About Anouk

I am an example of what is possible

I share my story because I know it gives hope and inspiration to people who are experiencing great challenges in their life.

Great challenges

My childhood was characterized by fear and isolation. I lost my younger brother in the year I became 20 and my first husband passed away when I was 30. I suffered with anxiety and depression for many years.

For a long time, I thought all the answers lay in psychology. In my quest to understand and heal myself, I became a psychologist, family and relationship psychotherapist and behavioral scientist. I certainly found some solutions here and I was able to share them with other people.

Then the biggest challenge of my life happened in 2007, when my second husband committed suicide. He didn’t leave a note; he simply walked out of the house, leaving me with our children.

This shattered me. Nothing I had learned through psychology gave me the tools to deal with it. I went into survival mode (fight, flight, freeze) and for a number of years I lived by the emotions of anger, hopelessness, guilt and shame, grief, anxiety and fear.

Living in chronic stress for such a prolonged time can make us sick, and eventually that’s what happened to me. The stress set off a serious immune reaction in my body. I lost the ability to walk. I lost my job and my income. I couldn’t look after my children. I was ill for many years.

The corticosteroids I was taking to manage the immune reaction caused another condition that created ulceration throughout my body. I was also diagnosed with depression soon after.

Then in 2011 I was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer.

I remember my lowest moment, lying on the floor in despair, praying to God for a sign that life was worth living.

How I survived and learned to thrive

My breakthrough came when I started attending workshops with different teachers in the filed of energy healing. They all say how we create our own personal reality by the way we think and act and feel. And they showed me the way to change, using methods that have been scientifically proven to work.

I realized that I could learn how to change my own thinking and emotional states through meditation – and I believed that in this way I could also heal my body.

Changing my thought patterns was very difficult in the beginning, I was holding onto a lot of grief and hopelessness and resentment. But I meditated three times a day, and over the year, I improved emotionally and mentally. I moved over to complementary and energy medicine also and in 2012 I started to see my physical health improve; I started walking again and the depression vanished.

Then in 2013, a scan showed that the oesophageal cancer had disappeared.

Since then, I have changed my whole life. I am vital and healthy, still clear of disease. Emotionally, I have grown into a totally different person. I feel strong and confident.

My career has changed too; I have turned away from the clinical world and towards the new science of meditation, energy work and health. I know it works. I run workshops and trainings for people who are dealing with mental or emotional trauma or physical conditions.

The greatest gift

Life will always bring more challenges and there is always more to discover, but I now have the tools I need. I still meditate every single morning – it has become my way of life. I create every day with love, compassion, gratitude and joy. I see possibility in all of us. And I’m able to support others in their transformation because I have lived that journey myself.

I can say now that my husband’s suicide was the greatest challenge that life gave me and it has enabled me to grow and heal in ways I could never have imagined.

Heart greetings Anouk

The wound is the place
where the light enters you
~ Rumi