Why Paths Are Many exists.

Paths Are Many did not come together through my efforts alone. It has grown through the generosity of many friends: people who suggested teachers, checked details, offered thoughtful feedback, and encouraged me to continue. Others shared skills where mine were limited, and some very patient technology helped with the work behind the scenes.

The site is still growing, and it will never be complete. Spiritual traditions are too rich, living, and varied to fit neatly into any single collection. What is gathered here is offered with care, and with the understanding that there will always be more to learn.

My own story is only a small part of the story behind this site, but it may help explain why I felt drawn to create it.

About the Founder

My spiritual journey began at twenty-two, when I started attending weekly meditation classes in Amsterdam. I had begun to recognise how much within me had remained unfelt and unprocessed, and those gatherings became an important first anchor.

Six years later, I attended my first silent retreat, led by Isaac Shapiro and Meike Schuett, in the lineage of Papaji and Ramana Maharshi. During that retreat, something briefly opened. I would hesitate to give it a grand name, but it offered a glimpse beyond my usual way of seeing myself and the world. That experience quietly changed the direction of my life.

It led me to India, where I had the privilege of spending time with a number of teachers, including Mooji and Swami Atmananda Udasin, as well as others who are now represented on this site.

The person who shaped my life most directly was Pia Ma. For seven years, I assisted her and helped facilitate retreats. She also trained me in hands-on healing, through which I began to understand more deeply how the body can hold what the mind has learned to set aside.

Although much of my path unfolded within non-dual traditions, I have never felt that truth belongs to one lineage. I have sat Buddhist retreats and have been deeply nourished by Buddhist teachings and practice. I am also continually moved by the Christian mystics, whose writings speak so intimately of silence, surrender, love, and union with the divine.

I have found wisdom in many places: in Buddhist clarity, Sufi devotion, Christian contemplation, Hindu teachings, embodied practice, and traditions rooted in the natural world. I do not claim to understand all these paths deeply. I try simply to approach them with respect, curiosity, and gratitude.

The years that followed were given largely to retreat, silence, solitude, and time with teachers. Much of that period was spent patiently meeting the patterns I carried. I sometimes think of those years as a long breathing in.

At a certain point, I felt a quiet wish to breathe out: not to present myself as a teacher or an authority, but to share something useful from all that I had received.

Over time, I began to notice that traditions which appear very different on the surface often return to similar human questions. How do we live with suffering? What are we beneath our habitual stories? How do we love? How do we surrender? How do we become more fully present to this life?

Their answers are not identical, and I do not want to flatten their differences. Each tradition has its own history, language, practices, and depth. Yet I often sense a shared movement towards truth, compassion, freedom, love, or home, whatever name a particular path may give it.

That is the spirit in which Paths Are Many was created. It is not intended to declare one path superior to another, or to suggest that every tradition is the same. It is simply a quiet place where people can encounter teachers, traditions, texts, and gatherings, and perhaps discover something that speaks to where they are.

There are many paths, and each carries its own wisdom. This site is my small attempt to honour that richness and make the search a little easier.