what are you made of?

Just when I got the hang of it and thought : hey, I’m starting to be really good at this simple-thing, my good old friend ‘life’ left the back door open to invite ‘chaos’ in. Those two really like each other. In fact, I think they are secret lovers. Now for once it is not…

charlie chaplin

The children love old Charlie Chaplin movies. Just recently I dug into his life a little bit and found this poem he wrote on his 70th birthday (April 16, 1959). Again – self love – above all – always. ______ As I began to love myself By Charlie Chaplin As I began to love myself…

monday morning

Read this at the start of your day, at the start of your week, at the start of another bad thought, at the start of anything really. We are so trained to think negative about ourselves, to try to ‘improve’ ourselves to be ‘better’,  which just diminishes us more. Rachel Brathen explains it very well….

silence

At least once a week someone asks me what the trick is. What is the solution to stress, anxiety, burnout? What is the way out? The secret is there is no way out. Wanting out is wanting to go back to where you came from. When we find ourselves in crisis we need to understand…

happy solstice

Midsummer night with a strawberry full moon. The cosmos is blessing all of us!

homesick

It’s a rainy day. It’s a sad day, I’m sad today. It has been almost a year since we moved our base back to Amsterdam. “Let’s do it ‘right’ just here, before we expand again” my husband said. I thought it was a wise thing to say. Every time I give a lecture people ask…

love this

There is something magical about this picture, I cannot keep my eyes of of it. I feel like I belong there, it was my time and place. This is Rainer Maria Rilke, Rose Beuret (Rodin’s wife) and Auguste Rodin and two of their dogs around 1902/1903 in France. I also found a letter from Rilke to…

mestival tonight

Posting is not in my daily routine and I always forget to mention if I’m speaking somewhere. So better late than never: tonight I’m giving two workshops at the Mestival in De Rode Hoed in Amsterdam. I think there are still tickets, or you can send me a message and I’ll see if I can sneak…

problems

I often post quotes to remind myself how much wisdom is going around, to keep my eyes and ears open for it. So many people have lived through all that we think we’re the first or only ones to experience. Truth is most of us will go through all the colors of the rainbow in…

transformation

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know,…

perfectly broken

My parents got divorced when I was 13 years old. This had a huge impact on me, but I never took this too serious. So many of the people I know got divorced parents or themselves are separated from the father/mother of their child . So why put salt in the wounds by whining about it? Lately I…

la taillede

Our dear friends Ali and Matt got themselves into a little adventure and bought this huge old farm not far from us. Every time we visit them so much work has been done. This time the vegetable garden was out and I felt like a kid in a candy store picking as much salad as I could…