How the course began, and how it came to us

Fifteen years as a doctor in Skärholmen

Bengt Stern was born in 1930 and qualified as a doctor in 1956. He worked as a clinical physiologist and in 1968 became a general practitioner in Skärholmen, then a newly built suburb of Stockholm, and there he stayed for fifteen years. Alongside the practice he studied psychosomatic medicine, body psychotherapy, and humanistic and transpersonal psychology in Europe, the USA and India.

He has said himself why he left: “What my patients wanted, and got, was sedatives and sick leave, when what they really needed was to take responsibility for their own lives.”

The courses begin at Mullingstorp

The practice closed in December 1983, and the following year he began holding courses at home at Mullingstorp on Vikbolandet. It was the red house his father had bought in the war summer of 1940, and the house he had grown up in. In 1985 the institute was formally established.

The course was called Meet Yourself, and by 2000 at the latest it was followed by a Step 2 and a Step 3. The sources he named himself were Jung, Stanislav Grof, Martinus and Wilhelm Reich. As early as 1990 he described breathing exercises, body-oriented therapy and meditation as methods he worked with.

The books and the illness

He wrote Att växa till hälsa (1985), Möt dig själv bortom allt förnuft (1990) and Att må dåligt är en bra början (1994), published in English in 1996 as Feeling Bad Is a Good Start. The last of them exists in five languages. He summed up what it is all about like this: “In every new moment a person can take hold of the tiller of their life and shape their future.”

In 1994 he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer with a poor prognosis, and he kept working for another eight years. He died in his home at Mullingstorp on 6 September 2002. Around 5,000 people took the courses there, by the institute's own count.

Mullingstorp closes

In August 2018 the courses were suspended until further notice, because the estate was to be sold. That is what Mullingstorp's own website said. When the courses ended there was nothing equivalent left, and that is why Vitalisera was started, to carry the courses on rather than let them disappear.

The concept is the same, many of the therapists and course leaders came along, and the courses have been updated but have kept their form.

The same three steps, on Aspö

Step 1 is about self-knowledge, Step 2 about the patterns of childhood, and Step 3 about adult relationships and about existence. Each of them is a week.

Four of those who lead the courses today appear by name and portrait in Mullingstorp's own brochure from 2013. And offering all three steps means taking something up again, because the three-step form was Bengt Stern's own from the start, disappeared for a period, and is here with us today.

Mullingstorp itself wrote on its website in 2016–2018 that the courses were “known for containing the most far-reaching process in advanced self-knowledge and leadership”. That is the process we carry on.

Those of us who run Vitalisera have one thing in common, which is that our own lives took a new turn when we took a week like this one. That is why we do this. Everyone who leads the course has been through it.

What Vitalisera means

To give new life and strength. That is exactly what we want to give the person who comes here, whether the reason is to feel better or simply to understand themselves a little better.

The name was chosen from some fifty suggestions. One of them was to name the business after him, and that one we set aside.