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Reject Fake Harmony, Embrace Conflict
Today I realized again that my hypersensitive nervous system is ultimately a gift, not a burden. It helps me detect so many things, even when my mind doesn’t see them or can’t put them into words this fast. Being born into a family where nothing is talked about and everything is swept under the rug, I feel it is one of my purposes in this life to cut through all illusions and facades—to heal the illness of fake harmony. Fake harmony, fake niceness—these are some of the most important dynamics the empire relies on to hold up its structures, allowing the cancer to spread through every being, every relationship, and through that, the whole collective. Conflict can feel unsafe for the nervous system too, yes. But I have the power to heal that—and it’s already happened a lot. Everyone has the power to heal that, to learn to tolerate the short-term discomfort for the greater gain, for liberation in the long run. Conflict can be messy, and it can hurt. But chaos is part of nature and of every process. Chaos is part of the healing journey. Being in conflict, navigating conflict, is nothing compared to the cold walls of fake harmony. I want to commit to tearing down those walls. ❌ REJECT FAKE HARMONY ❤️‍🩹 EMBRACE CONFLICT
Love Journaling
As part of my morning routine I started doing gratitude journaling more regularly. Pia inspired me to do this practice at the beginning of 2024 (based on a post by Lida Pavlova), but I hadn't found the right way to integrate it into my daily life until earlier this year. Now, I keep a notebook dedicated to this next to my bedside, and I try to fill a page after waking up. Usually, I start sentences like this: - "I'm grateful for..."
Learning about Cancel Culture
We've dismissed the term cancel culture for a long time because we saw it mainly as a way for people in power to evade accountability when confronted with mistakes. What’s often forgotten is that the roots of this practice lie in Black liberation movements, where calling out harmful behavior publicly became a vital way to seek justice outside of systems that fail to protect marginalized communities. Over time, however, the term has been co-opted and repurposed—often by those in power—to deflect criticism. Rather than taking responsibility for the harm that was caused, people often focus on how the injustice is communicated. This shifts the attention away from the root of the issue. We believe it's crucial to listen to people experiencing violence and injustice, no matter how it is delivered. There should always be space for righteous anger. However, the more we reflected on our own behavior during conflict, we realized there is more going on. We noticed how punishment and fear of punishment–so deeply ingrained in our culture–affects how we show up in our relationships and results in hurt and disconnection in cases where more effective conflict resolution could be possible. We experienced this not only in personal conflicts, but also when trying to help organize for Palestine and collective liberation over the last year. There is a growing number of people in movement spaces highlighting the importance of finding more effective and connective ways of working together. As big believers in the transformative magic of conflict resolution, we feel drawn towards better understanding the underlying dynamics of cancel culture and how they show up in ourselves, our personal relationships, and our movements. We are exploring this as two white Germans. This means we're currently focusing on: - How German socialization affects our conflict behavior - The process of white Germans waking up to being complicit in structural violence - Doing the necessary shadow work to be able to show up in movement spaces in increasingly healthy ways
My Current Morning Routine
For July, I’ve decided to experiment with a more structured morning routine again. So far, it’s been giving me a lot of energy and I feel more in the flow. To track how the routine evolves over time, I want to write about it here from time to time. First things first: I’m trying to stay away from my phone and any kind of notifications or input throughout the entire routine. This method is called Low Dopamine Morning and it has really helped me stay grounded before opening up to the outside world. Here’s a post where I write more about it: Arriving Within Myself. My current morning routine: - Before getting out of bed: - Dream Journal - Gratitude Journal - Life Beyond Suffering - Countdown Meditation - After getting up:
Building for Transparency
We want to build tender.garden as a platform that supports our process of learning in public. Instead of showing just the result, we want to share our journey and the mistakes we make along the way. By focusing on taking responsibility for ourselves, by reflecting in the open, we strive to move away from pointing fingers and rather invite anyone interested to join us at eye level. For this, we try to be more transparent in two ways: - Transparent Updates: Being open to changing our minds and updating our content accordingly - Transparent Credit: Acknowledging and sharing who we learned from How do we deal with the situation when we learn something new, maybe even that we made a mistake? How can we change our content, take responsibility, while also making sure that this learning process isn't erased? As a first step, we added an Update History section that can be opened by clicking/tapping the Last updated date on a page. Here is an example how it looks like on the Countdown Meditation page: For bigger changes, we can also link to blog posts explaining the thoughts behind them. We are very grateful for so many hearts and minds that are offering their perspectives in conversations and resources. To show more transparently who we learned from, we just added an Acknowledgments section that can be opened by clicking/tapping the heart icon next to the other authors of a page. Here is an example:
