My business arose out of abuse, dedication and mystery. At a very young age I learned it wasn't safe to shine my light, and I hid behind a mask of indifference and learned to shun people. My heart, looking for love and belonging in other places, found the power of mountains, the fierce gentleness of the wind and the mystery of sunsets.

I studied theoretical physics, thinking it would bring me closer to the powers of nature, but found concrete building and male ego's.

Being smart and highly ambitious I did stay to get my doctorate and started my career at a top university. But after 6 years I hit my wall and chose to live half a year among the ice and rocks of the Himalayas. It was there that I found what I had been looking for all along: in Mount Everest I recognized the presence of a feminine divine as has been honored by locals for thousands of years.

In between treks in Namche Bazar, a tiny outpost of civilization in the Mount Everest Valley, someone had left a thin book on yin and yang. It became my first spiritual book. My hostess would pack me a lunch of fresh baked bread and fill my thermos with tea, and I would spend the days reading among the world's biggest giants. Maybe it was their mighty presence that shifted my focus from the yin and yang on the pages to the circle holding both.

The mountains combined with the book gave me a language for the wholeness, the mystery, not part of manifestation yet essential to her existence. The circle holding all of creation, being creation yet not being her. It was that what I had experienced in Sagarmatha, Goddess of the Sky, known to the west as Mount Everest.

Staying true to that experience has been my guideline ever since. It would take me on a journey beyond the very assumptions our paradigm is built on - and to reality bending wins and successes.

Back home in Netherlands, I ventured into the spiritual world, always with my own initiation in the high mountains as reference. I didn't need someone help me find the divine, I needed help to place and integrate the divine I had found.

Missing any map, refusing to be led by interpretations that didn't carry the magnitude of what I had experienced, all I could do was find my next step, one step at a time.

Without realizing it, I had found what would become the essence of my work and life. It was to become the seed for adventure, abundance, leadership and power beyond what I had ever imagined.