Futures Are Us
Re-Imagining education in support of the mental health and inner growth of emerging adults
As we spend more and more time in a virtual environment, there is a greater increase in loneliness, tension, stress, and depression, especially among young people. Especially after the corona pandemic, 49% of young people in the EU say they need mental health care that is not available. (source: European Council) This applies to 23% of the adult population.
How to deal with these phenomena in a healthy way? How to live? How to connect? We need other forms of knowledge. In my work, people of all ages come into contact offline with altered states of consciousness where knowledge opens up from a deeper knowing. Awakening in these states of consciousness is important because they are meaningful, and therefore transformative.
Connected breathing is a process of breathing that can open up mystical experiences and help people to see themselves and the world differently. People describe such a deep experience as a reset, a liberation, a rapture through touching or being touched by something essential, something intangible, a homecoming, a spontaneity, a literal enlightenment, a clarity with a core; a truth, a heart opening, a discharge, a deep connection with the cosmos, being one with the world, a knowing who they are and what they have to do. This altered state of consciousness resembles meditation, prayer, some drug experiences, dreams. Some modern psychologists and others have coined terms such as peak experience, flow, relaxation response, mysticism or ‘non-ordinary’. It is called the high, the rush, and also the ecstasy. I want to carefully and broadly investigate the handling of these states of consciousness by offering experiences at universities for students and teachers.
How can we investigate together what breathing and inner education can mean for the mental health of young people? What would it be like if young people could come into contact with expansive states of being? How could education contribute to the health of young people? What kind of space and budget can be made available in schools and universities for such a process?
With my organisation Open Up I hope to inspire and empower young people from within. I have already introduced A-Coming-of-Place, The Guest, The Address, the Alivedream as an opening to an experience, a ritual, an investigation, an experiment to decentralize cognition and to come into relation with places we do not yet know. To generate other forms of knowledge, and to investigate how they function and how they fall into dysfunction.
Becoming other-wise
Why do we live in a world where we have stopped perceiving the full spectrum of who we are? Most of us have been taught to be and think a certain way. Our contemporary form of education diminishes the idea that there are diverse visions, many knowledge frameworks, and many streams other than mainstream visions of what learning, knowing, sensing and being could be.
There are good reasons to why we need to open a new chapter for the student in the world’s classroom. Also, we need to process the circumstances of what it means to be a teacher, and to question with care the complexities of being one in a system that is changing.
Students, real people in real schools and universities struggle to act in a context where there is little listening or engagement from the holding environment to their inner world. To imagine a different approach where one can be educated how to live and deal with the subjective experiences, insights, and questions, is needed. Classrooms are still sites of exclusion where its structures, and systems, and theories derive from a power of universality. There is no magic there ✨
I have a deep longing for a form of education that is not solely determined by its principles of standardization, or coming from an place of being over consummated with explanations without real human interactions. I imagine education to come alive and open up differently.
“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 that we do this work. To become other-wise.
I am looking for introductions at faculties to start introducing the vision and work to support the mental health and wellbeing of young people.
Find out more: www.openup.world/futuresareus
