Coach | trainer | social gardener

sex positive | educator | activist

 

I work as a professional coach, trainer, educator in the field of sexuality, gender, relationships, identity and intercultural encounters. I work with groups, individuals and couples.

As a personal coach / counselor for more than ten years I help my clients to heal issues in their sexual life or relationships. I support their efforts to solve problems through talking, sharing, re-focusing, asking the right questions, or just simply listening. I offer ideas, feedback, tools and support, so they can step out from their established routines and move forward with their lives. Sometimes my role is beyond words; it is appreciative attention, being present, feeling and using the energy of the situation, accepting the other person without judgements, and creating a safe space of mutual trust.

As a trainer I do in-service training, personal coaching and group sessions for teachers, trainers and youth educators as well as counselors, integration workers, health- and social workers, job consultants, sexual supervisors, and disability consultants. I offer training programs on the human body, health, sexuality, interculturality. I provide professionals with sex- and gender related information, and ways to a better understanding of sexuality in their professional life. I help professionals to get a better understanding in their self-development and improve their communication skills.

sex and motherhood

I have a special interest in the topic of motherhood. I have written a book on it: Woman, mother, lover – Motherhood and Sexuality, in which  I discuss the Western cultural tradition, Western sex discourse, and the intersection of different gender and social roles. The book is an anthropological study with strong literary sensibilities, and is based on personal interviews with mothers and fathers, young and old, living alone, in hetero and in homosexual relationships.

migration and life transition

As a migrant woman myself, I also work on migration and life transitions with my clients. I am interested in how various transitions in time and space have overlapping and interconnected impacts on our family life, relationships, intimacy, sexuality. How new aims (or lost goals), new (or confused) identities, losses and new (or no) perspectives trigger changes in our relationships, impacts our man- and womanhood, our intimacies and eventually our sexual lives. I give support to my clients so they can regain their lost balance, stay or get connected, and activate their (hidden) resources, and feel empowered again.

get connected – the garden as a ‘working tool’

My work with people taught me that physical space has a crucial role in creating security and intimacy for the emotional work to be done. We get connected with ourselves and with others in inviting spaces, and we fail to do so in hostile environments. For many years I have been working as a creator and facilitator of different garden projects, where gardening fostered social integration, community building or healing. I see the garden as a special space of healing, where people can be energized and empowered. Gardens can teach us things beyond words. It taught me how to be present, how to listen, how to listen actively. To distinguish between the important and one that could wait. Gardens taught me to feel the energy, good and bad vibrations, to detect if something is about to happen. In a garden there is hardly anything, that is inherently good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Things are simple and functional. Beauty hides in this order. Pain, suffer, loss, death have their own place in the garden. Working in the garden also reminds me to be patient, to trust the forces of birth, growth, transition and death. I believe that physical presence, physical work, embodied activities enable us to re-connect with our inner balance.

the “floating garden”

I live and work in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands but I do projects and have clients from more than a dozen countries in Europe. I use the floating garden metaphor to describe my life and my work. The garden that I create is floating, it is among us. When I work with my Hungarian clients via Skype, go to Romania to give training, when I give group sessions in Luxembourg, or when I work with migrant professionals in Italy or in the Netherlands, I can take my floating garden with me, so I can connect through sharing experiences, sharing our basic human needs, our vulnerabilities, things beyond words and languages.