About me

I am a philosopher, scholar of Jewish studies, Kundalini yoga teacher, and licensed psychotherapy practitioner, based in Berlin. Through my father, the philosopher Jochen Kirchhoff, I grew up immersed in long conversations about history, the critique of science, natural philosophy, and Eastern wisdom traditions — particularly Buddhism, the Upanishads (in the form of the Oupnek'hat), and Chinese philosophy.

My path is carried by the conviction that there is an objective spirit inherent in the world, accessible to human beings through an inner organ of receptivity — a kind of spatial organ — through what I would call thinking empathy. This becomes possible when we open ourselves and are willing to cultivate ourselves ethically, to let go of the need to be right and to be superior.

My studies in philosophy and Jewish studies in Berlin and Jerusalem led me deep into the Western intellectual tradition and its genuinely creative currents — those to be distinguished from mere intellectualism: from the pre-Socratics through the Neoplatonists to Renaissance philosophy, early German Romanticism, Weimar Classicism, and beyond to German mysticism and the philosophy of will (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche).

A spontaneous satori experience, exactly one year after completing my reading of Spinoza at the age of 24, taught me — beyond the already present feeling-oriented direction of my thinking — what life is truly about: existential experience.

Philosophy as the love of wisdom therefore unfolds within the living of life itself. The real process of thinking develops from spontaneous intuitions into larger connections and the thoughts that are actually at work behind events, along the questions that life itself raises. It is not abstract talk.

That philosophy is often perceived as such is evident from the common question about what one intends to "do with it later" — that it is cerebral and somehow superfluous. This does not in any way negate the rational-logical foundation of academic philosophy, but it extends it to include the existential dimension of feeling and of knowledge given by space itself: wisdom as a living, ordering force. In Buddhism, this is called Prajna Paramita. In space — which is also the world soul — philosophy finds its true counterpart. In this sense, it grounds us, orients us practically, and connects people.

Inspired by these reflections, I turned to direct spaces of experience and "experiments with reality." Alongside Daoism, I pursued the practice of Kundalini yoga with profound experiences, and later systemic family constellation work, encounters with indigenous cultures such as the Colombian Kogi, and various modalities of personal development.