This is one big page where I can write all about myself, without feeling the need for it to be useful.
At eighteen, impulsive, I spent nine years in a Tibetan Buddhist hermitage in France, because it was making sense, including a three-year traditional retreat. Those years shaped how I see everything: attention, fear, emotion, the gap between a moment of awareness and the change. I came out convinced that transformation is slow, daily repetition, that patience is a discipline, and that the mind can be trained the way the body can.
This is the foundation for everything I do now, in the mountains and off there.
I started climbing in 1995 in Northern Slovakia — sport rock routes. Then I stopped when I went to the hermitage and did not touch rock for 9 years.
I lost two years at the hermitage. I worked in mental health fields. I kept on doing it for two more years, whilst I moved to UK. Then I rediscovered the climbing passion and without losing much time, I became climbing instructor. While on a trip to Chamonix, I decided to become an IFMGA guide. Not for the work, but to have the set of skills the training offers. I took a loan and moved to Chamonix as soon as feasible to begin the required process. Since 2014, I've led expeditions in the Alps, Himalaya, Southern Alps, Andes and Arctic regions.
What I was really doing in all of it — on my cushion and on the mountain — was learning how I and others function under pressure, and what it takes to stay clear when everything is uncertain.
I had a chance to experience some big events. Be it in mountains or between people. Such as Running Man. It made me certain that it is slow and daily work that brings about certain way of being. Big events are just that.
Big events.
A serious accident in 2022, two weeks after the birth of my child, closed the guiding chapter. It opened something else. I now work in two directions that, for me, have always been the same direction.
The first is organising mountaineering outings. Well-known summits, instruction, remote hidden valleys, trips that combine wild remote terrain with genuine depth. I handle the logistics, the risk management, and the care that allows people to enjoy it.
The second is working on the inner landscape: how attention works, how emotion moves, how clarity becomes a practical skill rather than a lucky accident. Whether in the mountains or in a room, the question is the same — what does it take to stay steady when things are uncertain?
I wish I could say I have discipline and my life has clear direction thanks to my sitting and observation. I am very much distracted and victim of dopamine addiction. I do try to have daily reminders and methods to slowly soften my mind, hold attention over a longer span, be able to meet fear without being paralysed by it. I like to support others in developing the internal conditions that make change sustainable — not just the insight, but capacity to integrate it.
My working principle: meaningful transformation always begins inside.
I grew up in Czechoslovakia and watched the Iron Curtain fall — old enough to grasp its magnitude, young enough to not suffer by the communist regime years.
Chamonix has been home since 2011. This place is a paradise for people that want to live here. And somehow there is lot of frustration, sadness, loneliness. This place is very concrete example that stimuli happiness is very short lived.