Meditation Break
Somehow, my meditation practice hasn’t been working as well over the past few weeks. I’ve still regularly set a timer for 5-15 minutes and meditated, and I would still say it helps me come back to myself each time. But it no longer had the effect I was used to in the months before. It felt more mechanical; I wasn’t as present anymore. Especially during the 10 days I was sick, I noticed: - More structured exercises involving a lot of visualization felt exhausting and left me drained - The awakening in meditation (realizing I had drifted away) had much less impact and didn’t really help break thought loops On Saturday, I decided: That’s it, no meditation today. To recover better, I committed to looking at screens as little as possible and to not working. No laptop, just occasionally checking notifications on my phone. And it was really nice. I lay on the bed for hours, listened to soothing music in the background, and just stared at the ceiling, letting my thoughts wander. I was simply in idle mode. To avoid getting stuck in mental circles, I had a notebook next to me where I occasionally wrote down a sentence that came to mind. You could actually see it as a kind of stream of consciousness writing. That really helped. I felt like many thoughts just needed permission to flow through my system to be released. The decision to not meditate surprisingly dissolved many thought loops. Afterward, I felt lighter and clearer.
Conflict Update June 2025
Over the past few months, my training as a mediator has led me to dive deep into the topic of conflict resolution. And I had to realize: I thought it would be so simple. When I first discovered the potential of conflict resolution a few years ago and began exploring it more deeply, I truly believed things would only get better from there. I saw how much it helped Pia and me to speak more openly in our relationship. And I thought I could apply that same approach to all my other relationships. This kicked off a painful learning process. I began to understand more clearly that I’m still far from where I want to be. Just because I have theoretical ideas about how to deal with conflict doesn’t mean I can put them into practice. What’s become increasingly clear to me is that every conflict and every relationship is different and comes with its own unique challenges. And that I’m still far from being the kind of communicator I want to be when things get tough. This often led to mutual hurt and feelings of powerlessness. The topic of responsibility has become more and more central to me in recent months.
tender.garden v0.1
For over four years, we’ve been collecting thoughts, concepts, links, and personal experiences around the topic of Collective Liberation. Now all of it finally has a home: _tender.garden. This platform is our digital garden — a place to learn in public, to share, to sort our thoughts. Things are allowed to grow, remain unfinished, and change over time. At the moment, tender.garden_ is made up of the following categories: - Blog Posts – Personal reflections and stories - Concepts – Ideas we’re working with - Tools – Exercises and frameworks that help us - Resources – Books, articles, and links that shaped us While blog posts are time-stamped and reflect specific moments, the goal for the other categories is to continuously expand and evolve them. Here’s a screenshot from our concept page of Relationship Anarchy:
Transmute / Rage Letter
At the end of June, I decided that I wanted to “step back for the weekend” to let some emotions flow and process things I’ve been suppressing. What started as a weekend turned into the entire month of July. I realized I needed more space than I had thought because I felt both burnt out and restless at the same time. During this month, I went through many phases I still want to process in writing. Today, I want to tell you about my rage letter. At the end of July, I took a week off and decided to explicitly allow my emotions to flow again. On Tuesday morning, I started with a breathwork exercise I learned in a workshop with Carla. The psychedelic effect of this exercise continues to surprise me: it usually stirs up a lot of emotions that have accumulated in my body, and I need a few days to let them flow through me. Afterward, I feel clearer and freer. Tuesday and Wednesday, I spent my days in the forest and by the lake. I went alone, sat by the water, then retreated to the woods to soak in the nature and meditate. All with as little phone time or other activities as possible. And wow, did I feel awful at times. Just sitting there, feeling bad, and accepting it without distracting myself was hard to bear. Thankfully, I managed to remind myself now and then that I was doing this intentionally, that it was normal to feel this way, and