Author • Spiritual Companion • Contemplative Pianist & Composer
Member of the Reiki Healing Association RHA
The story behind the books, the music, the culinary work, and the presence that connects them.
A Path Lived from Within
My life has unfolded through many seasons: culinary arts, music, writing, illness, recovery, silence, healing, prayer, and inner transformation.
For a long time, these may have appeared to be different paths. Looking back, I understand them differently. Each has been a way of nourishing, creating, listening, and accompanying life.
I began my professional journey as a chef in Montréal in 1996. In 2003, I founded MChef, which I led until 2022. My culinary work carried me through Montréal, Geneva, Milan, and Las Vegas and shaped more than two decades of my life through food, creativity, service, and conscious nourishment.
Although MChef came to an end, my relationship with food and cooking did not. I continue to write cookbooks, create recipes, and explore the relationship between nourishment, simplicity, pleasure, awareness, and well-being. Cooking remains a living part of who I am and of the work I continue to offer.
Music has followed another path through my life. As a pianist and composer recording under the name MariDo, I have created nine contemplative piano albums. Music has often allowed me to express what words could not, accompanying moments of reflection, prayer, healing, rest, and inner stillness.
Writing eventually became another language of that same inner life.
Following my journey through cancer, intensive treatment, stem cell transplantation, and profound recovery, writing became a place of prayer, grounding, reflection, and presence. Through illness, uncertainty, grief, healing, and reconstruction, I began to understand more deeply how profoundly life can change us and how important it can be to have something besides us while we find our way through.
That experience gave birth to another dimension of my work, one centered on the many visible and invisible passages of a human life.
Today, my books, culinary work, music, The Passages, narrations, prayer, and spiritual companionship live alongside one another. They are not separate identities I need to choose between. They are different expressions of the same life and the same intention: to nourish, accompany, and create spaces in which something within us may be heard.
Books as Companions
I write books as spaces of presence, reflection, and companionship. Some emerge from healing and transformation. Others from grief, reflection, nourishment, memory, or the simple human experience of living. Each takes a different form, yet all are created with the hope that something within their pages may meet the reader where they are.
Semper Fidelis: Always Faithful
A reflection on inner fidelity, healing, resilience, and remaining faithful to oneself through life's many transformations.
Beyond the Veil
A gentle companion through grief, presence, and continuing love, exploring the enduring bonds that may remain beyond physical absence.
Beyond Recovery: A Companion for Healing, Integration, and Inner Reconstruction
A contemplative companion for the often-unspoken passage that follows illness and survival, for those learning to inhabit not who they once were, but who they are becoming.
The Journey to Wholeness (Coming Soon)
A year-long journey of reflection, healing practices, integration, and inner alignment, gently accompanying the continuing process of becoming whole.
The Culinary Books
Long before some of my contemplative books were written, I was writing about another form of nourishment.
My cookbooks grew from decades spent as a chef and from my continuing belief that food can be approached with pleasure, simplicity, awareness, and care. I continue to write cookbooks and develop recipes today. Culinary creation is not a chapter I have left behind. It remains one of the ways I understand nourishment and one of the ways I continue to create.
The Passages
Over time, individual reflections began to reveal a larger landscape.
Healing has its passages.
Grief has its passages.
Love, uncertainty, change, forgiveness, silence, presence, resilience, and becoming have their passages too.
The Passages is a growing collection of contemplative writings that gives gentle names to these universal human experiences, allowing us to recognize something of our own inner landscape within them.
They are not a path that must be followed in order. Each Passage can be entered where something recognizes you.
The writings are also finding another form through two narration series: The Passages — Narrations in English and Les Passages — Narrations in French.
Through voice, breath, and silence, the written Passages become another kind of space: one in which we can simply listen together.
Music as Presence
Music has always been another way of listening.
As MariDo, I have created nine contemplative piano albums intended to accompany moments of prayer, reflection, healing, rest, and inner stillness.
There are places within us that words can reach.
And there are others that sometimes only music can enter.
For me, both belong to the same landscape.
Prayer and Spiritual Companionship
Prayer is another quiet thread within my life and work.
Through Who Is Praying for You?, I hold a bilingual prayer circle where a name or intention may be entrusted in English or French and carried in prayer.
Sometimes we are the ones who pray.
Sometimes we are the ones who need to be carried in prayer.
My work as a Reiki Master and spiritual companion also continues through established connections and referrals. I approach this work not from a desire to fix another person, but through presence, listening, and respect for the inner life and the individual path of each person.
A Quiet Letter
A Quiet Letter is a bilingual English and French correspondence from the inner garden.
From time to time, I share a new Passage, narration, reflection, or piece of music: a simple way of remaining connected to what is growing here.
The Thread That Connects It All
For a long time, I believed I was creating different things.
Books.
Cookbooks and recipes.
Music.
Healing pathways.
Reflections.
Prayer.
With time, I came to understand that they had been growing from the same place.
The culinary work became a language of nourishment.
The books became companions.
The music became a place of stillness.
The Passages became spaces of recognition.
The narrations gave those words a voice.
Prayer became a way of carrying what another heart entrusts.
Spiritual companionship became presence beside another person's path.
The forms have changed and continue to change.
The intention remains: To nourish life, accompany its passages, and invite each person into a more conscious relationship with what is alive within and around them.
One heart at a time.
A Space to Begin
If you feel drawn to this space, you are warmly invited to enter wherever something recognizes you.
You may begin with a book, allowing its pages to accompany a deeper passage of healing, grief, reflection, or becoming.
Explore the Books →
You may enter through food and nourishment, discovering the cookbooks and recipes that continue to grow from my life as a chef and culinary author.
Explore Cookbooks & Recipes →
You may spend time within The Passages, where reflections give gentle names to the many seasons and experiences of our inner lives. Enter The Passages →
You may listen as these writings take another form through The Passages — Narrations in English
Listen to The Passages — Narrations →
and Les Passages — Narrations in French.
Écouter Les Passages — Narrations →
You may enter through music, where the contemplative piano of MariDo offers another language for reflection, prayer, rest, and inner stillness.
Listen to MariDo →
You may entrust a name or intention to Who Is Praying for You?, our bilingual prayer circle, where intentions in English and French are carried in prayer.
Entrust a Prayer Intention →
Or you may remain connected through A Quiet Letter, a bilingual correspondence carrying new Passages, reflections, narrations, and music from the inner garden.
Receive A Quiet Letter →
Each is a different doorway into the same living space.
Begin wherever something within you responds.
May what you find here accompany you with peace, hope, and presence wherever you are on life's journey.
A return to oneself. Not to who we once were, but to who we are becoming.
Credentials
Author
Chef & Founder of MChef (2003–2022)
Culinary Author
Spiritual Companion
Reiki Master
Contemplative Pianist & Composer
Member, Reiki Healing Association (RHA)
Contact
For general inquiries, books, media, music, or personal correspondence,
you are warmly welcome to write.
Stay Connected
A Quiet Letter
A correspondence from the inner garden,
carrying new Passages, narrations, reflections, and music.
Who Is Praying For You?
Sometimes we are the ones who pray.
Sometimes we are the ones who need to be carried in prayer.
Entrust a Prayer Intention to the Circle →
Gentle Disclaimer
The healing and spiritual guidance offered here are intended as complementary spaces for reflection, presence, and personal well-being. They are not substitute for medical, psychological, or other professional healthcare. When medical or professional support is needed, please consult an appropriately qualified practitioner.