School of Light institute

UROŠ AND PETRA ARE DIRECTING US TO SEEK OUR INNER LIGHT

Interview for the Zarja magazine

Uroš and Petra Dobnikar. He is a trauma – orthopedic surgeon , she an academic pianist and professor of piano. Years ago they realized together that the current knowledge we posses cannot even come close to expressing the miracles that are happening every day in and around us. They are convinced that the purpose of each and every human life is to discover its inner strength and be enabled to create, heal, connect and feel love. Diseases and accidents come into our lives so that we can recognize their root causes, remove them and advance into a freer life. This is why disease is a gift, or so they say in their book, School of Light: Way to Truth.

Uroš and Petra started to help people in need, people seeking meaning in life and a connection with their essence. In addition to writing, they help people by holding meditations in Maribor, Slovenia, where they live with their three sons, a dog, a rabbit and a mischievous and cute parrot named Blue.

Text: Katja Božič; photo: Šimen Zupančič

In your book you write that we perceive the world in accordance with our beliefs, which are deeply rooted in us and have no connection to real life. If this is true, then many of us are not really living at all. We could say that it’s as if we are sleepwalking most of the time. How did you wake up from this dream?

Petra: In one moment we simply felt that it was time for us to awaken to real life. We had good jobs, we had three children, our life was a happy one. Then we started thinking that there must be something more to life than this. At that time we met a friend who introduced us to meditation. We started to discover a completely new world and inner worlds that we knew nothing of before. We traveled around to countries that were deeply connected to certain belief systems or faiths, but actually this often turned us away since we saw that people are very religious and seem happy but don’t actually radiate the feeling that we felt in mediation, a sort of inner strength.

When did you feel that “there has to be something more,” as you say?

Uroš: It’s hard to describe this until you really experience it. You simply know that you are not feeling the body the way you could. As you start to explore and discover, you realize that inside of us we are full of treasures that we are not aware of. The world starts to become more and more beautiful as you surrender to this inner world and allow this intelligence that resides inside of all of us to lead us in life. But this is a process. As you start to awaken you have to keep letting go of all of the old things and habits that are a part of you. If you can't leave this behind you cannot proceed on the path of conscious life.

Can you still remember the old habits that you left behind?

Petra : Yes, especially the subconscious feeling that you must please everyone and that you are being evaluated and judged all the time. As we began to feel a path that was all our own with such depth, we simply knew that we had to start with ourselves. If we take into account the surroundings in which we live (Slovenia) it makes sense to say that the inner strength starts to develop when you let go of the feeling that you need to please others and simply start to live authentically, the way you feel you ought to live.

Uroš : In the past I was always deeply entrenched in science – I studied medicine, completed my Ph.D. and tried to act and think scientifically and explain certain events that happened to me.

We try to control life, but through meditation I realized that it is simply not possible to perceive and live life in such a way. The world of the mind wants to control every event in life through thought and belief. Since this is not possible, we are faced with an inner conflict when things we can’t control start happening to us. As a consequence, problems in our lives start to arise. But as I became more and more connected to myself I realized that life is something completely different, something that is governed by an intelligence that we cannot explain, understand or prove. If you are able to simply surrender this intelligence, everything starts to run smoothly. Everything works. I started to feel new energies in my body, things that nobody had ever taught me about. I started to explore this new world of feeling, a world different from the world of thought and proof. Life will show you which path you are on. The more you are open to it and the more you trust the intelligence that guides you, the more things will run smoothly. And this is it. I started to see my patients and the idea of disease in a completely different way from the old way I was trained as a doctor to think of disease and healing. A patient is sick and you need to heal him. This is the prevailing belief in our society. But through my own journey I realized that every disease has a cause. Until we remove the root cause of the disease we cannot cure the patient. We only heal symptoms, we ease the suffering, but we do not identify the root cause of the disease. As this knowledge came to me and I had these realizations, I felt relieved. I became calmer. Now I can listen to my patients more. I can see what their real problems are and can direct them to start seeking the deeper causes of their problems.

How can you integrate this knowledge into your work?

Uroš: You cannot do this in the system in which we live, but it is possible to do it in our personal lives. We are after all meant to meet people, to develop loving, fluid relationships, to be(come) connected. This is something that has changed within me – I see patients differently; I feel them and know how to connect with them. People need someone who will direct them in life, a teacher who will teach them how to live so that the disease does not come back anymore. We doctors have forgotten this. There is an artificially created wall between a doctor and a patient – on the one side we have high walls of arrogance and low self-esteem, and on the other side a feeling of powerlessness. This is a system designed for victimhood. Patients are powerless victims because they do not know how to heal themselves. But everyone possess an infinite power within himself, a power that enables him to heal himself.

