On Our Team: Miriam and Working with the Shadow Self

Miriam Kaddouri addresses these topics from the perspective of different layers of consciousness. Her goal is to help neutralize and transform traumatic experiences by shifting our perception and challenging everyone to be responsible for their own life as autonomous, unique, creative beings. 

Due to her multicultural background, her approach is mostly based on working from her own life experience within a transcultural context. She believes that true connection derives from speaking our truth – i.e. expressing how we truly feel and experience existence in this three-dimensional reality.  

Miriam was born in the Netherlands to a Christian Dutch (Frisian) mother and Muslim Moroccan father. Aside from her own multicultural and multi-religious background, she grew up being influenced by many other cultures, such as Indonesian, Italian, and Canadian. Even as a child she knew that, even though being surrounded by multiple cultures was enriching her life, it came at a cost. All these cultures, with their different belief systems, brought with them expectations of how a young girl should look, feel, and act in society. Because of all these cultural and religious convictions, she never felt able to connect to her true self. Moreover, she felt this friction not just within herself, but also in society. This has been a major influence on how Miriam perceived and experienced her identity and sexuality across these different cultures and religions. 

Her life experience has also influenced her educational choices. She made the conscious choice to study Middle Eastern Studies in order to better understand her own Arabic and Islamic background. After graduating, Miriam realized that her calling lay in the social sciences, and so she obtained a further degree in transcultural coaching from a private institute, so she could help people directly. 

After completing the coaching program, she understood how deeply rooted cultural and religious believes had damaged her emotionally. She therefore decided to pull back from society, to create space for transforming her old belief system, so that healing could take place. During this four-year evolution, she became aware that the different layers of trauma and conflict were as much a collective experience as an individual one. Miriam saw a society-wide system that was increasingly failing its members. She set about examining different layers of consciousness, and the way they manifest in different cultures, in order to help bring about a shift in perspective for anyone who desires one and is ready to experience it.

Miriam Kaddouri is a motivational speaker who also offers personal consultations as a transformational coach, specializing in topics such as identity and sexuality within the context of the shadow self. She identifies the shadow self as the part of us that we tend to deny or refuse to examine.