About Maria Clara
An Orientation Through Experience
Where Presence, Strategy, and Leadership Converge
Presence, perception and lived experience have shaped the way I work.
My life has unfolded between worlds: structure and intuition, responsibility and freedom, strategy and silence, city and nature. Moving across cultures, systems and roles taught me to remain attentive to what endures while circumstances alter.
I was born in Argentina and have lived and worked across Argentina, Germany, Mexico, the United States and the Netherlands. From an early age, different languages and cultural codes required continual recalibration. Over time, I learnt to move between perspectives, listen across difference, and perceive the patterns at work beneath the immediate picture.
Bridging different ways of knowing - rational and intuitive, visible and unseen, personal and collective - became a defining thread of my life and work. Over time, I also came to understand that perception is relational: what we are able to see is shaped by the quality of attention we bring to ourselves, to others, to circumstance, and to the wider living world.
I am drawn to the point at which movement is already under way.
Authority begins with knowing where one stands. From there, speech, decision and action acquire coherence.
It is not a matter of believing more in oneself; it is inner coherence and the capacity to stand in one's own direction.
Orientation is the capacity to locate oneself within a wider context and respond from that position with integrity.
Over time, this becomes lived autonomy: the ability to remain true to one's direction while staying in relationship with the world around us.
My work is informed by a strong intuitive and perceptual capacity. I understand intuition as attentive perception: noticing subtle shifts, sensing the structure beneath an account, tracing relationships between elements that may initially appear separate, and giving attention to what has yet to find language.
With time, this became a disciplined way of seeing: distinguishing the essential from the habitual, listening for what remains unspoken, and tracing connections between elements that may initially appear separate.
I am interested in the point beneath explanation: the pattern, tension or truth that changes how the wider situation can be understood.
People who have worked with me often describe the space as both deep and light. Warmth, humour, silence and real care are not separate from discernment; they are part of the quality of relationship in which difficult or subtle material can become visible without taking authority away from the person.
I hold the whole in view while the person develops their own relationship to what is before them. Careful dialogue, precise questioning and sustained attention allow the underlying configuration to become more legible. The work remains participatory: meaning, judgement and decision stay with the individual.
Life refined this perception through migration, cultural displacement, motherhood, long-term commitment, separation, professional reinvention and consequential choices. Each required a different response, and each deepened my understanding of how human beings orient themselves when familiar reference points shift.
Alongside my own life transitions, for more than two decades, I have accompanied individuals and groups through moments of deep change, decision, and reorientation - across personal, organisational, and life transitions. This includes working with individuals one-to-one, leading groups of over one hundred participants in sustained learning processes, and supporting individuals and groups in educational, leadership, and cultural contexts internationally.
The continuity between how I live and how I work matters to me. The same qualities I bring to a session - attentiveness, steadiness and respect for individual agency - are part of how I meet life itself.
People often come to me when a familiar way of understanding their lives, work or responsibilities has begun to shift. They may be facing a consequential decision, the completion of a chapter, a change in meaning, or the first indications of another direction.
I hold the whole in view while the person develops their own relationship to what is before them. Careful dialogue, precise questioning and sustained attention allow the underlying configuration to become more legible, while authority remains with the individual.
My work also includes a dimension rooted in living Andean wisdom traditions, held through direct permission from Q'ero elders and within the Cusco lineage. This capacity was already present in me since childhood; these traditions offered it a space to be lived, disciplined, and refined, through more than two decades of direct practice.
At the centre of this tradition is Sumak Kawsay, living in harmony: a way of relating thought, feeling and action through reciprocity and participation.
Haywarikuy, ceremonial offering and symbolic practice enter my work as living cultural languages, shared with care for their origins and considered in relation to contemporary life.
Ayni, reciprocity, gives language to something central in my work: the understanding that what emerges acquires meaning through relationship and participation — with other people, circumstance, nature and the wider world.
I am interested in the conditions that allow a person to inhabit their life more fully, with honesty, discernment and respect for their own rhythm.
Coherence, attentiveness, warmth and the dignity of autonomy are central to the way I work.
I trust subtle perception, considered judgement and the intelligence of what becomes visible when enough attention and relationship are present.
I speak in my own name and work from direct experience. I hold space for what is present to be seen with sufficient depth that a person can meet it from their own ground.
This work is offered through:
Thresholds · Dialogue · Mentoring · Haywarikuy · Seminars
Individual and group formats · In person and online
English · German · Spanish