I come from the Dutch East Indies. Who I am and how I look at life is connected to that. This means, among other things, that physicality and touching and massaging one another come naturally to me.
In the course of my existence, an affinity with movement and fascination with the interaction between body and mind also developed early on. How does body posture and the way we move affect and influence the mind? What do meditation, attention, presence, awareness do?
I was fortunate to also encounter this angle in my four-year training as a massage and movement therapist at the Akademie voor Massage en Beweging in Amsterdam. In addition to a wide range of techniques from gentle to deep touch, much importance was placed there on attention to mental processes that could be triggered by touch.
After my training – the basics in fact – I attended various further and continuing education courses to deepen the aspects of the work that were important to me at the time and within my capabilities.
Often, over time, people develop a certain asymmetry in their bodies. In my massages, I try to restore the balance between left and right, front and back, bottom and top. The guiding principle is how a person relates to the earth, to gravity. I also try to pay attention to how a person causes and/or maintains an imbalance in everyday life.
Which of the techniques I have learned, I bring in, comes about intuitively, but also by what the person brings up, consciously or unconsciously. My contact with the client and his/her body is therefore of central importance. This almost always results in a mixed form, which is difficult to attribute to a particular “school”.
Broadly speaking, I work towards increasing inner space and sense of connection in the client.
