About Martin
MSc in Organizational Psychology · Process Guide · Facilitator

Perhaps something has become stuck, and what used to help no longer does. It may be a conflict that has settled in, a transition where the old has fallen away before anything new has taken shape, or shame, freeze, and exhaustion lingering like a long winter in the body. Perhaps you are highly sensitive, and the world easily becomes too much. Perhaps you lead a team or are part of a community looking for more alive ways to work together. Or perhaps life is going reasonably well, but you sense there is more aliveness, meaning, or creativity waiting. Whatever you are facing, we find the pace together. There are no grounds for hurrying.

I work at the meeting point of psychology, somatic practice, and ecological awareness, drawing on depth psychology, research on the nervous system, contemplative traditions, and what I have learned from Indigenous teachers and thinkers. For more than twenty years, I have accompanied people, groups, and organizations through growth, transitions, and crises.

The work may be with individuals, groups and gatherings, leaders and teams, or helpers who want supervision. It can take place in conversation, in a circle, or outdoors, depending on what is needed.

Twelve years in climate and cultural movements taught me how people can organize themselves, and what makes such systems come alive or get stuck, both in the structures and in the people who carry them. I also saw how crises unfold, in a single person and across whole communities. My master's thesis in organizational psychology explored the embodied and relational roots of an ecocentric identity. Where theory helps, I draw on developmental and integral perspectives, without following any one map.

For thirty years, I have also had a practice in nature and a career as a children's magician. Magic is about perception, wonder, play, and not being dazzled by the surface of things, and that way of seeing runs through all my work. The forces within us that seem to block our way are often protectors, and beneath their strategies there is usually a deep loyalty, even love. An inner loyal soldier can be vigilant and strict, sometimes making us small or turning us against ourselves, because it longs so deeply for us to fit in and belong. A hungry ghost can reach for more and more, trying to comfort us and fill a hole that has no ground beneath it, longing for a love that always seems just out of reach. Look closely enough, and you see exhausted parts of us, waiting to be welcomed home to the fire. When they are fully seen and met with warmth, sometimes even with laughter, they can soften and find their own new place, and what is deepest in us, some would call it the soul, can begin to lead.

Life has also led me through difficult terrain: freeze, existential anxiety, shame, deep grief, the dissolution of identity, and closeness to death. I know what it means to be struck at the very ground of existence, where even rest and simply being no longer feel safe. Many traditions call this a descent; the nervous system knows it as collapse and freeze. Both are true, and both can slowly change.

Shame is something I know especially well, from the inside and from years of training in relational work, including the shame that has been carried down through family lines, places, and cultures. Shame arises between people, and when something feels too hard to handle on our own. It is between people that it can soften; from inside it, we often need someone beside us to see what we cannot. It is often in a warm and clear meeting with it that stuck patterns and stuck groups begin to move.

Beneath all of this lies practice: years of relational, emotion-focused, and strengths-based work, decades of contemplation and somatic practice, and experience with transpersonal states, grounded in the body. Like roots that grow in the dark, it has given me a steadier ground to stand on. Much of what heals happens below words: in the breath, in the weight of the body resting on the earth, in the slow return of feeling. Sometimes what we have been looking for was right beneath our feet all along.

The work is not only between people. We are woven into a more-than-human world that also lives within us. Where it fits, we go outside, feet on the ground, and the land, the weather, and the seasons become part of the conversation. Much of what we are trying to remember, the living world already knows.

My window of tolerance has grown wider, and I aim to stay present and in relation even when foundations shake, within clear boundaries and as far as I am able to respond to what the relationship needs. I work in a psychodynamically informed way, paying attention to what plays out between us. I trust that what has frozen can move again. Often it begins with something as simple as the breath: a slightly longer out-breath, a little more room in the chest. A nervous system thaws much like the land in spring: at its own pace, and from the ground up.

And like spring, thawing brings life back: energy, joy, play, creativity, and meaning, for a person, a team, or a whole community. But growth that lasts needs roots. Much of what is called development today reaches upward without being rooted below. The growth I care about grows from the foundation, the way a tree needs its roots to carry its crown.

This applies to those who help others, too. In supervision, I support facilitators, teachers, leaders, and others in helping roles in building a practice that can last: one that is rooted in their own body and values, with room for rest, clear boundaries, and care for what gets stirred in them along the way. Together we look at what happens in the meeting with others, in groups, and in the helper's own nervous system, so that the work can nourish rather than drain.

All of this rests on humility. I make no claim to know your experience, or what it is to live in a different body, gender, or culture than mine. I don't have the answers to your life. I am still a work in progress myself, with support of my own along the way. I see myself as a lifelong apprentice to belonging: how it can be lost, longed for, and slowly rebuilt, both from within and without. What I bring is my presence, my experience, warmth for whatever is here, and a deep trust in what can grow. Your journey is your own, and I can walk alongside you for a part of the way.

Warm regards,
Martin

The Place