My journey in Psychology began as a driven, high-achieving student. There was not a spiritual bone in my body. I was fully rational, deeply scientific and a complete atheist. I believed that when neurons stop firing, consciousess experience ends, the switch turns off and biology simply takes the body back. I was perfectionistic, overly disciplined, and stoic in the way I approached life. Looking back, I see that much of this developed through living through the ups and downs of the long illness of my mother over almost ten years. Her disease shaped my relationship to suffering, responsibility, emotional control, and resilience from an early age. 

Her passing in 2017 then changed my lifes trajectory. In her very last moments, I noticed thoughts arising in my mind, but I did not want to be in thought. I wanted to be fully present with every cell of my body and absorb the last breaths we would ever share. In that moment, I became aware of the voice of the mind and that whatever I was, was separate from that. After my mother’s death, a period of pain opened and with it, the question: 

What is a good life and how can we live it? 

The fragility and impermanence of life became drastically clear to me. I realised how precious and limited our time here is, and with that realization a drive arose to understand what truly makes life worth living. These questions then led me to Positive Psychology, the scientific study of wellbeing and human flourishing. I began studying Applied Positive Psychology and Coaching Psychology. At the same time, I encountered TRE® (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises), a body-based (somatic) modality working with the nervous system and stored tension patterns. During one session, I experienced another profound shift in perception. My body was moving without me moving the body. So this body was not me either. There was awareness of the body and the realization that my sense of self might not be limited to the body in the way I had previously assumed. The experience was profoundly opening and eventually led me to train as a TRE® provider to integrate the method into my own work. 

As I was studying the science of wellbeing something felt off. It was too top down, too quantitative, too Western, too narrow. So I conducted a Meta-Synthesis about the conceptualisation of wellbeing in non-Western cultures as my Master’s project. What I found would fundamentally change both my life and career. Across many cultures, spirituality emerged as an essential component of wellbeing. Yet within Positive Psychology and modern Western wellbeing models, spirituality was almost entirely absent. And what was even more striking: I didn’t even know what spirituality was. I realised that both my environment and, to a large extent, modern Western culture had not only become disconnected from deeper existential and spiritual dimensions of life but even denied it in the sake of science. 

So I decided to study spirituality directly. I travelled to India to learn from the source and began immersing myself in traditions such as Yoga and Buddhism. What started as intellectual curiosity gradually became a deeply personal path of practice, inquiry, and transformation. Over the following years, I travelled extensively, studied contemplative traditions, attended retreats, explored altered states of consciousness, and learned from both traditional and contemporary teachers and approaches of various traditions. During this time, I repeatedly encountered concepts such as awakening, enlightenment, moksha, nirvana, union with God, and self-realization. Different traditions used different words, metaphors, and frameworks, yet I increasingly wondered whether they were all pointing toward the same underlying transformation. And having graduated in the science of optimal human potential I wondered if this “awakening” might in fact be the the highest expression of human potential. 

This question eventually became the foundation of my PhD research, where I now explore spiritual awakening from a scientific, contemplative and experiential perspective. My research is grounded in the understanding that human flourishing may extend beyond conventional psychological wellbeing toward deeper forms of awareness, integration and connection. 

Alongside my academic work, I continued deepening my own practice through meditation, self-enquiry, embodiment practices and contemplative study whilst travelling the world as a nomad. I had sold most of my possessions and over three years spent Winters in Asia and Summers in Europe in connection with nature, meeting incredible people and being deeply immersed in spiritual teachings and practices. 

Today, my work bridges modern psychology with contemplative wisdom traditions. Through coaching, retreats, teaching, writing, and research, I aim to make these perspectives more accessible and understandable for modern secular individuals. Not by offering dogma, final answers or a new thing. But by bridging the wisdome traditions and science and translating the recurring concepts into relatable constructs, frameworks, practices, and reflections that support people in navigating their own development towards the optimal human potential. 

At the centre of my work is the understanding that human beings naturally move toward growth, integration and connection when the right conditions are in place. My role is therefore not to tell people who they should become, but to support them in reconnecting with who they already are beneath dysfunctional conditioning, stress, fear, and habitual ways of relating to life. Upon that functional conditions can be cultivated and established. This work is a gradual process of becoming more conscious, more compassionate, more aligned, more present, more joyful and more fully alive.