Ineke Vogel lives in the Netherlands. She is an authorized Zen teacher and priest in the Soto Zen tradition. In 2011, she received jukai, the Buddhist precepts, from Zen master Genpo Roshi. She became a student of his successor, Maurice Genko Knegtel Roshi, and was ordained by him as a Shuke, or home-leaver, in 2019. In 2023, she received Shiho, Dharma Transmission, from him. This places her in the lineage that traces back through Maurice Genko Roshi, Genpo Roshi, and Taizan Maezumi Roshi to Japan, China, and India, all the way back to the historical Buddha.
Before choosing the Zen tradition, she spent a significant amount of years in the Shambhala tradition, founded by the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
Ineke has a master’s degree in psychology and completed a two-year post-master’s program in mental health care. Additionally, she specialized in oncological psychology. She has worked in health care, spending the last fifteen years with cancer patients and their loved ones. In her work, she mainly used experiential and body-focused therapeutic approaches. She completed the teacher training in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and served for many years as a mindfulness trainer.
The issue of life and death has always fascinated her, and her work with clients has deepened that engagement in many ways.
From an early age, Ineke has lived with a connective tissue disorder that caused increasing pain and physical challenges. This eventually led to her becoming fully disabled at the age of 38. After an eight-year period she was able to work part-time again, but at 58 she had to stop working for good. Around that same time, she was diagnosed with a multisystem illness, bringing with it the ongoing challenge of living with increasing limitations and very limited energy.
She has a partner with whom she shares life’s ups and downs and together they have two adult sons, twins. Motherhood was never something Ineke could really imagine for herself, but the arrival and raising of these boys is something she describes as “one of the best things in my life!”