December 2021
People sometimes ask me how I combine being a breathing coach and work at Waag’s TextileLab Amsterdam. For me they are related and one couldn’t exist without the other at this point. Transformation happens within us and around us, mirroring each other.
Since 2012 I followed different trainings in the field of body & energy work, consciousness and transformation. My own journey and supporting people in theirs, made me experience and understand transformation, conscious shifts of perception and values, resistance towards change and how and why we keep destructive mechanisms alive. These experiences are a big inspiration for my work in the lab, translated into a holistic research methodology and transformation / innovation processes applied to the field of textile and clothing and the innovation projects we work on. (Of course all done with my partner in crime and friend Cecilia Raspanti who I founded the lab with in 2016, the rest of the wonderful TextileLab team and Waag.)
And visa versa. Working on projects in the lab these last 5 or 6 years made me dissect and understand the systems we created, how they effect and shape our way of thinking and acting, how these systems reflect what’s alive in us, individually and collectively and how we can work together. And you know what? We are so much more free than we think we are. Personally, but also in the world we can create (or just be) together. And yes, change is a sometimes frightening and uncertain process.
Thank you all teachers. Enablers, supporters, friends, partners in crime, confronters, triggers, mirrors. Thank you brave people for consciously breathing through every experience you have and bringing stuff to the surface that wants to be seen. Thank you for going inwards to see what’s truly alive in you, no matter if it feels painful, great or scary.
Let’s feel (again) what we and our bodies are capable of and which way we want to go. Let’s be honest about the parts of the toxic systems we keep alive and can’t let go of. Let’s see what no longer serves us. Let’s figure out together step by step, layer by layer. Let’s be.
Hope to see you soon on the mat (or in the lab). ?
