Ever since I watched the famous Japanese animation film 'Spirited Away' as a teenager, I have been fascinated by everything Japanese. In my 20s I worked as a music journalist and DJ in The Netherlands and immersed myself in Japanese Zen-Buddhist meditation and philosophy on free days. After a few years, I realized the fast-paced music and media world was demanding too much from my physical and mental health. Yoga and meditation helped me find a healthy balance, so I decided to do a yoga teacher training in The Hague in 2013. Obviously, this had to be a Japanese yoga training, called Dō-in 導引. I slowly switched my media and music career to teaching yoga full-time and taught at schools, companies, events, and on national television.

While practicing and teaching on a daily base for some years, I began to understand that a big part of the major problems of the last decades are caused by our disconnection from Nature, and thus from ourselves.

In my eyes our modern world is obsessed with always wanting more, going faster, while getting burned out and destroying the only thing that is vitally important to us: Nature.

Not yet fully aware of the huge climate impact of flying, I made my first study trips to Japan in 2020 and 2021 to learn about the language, culture, and religions. I was hoping to find the knowledge in Shinto and Zen Buddhism, that could help us reconnect with Nature.

Well, it was stupid of me to think that people living in metropolises like Tokyo or Osaka have a better connection with Nature and themselves. 
Whenever I asked Japanese friends - whom I met in various parts of Japan - about Japanese yoga, they always told me they had never heard of it.