Hello, my name is Anna. I am connected to the Divine Mother and Father, both poles within myself are united. From an early age I wondered why the Christian faith and other Western faiths did not have a Divine Mother. Intuitively I knew of the Great Mother as a symbol for Life, for the connection with the ‘All’. I felt related to that. But this Mother had no role within the Christian faith nor within our culture. There was Mary, holy virgin whose body and sexuality had been controlled, erased, disabled for centuries (photo:  the St Mary’s Chapel in Bavel, the Netherlands where I grew up). 

My longing for the Divine Mother led to a spiritual and emotional search for Love, for Source, for myself. It brought me to my own shadow or dark side, the holy virgin and whore within myself, a little hurt girl who longed for love. Sex was what I shared in relationships, not my own feelings and desires. Part of my story, is about women’s oppression, which symbolizes the oppression of my own unique womanhood. In my search for love, I worked hard but nothing really seemed to work out or come easily. Around me I saw friends who got married, had children and had a nice house. For me it was struggling with life. My first job was as a police inspector in Amsterdam. An amazing experience. Still, after a number of years as an employee, I wanted more freedom and as a starting entrepreneur I started with women’s empowerment. I wanted to make the world a better place and founded a platform femalefactor.nl to make women aware of their talents. 

After about a decade of pushing and pulling at life and struggling entrepreneurship, I could no longer afford my apartment. I borrowed money from friends and my sister and that’s how my debts arose. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I can still remember the moment I had to leave my house. I was in the car with a friend and the few things I had left. The beautiful sunflower from my balcony on my lap. Surviving and sustaining myself immediately slipped away from me, even though I had no income and no house anymore. In the years that followed, I traveled through the Netherlands and Europe and did volunteer work. Forced by my debts, I started to surrender more and more and trust in life.

All these years with low self esteem I told myself that life was not meant for me. I told myself that it was impossible, that I weren’t capable of it, that I made a mistake, that I failed… It made me shake off my fears, it made me love the whole life within myself, I didn’t lose my confidence, I didn’t give up and move on to become a new version of myself, mature, experienced. I have learned to face life’s challenges from the awareness of my inner strength…

A lot has changed in my life now the innocence, the smile and my enjoyment of life are back. I see the experience of living my shadow as a dark page in my life, yet it has also brought me a lot, loving myself and loving the world. Now I play my role of the mother goddess with passion. I hope you do the same with your role, as goddess, ego, painter, poet, king, lover, football player, kind, healer. You name it. It’s like that, otherwise it would have been😁 different