On a sunny and windy afternoon I sit down on the grass surrounded by fields of reed in Diemerpark, an urban park located in district Amsterdam-Oost, quarter IJburg. Until 1973, Diemerpark used to be a garbage dump. The district decided to impolder IJburg as this new quarter couldn’t use a garbage dump. They chose to …
An exercise to kill your nerves before a performance (1 hour – all day) Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) has some very helpful tools in order to relax before one has to do a speech. Since the audience tends to copy the mental state of the speaker, it is highly important to be calm instead of …
Beauty is often linked to order, rationality, perfection, civilization, truth, and the good; while ugliness is associated with “mundane reality, the irrational, evil, disorder, dissonance, irregularity, excess, deformity, the marginal: in short, the Other” (Nelson and Shiff 281). Francisco de Goya (1746 – 1828) is considered one of the greatest artists of the romantic period. Goya’s …
The idea of philosophy as a form of therapy has been present since antiquity.[1] In fact, many scholars have argued that Stoic Philosophy is a philosophical form of therapy. Epictetus described a way of living, an ethic with peace of the mind or serenity as the main goal, and was already busy with creating a philosophy …
“The true character of a society is revealed in how it treats its children” Nelson Mandela.[1] In the Netherlands, approximately 119.000 children grow up in a context of child abuse every year.[2] In fact, over a lifetime, 1 in 4 Dutch inhabitants have experienced or still experience child abuse.[3] The potential detrimental effects child abuse has on human …