Martin Engdal
About Me
I am first and foremost a student of life—curious, listening, and shaped by experience more than theory. Teaching came later, as a natural extension of walking the path and being asked to share what I had learned along the way.
For a decade, I held a leadership role in the mountains, developing and managing a lodge that gradually transformed into a retreat center. What began as a quiet vision slowly found its way into form. The process taught me patience, responsibility, and the subtle art of bringing something unseen into reality—one decision, one season, one conversation at a time.
For over twenty years, personal development has been my primary field of study. My journey has moved through therapy, coaching, yoga, meditation, and long periods of disciplined inner work. I am certified as a Co-Active Coach through CTI, a Goal Mapping Practitioner, and a yoga teacher and therapist across multiple traditions—Hatha, Kundalini, Elemental Yoga Therapy, and Zen Thai Flow. Each modality has refined my understanding of the human system, yet none stands alone. What matters is intention and integration.
One of the most meaningful chapters of my work was starting and leading a yoga and meditation program inside the prisons of Oslo, Norway. What began as a solitary initiative grew over three years into a multi-teacher project across several prisons. I also trained other yoga teachers to work in these environments, where presence is essential and authenticity cannot be faked.
I have sat through dozens of meditation retreats and completed many courses in coaching and personal development. Each experience refined my understanding, not of perfection, but of humility.
Yet of all the retreats, trainings, and initiations life has offered, nothing has been as profound as family. I am a husband in a decade-long relationship and a father of three beautiful children—two boys and a girl. Family life remains my greatest teacher, mirror, and ground. It is where theory is tested and humility is non-negotiable.
I am self-made, shaped by both challenge and creativity. I grew up in a complex home environment, exposed early to art and expression but also a rock n roll lifestyle—my mother an artist, my father in the music business. Alongside encounters with artists in the music industry also insecurity and confusion lived. In my teenage years and early twenties, sensitivity hardened into armor, expressed through anger, being a big tough guy, and numbing through substances. Beneath it all was a lost, tender boy searching for belonging.
In my late twenties I realized that healing and change were possible, that moment everything shifted. What began as survival became an adventure in self-inquiry—one I am still on. I do not claim arrival. I value humility, curiosity, and honest practice.
Today, my work integrates creativity, authenticity, resilience training, fasting, breathwork, cold exposure, meditation, nervous system regulation, and lifestyle design. I am interested in what helps us remember who we are beneath conditioning—and how to live from that place with responsibility and heart.
I meet people where they are, and I walk beside them—not ahead
