ABOUT ANNETTE
Hello Beautiful Human,
I am a meditation teacher, somatic educator, author, practicing nature mystic and human rights advocate. My work lives where two paths meet: the path of healing, which helps the body feel safe again, and the path of liberation, which reveals what was never broken. Together, they make room for awakenings the body can hold.
I was born in Germany in the sixties, into a complicated family and the bone-chilling shadow of my country's history. Both set me seeking early. I've spent my life trying to decode the human experience of happiness and suffering, and what it takes to have a conversation with life that feels true, ethical, meaningful and alive.
The first real relief I found from depression came through yoga and Tai Chi, during years I spent living in Spain in my twenties. That door opened into a lifelong love affair with Eastern contemplative traditions: the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi and the Tibetan meditation practices of Mahamudra and Dzogchen. I feel deep gratitude to my precious teachers, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and Tsoknyi Rinpoche. Ancient earth-based practices from the Andes found their way in too.
In my mid-thirties, I discovered that the body holds its own wisdom and wounds, which awakening alone does not always touch. That discovery turned me toward somatic trauma resolution.
These threads found form in my own method, Embodied Inner Listening. It joins Focusing (Eugene Gendlin, PhD) and trauma repair with Buddhist philosophy and self-inquiry. Here, body and mind are gradually invited to rest as the center-less openness at the heart of everything.
From Spain, my nomad feet carried me through India, Japan, Australia and the Netherlands before landing in the US in 2005. In 2009, my husband Stephan and I co-founded Blue Spirit Retreat Center in Nosara, Costa Rica, which has become a sanctuary for thousands of seekers from around the world.
Along the way, I trained in both sides of my work. For healing, I am a certified attachment trauma practitioner (DARe) and a facilitator of embodied parts work (IRF), somatic EMDR interventions and Sacred Theatre. For the spirit, I am an ordained Wisdom Keeper in the Order of Universal Interfaith. And as Resilience Faculty for the Human Rights Foundation, I accompany activists across the globe as they navigate the stress and burnout of working on the front lines of human dignity and freedom.
When I am not teaching, you likely find me walking the beach with my rescue dog Dante, diving into the waves, or picking up plastic along the shore. Or out by the river or in the fields with my spirited horse, Kareem, happily sandy, muddy and windblown.
My book, Mystic Nomad: A Woman's Wild Journey to True Connection, is a love letter to this whole luminous, messy, magnificent path, and an invitation into your own.
