My Personal Story

As a child I did not feel much connection with my peers. I often felt different and an outsider. Something that was increased by moving to another country as a child. As a family we moved to Germany when I was 3 and then to England when I was 5. I grew up in England but maintained my Dutch roots with my family. As a ‘foreigner’ in England I was often searching for connection. I was happy living in England and I embraced the culture but I was always curious about my Dutch heritage. So, at the age of 23, I decided to move back to Holland.

I have always been fascinated by the earth and the creatures that inhabit it. As a child I already had a great love for crystals and stones and would often come home from a walk with unusual stones in my pockets. I studied Geography at University and after my Masters in ‘The Geography of Third World Development’ I returned to Holland with the goal of working for a Non-Profit organization focused on foreign aid. The reality was that this was much harder than I had expected also due to an economic recession that was prevalent at that time.

After a couple of years, I decided to take a different direction and ended up working in IT. This was the start of an almost 25-year long career in the IT. All this time I had been working with the Tarot. I received my first Tarot deck at around the age of 13. I did readings for friends and family and felt a great affinity with the cards and was often surprised at the accuracy of the readings.

After about 15 years working in IT and focusing on a commercial career, I made the decision to put all my spiritual interests aside. I stopped doing Tarot readings and no longer went searching for stones. I continued working and very slowly became more and more removed from the things in life that made me happy and gave me a sense of belonging. I enjoyed working hard and earning a good salary. I had some great colleagues and became friends with a few of them. However, it always felt as if I was rowing upstream. I was focused on the next step and getting recognition and I never felt like I really fit in. It was exhausting.

Then in 2018 I was diagnosed with Bowel Cancer. This was a huge turning point in my life. I had ignored multiple moments in my life where my intuition and gut had told me I should make a change and find something that would feed my soul as well as my intellect. I made some halfhearted attempts but never had the courage to take the step. Now I was forced to step out of my working life and really focus on myself and what I needed to heal.

One of my first thoughts, after hearing that the cancer had not spread and that I had a very positive prognosis, was that I needed a Rose quartz– this is a crystal that stands for self-love, healing, and compassion. I carried a rose quartz heart with me and wore a rose quartz bracelet to all my radiotherapy sessions and while taking my chemo tablets. I also had them with me in the hospital for the two operations that I had to have to remove the last part of the tumor.

My immediate response in a time of crisis was to find comfort in the things that I had felt so connected to as a child. The door to my spirituality had opened a crack. As I was focusing on my recovery I had time to distance myself from my work and realized that even though it had brought me a lot, that it did not make me happy and that I was following someone else’s path and not my own. I felt it was high time I started to follow my own path – whatever that may be.

During this time, I had a wonderful coach – Eva – who helped me navigate through the tough journey of accepting my situation with the cancer, learning to be compassionate to myself and listening to my heart and body to hear what they were telling me. It was also during my recovery period that I was walking in Haarlem talking to my sister and not paying any attention to where we were walking when suddenly I stopped dead in my tracks. I looked to my right and found myself standing outside a spiritual shop called House of Elder. I went into the shop and felt such a wonderful, positive, healing energy. I immediately bought a deck of Oracle cards (I wasn’t ready for Tarot yet), a journal and a spiritual book. I also saw that there were workshop and courses I could follow through the shop.

This was the start of my opening the door to my spirituality and intuition more widely and really embracing my true self and finding my own path to walk. It took me a little while to flex my spiritual muscles again but slowly I became more in touch with my intuition and felt like I was at least looking in the right direction even if I wasn’t yet walking on that path. I spent time contemplating what would make me happy and how I could be of service to others.

During my IT career one of the things that I got most job satisfaction from was in coaching my team and colleagues. That in combination with the firsthand experience I had of a great coach who helped me through a very difficult time made me realise that what I wanted to do was coach people. To help others find their true path, become more centered and break through barriers that are holding them back. For me it was wanting to fulfill the expectation I thought others had of me – to be successful, earn a good salary, make my way up the corporate ladder. For years I spent my time and energy on doing things I thought would make others proud of me. I did not end up in a burnout but for me my illness was the loud gong that told me I needed to make a serious change. So, my plan was to reintegrate back at work, start a Coaching course and then eventually look to set up my own coaching practice.

This was a ‘sensible’ plan since I could keep my income while working towards my new coaching career. However, the universe had a different idea and after I was fully back to work for only a couple of months, I was made redundant. This was initially very stressful and no-one likes to feel rejected but I realise that someone/something was looking out for me since this made the step I wanted to make a clear path with no other distractions and no holding onto the past.

I needed to be brave and fully commit to the changes I wanted to make in my life. So, I started my coaching course and at the same time continued to develop my spirituality. I started working with the Tarot again under the wonderful guidance of Felice and started doing readings in the shop. My love for the Tarot came slowly back to me and after a while I felt very much in tune with the cards and the messages they were bringing. It felt for the first time in a very long time that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing and helping people in the unique way that I can help them.

Tarot readings, Coaching and combining the Tarot with Coaching feels like a very natural thing to do and it brings me great joy to see the benefits this brings to my clients.