Welcome,
I'm quite confident that our external challenges are intimately linked to our inner struggles. 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, relating, evolving and thriving in the world.
Open Up is a breathwork and inner growth institute, and an attempt to cultivate the necessary rupture & wisdom for becoming other-wise in an embodied way. It is an ecology of spaces and places to practice and experiment ways of opening ourselves to the unknown and the unimaginable in partnership with the more-than-human world.
To do so, I develop methodologies and facilitate transformative experiences that shift perspectives, unleash energy in a rigorous approach to create positive change and chart bold, moral futures together. A future that fosters inner growth, social change and creative expression. This is not merely about being and acting differently in the world, but also about co-creating new worldviews that are prerequisites for true societal and cultural transformation. Can you take an instant to visualize this event?
Looking forward to connect,
Katrien Franken, founder
Katrien Franken
I'm a multiple award-winning artist, serial social entrepreneur, breathwork and inner growth facilitator, educator and researcher, poet, writer, and activist, as well as founding director of Open Up. I view my work as an act of journey; an expression of assembled studies, longings, learnings, spiritual practice, failures collaborations, experiments, and experience of twenty years at the edges of our evolutionary growth.
Open Up acts as a portal
Based on our own research, training and experience for
transformation, we bring care to four worlds of work.
Mystical experiences
Opening up the bodymind in carefully curated journeys 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. Opening to the kind of knowing by Being that grounds our ability to make sense of the intelligible of reality, intimately. This state reveals deep existential truths about interconnectedness and life and helps to co-generate
care inpartnership with the more than human world.
Positive
Catharsis
Cultivating a profound receptivity for opening to the real in a non-directional way.
Allowing ourselves to feel beyond our limitations. From small and subtle shifts to bigger ones, we support the release and relief from what is holding us back to come to new senses and perspectives of power, joy, and freedom.
Making space for the shifts to draw yourself in deeper and reciprocally open up.
Serious
Play
Play is an essential part of a learning process throughout life to bring something incomprehensible into the world at the end of knowing. Serious Play engages fundamental transformative processes for us with a deep care for strange encounters in ecosystems of being. With a high level of sophistication we move from our orderly world to a place of openess,
imagination, creativity, and connection,
Psychological insight
Opening to socratic inquiry, and active intuitive listening. A matter of deeply exploring our reality through our experience. Through a mutual learning process we gather the necessary insight for constructive meaning-making.
A process of evaluating and assessing each situation with curiosity and presence in search for profound wisdom.
A stunning invitation is in the air, urging us to rethink ourselves, our ways of learning and our actions in the world to what mutually benefits us. In an Open Up based pedagogy, the longing is to deeply explore what it means to be alive in the world today, being in the body and to bring more than just breathwork, more than just solutions, more than just a future. We practice breathwork to open to new places of power where there is joy in carrying the health and well-being of our interconnectedness. Join us in this activism of inquiry to unleash energy in bodies, in flows, in possibilities, from meaningful experiences to action.
Longing
A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
Our
PHILANTHROPY
Open Up's impact initiatives are set out by Katrien Franken in 2020, and are deep offerings to whole systems change. A human investment in a future of inspiration and longevity, unlocking new opportunities for radical change and healing.
She's exploring how the conditions of transformation come together on the fringes of the culture. Her engagement is with deep inner practices, and journeys of coming alive to critical shifts in ways that allow ruptures to grow the new.
