A Trip Down Memory Lane

While we were creating my Press & Media page on the School of Soul Embodiment Website, I was really taken on a trip down memory lane as I dug up some of the media pieces I have been featured in over the years. I didn’t even find all of them, but I found a lot, and what I really loved in revisiting these past versions of me is that in the past ten to fifteen years I have become the embodiment of the things I was already envisioning back then.

As most of the articles I found are in Dutch, it may be difficult to assess this for yourself for my English-speaking audience but trust me when I say that I was already talking back then about the things I am doing now. Back then I identified them as part of the problem, a problem that I am now actually helping to solve both in my work as a healer working one-to-one with clients and my group work as a teacher – not to mention in my own personal life by being a leading example.

It’s funny because although it would seem that feminism, web design, online coaching, Twin Flame teachings, or being a spiritual teacher and healer don’t have much in common, going back I could see the red thread that connected all these different phases of my life and how it all comes together in the work I do now.

From a Goddess in the kitchen… to feminist and beyond

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any of the media exposure I had gotten for my second book published in 2006, you’re missing out on pictures of me with angel wings. Both of my first two books were published in Dutch under a different name than I use now. Actually, my name has had quite an evolution of its own from my married name to my maiden name to now a combination of my changed legal name and my soul name that came through in the fall of 2018 while meditating at Es Vedra in Ibiza.

The articles I found go as far back as 2008, but I actually started writing for online platforms and printed magazines in the early 2000s where initially I wrote about food and healthy kid-friendly recipes. My first book was a Macrobiotic-inspired cookbook with vegetarian, dairy, and sugar-free recipes. This was completely weird back then and fully accepted now. Being ahead of my time is something that is a reoccurring theme in my life, that you will see come back in my story again and again.

After a four or five-year love affair with creating healthy food that my kids loved to eat and even becoming one of the first vegan pâtissiers (confectioner) in Germany where I was living at the time  – I started on the path of healing my femininity. As I dove deeper and deeper into healing my inner feminine, I began to see more clearly how society was still created around the man as the ideal worker. But one thing men have had historically that women often don’t have is a female figure (his partner or mother) who does all the necessary care work for him for free.

The reason why a man can almost always work full-time when he has children is that he either has a partner or his mother to take care of his children, cook, clean, do groceries, and if necessary care for his elderly or sick relatives for free. This is not to say that men don’t cook, clean, grocery shop, and take care of the kids or the elderly and sick – they often only do this to the same extent as women when their partner is the main breadwinner and even then studies suggest that it’s still the women who do most of this unpaid work on top of their businesses or 9-to-5’s. In fact, when women outearn their male partners, they will try to overcompensate this by doing more of the household chores.

‘Some researchers have found that in the UK, 45% of female breadwinners still do the majority of household tasks, compared to just 12.5% of male breadwinners, and that the average female breadwinner spends the equivalent of an entire working day taking care of the house on top of their full-time job.

Additionally, research carried out in Australia and the US showed that although women decreased their housework as their earnings increased, this was only true up to a certain extent. Once women started to out-earn their partners, researchers found that couples often reverted to more traditional gender roles, with women picking up a disproportionate share of housework.’ according to the BBC‘

This counterintuitive behavior is a result of our patriarchal conditioning kicking in. Women in this position have the money to outsource everything, but subconsciously don’t choose to do so because they feel they need to prove their femininity to their partner to compensate for outperforming him financially. Consciously we might mock this idea and say it’s preposterous, but we are driven by our subconscious and will live out what we subconsciously believe whether it is correct or incorrect. In fact, we will live out our outdated subconscious beliefs even if we don’t consciously agree with them – simply because the subconscious mind is more powerful which cancels out our conscious beliefs even when they are more modern or more socially just.

How we are still living out our patriarchal conditioning

As this New York Times article states ‘SOCIETIES RARELY TAKE STOCK of the value of unpaid care work unless there is a disruption in the supply.’ It goes on to state that in the 1970s Iceland was brought to its knees when Icelandic women refused to cook, clean, or look after children for a day. The Icelandic men scrambled to fill in, taking their children to work and overwhelming restaurants.

What I am talking about here is not more battle of the sexes kind of stuff (this is not a call for more man-bashing), but rather to point out the need for the reevaluation of the value that women or what is traditionally seen as women’s work brings not only on an individual but also on a societal level. My conclusion in 2008 was that we had traded in one prison for the other, rightfully so our great-grandmothers, our grandmothers, and mothers wanted more from life than to be stuck in the nursery or the kitchen. They wanted to seek their own mental, emotional, and spiritual fulfillment by fully realizing their potential. Fast-forward one to two generations later (my paternal grandmother was one of the first female doctors in the Netherlands in 1925) we were not only in a situation where women were required to be financially self-sufficient, but they also continued to get stuck with the lion’s share of the unpaid care work.

