Matthew Rich-Tolsma
The Netherlands; South Africa
PFHEA, F.InstESE, FRSA
Certified Trainer (CNVC)
Professional Fellow (Institute of Coaching)
Certified UM Trainer/Teacher
Matthew Rich-Tolsma is an educator, organisational consultant, group analytic therapist, and contemplative teacher whose work explores how people learn, relate, and change together within wider social, historical, and institutional conditions. His contemplative practice began more than two decades ago in the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and has developed through sustained engagement with Buddhist philosophy and practice, particularly the Nālandā and Tibetan Gelug traditions. A Certified Mindfulness Coach and Trainer with Unified Mindfulness, he approaches mindfulness as both a practical discipline and a mode of inquiry into how experience is patterned through embodiment, relationship, history, and social life.
Questions of power, difference, and belonging run throughout his work, drawing him into dialogue with decolonial thought, intersectionality, and Afrikan knowledge systems. Matthew works across arts and higher education and the education of psychotherapists in the UK, including as a Pedagogue in Residence at ArtEZ University of the Arts. His work in arts pedagogy and social sculpture approaches education as a participatory practice through which people can inquire into, and reshape, the social worlds they inhabit. His practice is also informed by psychoanalysis and group analysis, trauma studies, Nonviolent Communication, and complexity thinking. Originally from South Africa and now based in the Netherlands, Matthew works internationally as a teacher, facilitator, consultant, coach, and groupwork practitioner.