The name “Zaka Counseling” is an homage to a region with which I associate essential moments of my personal and professional growth. With Zaka, the focus shifts to Haiti. In Haiti, I conducted intercultural studies. My research interest centered on people experiencing severe socio-ecological and thereby existential crises. I studied how they maintain relationships with one another, but especially with the natural world, how they cope with these complex crises, and what contribution humanitarian aid can make. I studied the relationships between aid workers and those in need. In doing so, I uncovered a great deal of hostility and violence and explored the ruptures that fuel them. I discovered a rather universal problem: the unwillingness and inability to engage with one another in such a way that genuine differences are seen and acknowledged, instead of being forcefully leveled.

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Relationships thrive when there is enough inner and outer space to recognize and acknowledge oneself and the other, to hold and shape both: the similarities and the differences. The name Zaka is symbolic of this.

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In Haitian Voodoo, Zaka (or Azaka) is the name for "The Spirit of the Land." Spirits refer to specific spiritual qualities that help us see things in a particular way, imbue them with feelings and meaning, and guide our daily actions. Zaka is one such quality. Zaka refers to our profound connection to the earth, to all our earthly possibilities. It is said that Zaka helps all those who, honestly, wholeheartedly, and through steady work, wish to earn a fruitful harvest and abundance in their lives. Historically, Zaka is the most important spiritual quality for farmers, workers, and laborers. This reminds us of our inheritance of peasant ancestry and traditional ways of living.

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Zaka, in this sense, is a spiritual quality inherent in relationships. To gain a sense of the quality of Zaka, imagine you want to start cultivating a garden, dedicating yourself to a patch of earth with the ambition of creating abundance. Zaka is what guides you, helping you develop a sense of “the other”, the garden’s complexity, of its characteristic and structure, of rhythms, cycles, and dynamics, of how to begin and maintain, of a path of development, and of the appropriate tools you can use such as steadiness, tact, simplicity, clearness and variability.

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When the quality of Zaka manifests in our relationships with people, animals, and things, we begin to profoundly engage with one another and nurture these relationships. Zaka can be experienced as love, connectedness, steadiness, vitality, and deep joy in everything we do to keep our relationships flourishing and in what these relationships ultimately enable and give us.

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To me, the spiritual quality and meaning of Zaka functions as a symbolic and ethic navigation and thereby protection in my relationship work as a counselor, teacher and researcher.