Heiko Gardener

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Heiko Gärtner in front of an icy sea from Iceland
Heiko Gärtner on an Iceland expedition

Heiko Gärtner (born March 12, 1979 in Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz ) is a German survival expert, investigative journalist , author and activist for environmental protection and human rights . In addition to several television appearances, he was best known for his books and the life adventurer project . To do this, he has been walking around the world on foot without paying any money since 2014 in order to collect donations for various aid projects.

biography

Heiko Gärtner grew up in Postbauer-Heng in a rural region in Bavaria. His father was the head or general agent of an Allianz agency , his mother a saleswoman, dressmaker and later a housewife. As a child he discovered his passion for nature as well as research and discovery. This enabled him to prepare for his future career as a survival trainer and extreme journalist at a young age. He was also an avid martial artist, which also laid the foundations for his later work.

Due to a serious illness with meningitis and Lyme disease , however, he was unable to pursue the career he favored and instead began an apprenticeship as an insurance salesman in his father's insurance agency.

In the following years he was trained by Samy Molcho and Hans D. Schittly, among others, in the targeted use of body language , gestures and facial expressions , as well as in reading micro- gestures and facial signs. He initially used these skills in his work as a broker and seller. In addition to the field service, he trained as a motivation coach and sales trainer and attended in-house seminars on the topics of time management , profiling and personal development . In his private life he studied micro-gestures according to Paul Eckman , reading faces and non-verbal communication signals and diagnosing facial features . The knowledge he was able to gain in this way enabled him to write his book on face and body diagnosis later, according to his own statements.

In the following years he undertook various expeditions, including to Thailand , New Zealand , Iceland and Canada . There he was in touch with various primitive peoples and mentors as well as a Thai claims to Shaolin - monastery build. He then expanded the knowledge and skills he acquired through self-study and several training courses. This included training as a wilderness instructor and a national park ranger at the Institute for Nature and Landscape Management in Laufen. According to the company, a central element was a so-called One Moon , an extreme seminar in which the graduates spend 28½ days in the forest, isolated from any civilization .

At the end of 2007 he founded his own training institute called Wildnisschule Heiko Gärtner in Postbauer-Heng. From this point on, Gärtner offered his own training in wilderness, adventure and environmental education as well as in natural medicine and mental coaching. The topic of survival also played an increasingly important role for him. In order to prepare for his job as a survival trainer, he spent several winter months in the Ukrainian and Polish wilderness. The aim was to find out whether he could survive in nature even under extreme weather conditions and at low minus temperatures without civilization equipment. He then offered survival courses for beginners, advanced and professionals. They ranged up to so-called survival extreme courses, where the aim was to survive in the snow for 24 hours with shorts and a T-shirt but without equipment.

Due to the rigors of his training, more and more media became aware of Heiko Gärtner's training program. They booked him as an expert for various emergency scenarios such as survival in the swamp , orientation in an unknown wilderness or surviving as a shipwrecked man . Also, special units of the police and the military booked him as a trainer and examiner to the survival skills to test the recruits and expand.

In 2010, Gärtner started his first major extreme project, which could be followed live via the Internet and via daily reports in the daily newspaper. He hiked 3,300 km as a Stone Age person to Spain for 100 days . According to his own statements, he lost over 13 kilograms of body weight. In the period that followed, Gärtner was booked by various television stations for technical expertise in the field of survival, and now even foreign television stations, including one from Japan , became aware of him.

With increasing awareness, Gärtner shifted his activity towards investigative journalism . Together with his colleague Tobias Krüger, he lived with homeless people for several weeks , mainly in Cologne , Frankfurt , Munich and Nuremberg on the streets. The two also immersed themselves in other areas of society that are often taboo. Sun visited and interviewed them drug dealers , crack - prostitutes , street children , male prostitutes, cults and the inhabitants of a secretly built parallel city, hidden in the green median strip of a highway in Nuremberg was. The experiences from this project flowed into the book Outside - Reportages from the Edge of Society , which was published by Redline-Verlag . Co-authors were among others Günter Wallraff and Detlef Vetten . The team of journalists started another project of this type in July 2012 under the title Fühl dich ein! It was about living with various eye diseases and complete blindness. In order to simulate this, Gärtner and Krüger simulated the corresponding restrictions with the help of age simulation glasses and eye patches. Equipped in this way, they traveled through Germany and tested the infrastructures that are provided for the visually impaired in order to draw attention to grievances. The project ended with a blind ascent of the Zugspitze.

In March 2012, Heiko Gärtner was commissioned by a medicine man to write a documentary on Aboriginal culture . In return, as a thank you, he was invited to take part in a Presence Healing course under the guidance of medicine man Darrel Combs. This also became part of a working group that dealt with the collection and processing of indigenous knowledge, especially on the subject of healing and medicine. From this he was later sent on a research trip, a so-called medicine course, in order to collect the traditional healing knowledge of all cultures.

At the end of October 2013, Gärtner published his first book with the title: Recognizing diseases at a glance - face and body diagnosis, as well as other techniques to comprehensively record people at mvg-Verlag . In it, he summarized the results of studies on body analysis that he had started at an early age at the insurance company. Over the years he had supplemented this in many ways, including with the help of medical knowledge, which he was able to gain insight into from various indigenous peoples .

