Youth Exchange on embodied movement, nature connection and stillness.
When: 13/05 – 23/05/2024 (including travel days)
Where: Statek Habří, Moravecké Pavlovice, Czech Republic
For whom: 24 people from Czech Republic, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Poland
“The body benefits from movement, and the mind benefits from stillness.”
–Sakyong Mipham, Buddhist lama
Are you falling? Your body will catch you.
Do you sometimes feel like living means walking on a tightrope, juggling all these things – work, studies, friendships, relationships, money, family, free time, dogs and cats – and every minute feels like you are about to fall?
Come to nurture your art of balance and find a way to be present with your body and senses enough to notice the life around you. Dance, feel the sun on your skin, and pause.
Join Balance and you will:
- learn how to find a sustainable balance through embodied movement, bodywork, and connection with nature.
- improve your mental and physical health
- cultivate a healthy relationship with your body
- boost your digital and problem-solving skills by helping with improving a digital well-being tool
Main info
Background
In a brain-oriented culture, where thinking is highly valued over feeling, our attention is mainly on our thoughts. Less attention is often paid to the physical aspect of the body and even less to emotions, and spirituality. This creates an imbalance in our lives, leading to stress, and unhappiness, and can eventually cause mental and physical health problems.
During Balance, we will
- provide an experience of how bodywork and movement can support our well-being
- help you to identify specific strategies how to maintain your life balance and well-being
- support you in making an individual plan for how to follow the strategies that you have identified
- test and improve a digital tool for maintaining a sustainable balance in life
This youth exchange is for young people who want to find a greater sense of balance in their lives through embodied movement, body work and connecting with nature.
- young people between 18 and 30 years old
- group leaders older than 18
- participants committed to taking part in the programme, including creating follow-up activities for their communities back home
- residents of Czech Republic, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland
- dedicated to spend 9 days in different body-movement & mindfulness activities
- ready to eat 9 days only vegan/vegetarian food
- dedicated to live in a sustainable eco-friendly community for 9 days and respect the commonly agreed rules
- youth committed to learn how to communicate and respect each other’s boundaries and sensitivities and generally be gentle and considerate
We have space for 24 participants who are committed to participating in the learning programme.
- You will take a full part in the whole programme
- You will fill all the evaluation forms after the project
- You will take part in testing a further developing of digital tool supporting individual well-being: https://bit.ly/HOPEtool
- You will be using above mentioned tool for at least 1 month and fill the evaluation form afterwards
- You will get at least 2 people who will be using the above mentioned tool for at least 1 week
- start with filling the application form.
- every partner organization (see below) will select 5 participants + 1 group leader to take part in the programme.
- if you are selected, you will receive a Confirmation Letter with more information regarding your participation. ONLY then you can start managing your travel arrangements and booking your tickets!
- if you have any questions, please contact us on an email info@czechinspire.eu
Learning Process & Programme
We will meet in a space where we can reconnect with our bodies through movement, nature connection, and stillness (of both body and mind). There will be an invitation to be present for our lives, to be with the body, to listen to it and learn from it. Bringing our attention to the body without judgement. All of this guiding us deeper into finding a sense of balance in our lives.
Movement. Embodied movement and bodywork will help us to develop a deeper relationship with the body. Through movement (dance) improvisation, embodied movement, and authentic movement, we will tune into the movement of the body itself – getting to the source and poetry of the movement. Meeting our skin, our tissues, and our bones, listening deeply to what moves us in life.
Nature. Feeling the movement of the grass, hearing the sound of the clouds passing through the sky, and our hearts beating a little bit slower amidst that. Nature has an incredible power to draw our attention to what is happening in the moment, and to take us deeper into ourselves, helping us to understand what is happening in our lives. She can gently heal and inspire. We will learn how to be with nature, how to move with her, and how to pay attention to her, perhaps a little more.
Stillness. When something becomes quiet, a doorway to small sounds opens, and with it a chance to listen to something which is deep and beautiful – inside us, ready to be heard, but usually drowned out by other sounds. We will learn how to quiet our minds and bodies through mindfulness, nature work, and simply appreciating not doing.
Day 0 – ARRIVING: arrival at the venue, accommodation, logistics, setting up the frameworks of the program and introducing the people involved.
Day 1 – GROUNDING: getting to know each other, starting to move, connecting with the ground
Day 2 – BREATHING: connecting with the body through breath and weight of the body
Day 3 – PLAYING: connecting with different layers of the body, exploring imagination through movement
Day 4 – FEELING: working with emotions through bodywork and movement
Day 5 – RECOLLECTING: building on the learnings from previous days
Day 6 – INTUITING: connecting to intuition, identifying individual strategies to maintain balance
Day 7 – CONNECTING: approaching the spiritual aspect of the body, formulating specific strategies to maintain balance
Day 8 – BUILDING: designing the online tool together
Day 9 – CLOSING: takeaways from YE, farewelling
Day 10 – DEPARTING: departure until 10:00
This might be adapted according to the community’s needs on the ground
* This is a plan but it will most probably change according the current needs of the group. Thus, you have an idea what is coming, but nothing is written in stone.
