Why I do what I do.

A long story, hear me out. On purpose. Because talking in Instagram-oneliners is slowly killing me.

I always was a genuinely good girl.

I actually like being good at things, being a good person. I'm punctual, warm, interested in everyone. I have always had a gift for making people feel at ease.

I still do. But not at the cost of myself anymore.

As a physiotherapist, these skills made me very successful, well liked. The endless chatting, my curiosity, the efficiency, the full attention, the touching: it became my trademark.

I was good at the game. But the logistics of it emptied me completely.

So I switched to animals. My own practice, my own rules. I loved it (still do!). But long days, extreme weather, small children at home, always on the road. It was better, but not yet right.

When my newborn son died after living for just two days, something shifted.

From that day I stopped tolerating nonsense. I made a vow to myself after that dark period: from now on my new operating system will be: "only what matters."

And then something happened that pushed me even further.

My other child did not respond well to a certain standard medical intervention. And I started asking questions, which alone gives you a label that makes it very hard to have a mature discussion on the subject afterwards.

What I discovered was that certain questions are unwelcome, that some topics are off-limits in our society. That asking, really just asking, following the thread wherever it leads, can cost you a lot.

I asked them anyway and kept doing very intensive research. For years.

There was no other option for me: a concerned mother does better research than the FBI. Especially mothers who have already lost a child. The dragon was poked.

And then came March 2020. Again a lot of questions that needed to be asked. It wasn't about being right or being heard.

It was about something deeper: autonomy, sovereignty, informed consent, the right to think for yourself and say what you actually see happening.

A lot of people stopped liking me that much. Some got pretty loud about it.

And something unexpected happened: I stopped needing them to.

The muscle of "I'd rather be honest than liked" got trained the hard way. And even though it hurt, it was very liberating too.

Through all of it, all the questions, all the threads I followed, about health, about history, about systems, about what we're told and what's actually true, all the rage I felt about all of it, I kept coming back to one thing.

My conclusion after a zillion hours of research in a lot of uncomfortable rabbitholes is this: it's actually very simple.

Everything becomes clearer when you know who you are, what you actually want, why you're here, how to navigate it all. Not perfect, just real. And that our human life can be pretty messy, but that's the whole point.

Here's what I noticed: most people don't really know who they are and what they want from life.

Not because they're not intelligent or aware, many of them are extraordinarily so.

But in our overly busy lives, studying/working hard, partying hard, lots of noise and lots of distraction, there hardly seems any time or place for contemplation.

We learn a lot, but not so much about ourselves...

Imagine me: seven years of old Latin grammar, but not a single thing about my own values or wildly genius insights.

I'm talking about your true essence, before the degree, before the career, before the mortgage, before the identity you have built to survive in the world.

The sticky sauce of school and society goes on early. And underneath it, still there, still intact, is the version of you that already knew things.

I started thinking more and more of who I was as a child. Dreaming big, feeling deeply, somehow remembering pretty profound stuff. Taking time to go back to little me opened up questions about history, about where we come from, about things I somehow already knew as a child.

That's mine. Yours will be different. But it will be completely, ferociously yours.

It took me some really hard lessons in life to do this kind of deep dive on myself and my values. I imagine this could be more fun for you.

That's why I built SPINE.

A self-led program, just you with a screen and pen and paper, moving through the questions nobody ever thought to ask you. Not as a nice thing to do on a Sunday afternoon, but as a potential gamechanger, on how you see yourself, how you make decisions, and what you actually do with your life.

SPINE has three layers.

The first is Remembering. Going back to who you were before the conditioning got its hands on you, unearthing what's actually yours: your fire, your genius, your original signal.

The second is Direction. Sharpening your inner compass and getting clear on what you actually want, not what makes sense on paper or what other people expect.

The third is Action. Not inspired action as a concept, but actual movement, decisions that come from you, in your own pace, toward what is completely yours.

Together, they give you your blueprint. A starting point to design the life that is actually, undeniably yours.

SPINE is meant as some kind of portal to yourself. From there, the real fun can begin.

My big delusional dream?

Let's make this a quiet, unstoppable kind of movement. Because I feel it in my bones that this is why I am here.

We have spent too long looking outside ourselves, outsourcing our knowing, our choices, our authority, waiting for someone else to tell us who to be and what to do. What I'm building is the opposite of that. Coming back to yourself, grounding in yourself, actually incarnating into this life, this body, this moment.

Embodied. Sovereign. Free. Playful.

That's the movement. One person at a time, remembering who they are. And from there, changing everything around them.

It starts with you.

Love, Annemarijn

PS. If something in here stirred, there are a few ways to go deeper, all free.

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