Illness gifted me a bit of time by myself recently, and it struck me that rhythm is really the heart of health. Yet our modern lifestyle has us ignore many natural rhythms. Take electrical lighting, which has put us out of touch with an ancient sleep rhythm, one that may have had two sleep phases in boreal winter times – bridged by a meditative half-waking time. Obviously winter invites us to rest and celebrate – yet we’re as busy as always, if not more, consuming, filling our head with conventional x-mas duties that have lost touch with their original purpose.
Laying in bed, healing my bones, I slept a lot, laid awake at night, and pondered. I dreamed. And I came closer to my inner being, my insight, those ideas and motions that feel right, that remind me – quietly and patiently – which steps to take next and which ones to leave.
Maybe I keep doing this all winter. Maybe it’s what my body needs – after lifetimes of yanging through season after season: planning and making, then more planning and making. Maybe I gift myself full rhythms now, including the yin seasons: harvesting and dreaming. And give each season the equal amount of attention.
And maybe finally, I’ll live what the Conscious Cycle Kit nudged me to do since I created it in 2019. Four seasons, circling around a stylized Yin and Yang (see below poster for reference).
Yin seasons are receptive, passive, private, quiet, vague, slow, soft, introverted, regulatory: fall and winter.
Yang seasons are protective, vigorous, social, noisy, clear, fast, strong, extroverted, productive: spring and summer.
The whole wheel gives an overview of the four seasons moving through four domains. The seasons move clockwise around the wheel. The domains radiate out from the core: creativity, resilience, respect and courage. Each of the domains describe a holistic rhythm of life and its creative processes.
The wheel is as simple as it is complex. It’s so radically different from the way our schooling and economies tell us to do things. It’s so out of the box for our habitual brains that we may easily miss how basic this rhythm is to our being. And we keep missing two out of four beats. No wonder we see so much burnout and illness.
I’m at the end of my thought for today. If you read this and feel inspired to learn more, find more downloads on our website, follow us on insta or join our group for monthly calls.
Pick, remix and make new
Learning through aesthetic pedagogy
Group size: 3 – 6 pax
This crazy little book was the result of a birthday surprise, in which we design a geo-located scavenger hunt that started in an art gallery, where we posted a fake art plaque with a primer and a QR code, which gave the first clue. This pdf covers the main stops and overall design of the game.
Later in the year, I worked on an 
To get my ethnography going I started a 
Soon after I had about 300 group members, I invited those based in Sydney to a local workshop, a playground to explore and make-do. We were about 20, meeting for 3h at 
We started with a little identity change. We gave each participant a small tag. On the one side they first estimated their percentage of feminine and masculine traits. For example, today I feel 70% feminine and 30% masculine in a female body. Then, we turned the tag around and wrote on the other side. This time, we would choose the opposite or a variation that is very alien to me. For example, I would now have a male body and feel 90% and 10% feminine. The idea was to tap into empathy. Once we had our characters, we all pledged to stay in character throughout the workshop. When we did this, Baran played the hang for us. The atmosphere was so joyful, chilled and energised. Loved it. 
Just looking at the outlines, the group walked around and wrote adjectives next to the traces. This way, we collected impressions about shapes and outlines that hint on masculine and feminine, but we also gathered counterintuitive statements. Overall, we figured that objects were divided into fem, neutral or masc according to their function and/or shape. Very interesting was the 5-year-old, who couldn’t identify specific female objects, everything was male or neutral. Overall, we saw that everyone started from a different idea of what Androgyny is.
To go into the next exercise we asked everyone to choose an object and form groups around a certain object. The task was to create a story that incorporates the object and the gender swapped characters we were playing. For the next hour, groups drew story boards, build small objects and wrote various versions of character development. All this work was done on butchers paper.
To share their ideas, each group improvised a 5-minute performance with everyone on stage performing their character in drag. Giving everyone a counterintuitive role, our idea was to help people get into other people’s shoes. But what happened instead was that all our stories poised at the edge of stereotyping. It was remarkable to see how we all exposed ourselves freely to how little we actually knew about what it really felt like for others. 
On the wall we had created a matrix, on which we collected these statements to get an overview about feminine and masculine gender ideas in the room. After each performance the whole group would run at the wall and place their triggers and thresholds along a horizontal line that ran from feminine to masculine, and a vertical line that ran from trigger to threshold. 
With such a short timeframe there was no more time to drill deeper into areas, such as the “in between”, transgender, orgasms, sexuality, politics, business, language, emancipation of gender, evolution, etc. We left knowing that there was great interest in a series of playgrounds around the topic.
roup size: minimum 10 pax