- Program is fully vegetarian
- Program is without alcohol
- you will be helping with cooking (and learning on plant-based cooking in the process, under the guidance of our vegan-chief)
In this project, we aim to guide you to find a way how to sustain a balance in your life. This inspires us to create a project, where we want to build a community and communicate even before the project. This might be challenging, as the group formation is dynamic, but our idea is the following:
Before the Youth Exchange, we would like to meet you in 1-2 online meetings (approximately a month and a week before the YE) where we will set out the framework for learning – you will have the opportunity to observe the patterns in your daily lives that bring you out of balance. Further, we will introduce the digital tool supporting individual well-being https://bit.ly/HOPEtool, which will be later improved by the whole group during the Balance project. We will encourage you to test it even before the YE, so we will be better prepared for designing the improvements. Lastly, we will start building our small Balance on-line community on Facebook.
After the Youth Exchange (as written in the Main info) you will be working on improving the HOPE tool – using it for 1 month, sharing it with at least 2 people, and filling in the evaluation form. Apart from this, we would like to maintain contact to support you in implementing the changes, that you will name during the project, into your life. This will happen through communication in a Facebook group, which will be created before the YE, and through online meetings that are planned to happen several months after the YE: Though this will be a voluntary part of the project, we would be happy if we could create this continuation together!
Accommodation – Statek Habří
The venue is a pension in the Vysočina region. Forest is nearby, there is a pool, stand-alone studio.
Rooms will be from 4 to 8 people. The rooms are equipped with bedsheets.
Website (in Czech).
- There will be 3 meals a day + 2 coffee breaks. The food provided during the program will be an environmentally-conscious vegetarian diet cooked by our amazing vegan chef who will be happy to provide you with information on sustainable and healthy cooking.
- Before the project, we will ask you about your special diet or allergies to arrange your needs in time.
- There are no shops nearby, please bring all the necessary stuff with you.
- In case of need, we can do shopping from time to time, based on availability of our shopping crew.
- Be at Křížanov (district Žďár nad Sázavou) on 13/05/2024 at 18:00. You will be picked-up from there by bus.
- For traveling in Czech Republic, you can use this website: https://idos.idnes.cz/en/vlakyautobusymhdvse/spojeni/
Good tip:
It can be difficult to pronounce names of Czech cities. Put the names on a paper and show it to people! They will try to help.
Travel Reimbursement
The project is co-financed by the Erasmus+ programme.
The costs of the programme, including meals, accommodation, and travel costs (according to the maximum amount of money allowed per country) will be covered by the Erasmus+ programme. Please contact your sending organisation to learn more about the financial details, and how to arrange the booking of your travel tickets.
Very important!
The travel expenses will be reimbursed on the basis of tickets, bookings and invoices, so remember to keep them all with you!
Erasmus+ calculated maximum amount of travel reimbursement you can receive based on the distance band.
Ukrainian, and Lithuanian participants are obliged to travel green, meaning you are not allowed to travel by plane. Given amount of reimbursement is valid only if this condition is kept.
€320 Lithuania, Ukraine
€275 Poland
€23 Czech Republic
- If you are paying any fee to your sending organization, we don’t ask for any extra fee.
- If you are send for free, we ask you to pay a €30 participation fee. It will be send to your sending organization to cover their administration hours.
- If you can’t afford to pay any fee, that’s ok. Simply contact your partner organization or Project Supervisor (info@czechinspire.eu), and they will support you by discussing alternatives (i.e. you help us photos during the project, instead of the fee). We want to make participation open for everybody. All we care about is to have involved and motivated people.
Partner organisations
Project's Team
Tereza Juráková
Embodied movement facilitator
Embodied movement facilitator, nature admirer, and dancer.
I am a wind that blows in many directions. Started as a molecular biologist, then switched to product manager of online services, and of course in the meantime, I became a dancer, and photographer, and spent a lot of time outside (tracking wild animals, for instance).
I am interested in discovering and sharing how we can learn from our bodies and improve our lives based on this learning. And learning to percieve the poetry of the movement. I will guide you back to your bodies while perceiving nature, and each other.
t.jurakova@gmail.com
+420 608 934 192
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Vojtěch Žák
Project supervisor
I am a trainer, facilitator, coach, storyteller, and writer.
The main topics I am focused on are the labor market, social inclusion (mainly of the LGBT+ spectrum), and personal development. The main methods I use are storytelling, coaching, systemic work, body movement, art, gamification, and LARP.
I went from a career as a journalist and marketing specialist to becoming a coach, facilitator, and trainer. I have worked for 6 years as a scout leader and later participated in the EVS program at Olde Vechte Foundation in the Netherlands.
info@czechinspire.eu
+420 775 636 658
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Michal Filípek
Kitchen and sustainability facilitator
Plant-based chef, low-waste lifestyle geek and sustainability lover.
From studying French language and literature to Erasmus+ cooking. Long story short, I like cooking more.
I can share with you my experiences in the kitchen, including several years working in a restaurant. My method is simple – everyone can cook.
I believe that a sustainable lifestyle is not a matter of being perfect but implementing small steps into your everyday life. During this project, you will have a chance to experience many of these little steps and see which one is working for you. I will be there to support you!
mifilipek@gmail.com
+421 902 400 626
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