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Futures
are us
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Becoming Other-Wise
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Is this the best future we can build together? We must do better. Open Up aims to re-imagine education and empower emerging adults from the inside out, to participate in creating a wildly better shared future. We are building a movement of openings; inspiring a collective shift on the edge of knowing, where young people can nurture and be nurtured by non-conventional spaces for learning differently than we know how that is in support of the health of the whole.
We aim to disrupt modes of perception, and relationship, and responsiveness by opening up the notions of the world we breathe, shape and create. ​
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WHAT IF?
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What if education could contribute to the health of emerging adults?
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What if we can we learn from “other worlds” to enrich all our worlds? ​​
What if our places of learning oriented away from learning about the world in order to act upon it, to learning to become with the world in- and around us?
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What if breathwork and the science can be experienced and learned at universities and schools, extra-curricular?
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What if we can we open and listen to what is alive and emergent, and integrate it into our daily practices?
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How can academics nurture & be nurtured by nonconventional spaces that are re-imagining
education and life?
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Sowing the Seeds of ​
a new education
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​​​Since 2015, Open Up has been birthing curious events, transformative learning journeys and engagements for positive change, including radical health change in mental healthcare (GGZ), youth empowerment in refugee settlements, leadership & activism, new scientific research in connected breathing, making futures possible in the midst of systems collapse.
We are now opening up to engage with education in other ways we know are possible. We are inspired to bring to life a form of education that supports the mental health and the well-being of emerging adults in service of the whole. We aim to catalyze new ways of seeing and learning how to learn that will develop a new set of shared values and capacities adequate to the needs of our time. ​​​
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Because it is to late to educate
in the ways we know how​
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"The call to revolutionize schooling is not so much an attempt to create a new world, as it is an invitation to lean into the mystery of the world that now is, and re-engage with it." – Bayo Akomolafe. ​Open Up asks us to do this work.
This initiative by Katrien Franken offers the starting points for a deeper inquiry and practice for exploring together what breathing and inner education can mean for the mental health of emerging adults? What it could mean if young people could come into contact with expansive states of being?​ Of living and learning, and finding our resources in other places to come into a better relationship and exchange with the world ahead.
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We have started at University Utrecht in december 2023 where 40 philosophy students experienced an Open Up journey, blending philosophy, somatic movement, contemplative practice, and collective reflection. We are looking forward to the experiments, practices, rituals and creations that will come forth from this new endeavor.
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Welcome to co-create,
Katrien Franken​​
Open Up acts as a portal
Every one matters
Other intelligence is needed
Change is a collective journey
A start.
We facilitate & develop inner experiences to open and expand life in a natural way where people experience a shift in their perceptions of reality; cognitive, emotional and intuitive. This is the place where new possibilities for living and being open up. This is where we also wish to co-generate new practices through theory, conversations, art and ideas.
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We are looking for collaborations with universities and schools who are open, or opening up to explore other forms of knowledge, and to investigate how they function, and how they fall into dysfunction.
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