I grew up in the Netherlands — a privileged country to be born in. And yet, my whole life I felt like I was swimming upstream. My way of thinking was so different from the mainstream that I never felt at home.
I ended up at the VU University in Amsterdam, working as a research assistant in healthy aging and neuroscience. A building full of people studying what causes disease and how to age well — spending their days sedentary, under artificial lights, some days barely seeing daylight. My boss would stay until the early hours of the morning. She barely saw her kids. I lived 200m from the beach, yet by far didn't go as much as I'd wanted. That contradiction eventually became impossible to ignore. So I left.
Surfing and a yoga training brought me to Nicaragua. A place where life feels raw and essential. A place I felt completely at home. A place where I, literally and figuratively, built my own home.
I spent nine years there. I built a life that made sense in my body, not just in my head. Then an ear surgery made surfing impossible — and something I still can't fully explain told me to go to Thailand and learn Thai massage. I had never experienced it. I didn't know what it was. I went anyway.
I studied first at an international school in Chiang Mai, then with a Master in his eighties who had been practicing every day for over sixty years. He knew things about the body that no book teaches and no curriculum reaches. I only gained a fraction of what he carried — but that fraction changed everything. Because under my hands, for the first time, I felt directly what I had been searching for in academia: how mind and body are inseparable. It was no longer a theory. It was something I could feel.
That is what this work is built on.
