Jutta Weiske
Founder of Avidanja
Hello, my name is Jutta, born in Germany and I have lived in Portugal since 1985 because I was in search for a cleaner and simpler life which I could offer to my newborn son, my family and myself. From early on, 3 themes continuously were calling my attention and with the passing of time I came to realize they are all interconnected. It started with a deep fascination for the idea that we can have a big influence on our physical health by applying laws observable in nature. Almost simultaneously I intuited that there must be more to life than what I understood with the mind and saw with the eyes. I also felt the importance to be connected to a network of people, so I lived, and still live, in a community which is connected to a larger community in the hills of Central Portugal.
The biggest shift until now happened in 2010 when all my interests came together and made sense as a logical and natural interconnectedness. I decided to convert my residence into a venue, a place where I could share a simpler holistic lifestyle and combine all my interests. At the same time, I joined the Awakened Life Project where I learnt to re-connect with the Life Energy that animates everything. This Life Energy animates our individual bodies just as it animates nature and all else. Our bodies are part of this entire and complete system, how could they not be? I began to see our beautiful earth as an extended body, a reflection of myself, where the connection to others is a deep human necessity. We are all interconnected all the time. It made sense for me to start a little community where together we explore the truth of these discoveries and integrate them into our daily lives. My transformation and subsequent creation of a community stemmed from the teachings of my two beautiful spiritual teachers Cynthia and Peter Bampton. Their profound teachings and shared spiritual practice have enabled me to share the depths of what it means to be human and to truly experience embodiment.
It’s an honour and joy to receive guests, clients or volunteers for our ongoing Retreats and to simply share the joy of being alive.
It is a pure joy to Live and Be Alive!
Liva Reidzane
Co-creator of Avidanja.
Hello! I am originally from Latvia, I travelled to Portugal in 2019 to visit Jutta’s project and at first fell in love with the beauty of not only the physical place and the opportunity to explore my creativity, but also very much with the heart and mission of this project, which is to invite people to be in true relationship with others, ourselves and the nature and to see that there is no difference, no separation between anything and anybody. The more time goes by, the more blown away I am by what is possible in therms of intimacy and depth of relationship, when you have a group of people committed to live as an organism, to be vulnerable, to be transparent, to speak the truth, to be strong, to not hold back, to choose love over anything else and mainly to simply be happy and support that in each other. Therefore this mission has become my mission too ! Having lived most of my life in the city and most recently in Paris: studying, working and basically running through life, coming to Avidanja was like waking up from a deep sleep of feeling confusted, rejected and alone, to waking up to a completely new ground, new understanding, new perception of who I am and what is possible – I found in myself strength, clarity, dignity and joy of living. And it has lit up a fire and a passion in me to not only explore what life is truly about, but also to inspire people to do the same and the fire is only getting bigger ! I am since then the co-creator of Avidanja, supporting this project to grow and evolve while realizing my passion in woodwork, massage and filmmaking.