that these feelings needed to flow through me. This allowed me to observe my emotions from a distance and not take every negative thought associated with them seriously. And somehow, even though I didn’t feel good, it became a deeply beautiful experience—one I remember fondly and consider one of the most impactful of the year. All my life, I’ve been so afraid of "negative" emotions that I’ve always focused on getting rid of them quickly. Now I’m slowly learning that every emotion has its place, and that it can be an incredibly raw and beautiful experience to give space to a feeling I've resisted for so long. Those days were both shitty and sacred. On Wednesday evening, I walked through the city looking for something to eat. Somehow, I got frustrated—nothing was going right. On my way home, I was suddenly overtaken by anger. I was furious at this "stupid vacation," at "just sitting around feeling bad." Suddenly, I was mad at all sorts of things that bubbled up. Luckily, after some time I could remind myself again that it was okay for these emotions to surface, that this was an opportunity to release them. So I marched home (angrily!), sat down in my room, turned on some music, and wrote a rage letter for an hour. I just wrote nonstop, without pausing or questioning. This method is also called stream of consciousness writing. I wanted to write something no one would ever read, giving myself the freedom to say things I'd never otherwise say. Later, I could barely read any of it because it was so scribbled. The words fucking and shit appeared very often.
Talking About Dreams
It’s summer 2020, Pia and I are meeting for the second time. We’re sitting on a wall in the park. She tells me that a lot is going on for her, that she feels overwhelmed but at the same time deeply inspired. That for the first time it feels like she has a real vision of the future: living together with her closest people in one house and sharing life as a community. This vision partly came from watching a series called Tales of the City, which shows queer people of different ages living together as a community on a larger property. And something clicked inside me. After burnout and the end of a long relationship in 2019, I was floating a bit. I felt like I had fallen behind on the traditional path of life, that I had to start again from scratch and walk the classic nuclear-family road: relationship–moving in together–children–house. Even though I had often felt lonely in my “previous life,” it still seemed like the only imaginable way forward. Pia’s ideas about the future inspired me and continue to shape my everyday life and philosophy to this day. That’s how powerful inspiration can be. <Image src="/img/2024-04-11-imagination.jpg" width="1280" height="1036" size="large"
Arriving Within Myself
Last week, I wrote about anxiety and how I sometimes find it difficult to write authentically without worrying about what others might think. This is a theme that accompanies me in many areas of life. In relationships, as a host, in public, professionally, creatively... I often constantly monitor how people are doing and what impact my behavior (or lack thereof) might have on them. Over the past two years, I've been exploring the topic of people pleasing and will write more about it in the future. In short: It's hard for me to bear when people around me are not doing well, and I quickly slip into the mode of wanting to manage their emotions to then feel better myself. This is often accompanied by assumptions that I've done something wrong and must fix it immediately to make things right again. This leads me to overextend myself without being asked, which eventually results in escalation when I don't feel supported to the same extent (also without being asked). A downward spiral. To counteract this, I've tried to find ways to arrive back at myself. To move out of other people's heads and back into my own mind and body. Not monitoring others, but discovering what I actually feel, what moves me, and what I need. For a long time, I saw being alone as something negative, something involuntary. Only in recent years have I realized how incredibly helpful it is for me simply to be with myself, away from external influences. In Die Freiheit allein zu sein (German book, The freedom to be alone), Sarah Diehl describes the difference between loneliness and solitude. That solitude can help us experience the world and ourselves as authentically as possible. I highly recommend this book. “Solitude is not (just) the absence of someone or something else, but the presence of my undisturbed perception.” – Sarah Diehl Through solitude, sometimes things that I have unconsciously carried with me for a long time can sort themselves out. Like a ball of yarn with knots that need time and quiet to untangle.
Dealing with Jealousy
Here are a few coping strategies I observed when dealing with my own jealousy. There is no „one best way“, which strategy I’m using depends on a lot of circumstances and how much willpower I have in that moment to push through the discomfort. When I’m not in a good state and there are topics that easily trigger me, it is tempting to ignore things, letting your partner know you don’t want to hear about certain topics. While this can be a valid strategy, for me personally, this hasn’t led to more secure relationships in the past because it discourages vulnerability and transparency.