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The person behind Society of Rituals
About Marlon
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My search didn't start in a meditation center or on a yoga retreat.
It started at an illegal techno rave in Amsterdam — high on a cocktail of substances, taking a laughing gas balloon that showed me something I had no context for.
A vision. Or maybe just a recognition.
Items I had collected over the years suddenly made sense. The moccasins I had worn as a child. A statue of an indigenous chief my mother had gifted me. A painting I had made of myself dressed as one.
In that moment I deeply felt — I had walked as a shaman in a past life. Every bone in my body felt it. This was more than substance abuse.
But I didn't consider myself spiritual back then. I brushed it off. Told myself I had simply taken too much, as always.
When everything fell away
Shortly after, I got sick. Crohn's disease. Seriously ill. And when your health disappears, everything else falls away with it.
At the time I was a drug dealer. My life revolved around parties, status, and an overly macho lifestyle that looked powerful from the outside but was mostly an act. When I lost my health, all of it suddenly felt meaningless.
I started questioning everything. Is this really what I'm going to do with my life? I'm intelligent. I could have become anything.
So I stopped. I quit the drug business. Broke bonds with everyone in that world. Stopped partying. And started searching for a cure — which led me into the world of alternative healing. Books. Workshops. Courses. Anything that might help.
The vision that kept returning
At some point I went to see a Vedic astrologer. During the reading he said something that stopped me.
"You're an executive during the day and a shaman at night."
I walked out in disbelief. Was I really meant to be a shaman? What does that even mean?
A few months later I attended a light language workshop. During a group meditation people were asked to tuned into each other and shared what they experienced. An older woman with white hair — wise-looking, the kind of person you immediately trust — shared something about me.
"The moment I tuned into you, I saw you making some herbal mixture. Maybe ayahuasca. I think you were a shaman in a past life."
There it was again. But I only knew shamanism through ayahuasca ceremonies and indigenous tribes in the Amazon. And while I felt a deep connection to that world, I never felt it was my path.
Eight years of searching
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For eight years I was in search of myself. I had completely lost my identity when I quit being the party boy, the dealer, the macho guy. I didn't know who I was anymore.
So I tried to reinvent myself. Again and again. A neurofeedback training therapist & energy healer. A black label marketing agency for coaches. A jewelry brand. A money mindset and crypto investing coach. A holistic business coaching practice. I traveled the world searching for answers — Colombia, India, Egypt. All the places people go when they are looking for themselves.
Each business started with genuine excitement. Each journey opened something real. And yet each time I returned, the same patterns were waiting.
From the outside it looked like growth. But looking back now I can see clearly what was happening. I was performing. It wasn't coming from who I was. It was coming from the need to be seen. To belong. To be validated.
I wasn't resting in my present self. I was running on reactive patterns — the same ones I had always run, just dressed up in different language. And the consequences were real. At one point I sold my house and went all in into crypto. Lost over €300k when the market dropped and I had to liquidate my investments at a loss — because I was hospitalized and couldn't work. Everything I had built, gone. That is what reactive patterns cost. Not just energy. Not just time. Everything.
The breakdown that became a breakthrough
In January 2025 everything collapsed again. Two days before hosting a five-day online retreat — the official launch of my holistic business coaching program — I went into surgery to remove a stoma I had been living with for two years.
The day after the surgery I was in my hospital bed working on my presentation slides when I noticed my Crohn's starting to flare up again. The surgery was successful but it had triggered an auto-immune response. My body began turning against itself. I could not stop. Even then. Even there. That is how deep the pattern ran.
I hosted the retreat anyway. Five days. Showing up on camera, delivering sessions, holding space for others — while my body was falling apart behind the screen. I won't glamorize it. It was not resilience. It was the pattern at its most extreme.
When it ended I didn't follow up with the people who had shown interest. I hospitalized myself. Lost more than fifteen kilograms in ten days. Spent months recovering because my body wasn't absorbing nutrients.
All I could do was lie there. Reflect. Feel. Listen. And in that forced stillness — the kind you cannot escape — something finally shifted. I began to notice the subtle difference between a reactive pattern and genuine presence. I could feel when I was in my body and when I was trapped in my mind's loops.
That is when I discovered my actual gift. Sensitivity to the subconscious. Pattern recognition. The ability to see how a single loop shows up across every area of someone's life — their work, their relationships, their decisions. And I realized: this is what I am here to hold for others.
Why this. Why now.
By that point I had been inside enough business coaching containers to know what was missing. Frameworks. KPIs. "Ten thousand a month in 6 months or less." Discovery calls built on pain-pushing and manipulative NLP patterns designed to close the sale rather than connect. Nobody talked about listening to your feelings. Nobody talked about ethics. About resonance. About the simple fact that people who genuinely feel your work will naturally be drawn to it — without you needing to push them toward it.
I was done with that world. I wanted to do business differently. Through resonance, not manipulation. Through presence, not performance.
So I built the Sacred Business Oracle for myself first — as a way to hear my own intuition while navigating business decisions. Only later did I realize this was one of my deepest gifts. That I am a seer, not a salesperson.
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The birth of Society of Rituals
At the same time I realized something else. Building can be lonely. I had always loved the depth of connection that happens in ceremony and spiritual community. But I had also seen how easily spirituality can drift into bypassing — confusing dissociation with enlightenment.
I wanted something grounded. Something where spirituality isn't about escaping life but returning to it. To what is real. To intuitive authority instead of reaction. Life is here. On earth. In the body. In the decisions we make every day. That is what Society of Rituals is built from.
What I actually do now
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I don't call myself a shaman. Because the moment you believe you are the archetype, you stop channeling it — and start performing it. A shaman is not a person. It is an archetypal expression that moves through someone.
My role is not to lead people somewhere or fix them.
It is simply to create spaces where people can move out of reactivity and into stillness — so they can finally hear themselves again. Sometimes through conversation. Sometimes through ritual. Sometimes through symbolic tools like the Sacred Business Oracle, which reveal the patterns hidden beneath daily decisions. Once something is seen, it can be crossed. A new pathway becomes possible.
That is what ceremony does. It allows you to step outside of daily noise. Outside the loops. Into the now where you can see what is actually alive inside you right now. And from there, something shifts. Into coherence. Into your natural rhythm.
What I hold
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I don't have life all figured out. I am still walking this path. But I know how to hold space where your nervous system can rest. Where reactive patterns reveal themselves. Where you can remember who you are beneath the loops.
I am not here to save you or heal you. I am here to create the conditions where your system can reorganize itself naturally. This work isn't about becoming someone new. It is about remembering who you have always been.
