Updates

A chronological view of all updates and changes to tender.garden.

January 15, 2025

2 updates

Tool8 mentions

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.

UpdatedSeptember 17, 2025

jan

pia

Resource1 mention

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."

CreatedMay 3, 2025

jan

pia

January 11, 2025

1 update

Tool1 mention

Timeline

A timeline can be a great visual tool to reflect on the past, for example as part of a year-end reflection. It allows you to take a step back and think about everything that happened. The timeline is a very approachable tool, because you can freely choose the level of detail and how much you want to put into the visual aspect of it. And it's also a lot of fun! Here are a few suggestions to get you started: - Start with big events and milestones and then add more detail - Add different layers, for example colors for various emotions - Besides adding text, you can also draw icons or images to make certain events stand out - Ask yourself what the not so obvious important experiences were for you in that period of time. As a result, you not only have a visual representation of the year (for example) that can serve as a beautiful memory, you also spent time reflecting and maybe even had the opportunity to find some closure. The timeline can also be a really helpful tool for pattern recognition.

CreatedMay 19, 2025

jan

pia

January 8, 2025

1 update

Tool10 mentions

Stream of Consciousness Writing

The technique stream of consciousness writing helps tap into the unconscious by writing down whatever comes to mind, ideally circumventing the conscious mind. The goal is to focus on just writing without questioning the content that is coming out. This technique can be beneficial for many things, including: - Processing emotions, for example writing about feelings of sadness or anger - Shadow work and communicating with the unconscious - Working on setting intentions and visions, like future journaling There are several things that can help with stream of consciousness writing: - Get into a relaxed state that lets you write without overthinking. For example, a form of meditation or embodiment practice can be used. - Set an intention before you start writing. This can either be part of the meditation or in a step right before writing, for example using prompts. - You can set a timer (e.g. 10 minutes) and try to keep writing until it goes off.

UpdatedAugust 16, 2025

jan

pia

December 28, 2024

1 update

Concept7 mentions

As Above So Below

"As above, so below" describes the idea that the world is connected across zoom layers. The micro and the macro perspective are intertwined. - Wikipedia

CreatedMay 3, 2025

jan

pia

August 10, 2024

1 update

Blog4 mentions

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.

UpdatedSeptember 26, 2025

jan

April 26, 2024

1 update

Blog2 mentions

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"

UpdatedAugust 21, 2025

jan

April 24, 2024

1 update

Blog3 mentions

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.

UpdatedAugust 21, 2025

jan

October 7, 2023

1 update

Blog1 mention

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.

UpdatedSeptember 26, 2025

jan