I was born in Holland in 1958 just at the start of the space age. My family moved straight to East Africa. I spent my childhood in Tanzania Uganda and Kenya, a wild child in the sun, brown and barefoot. There I was introduced to the natural medicine and small household witchcrafts of the locals, I thought this was all very logical, right, and normal, Even the little dust devils and the giant Ginn.

Later we moved to Holland and then England where I finished my schooling and dabbled in mediumship and the psychic and ran away to art school. There I first witnessed what is called a ‘ke-aka,’ – a gigantic light being – that made me jump! It was around this time I started writing.

It was not until much later in life that my journey into shamanism started, I had already done mediumship training and reiki, tried my hand at standard psychology and studied my dreaming in depth and wrote it all down. I became an artist studying arts in England and the Netherlands. I wanted to learn everything about perception.

I first met a spirit – who came to me as I sat meditating. It introduced itself politely and regarded me with an attitude of polite curiosity – inside my own brain, I could feel it pressing on my speech centre and I could feel its presence in the room. I was floored by it.

Finding out how to communicate with it and not be afraid started me on my long, long journey into the shamanic. I went to Germany to learn shamanic counseling, India to study vipassana meditation and yoga, and to Tibet searching for a link, oddly, I met another spirit or two there, they are real, I could feel their presences.
Then I travelled to Japan to study martial arts and zen culture after which I flew over to America to study core shamanism with Micheal Harner. There, in America I finally did the 3-year advanced shamanic program. Where everyone learned to remember visionary experience and write it down, and share it.
It was good to meet people who had had similar experiences.

We could share our experiences but no one can teach you this.
The spirits teach you, if they wish.

While making this journey I remembered my childhood and knew that those warm gentle people I met there had been right. The spirit world exists independently of our imagination and the spirits are very real.
They populate the earth just as we do, but outside of our perception.

What I know is this,

Visions are real, dreams are real, love is real, and life goes on forever.