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Meet the Founder, Katrien Franken

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Katrien Franken is a leading-edge breathwork facilitator and pioneer, strategist, educator, researcher, and founder of Open Up. 

 

Katrien has worked alongside top entrepreneurs, politicians, artists, academics and many more, and across multiple societal contexts, to share the life changing potential of breathwork and altered states of consciousness. Her journey with breathwork began in 2004 as a personal healing and growth practice, which inspired her to share her knowledge with the world. Through Open Up, which she founded in 2015, she's inspired to include a breathing philosophy and practice that investigates what respiration and opening up means in a complex changing world and society. She's investigating how breathwork can become available for real problem solving in the world.

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Katrien works with a variety of breathwork modalities and tailors this to her clients and groups and projects accordingly. Her focus is on developing experiences and ideas of re-sensitizing ourselves to other worlds and away from the dominant human-centered view, calling for a new ecological imagination and regeneration. As a facilitator, she has guided individual and group experiences for thousands of people around the world, both in person and online. Designing methodologies and approaches that leverage the psychosocial, experiential and educational potential of breathing. Individuals and organizations hacking into the new to discover new places of power and responsivity that help shift/shape new realities, new cultures. ​

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​Katrien is the host & creator of 10 editions of the 5-week in-person Open Up course 'The Breathwork Group Series' (since 2017), Designed and led workshops at the Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research, introducing Breathwork for/as Psychedelic Therapy. Katrien was the first in the Netherlands to develop an in-person breathwork training for the year-long Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy training for the Integrative Psychiatry Institute. In 2024 she led the inaugural cohort of 22 licensed Dutch mental health professionals through the Open Up training as part of their accreditation in this emerging field.​ Katrien is a THNK School of Creative Leadership faculty fellow, and has facilitated executive leadership programs since 2019, and works as an advisor for multiple initiatives that drive meaningful change forward.

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Her non-profit initiatives focus on the future of health and education, investing in empowering younger generations in their (mental) health and care-making. In 2020, she initiated and led the first non-profit academic scientific research on 'The effects of conscious connected breathing on cortical brain, mood states and altered states of consciousness' (published in 2023). In 2021, she began teaching breathwork for free to refugee youth in Uganda's Nakivale Refugee Settlement, through the Open Up pedagogy. Giving back, making care possible.

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Katrien is trained in Grof Transpersonal Training, Holotropic Breathwork, Biodynamic Breathwork Trauma Release System, and is a certified Essential Counsellor and therapist (SIAF & CRKBO) and Warm Data Lab host (by Nora Bateson - International Bateson Institute).

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Before founding Open Up in 2015, she was an multiple award-winning artist/photographer. www.katrienfranken.com​​​​
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Katrien is open to opportunities for advisory and consulting work, facilitation and training, and public speaking engagements.

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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 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 deeply listen 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 and experiments are central in everything I do. Nothing is fixed or final 

  • I value experience as the highest good 

  • I work with what is most alive to come alive, because that is often where life is

  • I have become increasingly interested in the inner dimensions of change and healing

  • 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, Dreaming, 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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  • 20 years of Zen buddhist practice & meditation

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

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

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

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

  • Certified Essential Counsellor (by Rafia Morgan and Turiya Hanover - School For Essential) Counseling and SIAF) including The Enneagram personality typology, Essence work - the Lataif, and Inquiry (A.H. Almaas)

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

  • Trained in Client Centered Therapy based on the work of Carl Rogers

  • Trained in The Diamond Approach - A.H. Almaas

  • Trained in Somatic Experiencing (Peter Levine)

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

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

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