Our Story

I am a daughter of Mother Earth. An integrated being, with a keen scientific mind, an intuitive heart, and a wild body. I devote myself to leading wise, meaningful and practical community based alternatives to the enormous challenges we collectively face with contemporary life. 

Sacred Systems is the distillation and creative expression of my journey, my longings, my learnings and my life force. It is my contribution to midwifing a better world, one that speaks through my being, one I yearn for us to share.

The story I describe below is a story of my deep longing for a return to the sacred Village. One shared with kindred spirits, with those who hold a similar dream in their hearts.  

It is a cry for change. A cry for a return to a deep and respectful union with our mother, the Earth, the greater web of life, and the divine feminine. A cry for belonging, meaning, connection and direction in a world that’s lost its way. 

A cry for new systems, in service to Life.

Looking back, the quest for meaning and belonging has sent me across the world, spanning continents, careers, spiritual practices, community experiments, plant medicine ceremonies, burn-outs, deaths and rebirths. Now, as I’m starting the transition into my Crohn years, the time has come to assimilate the teachings, and offer them in service to the more beautiful world my heart knows is possible. 

My story is one shared by so many young women (and men!) growing up in a confusing and alienating post-modern society. I was a good girl, a compliant successful student who finished high school knowing almost nothing of the world or myself. This despite well-meaning (but not very helpful) guides and mentors. 

After graduating as a physiotherapist at the age of 22, I quickly realized that I wouldn’t find the answers to my questions within the confines of a tiny practice room in Amsterdam seeing one sick person after another. So I set off to Malawi, where I headed the rehab department of a desperately poor hospital for nearly two years. In those two years, my eyes started to open and my worldview began to change. People were poor, yet happy and generous. Hospitals were understaffed, but people took care of each other. Under the African sun, on the back of a pickup truck, I felt more free and more myself than ever before.

Connecting so powerfully to my life force changed everything….or so I thought. I knew I needed to balance and unite my scientific mind and intuitive wild heart. Yet 14 years (and two more postgraduate degrees) later, I found myself once again staring out of the window of my Naturopathic clinic, in Toronto, feeling as if my soul was dying. I’d lost my inner spark, my joie de vivre. 

Again, I knew something radical was calling me and that I would have to sacrifice the hard -earned career I had told myself was my path. If I was to reclaim my aliveness, I would need to open myself to a life of magic, synchronicity, and unpredictability. One where life itself would show me the way. I needed to take the first steps, to trust in a deeper wisdom.

And so, I packed up my life once more, and moved back to Europe to join the regenerative movement in Portugal. I met my shadows and danced with Eros during three ISTA shamanic initiations, after which I vowed to never lose the connection to my deep feminine life force ever again. I lived in intentional communities and joined the core team of a community-to-be. I hosted temple nights, cacao ceremonies and singing circles. I harvested olives and learned to play the guitar. I studied permaculture, earth-based wisdom, awakened feminine leadership and systems theory.

I experienced profound moments of reverence and connection to myself, to others, to the land, the more than human world and to life itself. I had stumbled upon what I was truly and unknowingly searching for; a deep sense of the sacred nature of life in all its glory. And I discovered that all of these experiences were underpinned in relationship to other like-hearted souls in community. In a return to the sacred Village.

I also encountered the shadow side of community living, the utopian dreaming, poor use of power, decision making and control, spiritual bypassing of conflict and ‘negative’ emotions and much else. The scientist in me dived deeply into the study of new and ancient systems to overcome these challenges.

Little by little, a vision began to emerge….