This is a sort of a secret that nobody teaches us anymore.

What happens when you speak of these things in front of your colleagues?

Uroš: They ponder and (eventually) accept them. I do not enforce my views on them since I know that everybody has their own truth and I accept and respect other people. If we touch on these things in conversation, it makes them think. At first it seems strange to them, but after a while they get used to it and start thinking in such manner themselves. Many of my colleagues are thinking in a similar manner, but they do not dare to speak about it publicly. Their jobs are publicly funded and they are afraid of loosing them.

Where you get this courage?

Uroš : This is not courage. It is the most natural thing: truth that helps people. As you speak the truth and stand by it, life will always support you and you simply have nothing to be afraid of.

Concerning the open letter you wrote two years ago to the director of UCC Maribor, some would say it was a very brave thing to do.

Uroš: But if everyone acted in this way, the world would be completely different than it is now. If you would publicly and honestly say what you think, things would resolve themselves much sooner. When you feel like doing something, you simply do it and the problem gets resolved. Fear prevents you from acting, you are blocking the healing that could resolve the entire situation in a way that you can't even imagine.

How did your relationships change after this open letter?

Uroš: People working there were very excited and felt relieved that somebody had the courage to speak up. People started thinking about relationships, which before really was not an issue. Relationships at work were very poor. This is a system that changes very slowly, but it is changing.

Your travels many years ago opened your eyes and probably encouraged you to think about how material goods are not what makes us happy. Still, people find it hard not to fall back into old ways of thinking and behaviors that threaten to ensnare us. How did you two manage to resist this pressure?

Petra: We did not resist at all. We live in a physical world and we need certain material goods in order to be able to operate here and now. The sooner you accept abundance into your life, the sooner you can live freely. Here we live according to certain rules. Elsewhere other rules apply. I realized that we always define everything ourselves. We did not fight against anything since we realized that people who often struggle are the people living with the feeling of being a victim. Victims have to fight for their survival. As you find the source inside yourself, this indescribable energy, this power, you step out of the feeling of victimhood. As you expose this victim, completely new possibilities start to open up in life. But when we returned from our travels, we often found ourselves in circumstances where we had to rely solely on ourselves. In certain moments you have to be very present in order to survive. This is where the seeds of our path started to germinate.

In your book you say that disease is a gift. It is interesting to hear this from a doctor. It is hard, though, to say this to someone who is suffering.

Uroš: When someone is suffering he or she cannot understand this, but as she overcomes this suffering and takes another look at it from a new perspective, she can see that the event, situation, disease or whatever caused the suffering was something that woke her up, something that pushed her forward. Every disease has a root cause, which is in the person himself. Everyone is influenced and shaped by ways of thinking, emotions, habits and speech. If these are negative, in the long term, it creates disease and diseases come to remind you that you are not acting in accordance with your true self, that you are disconnected from your source, and it somehow forces you to find that connection to your source again. This is the purpose of human life: to find oneself, one’s inner strength, with the help of which man can create, heal, feel love and connect with other people.

Disease only enters our lives to help remove the root causes and help us move forward with more freedom. It is a sort of a process of self-healing, which can at times seem like another symptom of the disease, but this process is actually healing the body. The body heals by creating a fever, something that grows in the body. These “symptoms” are transformations of the body. We see this as something bad, but this is the healing of the body. The body wants to align with harmony if it is not balanced. If a tumor grows, we see it as a disease, but a tumor grows because the body is fighting against negative patterns that we have forced upon our body with our mind, with our behavior.

Many already understand this, but it is still difficult to accept when a child becomes seriously ill. How do you explain this?

Uroš: Every child is born into a family with certain beliefs and patterns of behavior. Children are like sponges. They soak in unresolved issues and problems that their parents, grandmothers and grandfathers and ancestors had. These are sometimes expressed through grave illnesses, but only to remind us of these patterns and energies that wish to be removed from our patterns of behavior. The flow of nature wants to dissolve everything negative that is not in accordance with nature, and in doing so restore harmony. When something like this happens, we feel guilty; we seek a solution or some way to heal the child; but if we do not remove the causes that lies in the entire family, often medical treatment cannot be effective. It is important to be aware that disease in a child indicates a problem in the broader family.

