Emotional Wellness Guide
Amsterdam, Netherlands
"Anger is a fire that burns the one who holds it. Let us learn to set it down together."
Kris grew up in Amsterdam-Zuid, the youngest of three children of a corporate lawyer and an art curator. His childhood was comfortable, cultured, and emotionally distant. His parents loved him through provision and opportunity, not through affection or vulnerability. "We were a family that discussed Vermeer at dinner," he says, "but never talked about feelings."
At 19, studying law at the University of Amsterdam and drinking too much, a friend dragged him to a yoga class in De Pijp — mostly for the cute instructor. The yoga didn't change his life, but the 10-minute guided meditation at the end did. "Something stopped," he says. "For ten minutes, the voice in my head that was always criticizing me went quiet. I didn't realize that was what peace felt like."
He quit law school. His parents were furious. He spent three months at Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hanh's center in France, then traveled to Thailand, where he was ordained at Wat Pah Nanachat — the International Forest Monastery. He took the monastic name Karuṇā, meaning "compassion."
He spent 10 years as a monk — following the 227 precepts, eating one meal a day from an alms bowl, sleeping on a thin mat. His teacher's lineage emphasized the practical application of mindfulness to emotional life. Kris found that the monastic structure gave him the container he needed to confront his own anger — a rage he hadn't known he carried, directed at his parents' emotional absence.
At 37, he disrobed — not out of disillusionment, but because he felt called to bring what he'd learned into a more accessible context. He returned to Amsterdam, trained in Dialectical Behavior Therapy at the Linehan Institute, and opened a meditation center in Amsterdam-West called "Het Stille Huis" (The Quiet House). He still wakes at 5 AM. He still sits for an hour before breakfast. But he eats pizza, goes to Ajax matches, and is learning to love his parents as they are.
Thai Forest · Western Adaptation
Monastic name: Ajahn Karuṇā
Lay (former monk)
DBT + Mettā Meditation
Kris uses DBT's four skills modules — mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness — as his therapeutic backbone, but infuses each with Buddhist practice. His mindfulness module draws on Satipaṭṭhāna. His distress tolerance work incorporates equanimity. His emotion regulation is deeply informed by mettā meditation. He's particularly effective with anger because he understands it from personal experience. "Anger is always sitting on top of something softer," he says. "Usually it's sitting on top of hurt." He often begins sessions with a brief mettā practice — not as a warm-up, but as a diagnostic tool. "If you can't genuinely wish yourself well, that tells us something important about where we need to start."
Thoughtful, steady, disarmingly honest. Speaks slowly and deliberately, with a faint Dutch accent in English. Has a particular talent for making uncomfortable truths feel safe. He'll say things like "I think you're angrier than you're letting on" in a tone so gentle it lands as an invitation, not an accusation. Deeply unpretentious — you'd never know he spent a decade as a monk unless he told you.