I am a neurospicy witchy woman with a teenager's dirty thinking, a spiritual heart and reality based brain. I won’t always tell you my teenager thoughts. But I will share my spiritual heart’s messages and my analytical brain assessment of your body’s flow. 

NeuroSpicy

My brain drives on a neurospicy operating system. It makes me chaotically creative, a spiritual realist, not good in small talk but in deep talk, and loving animals and nature more than most humans. But what I do know is that the people who love my view, I love theirs, I learn from my clients just as they learn from me. And I love them to my core. They make the world a better place.

Well that’s me. How about yoga, and how did I come to do pilates? 

Well when I was 15 my lower back started to grow sideways from the heavy school bag. So my doctor told me to go and do yoga. And so I purchased a book and practiced it every day. I fell in love with it, and sometimes I also fell out of love or just didn’t have the time. 

When I was 24 I moved to the countryside of the Netherlands as was my dream since I was a small child. To connect with the community, I looked up parttime jobs and there was the job offer of being a yoga teacher. You didn’t need to be one yet, you could learn there. It was in a gym.. And let me tell you: I hated gyms! But when I got there… the energy, the people, my boss, it was so different than I was used to. I fell in love, my job interview was about the vibe of the place, people, yoga and the body mind connection. And I was offered the job immediately. 

There was a time that I could get used to the lessons. Getting used to being on the stage. (Trust me that was a whole other level, I never wanted to be center stage of anything.) And then to teach while performing the poses myself. Then I got the teacher training and I passed. After that they offered me to be a pilates instructor and I loved it from day one.

Qi gong was always a part of the yoga lessons, and when the gym was taken over by a commercial gym I quit. That’s where my interest in qi gong got me to grow in that flow and make it my own just like yoga and pilates. After a few years I started my own yogilates classes in my garden: Garden Yoga. Because when covid hit, we had to go outside instead of staying in the gym. And it was like a dream I didn’t know I had, came true. 

Now I moved to Portugal from the Netherlands, and I am missing the ladies, I already knew that I would miss the lessons. So we already thought about going online as they didn’t find anything that came close to my lessons. Which feels like a huge compliment by the way! 

So here we are! Between all my other businesses sharing my love for healing and movement.

Okay cool, but what about meditations, breathwork, zen, affirmations?

Well meditations is a different story. I actually made my own trance meditations when I was a kid not knowing what it was or what I did. When I got depressed at age 15 and the only thing that helped was a healer, helping to balance my chakras, I researched other spiritual healing things like astral journeying. And that’s where I found out that it was exactly what I was doing as a kid. So meditations come naturally actually. Of course I find inspiration through meditations that I followed from others, from nature, music, etc. 

Breathwork was something that came along with yoga. It was in my yoga book and in the spiritual workshops I followed through the years. I have never taken a class about DMT breathing, I don’t need that to get into trance. I use breathwork more for the body than for the hype that’s now going on. And I learned that the participants of my classes loved it. It makes you increase your lungs capability. Which means you can breathe better, which means you will be able to breathe more, meaning you claim your space more. It can also heal old wounds and emotions as the lungs can hold grief and sadness. (No, it’s not new knowledge, thousands of years old actually, it’s the knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine.)

Zen was something I didn’t know either. But it is what meditations and breathwork taught me just like pilates. How to endure without stressing about things. How to feel without becoming the emotion. And don’t think that I can’t be triggered or that I’m not emotional. I can get mad, frustrated, touched, sad, and all sorts of emotions. But when I do practice zen, it feels natural and it creates such a space for my inner world that the outer world doesn’t seem to matter. It’s like people telling me how great they thought it was that I could not be bothered with someone’s negative comment on my meditation when I was 26. It didn’t even go into one ear and out the other, it just didn’t even come into my bubble. 

Affirmations. I did coaching and learned how to coach others. And my favorite is mindset coaching with shamanic coaching. Within both we look at the mind as a great thing, but not as the thing we are. It can come up with thoughts on its own, and they do not have to do anything with us. We can just be aware of them, think that it’s really magnificent that the brain can do such things and let it go. But then become aware of what we do want to think about. Because deliberate thinking is almost as strong as the words we speak. It’s the beginning of manifesting. Everything that’s manifested, was a thought first. (Even when you didn’t want children but now you have them, you know ‘the act’ can bring kids in the world. So the thought of sexy time, manifested the children.)

Honesty

Yes I can be blunt, yes I can go deep, yes I can help you think positive. But I also know that sometimes life just sucks. And I would love to hold the space for you to rage about it. So you can let it go and then think of the things you are able to do. Or to just feel the way you feel no matter how long you want to feel them. I think that’s something you need to know about me as well: I don’t see anger as a bad emotion, there is no good or wrong emotion. Emotions are signals. It’s the body communicating how it feels about something and if you are on the right path of where you want to go in life or not. 

Duality = balance

I also don’t believe in love and light only. It gives me the ick. And I don’t believe that happiness is the balance. Love and light and happiness are just one side of the scale. If you have guilt/shame and love, if you have darkness and light, if you have sadness and happiness. That’s balance. And balance isn’t always 50/50. 

Life isn't black and white, it's colorful

It’s like energy, low vibration doesn’t mean it’s bad. High vibration doesn’t mean it’s good. Because mother earth also has a low vibration but it’s healing. Panicking is also a high vibration but it’s not helpful and can be harmful even. It’s not that dense energy is bad, when you are mourning and grieving someone you loved (no matter what body they were in, cat, dog, human, guinea pig, lizard) feeling light isn’t healthy. Feeling dense and low and sad is healthy with sometimes a laugh and then a cry. And when everything is going well in life, but you don’t feel light, happy and confident, it’s not healthy. But it all happens. And it’s never a bad thing. Depression when you’re in the right place is okay, it will teach you what you were missing in your life’s purpose for example. And laughing, feeling loved and blessed when you’ve lost someone is okay too. You will get your time for grief. 

That’s what balance means to me, that’s what duality does for us. It gives us both. So celebrate the smallest victories because no one and certainly life will not do it for you. 

So I hope you understand that I don’t have to see only happy faces, and that I will also do very calmly and carefully my poses in the lowest ‘level’ when my body flares up. But I will still support you on your growth. I will not always be able to do a lotus pose, to stand on one foot. And neither do you have to do that. It’s about moving with the flow of your body, mind and heart. Not someone else’s flow, not the flow I created for the lesson.

Let us flow our bodies as they can and heal what comes up or celebrate if nothing comes up at all!

Oh and don’t be afraid that I will do yoga in my underwear, I don’t like that either ;)