ABOUT ME - Mikel Hengeveld
My name is Mikel Hengeveld. I was born in the Netherlands, and the path that brought me to the work I do today has been anything but straightforward.
I grew up in an alcoholic and violent home and experienced sexual abuse by a neighbour during my childhood. At the age of 12, I developed debilitating cluster headaches, which became so severe that I eventually carried a small oxygen tank with me to help manage the pain.
I left home at 15 and studied floristry and gardening at agricultural school. During those early years, I tried to cope with what had happened to me in the ways I knew how. I drank heavily, often to the point of blacking out, while building a life working as a florist, gardener and bartender.
My own therapeutic journey began when I was 17. Over the years, I explored many different forms of therapy while moving through further difficult experiences in my life, including profound loss, betrayal, psychosis, drug use and financial hardship.
Looking back, I can see that I was already searching for something I did not yet have words for: a way to come home to myself.
In 2012, I moved to Bali.
Not long after arriving, I attended my first yoga class. At the end of that class, I cried. Something in me simply knew: this is what I am going to do with the rest of my life.
Yoga became much more than a physical practice. It became a doorway into my body, into awareness and eventually into a completely different relationship with myself.
My first teacher training in Ashtanga followed soon afterwards. Over the years, I continued studying Yin Yoga—including training with Paul Grilley—Vinyasa and Anahatha Yoga, while developing a dedicated personal practice.
Yoga naturally led me deeper into meditation. I attended my first 10-day Vipassana retreat in 2015 and another in New Zealand in 2018. Meditation has remained an important part of my life ever since, evolving through years of daily practice and continued exploration of consciousness, stillness and our inner world.
At the same time, I became increasingly fascinated by the body and the ways in which our experiences can be held within it.
I trained in Thai pressure-point massage at Wat Po in Thailand and studied Balinese massage and reflexology in Bali. Through years of training, receiving bodywork and working intuitively with others, I gradually developed my own approach to bodywork—bringing together touch, awareness, energy and a deep sensitivity to what the body communicates.
But my journey also showed me that working with the body alone is not always enough.
I continued exploring therapeutic approaches that could reach the deeper layers beneath our patterns, protective mechanisms and emotional responses. Regression therapy had been part of my own journey since I was 17, and after another profound regression experience in Bali in 2022, something became very clear to me: this was work I wanted to understand deeply and eventually offer to others.
That decision opened another chapter of study and training.
Today, my work brings together the different worlds that have shaped my own healing journey: yoga, meditation, bodywork, hypnotherapy and regression, Brainspotting, TRE, Voice Dialogue, energy work and embodied awareness.
I do not see these as separate techniques. They are different doorways.
Sometimes the mind needs to be heard. Sometimes the body needs space to release what it has been holding. Sometimes we need to understand the different parts within ourselves. And sometimes what is needed most is simply enough safety and stillness to feel what has been underneath the noise all along.
Food has also remained part of this journey. Cooking has always been a creative expression for me, and nourishing myself with good food played an important role in returning to health. Over the years, I have worked as a vegetarian and vegan chef at yoga retreats in Bali and Portugal, bringing the same philosophy into the kitchen: nourishment can happen on many different levels.
My past is part of who I am, but it is no longer the place from which I live.
For many years, I tried to escape, understand or silence the echoes of what had happened to me. Eventually I discovered that healing was not about fighting those echoes. It was about learning to listen differently—to the mind, to the body and to what lies underneath both.
That understanding is at the heart of the work I offer today.
I work with people who may already understand a great deal about themselves, yet still feel that something remains unresolved. People who have talked, analysed and worked on themselves, but sense that their body is still carrying something their mind cannot fully reach.
I know that place because I have lived it.
My life has contained darkness, but somehow I continued to see light even when it felt very far away. I no longer see my struggles simply as things I had to overcome. They shaped the compassion, sensitivity and understanding I bring into my work today.
I cannot walk another person’s path for them.
But I can walk beside them.
And perhaps help them become quiet enough to hear what has been there within them all along.
