About Machiel

When life enters a deep transition, familiar ways of orienting can fall away. Meaning thins and identity shifts. What once worked no longer holds. I work with people in moments of emotional descent, creative awakening, or inner reorganization. Together, we follow the movement toward healing and the next way of being as it is emerging.

I am a licensed psychotherapist, Creative Lucid Mentor, author, and teacher. I specialize in underworld journeys and embodied creativity.

My approach draws from Jungian psychology, embodiment, and non-dual insight. It is shaped by African Indigenous healing and global dream traditions. I work with symptoms, dreams, symbols, and imaginal figures as living presences. I trust the deep creative and healing intelligence of the psyche. I help people engage their inner life with presence, embodiment, and care, and support them in translating inner vision into lived reality.

I have worked with dreams and the deeper psyche for more than thirty years and practiced as a psychotherapist for the past twenty. A pivotal dream led me to found Jung Platform, which grew into a global education company serving hundreds of thousands of people in more than one hundred countries. My book Dream Guidance, published by Hay House, brought dream incubation to an international audience. I have taught at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Esalen, Rituals, Fortune 500 companies, universities, and Jung institutes around the world.

My own path began early. I was born in South Africa and grew up in the Netherlands. My father died when I was ten, and the ungrieved loss shaped my early life. In my twenties I entered a long descent marked by grief, confusion, and a collapse of meaning. Jung’s work opened a connection to psyche and ancestry, and dreams became my life-saving compass through that underworld. Ongoing heartbreak, dislocation, and later initiatory experiences continued to refine how I meet my own inner life and accompany others in theirs.

I have lived in Paris, traveled through Asia for a year, and have been in the United States since 2005. My training later included study at Pacifica Graduate Institute. I trained in Embodied Imagination and spent four years in initiation within an African Indigenous healing lineage. More recently I lived in Mexico City and spent time in Medellín and Buenos Aires. These places deepened my relationship with Latin American culture and the imaginal landscape of those regions.

I now live in New York City, where I offer depth therapy and Creative Lucid Mentoring. My work is for those who feel a deeper movement within and want to follow it with presence and courage.