Human Design Professional • Gene Keys Guide • Life & Relationship Coach •  Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapist • Grief Counselor •  Professional Vocal Coach

I work with people in the second half of their lives, mostly around what happens in their relationships and inside themselves when the version of life they built stops fitting.

On another page, I set out what I actually think. What is happening when a life you chose stops feeling like yours, and why that is not a decline. Why so much of what we reach for instead of real contact turns out to be built not to work. And why I work with Human Design and Gene Keys while refusing to fully believe in either.

All of that came from somewhere, and it cost me a great deal to learn.

It seems only fair that you should know. I wouldn’t want to hand my inner life to someone whose life has never been tested, and you may well feel the same. So here is mine, as honestly as I can put it.

We were together for twenty-three years, eighteen of them married. Then it was over, and I was alone in a way I had never been in my adult life.

And it was not only the marriage. When I stopped being loyal to arrangements that were costing me my well-being, a great deal of what I had counted as my life went with it. The friends turned out to be an acquaintance circle rather than friends. Family closed ranks. Several of those relationships had quietly been asking for compliance, and anything that withdrew the moment you stopped going along with it was never love.

The details belong in a book, not on a website. What matters here is what happens to someone when the structure their whole life was organized around suddenly falls away.

What happens is that everything you were tacitly leaning on becomes visible all at once, precisely because it is no longer there. It all fell away, and what was left was me, and a great deal of silence.

I had built a life that worked. I was competent, capable, the one who managed things. None of that helped. Much of what I had taken for myself turned out to be the shape I had adopted to fit a particular life, and when that life fell away, the shape had nothing left to hold on to.

That was the most frightening period I have lived through. I would not wish it on anyone. And it is also, without any doubt, where everything I now know began.

Nobody came in here with me.

I want to be precise about that, because it shaped everything afterward. It is not that the people around me fell short. It is that something like this happens inside, and there is no way to convey it. You are wide awake in your own life; you feel everything there is to feel, and all around you, ordinary life carries on undisturbed. Someone asks how you are, and even as you answer, you notice that no sentence exists that would carry it over.

That loneliness has its own name. Not the loneliness of having nobody, but of being awake among people who are living on the surface, because life is still permitting them to. That is their right. But someone who has not been through it cannot easily hold space for it either.

And it does not only apply to people who have had something fall away from the outside. I meet just as many people whose outer life simply carries on—work, family, calendar—while the same thing is happening inside. For them it is often even harder to share, because there is nothing anyone can point at that is wrong.

So, I did it alone, and not entirely alone. In that period, something opened up that I had no framework for and still don’t fully have words for. Call it spirit, call it a higher power, call it a higher self. I have no need to argue about it, and I could not prove it either way. What mattered was that it stayed, which was exactly what nothing else was doing.

And it showed me something I hadn’t expected: somebody else was in the room. Me. For the first time in my life, the child in me had an adult who would not walk out, and that adult turned out to be me. I had waited a very long time for someone to take on that job, and it was never going to be anyone else.

That company, whatever its nature, was enough to work out from the inside what actually holds a person and what only looks as though it does.

I have noticed how often it happens in that order. Whatever you call it, spirit or your own deeper self, it was always already there. Nothing arrives. What changes is that you finally notice, and for many people that noticing only begins once the thing they were leaning on is no longer there. It seems unfair that it should work that way. Perhaps it is simply that as long as life runs smoothly, we have no reason to look.

What I learned in those years is not a technique. It is that someone can lose the entire structure of their life and still be here, and that what remains when that structure falls away is not nothing. It is the part that was truly you all along.

Everything about how I work comes from that.

I do not promise anyone a transformation, because nobody promised me one, and it would have been a lie if they had. I do not give people a plan, certainly not in the first hour, because a plan is what you mostly give someone when you want the discomfort to stop, usually your own. I will not rush you, because I know exactly how long it takes and how little pressure helps.

What I didn’t have myself is what I offer: someone who comes in with you. Not because I am unusually patient by nature, but because I know what it is like to sit in there alone, and what changes when someone is with you who does not look away and is not alarmed by what comes up.

I do want to be clear about what that means, because it is not only comfort. I do not sweep things under the rug. I will gently name what everyone in the room is walking around, and I will come back to the answer you gave a little too quickly.

That shakes things loose, and the shaking has a purpose. It is how someone stops managing their life and starts being honest with themselves, and that honesty is the door to everything else. What falls apart in that process is only ever what was not real. What remains is more than what went, every single time, though you will not be able to see that while it is happening. You will only have my word for it, and that is why it matters that I have walked this road myself.

None of this happens roughly. I have no appetite for confrontation and no interest in breaking anyone open. I am warm, I move at your pace, and I have a great deal of patience for fear, having known so much of it myself.

I also do not think anyone has the right to tell you who you are. There was a period in my life when a great many things were explained to me, and the explanations that helped were the ones that gave words to something I already knew. The rest was other people’s furniture in my house.

My grandmother died in 2019, and it was in the months after that Human Design found me. The Gene Keys followed shortly after. I had not gone looking for it. What it gave me, when I needed something, was a framework for turning inward, a reason to pay attention to my own responses rather than to what was expected of me, and a vocabulary for what I found there.

That is what it does at its best, and it is not a small thing. It started something in me that was quiet and slow at first, and four years later my life came apart completely. I do not think those two things are unrelated. Turning inward tends to set a process in motion that eventually asks for everything.

