Welcome,
The emergence of our time calls for a generous and adventurous descend that leads us to interesting new places that open up other ways of relating in and with the world. I'm quite confident that our external challenges are intimately linked to our inner struggles, and rooted in trying to apply mechanistic world views on complex adaptive systems - be they human or other living systems.
Open Up is build for times like these and offers science-based experiential and educational learning courses, strategic design and facilitation with breathwork at the core to re-contextualise our relations and communications, and bring a brighter future into being. It's an attempt to cultivate the necessary rupture and wisdom to become other-wise in an embodied way. To open our hearts and and expand our awareness. As a practice it's also addressing how we choose to move in the face of uncertainty, and experiment with how we can elevate intelligence and consciousness together for real problem-solving in the world. These processes are not merely about being and acting differently, but also about co-creating new worldviews in service of future generations and the living planet. Can you take an instant to visualize this event?
Katrien Franken
About Katrien
Katrien finds great value in working with breathwork in relation with sense-making and complex facilitation, as essential tools to enabling systems to learn and evolve through their decisions and actions. She does this with teams and networks in a variety of contexts. Her journey with breathwork and inner growth began in 2004 as a personal healing tool which inspired her to share her knowledge with the world. She's a trained (early pioneer) Breathwork Teacher with 10+ years of breath work facilitation and experience in working with altered states of consciousness. Her primary interest is to investigate how breath work can become available for relational and ecological application for problem solving beyond individual healing. Prior to Open Up, she was a multiple award-winning artist.
Systems
SHIFTING INITIATIVES
As someone who's passionate about whole systems change, these initiatives are a deep offerings into that. It is a human investment in a future of inspiration and longevity, unlocking new opportunities for radical imagination, impact, change and healing. An exploration how the conditions of transformation come together on the fringes of the culture, and an activation of how can be of service to our emergent future in a regenerative way.
Methodology
A Coming Of Place
A Coming of Place (term by Katrien Franken) is an invitation that urges us to rethink ourselves, our ways of learning and our actions in the world to what mutually benefits us. It signals a movement from a process and story of personal growth, identity, and self-discovery (a Coming of Age) towards A Coming of Place perspective. It is a process and idea of re-sensitizing ourselves to other worlds and away from the dominant human-centered view, calling for a new ecological imagination and expansion.
Part of this work is called Now We Need Humans (term by Katrien Franken) which is a deep investigation into how breathwork and insight emerging in altered states of consciousness can have tangible, real-world applications, and can become meaningful outsights. The work is rooted in the idea that humans are magicians, imaginaries, and dreamers, alchemists, who have made the impossible, possible. And that there's something really exciting about the state-changing practice of breathing together at the edges of all we know in response to humanity’s greatest challenges. With this stunning invitation, Katrien hopes to offer more than just breathwork, more than just solutions, more than just a future.
Mystical
experiences
Interspecieng
I challenge and support humans to breathe and open up in consciousness and the body, and move beyond the intellectual or conventional. In carefully created journeys we open to access altered states of consciousness, which changes the nervous system, changes the state of our mind, and changes the way we perceive the world. From this elevated state that reveals deep existential truths about life & interconnectedness, we start our interactions with transformation
Containment
& Catharsis
Shifting Perspectives
Open Up's experiential learning journeys make space for rupture to unleash energy and biological intensities, to shift perspectives and cultivate a profound receptivity for opening to the raw and real in a non directional way. In that place we get access to new senses and perspectives of joy, power, and freedom.
Serious
Play
Opening Imagination
I consider serious play to be an essential, transformative part of a learning process throughout life. I want to help people imagine new futures in a time of upheaval.
Breathwork expands into deeper beliefs as well as higher calling.
With a high level of sophistication, I bring a deep care for strange encounters in ecosystems of being, and move from our orderly world to a place of imagination, openness, connection, and creativity. Note: Experiments are part of everything I do.
Psychological insight
Cultivating Wisdom
I combine connective breathing, with contemplating complexity and rigorous thinking with the sciences and arts for gathering the necessary insight for constructive meaning-making. It's important to cultivate the kind of knowing by Being that can ground our ability to make sense of reality, and truth and make conscious responsive action possible.
