About Machiel
“My dreams became an indispensable compass, and have supported me ever since.“
I work with people navigating life's deep transitions. These seasons arrive in many forms. They come as an uninvited loss, as symptoms that won't go away, or as a creative awakening asking to be lived.
My approach is rooted in a direct trust in the healing intelligence of the psyche. The psyche speaks through many voices, a dream, a symptom, a synchronicity, a longing, or something the body carries. Our work is to listen widely, and to host whatever is trying to emerge. This way of working draws on Jungian psychology, embodiment, and non-dual insight, and is further shaped by African Indigenous healing and the dream traditions of many cultures.
The Compass of the Underworld
The descent
I was born in South Africa and grew up in the Netherlands. When I was ten, my father died suddenly. My family and my culture did not know how to grieve. That ungrieved loss cast a deep shadow, and in my twenties it dropped me into a profound psychological descent.
I did not consciously choose to enter that descent. It is more that I realized I was already in the underworld of grief and loss, while a survival-oriented part of me kept functioning in the regular world. Carl Jung's work opened a vital connection to the psyche and ancestry. It helped me navigate the underworld, and find a relationship to death and to my ancestors. My dreams became an indispensable compass, and have supported me ever since. Facing that grief turned out to be life-saving. To my own surprise, I found a sense of purpose, and a larger, meaningful worldview.
Over the years I saw how much of our suffering is a response to living cut off from the deeper psyche. Symptoms such as dissociation, depression, anxiety, and addiction often begin as ways of coping with that disconnection. I found the medicine for my own suffering. And that allows me to support you in finding yours.
Over time, my life has deepened through each heartbreak, and each creative invitation, including the dream that set me on a wholly new path. These are initiations. They taught me to let the psyche unfold on its own terms, and to stay close to the raw texture of feeling.
Thirty Years of Study, Twenty Years of Clinical Practice
The practice
30
Years working with dreams
20
Years of clinical practice
100+
Countries reached through the Jung Platform
I have worked with dreams and the deeper psyche for more than thirty years, and have practiced as a psychotherapist for over twenty. My formal training includes a master's degree from Pacifica Graduate Institute. I spent three years studying Embodied Imagination with Robert Bosnak, and four years in initiation within an African Indigenous healing lineage. Decades of my own analysis and mentoring deepened this further. My lived experience of meeting suffering, and of giving form to the creative spirit, is the essential touchstone of this work.
I am also a poet, with three manuscripts in progress. My writing deals with underworld journeys, the non-dual landscape, and the awakening of creative life.
A pivotal dream led me to found the Jung Platform. It grew into a global education company serving hundreds of thousands of people in more than one hundred countries. My book Dream Guidance (Hay House) brought the practice of dream incubation to an international audience. I have taught at Esalen, Tibet House US, and Pacifica Graduate Institute. I have also shared this work at The New York Times, Fortune 500 companies, and Jungian communities around the world.
Pacifica Graduate Institute · Embodied Imagination with Robert Bosnak · African Indigenous healing lineage
My relationship with the imaginal world has been shaped by living in many places. After my childhood in South Africa and the Netherlands, I lived in Paris as a teenager. I backpacked through Asia for a year, and have been in the United States since 2005. More recently, I lived two years in Mexico City, and spent extended periods in Medellín and Buenos Aires, where I deepened my relationship with Latin American culture and its rich imaginal world.
I now live, write, and practice in New York City.
The threshold