ABOUT ELLEN

I have always been drawn to what lies beneath the surface.

Already as a child, I noticed a lot. I was sensitive to atmosphere, to the undercurrents in a room, to the moments when what someone said didn't quite match what I could feel was happening underneath.

And I was deeply curious about life.

I played classical piano from the age of eight, for many years, with an extraordinary teacher who taught me far more than music. Patience. Discipline. Beauty. And the art of truly listening.

I danced to house music until morning in Amsterdam, Berlin, at festivals and afterparties.

I travelled. I explored. I studied. And I read. A lot.

I have two master's degrees from two different Dutch universities, one of them in journalism.

I trained as a journalist because I wanted to know what was actually true, not what was simply assumed to be true.

For a while, that pulled me toward investigative work. I had a strong sense of justice. I wanted to give a voice to things that felt hidden, distorted or not being looked at closely enough.

I worked in culture and the arts, in communications and PR, and later became a manager in the insurance and risk-management world.

I was very good at being capable — at juggling many things, keeping everything moving, and making it look as though that was simply how life worked.

For quite a long time, I thought that if I understood enough, worked hard enough and got things right, I would eventually feel secure in myself.

Worthy.

But there were parts of me I didn't really know how to live with.

My sensitivity.

My intuition.

The intensity with which I experienced things.

My hunger for meaning. For deeper truth. For devotion. For stillness.

I felt I had to play a different role depending on the room.

My modus operandi was to think my way out of things. To analyse harder. Work harder. Try to manage myself better.

Almost like an Excel sheet.

And then I found myself in a place where thinking harder was no longer enough.

In 2013, while travelling through South and Central America, something happened to me that would change the course of my life.

I survived it.

At the time, continuing with my life felt like the wisest thing to do.

So I carried on.

It was much later, back in Amsterdam, that my body began to tell me that what had happened was not over.

I started having horrific nightmares. I did not have a map for this. The world no longer felt the same.

My work no longer felt right. The company was going through a major reorganisation and people around me were becoming ill under the strain. I absorbed so much of what was happening around me that I could barely tell what was mine anymore.

My relationship was difficult. I was exhausted. Noise became hard to tolerate. The city felt overwhelming.

Even my new home in a beautiful neighbourhood began to feel like a cage.

I became anxious and, at times, terribly frightened by what was happening in my own mind and body.

I didn't recognise myself.

Eventually, I had to stop.

My inner world and my body were asking for something I had never learned to give them: attention, care and space to feel what was actually there.

I sought help.

I also knew that I needed ground. I needed somewhere familiar. Some structure to my days. Quiet. Space. The wide openness of the countryside.

So I went to stay with my parents. Their house stood near the dyke, surrounded by open land and sky.

I needed to feel myself again.

I was trying to understand what was happening to me, and I went at it like a journalist.

I studied trauma and stress, the brain and the body. I explored yoga, meditation, Yoga Nidra, Yin, relaxation and other forms of inner work.

Much of what I was encountering in clinical psychology and the medical world felt fragmented to me — one part here, another part there. I wasn't looking for another piece of myself to understand. I was looking for the whole of me to be felt and seen.

I was beginning to discover the difference between knowing something about myself and actually being with myself.

In the stopping, in stepping outside my Amsterdam life, things began to change.

I slowed down. I started to listen to my body.

I felt. I cried. I wept. I spent a great deal of time on the floor.

And slowly, I began to feel my way back. It was a little like picking up pieces of myself and collecting them back into a mosaic.

Slowing down became sacred. A doorway into feeling and staying with what is.

A DIFFERENT LIFE

In 2016, fresh from my Yin Yoga teacher training in Amsterdam, I booked a one-way ticket to Portugal.

I left the job, the apartment, the life I had built so carefully, and went to work at a small retreat centre in the hills of southwest Portugal.

There was something I had been longing for there: space. Nature. The ocean. A different rhythm of life.

From Portugal, I found my way to Andalusia, southern Spain, where I lived and taught yoga at Suryalila retreat centre.

I started my own coaching practice and kept learning — about the body, the brain, yoga, meditation, and the strange and beautiful ways they all meet.

I also began creating and curating my own therapeutic retreats: Relax & Restore. Week-long retreats that I hosted several times a year.

I led them for seven years and worked with hundreds of women from more than twenty countries.

What those years gave me was a very intimate education in women.

Their lives could look completely different, but underneath the differences I kept meeting the same quieter threads: longing, disconnection, the wish to be met, the sense that something essential was just out of reach.

And I began to see that often, a woman did not need another answer. She needed enough safety, enough quiet, enough time to hear what was already there.

What stayed with me was not one particular technique. It was the moment something became real for a woman because she had experienced it herself. A feeling. A sensation. A truth she had been talking herself out of — something she suddenly recognised, felt deeply, and remembered in her own body.

That, to me, is sacred. It changes everything. And it started changing the way I worked.

