SPECIAL OFFER
ENJOY €200 OFF YOUR BOOKING!
Book The Great Pause in November or December 2026
and receive an exclusive €195 discount.
A perfect gift for yourself or someone else.
The Great Pause is a two-day, individual immersive sanctuary and tailored learning journey. An intentional time to pause, breathe, and re-invent yourself on a deeper level where the quality of presence, awareness, creativity, and relationship can unfold in an impactful way. It combines four science based breathwork journeys with creative, exploratory, contemplative practices, and sensemaking.
I work one-on-one with people who sense that there is a deeper way of being, and who are ready to learn to live from it. I offer a space of intimate, honest relationship and embodiment in which you can be with the truth of your experience and learn to think, speak, and act from that truth. With breathwork as a catalyst, the combination offers a gateway for true change.
The premise is simple: the truth will set you free if you practice it, commit to it, and stay with it over a long enough arc. This is not self-improvement. This is not a technique. It is a way of being in relationship with reality - one that develops a lived, embodied trust in your own experience, intelligence, and nature, through personal stories, and the study of life’s process.
WHY?
Something about the speed of our culture and our world is no longer working. We feel it. We see it everywhere. The pace of modern life has outgrown the natural rhythm of being human, and a deep longing for real connection is emerging. Every living system; nature, the human body, even the breath itself, moves in rhythms of expansion and rest. Without it, there's no renewal, only overwhelm, dysregulation, and overstimulation.
What makes life more regenerative is the quality of our presence. The quality of our attention. The quality of our relationships. The Great Pause was created as a response to that need. It is part of a larger cultural shift and exploration to open up to a wider and wiser perspective. As a layered process it cuts through distraction and moves beyond the breath, cultivating relational, psychological and existential awareness.
This is not self-improvement. This is not a technique. It is a way of being in relationship with reality - one that develops a lived, embodied trust in your own experience, intelligence, and nature. It is an invitation to a radical different way of being, interrupting automaticity and making space for something new to emerge.
Meet your guide, Katrien
I don’t believe life was meant to be mediocre, nor to be a copy-paste of someone else’s path. It is meant to be exceptional, and introduce new perspectives, awaken curiosity and courage, and foster meaningful change for a brighter future.
Clients often find me in times of transition, and are drawn to a highly private space where what is ready to shift, can be met with care, clarity, and depth. Read more about Katrien
Who I Am
What I bring to the room
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Contemplative depth: over 10.000 hours of breathwork and meditation practice, 10.000 hours of yoga practice, 250 hours of Counseling training (Accredited); the Embodiment of Presence and Essential States, Supervision and the Integration of Mindfulness and Meditation. 500 hours of breathwork training. More than a decade of facilitation and design of breathwork methodologies and experience in non-ordinary states of consciousness.
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Embodied knowledge: My understanding of transformation is not theoretical. I have been through my own profound breakdown, multiple cancer diagnoses, and reorganization. I do not ask anyone to go anywhere I have not been.
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Psycho-analytic rigor and intellectual range: More than a decade of exploring depth and meaning in deep conversation and transformational practice with people and their complexities and complications. I bring depth, structure and understanding to the process.
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Independence. I work from a place of genuine freedom, which allows me to tell you the truth without any institutional motivation to do otherwise. I'm offering a confidential space for full transparency. For influential people surrounded by others with incentives to flatter, that independence makes a difference.
Who I Am
What I bring to the room
-
Contemplative depth: over 10.000 hours of breathwork and meditation practice, 10.000 hours of yoga practice, 250 hours of Counseling training (Accredited); the Embodiment of Presence and Essential States, Supervision and the Integration of Mindfulness and Meditation. 500 hours of breathwork training. More than a decade of facilitation and design of breathwork methodologies and experience in non-ordinary states of consciousness.
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Embodied knowledge: My understanding of transformation is not theoretical. I have been through my own profound breakdown, multiple cancer diagnoses, and reorganization. I do not ask anyone to go anywhere I have not been.
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Psycho-analytic rigor and intellectual range: More than a decade of exploring depth and meaning in deep conversation with transformative practice with people. My strength is of navigating complexity. I can see through human, systemic, and relational patterns with care, and clarity. I'm bringing professional insight, sharp intuition and knowledge to the process.
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Independence. I work from a place of genuine freedom, which allows me to tell you the truth without any institutional motivation to do otherwise. I'm offering a confidential space for full transparency. For influential people surrounded by others with incentives to flatter, that independence makes a difference.
