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Katrien Franken, the founder of Open Up, is an accredited counselor, researcher, breathwork coach and therapist, and strategic facilitator, based in Amsterdam. A pioneer in the field of the future of breathing exploring the intersection of breath, consciousness, culture, and human experience. She’s brought her integrative approach to thousands of people around the world and across multiple societal contexts. She has worked across civic, political, scientific, cultural and societal contexts, designing methodologies with a mission to bring breath as relational, organic intelligence that can support the systemic shifts our world demands.

 

She is also an artist and advocate for offering experiences and ideas of re-sensitizing ourselves to discover new places of power and responsivity. Her practices and philosophies investigate what respiration and opening up means in a complex changing world, and how something so simple as breathing can become available for real problem solving in the world. 

 

Her journey with breathwork began in 2004 as a personal healing and growth practice, which inspired her to share her knowledge with the world. Katrien is trained in various modalities and views, such as Holotropic Breathwork as created by Stanislav Grof, Biodynamic Breathwork Trauma Release System, Essential Counseling, Warm Data by Nora Bateson - International Bateson Institute, Emergent Dialogue and Attachment Theory by George Haas, and learned to harness her high sensitivity and intuitive abilities. She brings more than a decade of facilitation and design of breathwork methodologies and experience in non-ordinary states of consciousness. Her understanding of transformation is not theoretical. She has been through her own profound breakdown, multiple cancer diagnoses, and reorganization.

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Some highlights from her journey:

  • Founded Open Up in 2015: transforming breath beyond the wellness practice (an early pioneer)

  • Founded and led the first non-profit academic research into ‘The Effects Of Connected Breathing on Brain Activity, Mood and State of Consciousness’, in service of the future of mental health. (Published, 2023)

  • Created: Open Up Refugees, a non-profit relational innovation project, supporting refugee youth through the Open Up pedagogy in 2021, and cross-sector collaboration.

  • Designed and lead the inaugural 2024 breathwork cohort for 22 licensed mental health professionals as part of a year-long Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy training program and accreditation for the Integrative Psychiatry Institute. 

  • Created and hosted 10 in-person editions of The Breathwork Group Series, a five-week group process of mutual learning, exploring breathwork, altered states of consciousness, socratic dialogue, and new futures. (since 2017)

  • Created: The Great Pause: a tailored multiple-day in-person sanctuary for leaders to discover greatness in the calm where the quality of awareness and relationship can unfold in an impactful way.

  • Before founding Open Up, she was an multiple award-winning artist/photographer. www.katrienfranken.com

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She is a faculty fellow at THNK School of Leadership, and has facilitated executive leadership programs since 2019. She works as an advisor for multiple initiatives that drive meaningful change forward. Her concept philosophies are what she has called: A Coming Of Place, Now We Need Humans, The Guest.​

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I deeply explore the questions: 

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  • How can we open up in  consciousness in such a way so we may improve our interaction and relationship with each other and with the world?

  • How can the depth of experience in and shared process become a center-piece in creating our future?

  • How can breathwork contribute to real problem solving in the world?

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Things that have guided Katrien for the past 20 years:

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  • I am curious about the confluence between mysterie and knowledge, openness and growth, longing and belonging, relation and connection, and the "space in between"

  • I am a deep listener, and through that offer questions that open to the source of the issue where human complexity can be unravelled in quest for depth, meaning and healing

  • My work is non-linear. Experiments are central in everything I do. Nothing is fixed or final 

  • I value experience as the highest good 

  • Bridge-building between worlds (e.g. inner work, psychology, cognitive science, the arts, ecology)

  • I weave visions for the possible, uncovering and discovering stories to re-store, re-imagine and expand perception of the interrelationality

  • Building praxis for collective embodied action

  • The appetite for time-bound experiments, rupture, curiosity, miracles, imagination and rooted possibilities for our mutual enrichment 

 

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Methods and teachings Katrien is trained and/or certified in:​

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  • 10.000 hours of Zen buddhist practice & meditation

  • Holotropic Breathwork as created by Stanislav Grof (ongoing since 2016)​

  • Certified (level 3/4) BioDynamic Breathwork Trauma Release System (100+ hours by Giten Tonkov)

  • Breathwork based on the work of Wilhelm Reich and Alexander Lowen

  • Certified Warm Data Lab host (60 hours by Nora Bateson -International Bateson Institute)

  • Certified Essential Counsellor (250 hours by School For Essential) Counseling and SIAF) including The Enneagram personality typology, Essence work, Client Centered Therapy based on the work of Carl Rogers,  and The Diamond Approach - A.H. Almaas.

  • Certified Yin Yoga teacher (200 hours by Anat Geiger through Yoga Alliance)​​

  • Trained in Somatic Experiencing (Peter Levine)

  • Trained in Emergent Dialogue (60 hours by Elisabeth Debold and Thomas Steiniger)

  • TRE (Level 1) - Tension and Trauma Release Exercise of David Berceli

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