ABOUT ME - Mikel Hengeveld
My name is Mikel Hengeveld. Born in the Netherlands, I grew up in an alcoholic, violent home and endured a childhood also marred by the sexual abuse of a neighbour. I developed debilitating cluster headaches at the age of 12 that eventually required me to carry a small oxygen tank on my back to help manage the pain.
At the age of 15, I moved out of home, attending agricultural school to study floristry and gardening. In a bid to resolve the history of my abuse, I started to heavily drink, often to the point of blacking out. Despite the challenges, I worked as a florist and gardener for many years, as well as a bartender.
I attended my first therapy sessions aged 17, including one focused on regression. Over the years since, I’ve explored a variety of very different modalities to seek healing from my childhood and further traumas: a deep betrayal by a partner who was incarcerated, and then died by suicide; psychosis; drug use; and crippling debt.
Eventually, I met my husband and we moved together to Bali in 2012. After my first yoga class on the island, I cried and knew that this was what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I fell in love with yoga.
My first yoga teacher training, in Ashtanga, followed shortly afterwards, and trainings in yin—including with Paul Grilley, one of the key teachers of modern yin yoga—Vinyasa, and Anahatha yoga followed, all while I developed my own daily practice.
This practice naturally led me to meditation. I attended my first 10-day Vipassana retreat in 2015, and a second in New Zealand in 2018; I sit in one to two hours of meditation daily and now study quantum meditation.
I also cultivated an interest in bodywork, attending an intensive course at Wat Po in Thailand on Thai pressure point massage, and learning Balinese massage and reflexology in Bali. Tapping into my own intuition, I have crafted a bodywork style of my own that incorporates the various kinds of work I have received benefits from. I call it intuitive energy work.
Food has always been a passion of mine, and nourishing myself with healing food has been part of my journey back to good health. I’ve been a vegetarian and vegan chef for various yoga retreats in Bali and Portugal, tapping into a creative outlet I have found very fulfilling.
I attended another regression session in 2022 in Bali. This was the fourth I’d ever had, and it changed my life in a similar way to my first yoga class. This kind of therapy has reached out to me powerfully again and again over the years, and this time I realised I had to also learn and offer it to others.
After many years, I have silenced my echoes. I am ready to share the knowledge I have gained from the therapies and studies I have undertaken to help others who suffer from the echoes of their past.
My life was dark but I always saw light at the end of the tunnel. My struggle shaped me into who I am today.
I want others to know that they have choices, too. They can face their past traumas and emerge into the light. I’m here to help.
