Pioneering breathwork & inner growth
at the intersection of consciousness,
culture, systems change and communication
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, and too inspire, educate and activate people and bring a better future into being. I'm offering science-based breathwork and experiential learning journeys, somatic inquiry and dialogue in an ecology of practices to elevate consciousness and our intelligence in partnership with the more-than-human world. These processes are not merely about being and acting differently, but also about co-creating new worldviews that are prerequisites for true societal and cultural transformation in service of future generations and the living planet. Can you take an instant to visualize this event? Join me in this activism of inquiry that deeply explores what it means to being in the body, and being alive in the world today.
Katrien Franken
Katrien Franken
I'm a social entrepreneur, educator, breathwork and inner growth facilitator and researcher,
counselor, writer, poet, and activist, as well as founder of Open Up. I view my work as an act of journey; an expression of assembled studies, longings, learnings, collaborations, failures, experiments, spiritual practice, and experience of twenty years at the edges of our evolutionary growth.
Mythodology
Inspire. Educate. Activate
Based on our own research, training and experience for transformation, Open Up is bringing care to 4 worlds of work. It addresses our fundamental research inquiry: How can we open up in consciousness and the body in such a way, so we may improve our vital connections with ourselves, each other and the nature?
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 and interconnectedness, we start our transformation.
Spontaneous
Catharsis
Shifting Perspectives
In our experiential learning journeys we 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 in partnership with the more than human world
Serious
Play
Opening Imagination
We help people imagine new futures in a time of upheaval.
We consider serious play to be an essential, transformative part of a learning process through- out life. 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
We open up to connect, share,
and cultivate intelligence and wisdom to create conscious responsive action. We open to
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 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 “Coming of Age" process and story of personal growth, identity, and self-discovery, 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 we hope to offer more than just breathwork, more than just solutions, more than just a future.
A Coming of Place
A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
Our
PHILANTHROPY
Open Up's impact work and systems-shifting 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 imagination, 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.
