Unfortunately, this workshop will not take place, as one of the hosts has suffered an injury and is currently unable to participate.
We wish them a smooth and full recovery. Thank you for your understanding!
Karolien Polenus & Yuxuan Cui
Body-based workshop with 2 daily energy routines routed in ancient natural healing traditions.
ENG | workshop | 1h30 | Warandepark (Parc de Bruxelles) | 33 euro
Part 1: An Introduction to Energy Medicine by Karolien Polenus
During this session, Karolien guides you through a daily energy routine that lays the foundation for harnessing your body's innate healing energies. Delving deeper, the class is tailored to address specific areas that are tailored to your needs. These areas span a wide spectrum, from understanding and harmonizing the female cycle to fortifying the immune system, managing stress, and more.
Unlock the potential of your natural energies as they emerge as your ultimate healers. Through fundamental insights and user-friendly techniques, you will discover the art of mobilizing these intrinsic energies to serve your wellbeing.
Karolien believes that by offering knowledge and tools, we can foster a deeper connection to ourselves, enabling you to take charge of your own health and wellbeing. Embrace this opportunity to not just learn, but to empower yourself in the art of self-care and healing.
Part 2: Wu Qin Xi (Five Animal Frolics) by Yuxuan Cui
Yuxuan initiates a body-based workshop rooted in Wu Qin Xi (Five Animal Frolics), an ancient Chinese movement practice that emerged from traditional Daoist healing systems. It is a slow, meditative form of exercise that mimics the gestures of five animals — tiger, deer, bear, monkey, and bird. Far beyond performative imitation, it is a somatic language of empathy and attention. Yuxuan invites participants of all ages to engage in these gestures, creating a space for interspecies resonance and embodied reorientation.
This practice is not only a cultural offering — it is a healing gesture. In its essence, Wu Qin Xi reconnects the human body to non-human intelligence through motion, rhythm, and breath. In doing so, it enables a temporary suspension of anthropocentric control: the body becomes not a tool of dominance, but a vessel for sensing, mourning, and transforming. It opens space for participants to process collective fatigue, ecological grief, and sensory estrangement through non-verbal, intuitive movement. It is an act of both physical recalibration and mental renewal.
Join Karolien and Yuxuan on this transformative journey and empower yourself with the wisdom to cultivate and channel your own healing energies effectively.
Karolien Polenus, also known as NiXiE, is a sound alchemist and artist based in Brussels. Rooted in the underground music scene as a longtime DJ and curator, her love for the nighttime shifted to the daytime after a serious health crisis initiated her into a different way of being. In 2022, she became a certified sound therapist and began a practice in energy medicine, using sound as a bridge to self- healing and expanded states of awareness. Her interdisciplinary work explores the intersections of sound, spirit, and the natural world —blending movement, ritual, and frequency to restore coherence in body and psyche. Her performances merge electronic and acoustic soundscapes with healing instruments, inviting audiences into immersive, altered states. Through this work, she explores how art can reconnect us—with ourselves, each other, and the living world. Her practice is both personal and collective: a sonic invitation to remember that we are nature, and nature is infinite.
Yuxuan Cui is a visual artist and storyteller currently living and working in the Netherlands. Yuxuan holds a BA from School of Foreign Studies & School of Arts, Nanjing University, and obtains her MA Fine Arts at Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU). Her artistic practice is rooted in a deep sensitivity to fragmented spaces, forgotten lives, and the fragile entanglement between human and non-human beings. Working across photography, moving image, installation, and archival materials, Yuxuan tell stories that explore ecological grief, displacement, and embodied memory. Her work often focuses on animals—especially feline species and waterbirds—as emotional and symbolic counterparts to human vulnerability and resilience. She sees her practice as a form of both mental and physical healing. On the mental level, it is an act of quiet witnessing: to listen to what has been silenced, to recognize what has been erased. On the physical level, she uses embodied movement to open new forms of connection.