In 2007, most of what I remember was a life of a happy 13-year-old boy, having two older brothers living in a smaller village an hour away from Amsterdam. Life was good until a big massive shift happened in my life; my parents decided to separate and not much later my brothers left the house. I remained at home with my father and after some time his new girlfriend.

 

My emotions shut down, I did not want to look reality in the eyes and I felt numb. Luckily, there were loving and caring people around me, including my family. In 2012, at the age of 18, my mother gave me a special gift. She said: “I want you to go to a retreat.”

 

This retreat changed my life. I felt I had seen something never seen before; this gave me a new fundamental source of trust, care, love and kindness. Backed by this experience, life became more and more interesting and I realised that life is always happening for you and not to you. After the darkness, a new time of lightness arrived.

I started to pursue what is meaningful and not what is expedient. Realising my business degree, I had the honor to grow professionally to learn one of the most important things: to begin with the end in mind and always be pro-active.

 

Also, I dove more and more into personal development and experienced a spiritual transformation. After the retreat, I wanted to ‘hold’ the feeling I had discovered within myself. So I started with daily meditations. Since nothing in life can be kept forever, I realised that the feeling within is something to be developed and practiced. After some time, I was inspired to take meditation practices to another level.

 

Thanks to my Irish inspiration Níall O Murchu, Head instructor of the Wim Hof Method, I started practicing breath-work (deep conscious breathing), cold exposure, and mindset-commitment training in 2019. After my personal Wim Hof Method journey, I finalised my Master's program in Poland at the Wim Hof Method training camp in 2022.