I’ve spent over twenty years working with bodies — as a performer, as a bodyworker, as a teacher. What keeps pulling my attention is what happens at the edges of these practices, where they start to overlap and sometimes contradict each other.
My background is wider than it might look from the outside. I trained in physics and programming in Austria, before my drive for contemporary dance became so strong that I wanted to learn it in full depth, in a professional institution. As there was no such education in Austria, I looked further — made auditions across Europe, eventually showing up uninvited at the Theaterschool Amsterdam long after official auditions had closed. They accepted me anyway. In 1991 I moved countries, and started building a dance career.
I worked as a professional dancer and performer for more than a decade, spent years in theater production and as a theater technician, and eventually eighteen years teaching at a film-acting school. Meanwhile, from 2003 onward, I was building a bodywork practice — studying the Grinberg Method, accumulating experience with clients. These paths didn’t replace each other. They accumulated.
On stage I found I could access vulnerable, sometimes dark inner material under the cover of “performing” — safely, without having to justify those parts of myself to the world. It took years to understand what that meant, and longer to find ways of accessing the same depth without the frame.
My actual philosophy emerged largely from friction and curiosity — an inner restlessness pointing toward the sense that there might be more. I spent five years inside a somatic method I learned a great deal from, and gradually found myself in growing disagreement — not with one thing but with a whole orthodoxy: strong beliefs about what clients needed, what freedom meant, which knowledge was worth bringing in, dismissive about the mind. Leaving it was a painful, but ultimately a rewarding process. It meant several years of working without that container, reorganizing what I’d actually learned according to what felt true. What emerged was a conviction I’ve held since: genuine curiosity about all the layers simultaneously — sensation, feeling, thought, belief, relationship. Body and mind as different perspectives on the same experience. The intelligence of coping and the search for more freedom.
During my training in TRE (Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises) I found a different approach to pacing and integration — and a way of staying in conversation with science, particularly around nervous system research, without losing the primacy of felt experience. The question of how a system processes intensity, and what it actually needs to integrate rather than just survive, became central to how I work.
Into Relating Practice
Then, wider — into relational practices. Becoming a circling facilitator gave me structures for something I’d already been living implicitly. The five principles of TC (Transformational Connection) gave me precise language and guidelines on how to be present — a deep, slowed-down tracking of being with what is, in connection to myself, to others, to the field between us. It also sharpened my awareness of recursive and meta-layers — the judgement about judgement, the fear and shame about fear and shame. Sitting with those loops, rather than trying to resolve them, eventually taught me an acceptance of myself and others in a very soft and all-embracing way.
During my We-Flow steward training I encountered a different question, and one that met with considerable suspicion on my part — alert to the possibility of bypassing, of using the focus towards flow to skip what’s difficult. Gradually I found my answer. Once we can genuinely be with what is here, we can choose to move toward freedom and wellbeing, toward where our aliveness actually pulls us — from a sense of agency and alignment rather than escape. Presence first. Then navigation.
Where is the place for more freedom?
At the core of my work is one question: where is the place of more freedom? Much of what limits us are the patterns and beliefs we developed after intense experiences of pain, fear, shame, anger, exclusion. I approach those patterns with curiosity rather than judgment. They were intelligent once. Often still are. The question is whether there’s more range available, more variation possible, without losing what the pattern has been protecting.
I like structuring knowledge, I love mapping my experiences into models. I’m very well aware that a model is not reality, just being one particular lens towards it. Looking through many different lenses widens my horizon and opens my heart. To myself and to others.
Growing our capacity to experience ourselves and others with what is actually here. And from there — exploring where the place of more freedom might be. These feel like two unnamed beacons that have been guiding my journey — present long before I had words for them.
Co-creation interests me for the same reason relational practice does: something becomes available between people that neither holds alone.
Based in Amsterdam.
