Updates
A chronological view of all updates and changes to tender.garden.
May 7, 2025
9 updates
Collective Liberation
"Nobody's free until everybody's free." – Fannie Lou Hamer The term collective liberation describes the notion that everyone suffers under oppressive structures. Contributing to liberation means taking responsibility in different areas of life. For example, it is important to find the right balance in the type of work: - Shadow Work: Actively work on recognizing and dismantling oppressive power structures. - Light Work: Actively work on building a world based on mutual trust and care. "Nobody's free until everybody's free." – Fannie Lou Hamer "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
Eat the Frog
Eat the frog is a productivity method that is inspired by a quote attributed to Mark Twain: “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” The goal is to tackle the most unpleasant task first as part of a morning routine, allowing you to start the day with a clear mind and a sense of accomplishment. - Make a list of tasks for the day, ideally the day before. - Identify the ones that you are most dreading, which you would most certainly procrastinate, with the result of them staying in the back of your mind all day, costing you energy. - Tackle these uncomfortable tasks first. This will let you start the day with a sense of accomplishment and free up energy that was previously locked by having this task on your mind.
Light Work
Light work means using tools that help us shape our world in a positive way. While shadow work is about recognizing patterns that might be holding us back, light work is about cultivating new, healthy patterns that have previously been beyond our imagination. While a lot of light work techniques are focused on the self, the act of imagining and building a better future for everyone is an important part of collective liberation. On an individual level, we can have an impact by taking responsibility for the energy we bring into the human organism. On a collective level, we can work together and envision a world that's beyond our current imagination, for example through utopianism. - Exercising our imagination of what's possible, for example using visualization techniques and affirmations. - Training ourselves to be in the present and cultivating awe, for example through gratitude journaling and awe walks.
Othering
Othering means focusing on our differences instead of what connects us. Instead of seeing the whole of humanity as an organism with the potential to collaborate with each other, it draws artificial lines between us and them. Othering is the near enemy of belonging. By defining some people as outsiders, we can feel connected the group of insiders. The human need for a sense of belonging to a larger group is often weaponized by propaganda. - Any type of discrimination - A focus on the nuclear family instead of the greater collective and community - Love stories based on "us against the rest of the world" - Finding a common enemy to bring together a group of people
Privilege
For us, one of the most effective ways to understand how privilege works is the following question: Whose voice gets heard?
Responsibility
To us, taking responsibility means recognizing which aspects of life we can truly influence and control. It's a practice of inner alignment and sovereignty. It also means leaving space for other people to take responsibility for their own choices and behaviors. We're realizing more and more that we can't make others act a certain way. We can't control anyone, and we shouldn't want to. Through shadow work, we learn how our unconscious patterns ripple into the collective. Taking responsibility then means practicing accountability when we're confronted with harm we may have caused.
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. How can we transmute energy that's moving through the organism? We have a choice how we react on others' energy. Do we carry it with us, being angry at something they said or a certain look they gave us? Do we attribute "good" or "bad" intention to it? Assuming innocence can be a powerful way for instant transmutation. Giving people the benefit of the doubt is also to the benefit of ourselves and to the whole collective. Potential harmful energy evaporates if we decide not to carry it with us. It gets transmuted without us having to take it in and transmute it through our bodies.
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). Visualization: How do you envision our relationship to look like in the future? What is currently holding us back to live that reality? 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