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, which I founded in 2015, is an attempt to cultivate the necessary rupture and wisdom to become other-wise in an embodied way. It is a crossing into intimate places that make space for us in a time that reveals a greater thirst this world cannot satisfy. I offer experiential and educational learning courses, trainings and breathwork journeys to re-contextualise our relations, and communications, and bring a brighter future into being. As a practice it's also addressing how we choose to move in the face of uncertainty, and experiment with how we can breathe together, and 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
Katrien Franken
Katrien's journey with breathwork began in 2004 as a personal healing tool which inspired her to share her knowledge with the world. She is a trained Breathwork Teacher and an early pioneer. Her primary interest is to investigate how breath work can become available for real problem solving in the world. She has 10+ years of breath work facilitation and experience in working with altered states of consciousness and people in complex situations and systems. Prior to Open Up, was a multiple award-winning artist / photographer.
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 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 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 real in a non directional way. In that shift we open to new senses and perspectives of joy, power, and freedom to become other-wise. We learn to shift perspectives and co-generate possibilities in partnership with the more-than-human world.
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'm inspired to expand our
intelligence and wisdom into conscious responsive action. I do that by cultivating the kind of knowing by Being that grounds our ability to make sense of reality, and truth. I combine
connective breathwork, somatic
inquiry, contemplative practice, and rigorous thinking with the sciences, arts and complexity for gathering the necessary insight for constructive meaning-making
