Ritual, worship and Myth

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We organize the year through a mythosomatic cycle based on worship and ritual. This cycle is constructed around ritual weekends and a biweekly reading group in which we read and talk about the practical aspects of ritual and worship and explore myths and storytelling. The cycle of the year:

 

Autumn: Death and dissolution 

→ dying, grieving, mourning, letting go, rotting, fallowing,…

Winter: Cosmos, time and space 

→ our ancestors and (hi)stories, our natural environment, community and service

Spring: Attention / listening 

→ silence, the void, deep listening and relationality, hierarchies of the senses and power structures, joy and art in activism, love

Summer: Union

→ play, sensuality & sexuality, devotion, awakening

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Find more information here

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Radical Engaged Pedagogy

 

“I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom.” bell hooks, Teaching to transgress
 

What you don't learn as a child, doesn't need to be unlearned later in life. This group is a call to all visionaries to collectively dive into a radical, engaged pedagogy: a fusion of critical, feminist, and anti-colonial educational approaches, with a strong emphasis on well-being. This implies that teachers also commit to a process of self-development and self-recognition, promoting their own well-being and enabling them to teach in a way that makes students free and autonomous. So far, we have been inspired by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Riane Eisler, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jacques Rancière, John Dewey and others. 

 

Through this group, we cultivate ideas for a new school built on values such as inclusion, freedom, expression, equality/equity, care, and creativity instead of dominance, coercion, fear, and inequality. All this with the aim that all children have the opportunity to choose and express their own way of being human. Are you interested in thinking and organizing with us?

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Join our whatsapp group by clicking here.

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Anti-fascism

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We live in uncertain, volatile times and sometimes it is hard to find ways to resist. Therefore we organize an anti-fascism gathering in which we read, exchange and organize. The groups is based on three pillars and they are as follows:

• Intellectual sharpness to understand what fascism is and how it shows up in the world.

• To recognize in ourselves and others the vulnerabilities and dynamics that enable fascism. 

• And to organize anti-fascist activities grounded in the intuitions of House of the beloved.

 

Join our whatsapp group by clicking here.

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Philosophical striptease

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This reading group is closely related to the goal of the anti-fascism gathering. Under the guidance of philosopher Toon, we read and discuss important philosophical works, in order to become undone. This fall we start with Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari, this is why:

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House of the beloved (Hotb) can be understood as a minoritarian monastery in the Deleuzian sense: not a retreat from the world, but a site where alternative modes of subjectivity are continuously produced. The monastery is organized around dynamic processes of self-transformation, where truth is not possessed but questioned and enacted, and freedom is not granted but practiced. In Deleuze’s terms, Hotb is not a “majoritarian” institution that seeks recognition, stability, or moral authority. It is minoritarian: it creates conditions for becoming-other within the dominant order. Its ethos of “being different together” resists fascism not by opposing it symmetrically, but by dissolving the very psychic and relational structures on which fascism feeds—rigid identity, fear of difference, projection, and the fetishization of authority. Through embodied practices of presence, inquiry, devotion, and relational experimentation, the monastery cultivates subjects who are capable of holding contradiction, ambiguity, and vulnerability without collapsing into violence or dogma. 

 

This is a three weekly, intense reading and brain teasing practice. Not for the weak of heart. Send us a message if you are interested.

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The epistemology of intercoporeality

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Most (post-)modern subjects live in a conceptual world. The self is propositionally defined, the sense experience is heavily mediated by a conceptual overlay, and ethics is defined as values and meaning. It makes them vulnerable to the meaning crisis after the post-modern deconstruction of grand narratives. 

 

In contrast, House of the beloved operates from an epistemology of inter-corporeality. The basis of knowledge is the felt sense of the socially-situated body. To “know” something means to perceive and recognize a felt sense and to be able to act in an attuned and responsive way. The alignment between the experienced body and the affordances of the (social) environment is the legitimization criterion.   

 

Because inter corporeal knowledge lives in the immediacy of the moment, the emphasis of learning is on becoming available and tuning-in, so the capacity to be aware of the felt sense is not hijacked by the conceptual need for control and clarity. 

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More information on dates will follow soon

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Death, loss and suffering (in cooperation with the University of Utrecht)

 

coming soon

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