I began to see that stillness, rest and relaxation could become doorways into something much deeper — ways of discovering truths about ourselves that are hard to hear when life is loud.

Life can begin to emerge from there. A woman can begin to live from what she already knows.

BECOMING A MOTHER

In the most unlikely place, I met my English husband — at Suryalila, where I was working. We fell in love, built a life together, and both carried a deep longing to become parents.

When I became pregnant, I made it my priority to understand pregnancy and birth as deeply as I could. I wanted to know what my body was capable of, and what it might mean to understand that deeply enough to trust it.

The idea of giving birth in a foreign country, within a system where birth was mostly seen through a clinical lens, did not feel right to me.

So when labour began, we got into the car and drove for two hours to the peaceful birth centre I had dreamed of.

It sounds almost impossible now — travelling for two hours while my contractions were already getting stronger. But at the time, it felt completely natural.

There, I began to connect with a fierce, ancient force in my body.

I felt what my body could do. What my mind could surrender to. What my body could hold. The expansion and the vulnerability. The life-giving force of it.

I came away with a knowing that has never left me.

COMING HOME

After having lived abroad for ten years, I came home to the Netherlands with my English husband and our bilingual son.

By then, home was no longer simply a place I returned to. I had begun to understand it as something I carried within myself.

I was no longer interested in choosing between the parts of myself — the rational and the intuitive, the body and the mind, what can be understood and what remains beyond what we can see.

I wanted to know what happens when all of it is allowed to belong.

And that became the ground from which my work grew.

MY APPROACH

I work with the whole woman.

The part that thinks.

The part that feels.

The part that knows something before she has words for it.

The body and the brain. Science and intuition. The measurable and the mysterious.

I love science, and I am deeply attuned to the things we cannot see with our bare eyes. I don't experience these worlds as opposites. They matter equally.

I am interested in the whole truth — in the way different layers of a woman meet, speak to one another and complete the picture.

My journalist self is still very much alive. I am curious. I ask questions. I want to know what is actually true, and I am suspicious of easy explanations.

But years of working with the body have taught me something equally important: some things cannot be understood simply by talking about them.

You have to feel them. You have to stay long enough for something to become your own experience.

I have studied in many rooms — yoga, meditation, Yoga Nidra, Yin, somatic work, psychology, Western science, Tao, mysticism and ancient yogic philosophy.

I wasn't collecting disciplines. I was following a thread.

I see the practice as a form, a doorway. What matters is what happens when she walks through it.

What does she discover? What does she meet in herself when she stays close enough to her own experience to recognise what is already there?

That is where my work really begins.

I listen deeply.

Not only to the words, but to what is moving underneath them.

To what is said, and sometimes to what is not.

To the body, the pauses, the small movements where something is beginning to come into awareness before it has language.

I listen for what is asking to be seen, felt or understood — and sometimes for what has been pressed into silence for a very long time.

And I listen with her, not only to her.

I want to create enough space for a woman to hear herself in a way she hasn't been able to before.

My role may be to ask a question, to reflect something I notice, or simply to stay with what is unfolding.

I don't need to make the recognition happen. I need to be present enough to recognise when it is already happening.

WHY I DO THIS WORK

I know from the inside out what it is like to look perfectly capable, tick all the boxes, and still feel that something is missing. To sense that something deeper is available to you, but somehow remain just beyond your reach.

To long to feel at home in yourself. Unfragmented. Whole. At peace.

To trust your own experience, your body, your knowing. To live from that knowing, in sovereignty, and to build a life that feels truly yours.

That matters deeply to me. It is one of the deepest reasons I do this work.

WHAT I BRING

I bring the journalist who wants to get beneath the obvious, and the woman who has learned to listen to what cannot always be explained.

I bring the body's intelligence, a deep respect for science, trust in intuition, and a willingness to stay with mystery.

I bring years of sitting with women, learning to recognise what can happen when someone feels safe enough to meet more of herself.

And I bring the whole of me into the room. Not one version for one kind of woman, and another version somewhere else. All of it.

And above all, I bring a deep respect for the woman in front of me. I don't need to tell her who she is. I want to meet her closely enough that she can begin to recognise herself.

TODAY

Today, all of that lives inside Lighthouse: the one-to-one work, the self-paced journeys, the writing, the Library, the Room of Recognition — a place of returning, with room for future retreats and new offerings to grow from here.

The forms will evolve. So will I.

I want to understand. I ask questions. I love that not everything important can be explained.

I am interested in what becomes possible when we stop trying to explain everything too quickly — when we slow down enough to feel what is actually there, and stay long enough to recognise it as our own.

I don't believe I have arrived somewhere you need to get to.

I know what it is like to lose contact with yourself. I know what it is like to feel deeply at home in yourself — in your body, your mind, your energy.

And from that place, I find myself deeply in love with the mystery of being alive.

I look forward to getting to know you.

With love,
Ellen