places **PAA: YslashY, your collaboration with yoga teacher Rachel Getrouw, takes participants on “sound journeys through the elements.” I saw that this project was inspired by experiences with sound in places like the tropical rainforest and sacred sites in Scandinavia. Could you tell us about those adventures and how they influenced the sound journeys and rituals you now create together?** Rachel is my life partner and she was born in Suriname, a former colony of the Netherlands, so that is how I got to know and to learn this country. Suriname is bigger, much bigger, than the Netherlands, but there are much less people living there. Most of the country is covered in rainforest. When you see this huge amount and surface of green from the plane when you are flying over Suriname, you become overwhelmed. It is so much. As far as the eye can see, it is green. And when traveling through this country, you understand, the green will always survive and conquer. Whatever we as humans think, it doesn’t matter. We can lay concrete streets and buildings on top of the earth, the green will always come through. In the end, the world will be green, but if humans will walk around, I don’t know. The green is stronger, much stronger, than the power of men. There is an instrument that is called the Maraka, an rattle instrument used by the Indigenous people of Surinam during their rituals and ceremonies. Of course I bought some big ones, I love them big, but I also bought a little one. When Rachel was teaching Yoga in a Hindi temple at the border of Paramaribo (Capital City of Suriname) I had to stay outside, I was not allowed to enter the temple during this class. That was ok by me, so I sat outside the Temple during the sundown. And it was during this sundown that I noticed the green came alive. Slowly the insects living in the green start making their sounds. It started softly with just a couple of insects, but it swelled on and it became a complete concert, with different sounds and rhythms. Then I recognized these sounds. It were the same sounds as the little Maraka creates when you shake it gently. The Maraka contains the sound of the Jungle, the sound of the rainforest. In my view the rainforest symbolises Mother Earth, our Great Mother. I call her since that moment the Great Green Mother. So we use this Maraka with our journeys. Our concerts, performances, ceremonies, rituals and mediations are purely acoustic. Sometimes, not often, our instruments are amplified, but we don’t use electronics or tapes to create sounds. We want to be as natural as possible. We want to do our rituals and ceremonies everywhere we can, even in nature and we don’t want to pollute nature with electricity, we want her to be as pure as possible. And that last thing is a challenge. In nature you can find a deep connection with our Great Mother, if you can tune in on her and when you listen to the sounds of nature and feel them, it becomes easier to tune in. We try to create a natural sound for people to tune in, so we can create that connection with the Great Green Mother or with the divine well or the silence behind the sounds. Because when you are in nature and you listen carefully, you will experience that behind all sounds, there is a silence. A silence that is the source of all existence, the womb of the Great Mother. ### Trance, Drum Circles, and the Wheel of Death **PAA: The aim of your sound journeys is to help people relax and find the silence within themselves. What are some of the transformations or breakthrough experiences you’ve witnessed in people who attend your sound meditations or drum circles? Is there a particular story that stands out where you saw someone heal or awaken in a meaningful way through sound?** There are many stories. One of the things we did was starting to work with the Wheel of Death, a model of the different layers the soul travels after death. It starts with the actual dead and follows with traveling over the sea of lead, entering the beach of the afterlife, going throught the heath of purification, entering the mountains of the ancestors and in the end returning to the eternal source. During a deep trance journey, you can guide a person through these wheels, to meet people who are deceased and to experience how it feels. It always ends in the eternal source before I bring the travellers back to their body. (To make this journey the soul must leave the body). What amazes me every time we do this, it ends with a deep silence. Even when we did this in a small tent at the Castlefest festival, a festival full with medieval bands and ceremonies, we ended up in a deep silence. A deep silence before or in the sounds around us. That is a deep spiritual experience. Same with the DrumCircles we guide. It places people outside time and place. Most of the time people are surprised when the time is up. The rhythm that has been created by the participants brought them in a state of trance. It is like a state of Zen. Being one with the thing you do. People forget where they are. People forget who they are. So when they return they are relieved from the stress they experienced before the DrumCircle. We have even stronger experiences with our GongBaths. Some people told us, we broke them down and then we rebuild them. Or that we cleansed the dust from the cracks. Or we opened drawers in their soul/memory that people forgot that existed. During the trance journeys we bring people to different worlds and we always love the stories people tell us. Our technics work. And are based on shamanistic practices. We don’t need drugs or plants for this effect. We just use our instruments, and we prefer to use less as possible. We did a journey through the Wheel of Death recently with a person who is going to die in not a long time and with his direct family. After this journey he was not afraid to go and his wife understood why she will have to let him go. All participants were relieved because it felt good. That is a present. And we were happy, proud and amazed that we can give such a present to people who need it. ### One Path, Many Roles: Nurse, Zielenman, Artist, Writer **PAA: You wear many hats – you’re a nurse, a Zielenman, a sound artist, and a writer – truly a versatile path. How do these different roles complement each other? Do they all come together as part of your larger mission to guide and heal others? For example, does your work in healthcare inform your spiritual healing work, and vice versa?** Yes they all come together. There was a time I felt like different persons in one, but that has ended. As a nurse I am a Zielenman, as a Zielenman I am also a nurse. As an artist you are creative, a talent that is also needed to be a Zielenman and nurse. The older I get, the less difference I experience. It is all one, like I have become one. It is all about healing. Understanding. Creating an experience where healing can be. ### What Healing Means at the Deepest Level **PAA: You’ve said you use sound and rhythm to help heal the human soul, whether through relaxation or through therapeutic drumming, singing bowls and chanting. With your unique background bridging clinical care and shamanic healing, what does “healing” mean to you at the deepest level? How do you understand healing on a soul level, and what do you feel is most essential for true healing to occur?** Healing for me is making one again. Bring back into balance. Accepting things as they are. That is a hard thing, even for me, for us, it is a hard thing, but it is something that we reach for. ### A Final Message for Seekers **PAA: For those who are on their own healing journey or spiritual path, what insight or message would you most like to share? Given everything you’ve learned and experienced, is there a core lesson or encouragement you feel every spiritual seeker could benefit from hearing?** Have faith. Deep trust that everything will be ok, one way or the other. The motto of YslashY is: Trust and See. Be open, have an open eye. Believe what you feel. It is a simple answer, but doing it, living it, can be a real challenge. ### What’s Next: Training, Courses, and Updates **PAA: Finally are there bits of information or updates about your work training and courses you would like to share before you go.** I hope to place a course to teach some of my ideas and techniques on the Perseus site as soon as possible. And keep an eye on the YslashY Facebook page, because we are hoping to bring our rituals over the border as far as we can. **PAA: Thank you very much time in answering these questions, looking forward to learning more about your approach.** --- ## Learn More ##### George on Facebook ##### Georges Website ---