Your problem may not be your problem

I don’t know either

I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to understand how human beings work.

I’ve read hundreds of books, followed courses and trainings, explored psychology, spirituality and self-help, worked with many people and eventually wrote nine books of my own.

So I learned a lot.

One of the more useful things I concluded is that I know considerably less than I once thought I did.

I don’t have a model that explains you. I don’t know what your life should look like or what you should do next.

But I am quite good at sitting down with someone and looking very closely at what is actually going on.

Without immediately turning it into a theory.

No program

So no, there isn’t one.

No workbook, step-by-step plan or method that I pull out of a drawer regardless of what’s happening in your life. We simply start with whatever you’re dealing with.

Sometimes something important shifts when you suddenly see what you’ve been doing for years.

Sometimes you need to face something, stop something, start something or finally make a decision.

And sometimes doing absolutely nothing is exactly what’s called for.

You just don’t have to turn yourself into another project first.

Four conversations

I currently offer coaching as a series of four conversations.

Most sessions are online. If geography and circumstances allow, we can also meet in person.

We don’t have to cram the four sessions into a fixed schedule. Sometimes it makes sense to talk again after a week, sometimes after three weeks. We’ll decide as we go.

The four sessions together cost €850.

There is no homework program, online portal or complicated trajectory attached to it. And between sessions you don’t have to get up at 5:45 every morning to sit gratefully in an ice bath.

About me

I’m Marnix Pauwels, a Dutch writer, coach and plant medicine guide at Ancient Mother Healing Center.

Before doing this, I spent many years in advertising as a copywriter and creative director. I’ve written nine books, worked as a musician, given a TEDx talk (see below) and spent a substantial part of my own life investigating why being a human being can be so unnecessarily difficult.

I’ve also had my share of addiction, anxiety and depression.

For a long time, all of that made me want to find the answer.

These days I’m much more interested in what happens when we stop pretending there has to be one. 

A TEDx-talk

In 2015 I was asked to do a TEDx-talk. I had one year to prepare, and I used that time mostly to worry about it. At first I didn’t really appreciate it that we were supposed to do it in English (I hardly did ANYTHING in English back then), but that turned out to be a really good thing.

The TEDx-talk has been doing quite well on YouTube, and most of the visitors are English-speaking, so there you go!

In this talk I tell people about my years of crippling anxiety around almost anything, and I share a pretty powerful metaphor that helped me completely change my life.