START YOUR JOURNEY
Open up your organic intelligence
Step 1
INTAKE
In a 30 minute intake call, we will investigate if we are a good fit, and the process can truly serve you.
Step 2
PREPARATION
Before The Great Pause, you will complete an intake form. We’ll review it together to create a personalized starting point. You’ll also receive preparation materials by email to help you begin well.
Step 3
THE WORK
With honesty and depth, we will work at the core of complexity, through theory, practice, rituals, and four breathwork journeys. This process allows visions and insights to emerge that can shift your identity, history, and lived reality with internal alignment.
Step 4
INTEGRATION
True transformation takes time, and integration is an important part, also during the two-days. After The Great Pause, we will have one or two integration session calls. You will have the option to continue working together to reinforce and build on your insights and change.
Working Together
What to expect?
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Breath work: Conscious Connected Breathwork is at the core of The Great Pause. The four tailored journeys include music, bodywork, and expression to support the release of tension with a slowing down at the end of each journey to experience awakened relaxation and harmony.
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Depth work: Here we explore the deeper layers of your psyche and bring them in closer contact with your own inner compass, values and sense of direction. You are supported in opening up to your longing from this deeper place and can start to bring that into perspective with awareness and meaning.
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Process work: In The Great Pause you are supported not to rush into what's 'next' but take your time. Through spaciousness, sensory awareness you are invited back to the body, simply being and relating to what is already here.
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Trigger work: We will co-create with the different energies, tensions, and frictions that can reveal unconscious patterns and hidden aspects of yourself. You are supported in noticing the assumptions, loyalties and inherited ways of seeing that shape your choices, and in relating to them as perspectives rather than unquestioned truths.
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Presence work: You are invited to listen with more than your mind and will be offered contemplative and reflective practices and solo writing exercises designed to deepen receptivity and your relationship with the living world.
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Relational work: Opening to the nature of intelligence and viewing life as an exchange. Who can you be when you're with your partner, with your spous, with your future. Learning to engage with the outside world and through all that forms and informs us.
Conscious Connected Breathwork
In a world drowning in complexity, breathwork is the simplest, most powerful tool to reconnect with yourself, regulate your nervous system, and expand your consciousness.
In The Great Pause you will be offered four carefully curated breathwork journeys that acts as a bridge between knowledge and embodied wisdom. It is an extraordinary self-healing practice that supports emotional processing, nervous system regulation, and access to altered states of consciousness. In a safe and trauma-informed space, this breathwork invites deep inner listening and the unraveling of what's been held, both positive and negative, and open a new relationship with emotional blockages, stress, tension and trauma, as well as your deeper truths and inner freedom.
Read the Open Up academic research on The effects of Conscious Connected Breathing on Cortical brain activity, Mood and State of Consciousness (Published, 2023)
INVESTMENT
Step 1: Complimentary Intake
To ensure alignment, the initial 30 minutes conversation is free of charge.
Step 2: Intake
A deeper assessment with a 30-minute debrief conversation.
Step 3: The Work
Customized to your needs as a two-day immersion in Amsterdam from 10.00 - 16.30/17.00. Lunch costs are not included. Pricing is customized if a structured, long-term approach is requested, and/or if the work will take place at another studio location than the Open Up studio, or outside of the Netherlands.
Step 4: Integration
After the two-day intensive we will schedule 1 or more integration calls of 30 minutes to further explore what is needed.
Starting from
EUR 3000
Excl. 21% VAT
SPECIAL
OFFER!
€200 DISCOUNT ON YOUR
BOOKING IN NOVEMBER &
DECEMBER 2026
NOW WE NEED HUMANS
THE GREAT PAUSE
In an era defined by complexity, acceleration, and disconnection, let our leadership be an act of humanhood. The Great Pause is part of a larger exploration which I've started calling Now We Need Humans. It urges us to remember that human beings and societies are not separate. The way we think, feel and relate to ourselves shapes the systems we create. Inner transformation and societal change are therefore deeply connected. The individual is part of the collective and by living and bringing those worlds together, it allows for a new kind of anchoring of individual minds into a more collective identity, reality, and process.
I Work With
Top entrepreneurs, founders, politicians, academics, scientists, healthcare professionals, veterinarians, policymakers, celebrities, artists, and also with young potentials who are ready to strengthen their presence and direction for the future. The Great Pause is for those who operate at the highest level, and seek a trusted, highly private offline space to challenge their thinking and process, and gain clarity and impact beyond immediate challenges.