You should write a book about your crazy life

My personal story Body, brain, experience, fields of expertise and obsessions.

Growing up as an inquisitive, highly sensitive, responsible, stubborn, intensely curious kid, I experienced some physical and sensory issues. Also, I had my first negative experiences with doctors, early on, (3 y.o.). Sometimes my little hyper flexible arms popped out of their sockets, I had some in-explainable tummy aches and started obsessively biting my fingers (stimming) already at a young age. Then, in my 3rd year in high school, the physical issues became more apparent and moved to my knees, lower back, spine, bladder infections, not healing from colds or viruses, growing pains, headaches and so on and so on. Nobody (adults) realised back then that most of those symptoms were psychosomatic, so they kept being wrongly treated as purely physical and linear issues. Not tackling the core problem of insecurity, fear of failure, fear of success, not being good enough (for whom?) or being too much, too intense, too loud.

At university, while studying Medical Human Biology, the symptoms changed also to psychological numbing symptoms, like overeating, procrastination, failing my studies and feeling lost. I kept getting more pains, injuries and illnesses all the time. Especially after I quit the Olympic Sailing team, after 4 years of being a professional athlete.

Old pains came back and more new weird things appeared, Rheumatic symptoms in hands and feet and my muscles over-reacting to activity. I also started being aware that sometimes there seemed to be a correlation between my physical “symptom” and my mental emotional state, and other times not!!! This was all very confusing and scary too. 

And importantly I did not see any correlation between my lifestyle (healthy, active, living my dream-life, stress free, blessed and happy) and the physical pains, discomforts, so many symptoms

2011, Pacific Ocean.

Then another eureka moment arose while sailing around the world, with my partner, on my own little boat. I was literally in paradise, snorkelling, on my own with 3 huge humpback whales in the middle of nowhere. (literally, in the middle of the Pacific ocean. In front of ‘Niue’). Then I realised that true happiness is definitely coming from the inside and that unhappiness or stress or even blocking a simple emotion can cause physical disease. 

From that encounter with the three friendly humpbacks, I fulfilled all my deep personal life missions that I had had since a little child. Deep contentment with all, flooded my whole system. That was on the outside world, now it became time to go explore my inside world. 

Since then my curiosity slowly started focusing more on the inside, on the working of our human brain and central nervous system in combination with our body. (I did not realise back then that I was one of the hyper sensitive ones, 😅🫣)

I was lucky to find my answers a few years later. Most of them during 10 day silent meditation courses, lots of hours on the internet, reading many books and trying out hypotheses. I started to be able to cure myself. I tried many ways to help myself and tried a huge variety of therapies, hypnosis, NLP, neurological research, all with myself (body/mind) as the object of investigation. I became a yoga and meditation-teacher and developed a personal yoga program for people who suffered from chronic pain and illnesses. For a few years we were inviting volunteers to our farm in Spain and do all kinds of mindful projects.  Later I combined all this with an education to become a mental coach and personal trainer. But in the meantime the adventurous part of me needed to be fulfilled again. So I became a volunteer again and slowly explored nearly all the Caribbean islands.