In the meantime, governments are blindly pushing women to ditch working part-time as this leaves women and children vulnerable to poverty when the man leaves the household and takes with him his full-time income in case of divorce or separation. A full-time income and career he has often been able to build relying on his ex-partner’s unpaid care work. Because if women would have that same amount of care work at their disposal they would potentially work full-time as well, providing that they knew another parent or trusted person would care for their child and outsource all the other tasks depending on her or in case they are still together the family income. The reason why women often opt for part-time work is so that they can combine it with their other care responsibilities that need to be done but that they aren’t paid for and that they earn too little to be able to outsource even if they would work full-time.

My short-lived career as a feminist…

In 2008/2009 I reached out to a group of people in the feminist movement and in other fields that intersected with feminism and we launched a media campaign to raise awareness for the need to go into the next phase of emancipation which in the Netherlands would have been the third wave of feminism. Being ahead of my time as always, I did find other people who shared my vision but the greater public, as well as the government, were not in love with this message and so instead of an actual third wave it was more a slight ripple. But for example, the feminist magazine Opzij, and big Dutch newspapers like the Trouw and the Volkskrant did publish our articles and wrote about us.

Already back then I was talking about the patriarchal conditioning that was underlying these dynamics on a societal level. Now, I help men and women on a personal level deprogram patriarchal conditioning because it’s this outdated belief system that subconsciously keeps us in the battle of the sexes not only on a societal level but especially on a personal level in our most intimate relationships.

Needless to say, my career as a feminist was over quickly, or maybe never completely got off the ground, to begin with. When I realized how difficult it is to instigate a collective shift in societal thinking, I let it go and decided to create what I wanted for myself instead of relying on a government to do it for me. One thing was clear, I did not want to be away from home 40+ hours a week in order to be financially self-sufficient as a single mother of two kids ages 5 and 9 at that time.

We had actually been a family of six; me, my husband, my oldest son, the two little ones, and our baby daughter Déesse. Our baby died shortly after being born from a rare birth defect, we found my then husband where he shouldn’t have been in the first place for the second time, and this time I filed for divorce – while shortly before all of this my oldest son had gotten into drugs and had been placed under custody.

Having lived through all that, I was watching the kids I had left like a hawk, making sure that if they showed any sign of depression, anxiety, or that they just needed the support of their parent while working through their grief – I would be there to give it to them. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to be such a hands-on parent if I was commuting daily and working 40-hour weeks.

Making the impossible possible

This is where the next phase of my life begins, I decided that I wanted to work from home so that I could arrange my work around my kids’ school and life. I would bring them to school, go home and work, pick them up at three – let them play or do things together as a family and then after dinner get them into bed by seven or eight and work another two to three hours depending on what needed to be done.

Nobody thought I could pull it off, but thirteen months later I was able to get off of welfare and work from home using the internet. I got featured in the Volkskrant with an article on using the internet to get people and especially women off of welfare and they even put a preview of my story on the front page. A couple of other media outlets picked up the story as well.

With that victory in my pocket, I created an online course on how to use the internet to create revenue for your online or offline business. Online marketing was really new at that time in the Netherlands and because I partially grew up in the States I could read and write in English as comfortably as my own mother tongue. This allowed me to translate what other countries such as the United States already knew on this subject and implement it in my own business success which then became the blueprint for others to build theirs on.

Because not only did we sell the blueprint to success, we sold marketing-optimized websites to guarantee this success. This was in a time when most businesses still had digital business cards or digital flyers/folders as websites (yep, that’s a while back). We created websites with blogs, social media integration, online programs (we created our own WordPress Academy plugin), etc. – everything that by now is pretty much standard in the industry. Back then it was a novelty, especially in a small country like the Netherlands.

I told you that I tend to be ahead of my time, in everything I do….

My journey from surviving to thriving

In 2014, I met someone online that I almost instantly fell in love with and he with me despite the fact that there was quite an age gap. We met during work and were drawn to each other like a moth to a flame. But he was in India and I was in the Netherlands with all the complexity that long distances and very different cultures bring. Nonetheless, we ended up in each other’s arms in 2015, and when I came back from India somehow, someway my dormant spiritual gifts had been opened, and all of a sudden I was able to bring people into their past lives by the sound of my voice. I went to India as a muggle and came back able to perform magic so to speak.

