A lifelong curiosity about what it means to be human
For as long as I can remember, I have been curious about people. About what helps us grow, what happens when we come under pressure, why we sometimes lose contact with ourselves and what allows us to find our way back.
That curiosity has accompanied me through very different parts of my life: as an athlete, physiotherapist, haptotherapist, coach, partner, father and grandfather. The roles have changed, but underneath them I increasingly began to recognise the same human questions.
How do we remain ourselves while living with others? What helps us feel secure enough to be free? Why can we understand something perfectly well and still find ourselves responding in a completely different way? And what happens when feeling, thinking and acting begin to move in the same direction?
I do not think I have found definitive answers to those questions. But after more than forty years of working with people, I have become increasingly fascinated by them.
Learning through sport
Some of my earliest lessons came through sport. As a young athlete, I played baseball and basketball at a high level and experienced from within what it means to prepare, compete and perform when something really matters.
Sport taught me discipline and perseverance, but it also taught me something less obvious. I discovered that trying harder does not always lead to performing better. There were moments when everything I had learned seemed to become available without conscious effort, and other moments when wanting too much made the same skills more difficult to access.
That experience stayed with me. Long before I had professional language for it, I had already become curious about the relationship between pressure and freedom, between conscious control and trust, and between what we are capable of and what actually becomes available when it matters most.
Years later, these questions became an important part of my work with athletes, professionals and other people who have to perform under pressure.
From the body to the person
My professional life began in physiotherapy. I was fascinated by the human body and by our capacity to move, adapt and recover. Physiotherapy taught me to observe carefully and to understand the body with increasing precision.
But over time, another question became more important.
The person in front of me was never only a body with a complaint.
A painful shoulder belonged to someone with a life. Breathing patterns changed with tension and safety. Physical complaints sometimes had a clear biomedical explanation and required appropriate medical care. At other times, the complaint seemed to be only one part of a much larger human story.
My growing interest in that whole person eventually brought me to haptotherapy. It allowed me to explore not only what happens in the body, but how people experience themselves through their bodies and in their relationships with others.
The body remained important. But my attention shifted increasingly from the body someone has to the person someone is.
More than forty years of meeting people
Over the years, I have had the privilege of meeting thousands of people. Some came because of stress, anxiety, burnout or physical complaints. Others were dealing with grief, relationships or major transitions in their lives. I worked with athletes who wanted to perform freely under pressure and with leaders and professionals carrying significant responsibility.
Their questions were different. Their lives were different. And no two people ever responded in exactly the same way.
Yet underneath those differences, I increasingly began to recognise something shared. Behind the complaint, the performance or the question was always a person trying to find a way to relate to what life was asking of them.
That gradually changed my work. I became less interested in finding the quickest explanation and more interested in meeting the person behind the question.
Not because explanations are unimportant, but because a human being is always larger than any explanation we can give.
Life as a teacher
My work has shaped the way I look at life, but life has shaped my work just as deeply.
Becoming a father and later a grandfather, loving people, losing people, experiencing friendship, disappointment, joy and new beginnings have all changed the way I understand what it means to be human.
Some things I understood intellectually long before I truly experienced what they meant. Other things I experienced long before I could find words for them.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me.
Knowledge matters. Science matters. Thinking matters. But there are dimensions of life that only become fully meaningful when they are lived. Love is different when someone you love can be lost. Freedom means something different when you have experienced what it is to feel trapped. And connection becomes something more than an idea when another person truly matters to you.
Perhaps that is why I have become less interested in having answers and more interested in remaining curious.
The Art of Feeling
The Art of Feeling grew from that curiosity. It is not a theory I adopted or a method I developed. It is a way of describing something that has gradually become visible to me through sport, healthcare, haptotherapy and life itself.
We are born feelers and raised to become thinkers. Learning to think is one of the great achievements of human development. But thinking does not have to replace feeling. For me, wisdom grows when our capacity to understand remains connected to what we experience.
That also means I no longer see development simply as becoming more. We acquire knowledge and skills throughout our lives, but another movement can take place at the same time: gradually letting go of what prevents us from being fully ourselves.
The Dutch word ontwikkeling has become a beautiful image for me: ont-wikkeling, an unwrapping.
Not becoming someone else.
Becoming increasingly free to be who you are.
Still curious
After more than forty years, I still enjoy my work enormously. Perhaps because the curiosity with which it began has never really disappeared.
Every person is different. Every encounter can show me something I had not seen before. And the older I become, the less I feel the need to fit everything into a definitive answer.
What interests me is the encounter itself. What becomes visible when we slow down enough to notice? What happens when someone begins to recognise what they actually feel? What changes when thinking and feeling no longer have to compete? And what becomes possible when a person feels secure enough to become more fully themselves?
This website is an invitation to explore some of those questions with me.
And if our paths happen to meet, I look forward to meeting you.
Professional background:
- Physiotherapist
- Haptotherapist
- Former elite athlete in baseball and basketball
- Former coach within the Dutch national baseball programme
- More than forty years of professional experience
- Co-author of Omgaan met Druk (Dealing with Pressure)