Updates
A chronological view of all updates and changes to tender.garden.
May 7, 2025
3 updates
Shadow Work
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate." – Carl Jung Shadow work describes the process of examining and integrating the hidden shadow parts of ourselves. It is about making unconscious patterns conscious, and integrating them so that we don't get controlled by aspects of ourselves that we deny. While shadow work is often used for individuals, there are also a lot of hidden and subconscious aspects in society as a whole. Carl Jung used the term collective unconscious. As above so below means that the collective shadow influences the shadow of human individuals, and vice versa. By working on recognizing our own subconscious patterns, we also help breaking patterns at the collective level.
Transmutation
Transmutation describes the process of transforming how we feel by letting our emotions flow.
Utopianism
Utopianism is a light work technique with the goal to envision a better future where humans live together in a healthy, sustainable way. It stretches our muscles of imagination and allows us to step outside of our current systems and thought patterns. How does the human organism live together in the future? How do people spend their lives together, how are they organized? How do members of the society see themselves?
April 30, 2025
2 updates
Relationship Anarchy
The term Relationship Anarchy (RA) was coined by Andie Nordgren in an article called The short instructional manifesto for relationship anarchy. Relationship Anarchy is understood as a philosophy that applies anarchist principles to relationships, which means: - Questioning normativities and rigid relationship categories by defining each relationship through mutual communication. - Recognizing and working on dismantling structual power dynamics that affect the individual relationship (as above so below). Calling yourself Relationship Anarchist can be a bit daunting, because people often understand it was being free of any societal rules of expectations. This is why we sometimes use the term Relationship Anarchism instead, which recognizes this philosophy as a process, not a goal.
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:
April 26, 2025
2 updates
Book: Existential Kink
Existential Kink is a shadow integration technique that was popularized by Carolyn Lovewell. In her book Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power a Method for Getting What You Want by Getting Off on What You Don't, she offers a variety of stories and exercises that show how readers can not only learn about and accept, but even embrace their hidden desires. "This book presents a life-altering shadow integration meditative practice that invites us to make conscious the unconscious pleasure that we take in the stuck, painful patterns of our lives. Through consciously enjoying and giving approval to these previously unconscious 'gulity pleasures,' we interrupt and end the stuck patterns so that we can get what we really want in our lives." "As long as we have unconscious (repressed, denied, disowned) enjoyment in some 'bad' thing in our lives, we will keep seeking out that very same 'bad' thing." In the book, Carolyn often references this quote attributed by Carl Jung: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate." – Carl Jung As long as we don't accept our hidden patterns, we are going to repeat them over and over again. History repeats itself. In Existential Kink, Carolyn gives many exercises that help with the process of making the unconscious conscious. - Deepest Fear Inventory
Deepest Fear Inventory
Deepest Fear Inventory is a stream of consciousness writing exercise popularized by Carolyn Lovewell in her book Existential Kink. The goal of this exercise is to: - Write down all fears that are currently holding you back from making a specific change in your life - Accept these fears by speaking them out loud - Letting go by tearing the sheet of paper to pieces On a sheet of paper, write something like: "Dear Universe, I refuse to have/do [add your desire]" Then write down a liste of bullet points with everything that could be holding you back: - "because I have deep fear that I..." - "because I have deep fear that I..."
January 15, 2025
2 updates
Awe Walk
In his book Awe, Dacher Keltner describes an exercise called the awe walk. It is a form of walking meditation with the goal to evoke and deepen the feeling of awe by embracing nature and surroundings. Go on a walk and: - Try to see your surroundings with fresh eyes (feel, hear, smell...), as if you were a child discovering the world for the first time, cultivating a childlike sense of wonder. - Take new paths and expose yourself to new stimuli. If you walk in the same location, make it a goal to discover something new each time, something you haven’t noticed before. We've also had great effects when combining the walk with singing a mantra, especially Om Dzambhala Dzalendhraye Soha. For a study, researchers sent two groups of people on regular walks over the course of eight weeks. One group was assigned to do awe walks, while the control group received no special instructions—they were simply told to walk. In Awe, Keltner highlights three effects observed in the study: - The more often people went on awe walks, the more awe they felt over time. Awe is an emotion that can be cultivated through practice and experienced more deeply with repetition. - The more awe participants experienced, the less anxiety and depression they reported in daily life. They also reported greater life satisfaction. - Participants were asked to take selfies after each walk. Over time, in the awe walk group, their faces became smaller in proportion to their surroundings in the photos, whereas this ratio remained unchanged in the control group.
Book: Awe
This book by Dacher Keltner is all about awe. He describes this feeling as a consciousness-expanding experience: "Vastness can be challenging, unsettling, and destabilizing. In evoking awe, it reveals that our current knowledge is not up to the task of making sense of what we have encountered. And so, in awe, we go in search of new forms of understanding."
December 28, 2024
1 update