DIDI VLAAR  

“I help people reconnect with what nourishes them — physically, energetically and mentally — so they can make choices that truly support the life they want to live.”

In my early thirties, I thought I was eating well. I ate mostly organic food, followed much of what was considered healthy at the time, and genuinely paid attention to nutrition. And yet my own experience was telling me something different. I was tired, often physically cold, and somewhere along the way I had lost a clear sense of what actually supported me.

Food became one of the ways I found my way back.

One of the most important choices I made during that period was to study Traditional Chinese Medicine, beginning with Five Element nutrition and later moving into Chinese herbs. What attracted me was that food was no longer simply divided into healthy and unhealthy. I began to understand it through effect: warming and cooling, building and dispersing, supporting and depleting. I applied almost everything I learned in our own kitchen and began to notice how much could change when food was approached in this way.

At the same time, Armand was deeply immersed in Chi Kung. Training alongside him gradually brought another dimension into what I was learning. The language of Chi was no longer something I only understood intellectually; I began to feel energy directly in my own body and field. And as that sensitivity developed, I also began to experience food differently. I could feel more clearly how a meal affected my energy, whether it left me grounded or scattered, clear or foggy, warm or cold, energized or heavy.

A feedback loop began to develop. The more I learned to feel my energy, the more clearly I could experience the effects of food. And the more consciously I worked with food, the better I could create the conditions that supported my energy, my training and my daily life. 

Over the years, another important shift took place. The traditional systems I had studied remained valuable, but I no longer wanted the map to tell me what I was supposed to experience. I became increasingly interested in reversing that order: first feel what is happening, then observe it carefully, and only afterwards use knowledge to help make sense of the experience.

That shift became fundamental to my work and eventually to Nutritional Chi Kung.

Nutritional Chi Kung brings together Chi Kung, food, energetic sensitivity and everyday self-observation. Rather than giving you another system to follow, it teaches you how to investigate for yourself. What does this food actually do in your system? What happens to your energy afterwards, to your clarity, your mood or your ability to focus? What patterns begin to appear when you pay attention over time? And what changes when you respond to what you notice and then observe again?

For me, this is the deeper practice of energetic listening. It is not about letting the mind control everything, but neither is it about assuming that every sensation automatically contains the answer. It is about developing an ongoing conversation between awareness and your own living system — learning to feel, observe, respond and keep refining your understanding.

Because food is never only about food. What you eat becomes part of the state from which you work, train, relate, create, make decisions and live your day. My work is to help you become more sensitive to that relationship, so that you can increasingly recognize what nourishes you and create the conditions that support the life you want to live.