I felt the push to leave behind online business coaching and web design and became a full-time healer and Twin Flame teacher/coach. I may have come back from India with a gift, but it was these years working with Twin Flames that really allowed me to fully develop the Soul Embodiment® Therapy method and become a master of my trade. Becoming a master healer came about through my deep commitment to my own healing, the deeper I went into my own healing the deeper I could take others into their healing journeys.

With this depth came a six-figure business. In my web design days, we cracked the 5-figure months, but it wasn’t till I started living my soul mission that I unlocked the six-figure years. This put me in the 6% – 12% of female entrepreneurs worldwide making more than 100K in their business. In the USA for example, 88% of female business owners never hit the six-figure mark in their businesses.

Becoming financially self-sufficient in this way through my own healing journey, allowed me to travel the world with my family and made it possible to live in the country of our choice and we chose Ibiza, Spain. My rags to riches story was really my journey from surviving to thriving and what’s interesting to know is that our survival programming that keeps us in survival mode isn’t cured by more money. It’s cured by more healing, but that’s the beauty of more money it can buy you more healing which has been my biggest form of self-investment these past years. In the beginning, I could hardly afford it, but the more I healed myself the more I healed my relationship with money as well as my relationship with life itself.

Taking my life and business to the next level

In 2021 I felt the push again to move into a new direction because everyone seemed to only be obsessing about their Twin Flame in this industry, and to me, it became clear that the meeting of one’s Twin Soul whether you would end up together or not was an initiation into this new paradigm called Heaven on Earth. Plus after six years of working with people who often were only interested ‘to heal’ themselves as a means to getting together with this other person, I wanted to work with more people who were as serious about their healing as I was.

It took me first not wanting to work with clients at all anymore and completely retiring from my one-to-one healing work, to understand that I had simply outgrown the community that I had served up till then and that it was time to move on. A small number of dedicated clients who had evolved with me were ready to move on as well, but the majority left to find other resources now that I was fully dropping the Twin Flame label and focus. Some previous clients were even so bitter and hurt that I had decided to leave that they lashed out at me viciously, writing lies about their experiences with me purely for the sake of discrediting me as an act of revenge – kind of like a vengeful ex.

But I didn’t let this stop me, I had to follow the promptings of my soul no matter where it would lead me.

As soon as I made the decision to open up to more clients truly committed to their own healing I started attracting a different type of client and they were very serious about their healing. These people did not come to me because they were struggling with the pain of not being able to be with their Twin Flame, they were struggling with other issues. However, working with them brought on a different challenge initially because in many cases they severely out-qualified me in education, as I suddenly saw an influx of psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, and other types of healers as my new clients.

I never specifically asked for this type of client, it’s what the Universe and my soul gave me in answer to my request for people who were as serious about their own healing as I am about mine. This was the ultimate litmus test for the Soul Embodiment® Therapy method that I had developed and that many a ‘Twin Flame’ hater (who obviously weren’t clients) had called fake, a scam, etc. For a community that claims to be all love and light, there’s a lot of unhealed pain that gets projected on everyone and everything that they feel threatens to get in the way of their happily ever after…

Long story short, I got even more phenomenal results with these new clients committed to their own healing journeys. I was able to take them deeper than they had ever gone before in their healing, often reaffirming what my Twin Flame clients had said as well that one session with me is the equivalent of multiple sessions with other healers. It was like a coming-of-age initiation for the healing method I had birthed, after which I created a certification program to train others to become Soul Embodiment® Therapy practitioners.

This final shift brought me to where I am now and my current offer, I would be lying if I said it was easy because it wasn’t but I have never felt more soul-aligned in my life and business as I do today. Looking back I can only say that I am really proud of who I have become and proud of the evolution of my work that now not only talks about the change I want to see in the world but helps to bring about this change through the lives I touch and how this ripples through in the families and communities of my clients across the globe.

Success tends to look easy from the outside, but that is often only because we don’t get a behind-the-scenes peek into the years of work someone has had to put in to create the current level of success they have achieved. We know nothing of the challenges they faced, and the obstacles they had to overcome. We see the end result but not the timeline of events leading up to it, which makes it seem as if it was effortless or something that only they can achieve.

I always hope that my story of creating something from nothing inspires others to know that it is possible. You don’t need to have money or come from money to create the life of your dreams, you simply need to know what you want and start moving toward it. I come from a broken home, I was sexually abused by my father and abandoned by my mother. I ran away to live with my first husband when I was sixteen – he was very abusive and spent years convincing me that I was nothing without him. I finally left him when I was twenty-eight realizing that if I didn’t leave now – I wouldn’t make it out alive. What made my life become more than just another childhood trauma or domestic violence statistic was my immense dedication to healing my past, a journey that I started when I was just twenty-one years old which in the end became a lifetime commitment that allowed me to completely transform my reality.