Build a new Foundation.
Change the way you perceive the world.

I'm Rafael — breathwork instructor, bodyworker, and health & performance coach: a lifelong student of what it actually means to feel at home, and fully alive, in your own body and life.

Bright living room with modern inventory

Where I come from

Spanish and Dutch, raised in South America, moving most of my life. As a kid I watched people around me suffer — friends, family — and I didn't know what to do with that. I wanted to fix it. Or maybe I just wanted to understand why it had to be that way.

My body-mind journey began on the mat. Martial arts as a boy, fifteen years of it. That's where the real curiosity started — not just about the body, but about what it means to actually be inside one.

The Unraveling

In my early twenties my body fell apart. Chronic back pain, chronic fatigue, Epstein-Barr. I'd been an athlete my whole life and suddenly I wasn't. I got low. Depressed, honestly.

This became my pain teacher. Losing my health and sense of joy was the first time I stopped performing and started actually listening.

The body has its own timing. It doesn't negotiate.

The Body is the Doorway

Here's what I've come to know through years of embodied practice:

We are a system of systems. Body, mind, breath, emotion. We are not separate from what we feel. The tension you carry in your shoulders is not just physical. The shallow breath is not just a habit. They are the shape of everything you've had to hold.

The body remembers what the mind has tried to forget.

When I learned to stop bracing — really stop, not just relax on command — something underneath opened. Not fixed. Opened. That's the difference.

And yes — lifestyle matters. Our health habits matter deeply. They are part of the same conversation. But we don't heal by just managing ourselves better. We heal by becoming safe enough to finally arrive.

"I'm obsessed with one thing: the place where your physical, mental, and emotional health meet. I call that vitality. You'll feel it as joy."

What I do now

I've been a yoga teacher, personal trainer, massage therapist, osteopath, breathwork instructor, and health & performance coach. I've held a lot of roles. What I'm most interested in now is simpler and harder than any of them: helping people feel safe in their own body and at home in their nervous system.

The breath is where I spend most of my time. Not because it's a technique — but because it's the most honest thing about us. You can't fake your breath. It tells you exactly where you are.

I work with stress, burnout, disconnection. The people who come to me are usually high-functioning on the outside and exhausted on the inside. They've been managing for a long time.

We slow down. We listen.
We find out what's actually there.

Where I am today

I'm based in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria — ocean, mountains, sun. I work online and in person.

I've had stretches of feeling genuinely alive and stretches of feeling completely lost. I'm not offering something I figured out in theory. I'm offering something I learned through practice, trial, curiosity and more than a few 'wrong' turns.