In November 2013, Heiko Gärtner handed over his wilderness school to a team of experts that he had trained himself to be able to turn to a new project. This began two months later, on January 1, 2014, in the form of a money strike, which was initially designed for five years. Until December 2018 he wandered through 45 European countries together with Tobias Krüger without money. They covered a total of around 40,000 kilometers, where they were repeatedly accompanied by various media and clarified about the grievances in Europe that they could observe during the trip.

In October 2016, the second joint book by Gärtner and Krüger was published. It is titled: The natural healing power of trees: How our self-healing powers are promoted and we can achieve holistic health . It was also published by mvg-Verlag. In it, Gärtner reports, among other things, on his experiences with the Shaolin in Thailand and shows how one can use the teaching methods of different native cultures to train one's perception and self-healing powers. In April 2020 the mvg-Verlag will publish a revised new edition of the book under the title Follow the Shaman's Call - Recognize your true self and develop your entire healing power.

After the planned five years of the hike without money, Heiko Gärtner and Tobias Krüger decided in December 2018 to continue their project for an indefinite period. The original “money strike” had gradually become a so-called charity walk. The declared goal was now to cross every country in the world on foot. The duo has been working with four social aid organizations as advertising partners since the beginning of 2014. This partnership is now to be expanded on the subsequent journey, so that the hike should become the longest charity walk on earth .

Books

  • Outside: Reports from the fringes of society . Redline Verlag, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-86881-335-7 .
  • Recognize diseases at a glance: facial and body diagnosis as well as other techniques to comprehensively capture people . mvg Verlag, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3868824490 .
  • The natural healing power of trees: How our self-healing powers are promoted and we can achieve holistic health . mvg Verlag, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3868826999 .
  • Follow the shaman's call: Know your true self and unfold your entire healing power. mvg Verlag, Munich 2020, ISBN 978-3-7474-0154-5 .

TV reports

  • 2011 RTL Punkt 12 48h pure wilderness - relationship test
  • 2011 Nippon TV survival camp
  • 2012 The Nordreportage NDR Exposed in the wild
  • 2012 Terra Express: Lost in the swamp
  • 2012 Pro 7 Galileo Orientation in the forest
  • 2013 World of Wonders Survival Training

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life adventurer .
  2. ↑ Heiko Gärtner, Tobias Krüger: 10 questions for Heiko Gärtner. In: www.lebensabenteurer.de. Retrieved June 30, 2019 .
  3. ↑ a b Heiko Gärtner, Tobias Krüger: About me: Heiko Gärtner. In: www.lebensabenteurer.de. Retrieved June 30, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Heiko Gärtner, Tobias Krüger: My Vita: Heiko Gärtner. In: www.lebensabenteurer.de. Retrieved June 30, 2019 .
  5. ↑ a b Heiko Gärtner, Tobias Krüger: Recognizing diseases at a glance: facial and body diagnosis as well as other techniques to comprehensively capture people . mvg Verlag, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-86882-449-0 .
  6. ↑ Heiko Gärtner, Tobias Krüger: Survival Guide - Here you can find help with survival training. In: www.lebensabenteurer.de. Heiko Gärtner, March 12, 2019, accessed on March 25, 2020 .
  7. ↑ website .
  8. ↑ Heiko Gärtner: Wilderness seminars. In: www.wildnisschule.net. Retrieved June 30, 2019 .
  9. ↑ World of Wonders: Wilderness Survival Training. Welt der Wunder Sendebetrieb GmbH, accessed on June 30, 2019 .
  10. ↑ Heiko Gärtner: Damn wild tour. In: www.heiko-gaertner.de. Retrieved June 30, 2019 .
  11. ↑ Exposed in the wild with Heiko Gärtner Nippon TV. In: YouTube. Retrieved June 30, 2019 (Japanese).
  12. ↑ Felicia Engelmann, Günter Wallraff, Dettlef Vetten, Heiko Gärtner, and others. a .: Outside: Reports from the fringes of society . Ed .: Felicia Engelmann. Redline Verlag, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-86881-335-7 .
  13. ↑ Alex Schönmoser: Run along - once around the world on foot for a good cause! In: YouTube. DonauTV, accessed on June 30, 2019 .
  14. ↑ Heiko Gärtner, Tobias Krüger: The natural healing power of trees . mvg Verlag, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-86882-699-9 .
  15. ↑ Steffi Mitkowsky: Heiko and Franz: On a trip around the world without money - how does it work? In: www.keine-eile.de. Retrieved June 30, 2019 .
From newspaper articles
  1. ↑ Business Notes : Master Prize for Heiko Gärtner in Neumarkter Nachrichten, issue of December 27, 2008
  2. ↑ Neumarkter dares the experiment "Homeless" in Mittelbayerische Zeitung, issue of January 26, 2012
  3. ↑ Stormy summit storm without any distant view in Neumarkter Nachrichten, August 31, 2012 issue
personal data
SURNAME Gardener, Heiko
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German survival expert and author
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1979
PLACE OF BIRTH Neumarkt in the Upper Palatinate