Meet Eelke Nathan

I'm Eelke Nathan. Some clients know me as Eelke, some as Nathan. Same person, same hands. I work from a treatment room at Sky Health on the Haagsche Bluf in Den Haag, and I only take a few sessions a day.

Healing was part of my world before I had words for it. My mother comes from a line of healers in Burkina Faso, and later trained in sports massage, acupuncture and healing touch.

But this work didn't come to me by inheritance. I had to find it the hard way.

It started in my own body. I have a scoliosis. I had half a meniscus removed, and for years I didn't take a step without checking the ground first. Two jaw operations in my late teens left me with a jaw that still braces. I know what it is to be at odds with the body you live in: to manage it rather than inhabit it.

In dance training I came down badly from a double arabesque and put my lower back partly out of line. My mother worked the muscles on either side until they let go, and the rest went back by itself. I had no word for what she did, and I didn't go looking for one. What stayed with me was that she waited. She didn't force the thing that was out of place. She worked with what was holding around it until holding was no longer necessary.

The deeper struggle was quieter. There were years when I felt numb, disconnected, overwhelmed by emotions I couldn't name. For a long time after I started training as a massage therapist, I couldn't receive a massage myself. I'd go somewhere else and come back when it was over. What slowly changed that was learning to stay, to feel deeply without rushing to fix. It still happens sometimes. The difference is that I catch it now, and I can come back.

So when someone on my table goes quiet in a way that isn't relaxation, I recognize it. I have been there myself.

Along the way, I became fascinated with the body. Not just its structure, but its instincts, its memory, its stubborn capacity to heal. I trained at Akademie voor Massage & Beweging and qualified as a massage and movement therapist in 2019, with training in character structure work, fascia release, trigger point therapy, the Trager® Approach and Lomi Lomi. I've since trained in Myofascial Energetic Release (MER), which is now the core of my practice, and I work under the MER Code of Ethics. I've been working with clients for eleven years. But no technique shaped me the way my own healing did.

A session with me is a conversation, carried through breath, sensation, and the quiet cues your nervous system offers when it feels safe. I don't work from a script. Your body leads; I follow.

People usually come to me for relief. A neck and shoulders that never fully come down, hips that have been tight for years, an old injury the body is still guarding. They come back for something else: feeling at home in their own body again.

If touch is hard for you, if you tend to drift off, apologize for your body, or aren't sure how much contact you want, you can tell me.

My work isn't fixing people. It's helping you get strong enough in your own body to stand in it without me.