About me

How it started

From my tenth year I knew: I will be a musician.
It did take a while before I realised that this required dedicated daily practise! But I didn’t mind.

Too bad I had regular pains in my neck from all the practising and lugging my cello around.

During my studies at the conservatory I found out that practising alone isn’t enough. Sometimes, things would go wrong during a performance, even if I had spent hours and hours working on the music.
I got so nervous that I messed things up.

After my studies, this kept happening sometimes. I started looking for ways to solve my problem. I tried lots of things: psychotherapy, yoga, meditation, sports.

But the problem didn’t go away.

Until, one day: I had a rehearsal with my string trio. The viola player unpacked her instrument and started playing. I looked up in surprise and said: what did you do? Did you get a new viola? It sounds so wonderful! She laughed and told me she just came from an Alexander technique lesson. And that had given her so much freedom in her body, that playing felt completely different – and sounded it, too.

Wow.
I wanted that too!

That same week, I booked an Alexander technique lesson.

Light as a cloud

My first experience with Alexander technique was beautiful: I felt so free and light. It was like I was floating in a space capsule and gravity had no grip on me. Suddenly the world looked very different!

I immediately started weekly lessons and then I even went twice a week. I felt this was something that would enable me to finally find out what exactly happened when I froze so terribly on stage.

I found out that I had many nonconscious habits which interfered with my freedom of playing. Even when practicing at home, I wasn’t free enough to ‘have enough reserve’ when performing onstage.

The Alexander technique helped me to become conscious of those habits so I could unlearn them.
My playing became freeer, my sound more beautiful, my neck pain disappeared completely, I enjoyed playing a thousand times more and my confidence just kept growing.

I was so happy with all this that I realised: this is something I want to help others with too!
This technique tackles things you didn’t even know needed tackling – nor that they actually could be tackled at all. The world has to know about this!

Fast forward to the present

By now, I have been teaching this technique for around two decades and I have worked with a very diverse group of people. Children who have to lug their school bags, elderly people who want to keep walking upright, mothers who can’t get rid of back pain after giving birth, people who got an injury during sports, doctors and psychologists, musicians, actors and dancers, looking for freedom just like me.

This is a technique for everyone, one that helps you to solve your problems yourself.

The cause of it is addressed, and the symptoms eventually disappear naturally.
It gives you a lasting result. And you can keep growing yourself with it!

New discoveries

I myself kept developing too: a few years ago now I started performing as an actress and creating music theatre. The Alexander technique comes in handy of course: it helps me to play with the space – around me and inside me.

As an actor, you work with you imagination and your body. You connect feeling, thought, imagination and intuition. That has a lot of common ground with the Alexander technique!

The freedom and playfulness which I get from acting make me realise more and more: yes, this is me. And this is what I want to do. Onstage, and also in my teaching.

Besides acting, another thing that has enriched my playing and teaching is the Dao.

For several years I have studied Daoism. This ancient Chinese wisdom school offers many ways to train your health, vitality, consciousness and spiritual abilities. To my surprise, I soon discovered that the techniques and meditations I learned there often have striking similarities to the Alexander technique. Through Dao, I started to experience more depth: the connection between the world inside and outside me.

Very interesting!

I regularly integrate Daoist techniques in my teaching.

All in one

To me, all these techniques interlock in a unique way. More and more, all this is having positive influences on my life and my teaching. It feels like I’m opening up more and more and this enables me to see and help others better and better.

It’s so inspiring to help so many different people. Every student is unique and requires me to be creative and open. And the most beautiful thing is to see how people grow in their consciousness and how this technique can, quietly and gradually, change their lives. I have seen that many times and I can never get enough from that!