about me

The short version

I am 55 years old, mother of five children between the ages of 15 and 26. I was born in Germany, raised partly in Canada and the United States, and now live near Göttingen with my dogs, my books, and whichever of the children happens to be home that week. I worked as a corporate transactional lawyer at AT&T for twenty-three years, until December 2024, when I resigned to do this work full-time.

Where I come from

For more than two decades, I worked inside one of the most demanding mind-driven environments I know of. International commercial negotiations, complex contractual structures, high-pressure timelines, sharp people. I loved most of it. I was good at it. It trained my mind to question, to look for hidden assumptions, to distrust any explanation that could not survive scrutiny.

It also tired me in ways I did not yet have language for. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being competent for a very long time, especially when life beyond the office is already asking a great deal of you.

And it gave me a specific kind of perspective on human beings. After twenty-three years inside that world, you see how high-functioning people actually live underneath the performance. You see what carries them. You see what costs them. You see how much of what we call success has very little to do with whether a person is actually at home in their own life.

I am a former corporate lawyer who has spent the last decade quietly trying to understand what it actually is to be alive.

What cracked open

In 2016, my second husband took his own life.

What followed was the most disorienting period I have lived through. I was left raising five children on my own, alongside the demands of my work, while sitting with the kinds of questions a loss like that forces a person to ask. What actually happens when someone dies. What is consciousness, really. What is real, and what have I just been trained to believe is real.

I had handled hard things my whole life with intelligence and effort. None of those questions yielded to either. And for a long time, nothing in my old toolkit did.

So I did what I had always done when something mattered. I went looking for serious people thinking about it, and I read.

The decade of seeking

What followed was about nine years of slow, sustained study. The kind of study where books pile up by the bed, where you fall asleep with a pen in your hand, where you find yourself underlining the same sentence three times because something in it is reaching for you and you cannot quite see it yet.

I read across many fields. Near-death-experience research and consciousness studies. Jack Kornfield's approach to Buddhist psychology. The Nag Hammadi library, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Bible, read as records of how human beings across millennia have tried to articulate the inner experience of being alive. Contemporary thinkers including Eckhart Tolle, Gregg Braden, Bruce Lipton, Joe Dispenza, and Robert Edward Grant, among many others.

And, separately and most deeply, the Salvador Teachings, a body of knowledge brought through the work of Christiane Hansmann, which I encountered in 2017 and have studied closely ever since. For nearly a decade I have sat inside that body of work, integrating it with my legally trained mind, with the psychology I was reading, and with my own lived experience as a human being. It has shaped much of how I now see the energy anatomy of what it is to be alive.

In 2025, I enrolled in Alyssa Nobriga's signature coaching certification with the Institute for Coaching Mastery, which has given me a rigorous, contemporary coaching foundation alongside everything else I have integrated over the years.

There is something I want to say about all of this study, because I notice I could make it sound dry. It was not. It was, and is, the most alive thing I have ever done. Anything that catches my attention and finds its way into my heart, I tend to follow with everything I have. I learned about this part of myself young, and it has been the through-line of my life ever since.

About the name

A small note on what this place is called.

The name authenticitate yourself! is a tribute. The word itself comes from a body of work that has shaped me deeply over the last decade. In its original spirit, it names the slow, structured return into alignment with what is most true in a human being.

I do not use the name here to repeat what that body of work teaches. I use it because, in a single word, it carries what I have come to see as my own mission.

To help people remember and return to who they actually are, underneath the patterns and roles they have been performing.

If I had to put it more simply: I am here to serve by helping people find their way back into alignment with themselves.