When the hardest years arrived, I had tools that actually worked. Human Design and Gene Keys gave me something to do with what was happening to me, and a way of reading it that did not reduce me to a woman falling apart. I came out the other side more truly myself than I had ever been. I am not going to be coy about that.

Somewhere in those same years I also arrived at a view of these systems that does not make me popular in my own field.

A Reflector named Nisarg Nikiel put it better than I could: the danger of Human Design is that instead of using the map, people get used by the map. Someone reads about their Type and then goes hunting through their life for evidence that it is true, which is precisely the wrong way around. The chart quietly becomes another identity to carry. “I am a Projector” ends up sitting in exactly the place where “I am the capable one” used to sit, and a person can spend years there, describing themselves accurately and feeling nothing.

I have watched people do this. I did it myself for a while. And I have watched a community built around a system whose stated purpose is liberation produce a remarkable amount of dogma, hierarchy, and people who very much need to be right.

So, I work with it differently. I don’t use Ra Uru Hu’s keynotes. I read charts intuitively and slowly, and I am more interested in your story than in your chart. I do not believe Human Design can tell you who you are. What it is genuinely good at is showing you who you are not: where you have been borrowing, performing, overriding yourself, waiting for something that was never going to arrive. That is useful, and it is about as far as I am willing to let any system go.

My test is simple enough. Anything in it that doesn’t leave you more able to trust yourself isn’t worth carrying, and that disqualifies a fair amount of what gets taught.

If you come to me for a reading, you will get a proper one, and I will take it seriously. But I hold it lightly on your behalf, because the chart was never the point. What you can finally hear in yourself is the point.

I am a certified Human Design professional, an IHDS-licensed Living Your Design guide, and a Gene Keys guide. I am a certified life coach and relationship coach, mindfulness-based psychotherapist, and grief counselor. For the longest time, I’ve been working as a professional vocal coach, after many years of training as a musician.

None of it qualifies me to know your life better than you do. My training gives me a wider range of places to look, a sense of where I am out of my depth, and the discipline to notice the difference. It also means that when grief turns up in this work, and it always does, I am not improvising.

I live in Belgium. I love rooibos tea, dark Belgian chocolate, and I am particular about coffee, which has to be real and is worth the fuss.

Music has been part of my life for as long as I can remember, and it still is. I sing, I play piano, I have performed, and I have been teaching voice since 2005. I still teach.

Teaching singing is a stranger job than it sounds. Someone comes in wanting a better top note, and what is actually in the way is a jaw that will not unclench, or shoulders up around the ears, or a breath held high in the chest because letting it drop feels like letting go of something. The sound gets compromised on the same word every time, and it is almost never a technical problem. It is usually something somebody said to them when they were seven or fifteen, about being too loud, or too much, or not good enough to bother.

I have spent years listening for the exact place where a person stops themselves or overcompensates. For a long time I had no idea I was learning the work I do now. I was.

That is why I am now bringing the two halves together and offering vocal coaching alongside Human Design. A chart will not give anyone a better top note. What it will tell me is how this particular person takes in energy, where they are likely to push through something they should be listening to, and which of the pressures they are singing under were never theirs in the first place. That is usually much closer to the real obstacle than anything I can hear in the sound. Singers spend much of their lives being shaped towards somebody else’s idea of how they ought to sound, and undoing that turns out not to be so different from the rest of my work.

My life partner is Rogerio. He is Canadian-Portuguese, and much of this relationship happens across several countries. People assume the distance is the hard part. The missing is hard, certainly, but distance is the easy version. Being in the same house teaches us the most, because that is where reactivity has room to show up and nowhere to hide.

He works with the same systems I do and brings a perspective of his own that I would never have arrived at alone. Some of our best hours go on conversations that start with one idea and end somewhere neither of us saw coming, and leave us both buzzing for the rest of the day. And what we are building between us is not only ours. It is a small model of how two people might relate in the world that is coming, and we both want it to be useful to more than the two of us.

I travel whenever I can, mostly for the experience, the connections with others, and the landscape. Standing somewhere that looks nothing like home changes the way I think. I go to observe and learn, and my mind moves into perspectives I would never reach by staying too long in one place. I bring them home with me, and I come home changed.

There have been animals in my life for as long as I have been alive. Dogs from the day I was born, and later, as an adult, cats and chickens as well. Most of them came to me as rescues. They kept me going through years when very little else did. I’m currently the sole caretaker of two big dogs and three chickens that were part of my previous family with my ex-husband.

What I like most is a long conversation with someone who is genuinely interested in going deeper than surface level. I ask more questions than is strictly polite. When something doesn’t add up, I dig deeper, and I am not easily satisfied by an answer that sounds impressive. I distrust doctrine, including the doctrines I was trained in. I would rather be told the truth than be comfortable, and I extend the same to other people, which is not always what they were hoping for.

I should also mention the dry humor, which doesn’t always announce itself. People who know me have learned to check my face. If something I have just said sounds outrageous, it was almost certainly a joke, and some of the best moments in my work are the ones where something painful abruptly becomes funny. It usually does, eventually. Life is absurd and difficult and, often enough, unreasonably beautiful, and I have no intention of keeping a straight face through most of it.

Perhaps some of my story sounded familiar.
If so, feel free to get in touch.