With this approach we can successfully help a sick child. Then very often the life of the entire family changes. Until you remove the root cause, nothing really changes in the long term. Change only comes when we start to observe our life, what is happening to us, what kind of relationships we have with people, what we feel, what words come out of our mouths, what is going on in our subconscious mind.

Only then can we really start thinking about changing. But nobody is teaching us this. We think we are victims, that we have to live out this role into which we have been thrown by the random currents of life. But the truth is that we alone decide our life and our fate, how we will live and what we will create. We wish to share this with people. This is the mission and the purpose of our institute – to show people that they are not victims and that they can discover true power within themselves, use it and live freely. That we can create something beautiful together. When this happens, diseases disappear. But this of course does not happen overnight. It is a long-term process through which you develop and raise your awareness.

How do you imagine medicine in the future?

Uroš: Personally I see the person in front of me as completely healthy. Even if he is sick I do not see the disease. I see through these masks and illusions to a completely healthy man who has in himself infinite power to create miracles in his life. Life always works like this: something is born, it grows, and then dies. The same goes for all rituals and habits and human systems. Nature always ensures that what does not serve life disappears. At this moment man needs medicine, because he does not know how to do without it. Once we learn to reach knowledge in a different way we will not need it anymore. If more than 50% of all the people in the world consciously decide to live without pharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical companies will go bankrupt and something new and more beautiful will develop.

Why do you love your profession?

Uroš: Because it enables me to be in contact with people and to help them. My greatest success would be if I could help them in such a way that the accidents would not even happen anymore. An accident always happens for a reason, as does a disease. When you remove the root cause, you remove the mental blockages that cause the injuries or accidents, and when this is remove the accidents will not happen anymore because they are not necessary. An accident is a gift, just like a disease.

In the book you also mention that with the help of our children we can learn and change a lot. How should we raise our children in such a way as to transfer as few patterns and beliefs as possible?

Petra: It is especially important to feel oneself. The most important thing is to feel a field of love in oneself. This makes us like magnets and causes the children to listen. As this field is created within you, everything changes. I raised my first two children as I was raised by my parents and received a lot of resistance. Children are free and we want to clip their wings and put them into boxes. I had to find a way that worked. This is the path of love. When you are “in love,” you start to accept diversity, you start to feel the child and his truth, and then there is no more resistance, neither from his side nor from yours.

As this happens we simply hear and see ourselves. At that point we start to cooperate and then everything gets resolved.

I read that even a fever in a child can be cured with meditation. Is that true?

Uroš: You can be certain that my scientific mind at first needed confirmation. I did not simply believe something like this is possible. This was a miracle for me, but when you see it with your own eyes, there is no other way but to believe it. Everybody has this power of healing inside themselves.

Did you learn from somebody or did you come this knowledge also through meditation?

Uroš: We have always listened to ourselves and the knowledge always came from inside. Whatever somebody tells you cannot be true for you. You have to listen to yourself. Until you realize this, you are lost and act from your mind; your life does not flow smoothly, you are in a drama. You go up and down. But if you listen your inner voice, you are always guided to the situation that you are meant to be in to bring you greater awareness. Even when seemingly bad things come, you learn to accept them and you move forward. These are gifts, challenges. You simply have to trust life and step out of the role of the victim.

How you raise awareness with children?

Petra: We allow them to learn from their mistakes. Parents always try to protect their children.

Uroš: It is important that you build a field of love, respect, and compassion. As you

cultivate this field, children naturally blossom. Children have a program that drives them to develop autonomously. They hold amazing potential, but we suffocate them with the ideas and beliefs we were raised with. They are also suffocated by the school system that frames and limits their minds. We teach all of them the same way. We limit their creativity and the potential that is unique to each and every child. If we learn to truly see and feel the child and to recognize this potential, then the child can flourish. We cannot force them into anything; we can only enable them to have a normal, free development. Since we live in a world where the mind is still the most important aspect of life, we have to be able to create clear boundaries. Nevertheless, children have their own life path. They are our greatest teachers.

Petra: Children are much more connected with primal intelligence, with the source, and we have to remember this. But as you remember who you are, you reconnect. This is power. Cooperation in families is also very important. For people who are trying to live a spiritual life this may seem like something very serious and not necessarily joyful, but it is in fact very joyful. Spirituality is life itself. We have to enjoy every moment. The mission of our institute (School of Light institute) is to spread this knowledge in order that people may be liberated.