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 seeing, learning, living, evolving, thriving, and relating in the world. I'm quite confident that our external challenges are intimately linked to our inner struggles.
I founded Open Up in 2015 as an attempt to cultivate the necessary rupture and wisdom for becoming other-wise in an embodied way. I do this through writing, and by creating transformative experiences that invite us to find ways to evolve and thrive and bring a better future into being. I offer science-based breathwork and experiential learning journeys to elevate consciousness and intelligence with systemic transformation practices. 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
Katrien Franken
I'm a social entrepreneur, educator, breathwork expert, facilitator and academic researcher, certified counselor, writer, as well as founder of Open Up. I focus on bringing new ways of seeing and being from the margins of culture into the mainstream. I view my work as an act of journey; a research inquiry, an expression of assembled studies, longings, learnings, collaborations, failures, experiments, spiritual practice, and experience of twenty years at the edges of our evolutionary growth. Read more
Katrien Works With
Mental Healthcare Professionals
Katrien has trained the first (ever) group of 22 Dutch licensed mental healthcare professionals in breathwork in 2024. It is part of the accreditation in their year-long training Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy.
Executive leaders &
Organisations
Mentoring leaders 1:1 and creating and facilitating workshops tailored for organizations and teams, to open qualities essential for future-ready leadership that thrives on regeneration.
Refugee youth &
Humanitarian organisations
Creating tailored programs for refugee
youth in Africa, community leaders and frontline workers. These include trauma release breathwork, creative inquiry to activate healing and insight, especially in contexts of displacement and post-conflict recovery.
Purpose driven networks & Local communities
Working with business leaders, policy-makers, scientists, creatives, activists, and educators to open possibilities for our societies, our planet, and ourselves.
Academics, Universities & Institutions
Creating transformational learning spaces and experiences for students and teachers at universities and schools. Re-imagining education as health, and empowering Gen Z from the inside, out.
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. With this stunning invitation and process, Katrien hopes to offer more than just breathwork, more than just solutions, more than just a future.
Mystical
experiences
Elevating Consciousness
We challenge and support individuals 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 transformation.
Spontaneous
Catharsis
Shifting Perspectives
Open Up's experiential learning journeys make space for rupture to release and unleash energy, to shift perspectives and cultivate a profound receptivity for opening to the real in a non directional way. In that shift we open to new senses and perspectives of joy, power, and freedom in an embodied way. We learn to shift perspectives and co-generate possibilities in partnership with the more-than-human world
Serious
Play
Opening Imagination
We consider serious play to be an essential, transformative part of a learning process throughout life. We want to help people imagine new futures in a time of upheaval.
With a high level of sophistication, we 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 we do.
Psychological insight
Cultivating Wisdom
When we open up, we connect, share, and cultivate intelligence and wisdom to create conscious responsive action. We cultivate
the kind of knowing by Being that grounds our ability to make sense of reality and truth. We
combine contemplative practice,
somatic inquiry and rigorous thinking with the sciences, arts and complexity for gathering the necessary insight for constructive meaning-making.
A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
Our
PHILANTHROPY
These systems-shifting initiatives are set out by Katrien in 2020, and are deep offerings to whole systems change. It is a human investment in a future of inspiration and longevity, unlocking new opportunities for radical imagination, change and healing. An exploring how the conditions of transformation come together on the fringes of the culture.
