Facilitation - Experiential learning - Berlin
Working with real team questions through engaging, hands-on experiences
Using nature-based learning, improv, play and breathwork.
I help teams co-create new ideas and ways of working:
Amidst pressure and uncertainty.
While having fun and recharging.
Through engaging, participatory experiences.
Questions I can help you work with:
How can a team experience its mission again, rather than only talk about it?
How do we stay creative when we don’t yet know what the answer is?
How do I get my team more involved in the change process?
How can we keep collaborating effectively when plans change?
How can I get my team to speak up, really listen and build on each other’s ideas?
How do we stay effective under pressure without burning through the team?
How I See Change and Creativity
The systems-change and innovation work I draw from sees creativity as relational: ideas, decisions and solutions do not come to life through individual thinking alone. They emerge through interaction between people, tools and environments, including things we rarely grant much agency to. This also makes uncertainty the fabric of life, rather than something to resist or neutralise.
Robustness vs Resilience
I draw on biologist Olivier Hamant’s work on robustness. Hamant shows how living systems survive turbulence through adaptability and tolerance of imperfection. I translate this into skills of regulating under pressure, reading the field and adapting when plans stop working.
Yes, and!
I am also passionate about combining seemingly unrelated or even contradictory things — like AI and nature-based learning. Improv and organisational work. It is often at these intersections that something interesting, unexpected and genuinely novel can emerge.
Worldly Nature of Creativity
I work with practices that let teams experience this worldly nature of creativity directly. Improv, which I studied for over two years, gives us ways to co-create when we do not know what comes next. Breathwork and somatics develop attention to what is happening in ourselves and between us. Nature-based learning puts us inside complex living systems rather than looking at them from a distance.
Ideas as Gifts
My passion is designing settings where experimentation feels possible, play opens new routes, and people can contribute the craziest ideas without worrying whether they will fit. It’s how new ideas and directions emerge, rather than a variation of the old being forced.
“Human creativity is the skillful participation in and collaboration with dynamic systems and emergent phenomena.”
— Iain Kerr, Co-founder of Emergent Futures Lab
Work with me!
I work with mission-driven teams under pressure to find new solutions, passionate about change, and open to new ways of engaging with work and the world. My work sits around creativity, collaboration and uncertainty: how we stay responsive when plans change, build on each other’s ideas, and co-create when we don’t yet know what comes next.
Facilitation for Teams and Organizations
We can test the waters through a Walk for Work or a Playing with Uncertainty workshop and, from there, discuss ways of integrating this into the rhythm of your team and work. It can take the form of regular team walks, a half-day robustness or team-building lab, a series of sessions, or working alongside a project over time.
Coaching and Mentoring
For people navigating change, uncertainty or bigger questions that do not fit neatly into a linear coaching process.
I’m trained as both a coach and a teacher, and I also work as a mentor, bringing various creative modalities into the work. Depending on what the inquiry needs, we might work with breathwork, nature-based learning, dreams, deep imagination or somatics — with thinking as only one of the ways we make sense of the world.
Event Sessions
Let me design a custom session for your event — be it a conference, gathering, learning programme or offsite — that helps people fully participate and create meaningful connections.
The format and duration are tailored to the programme and audience. It could be a walk, breathwork, an improv game, or a mix of practices that helps people connect, exchange ideas, recharge and return with renewed focus to the rest of the programme.
“Improvisation is a pedagogical tool in the service of robustness.”
— Olivier Hamant, Biologist and INRAE Research Director
What working together can look like
Nature-based team experiences
If you are in Berlin, I will often advocate for taking the work outside. A Walk for Work, a half-day session or a regular series can create very different conditions for thinking and working together. Movement, changing surroundings, nature, breath, observation and play bring in more of us than a meeting room usually does.
This is where some of the deeper work can happen: reconnecting with the mission, seeing a question differently, noticing patterns, having conversations that do not normally happen, and experiencing complexity and interdependence directly.
Indoor and online experiential labs
I also design sessions around creative collaboration, communication and resilience (robustness) indoors and online, and provide support on a project basis.
Through a half-day lab or continued support of a project, I design the setting and questions that help you question familiar assumptions, deepen attention and active listening, play with collective ideas, and have a memorable experience where you don’t need to memorise the learnings — they stay with you.
Expect play, guided experiences, improvising, breath, movement and more, while doing deep work.
The format can be a half-day co-creation lab, one or a series of workshops, or a format integrated into ongoing team or project work.
What Some Participants Said:
-
“I never realized uncertainty could be a gift. But it makes so much sense. I understood something big around coping with anxiety.”
MySalesCoach · Staying Creative When the Next Move Is Not Clear
-
“It's the first time I fully participated in a workshop. It was fun too. A lot of insights on how to welcome all kinds of ideas, own your own but not be bound by them.”
Nonprofit Builder · Co-creating New Ideas in Uncertainty
-
“I had an experience that was very different to any experience that I've had in my life up into the mid forties and I've done lots of different things. How can you be so relaxed and so inspired at the same time... This was cool."
Nature Flow Lab · Breathwork and creativity group session
About
Hi there! I’m Yulia, the human behind Nature Flow Lab.
I have been based in Berlin for the past eight years, after living and working in different countries and capacities: in Silicon Valley finance in California, at Greenpeace and later as a consultant and coach in resilience and holistic health in Russia, and in entrepreneurship, coaching and facilitation in Germany.
Across these different worlds, the questions have stayed remarkably similar: how do we humans change? How does change happen in me, between people, across a group, in an organisation and in the larger systems we are part of?
Much of my research, learning and experimentation has pointed me towards one often overlooked fact: the biggest shifts in me and in people I have worked with were brought about through experiences that involved feeling and the whole mind-body system, rather than mainly verbal paths such as a lecture or traditional coaching.
This is also how I found myself drawn to modalities where we learn through doing: state regulation through my training and work as a breathwork facilitator; creativity and group flow through more than two years of improv in Berlin; uncertainty and systems learning through wilderness and nature-based education. Along the way there have also been wilderness expeditions, vision quests, and a Wim Hof breath and cold expedition.
At the same time, I am grounded in more traditional learning and development as a teacher and coach by training, alongside my ongoing study of creativity and emergence with Emergent Futures Lab. I like keeping my feet in these different worlds and, in the spirit of creativity itself, seeing what happens when they meet.
Nature Flow Lab grew from bringing these strands together: analytical work and embodied knowing, strategy and play, human systems and the living world.
Like most of us, I am also engaged with the questions AI brings into our lives and work. I’m interested in what happens when AI becomes part of how we think, remember, create and collaborate, and how we engage with what it makes possible while staying attentive to what might be flattened or lost. For some teams, this becomes a practical inquiry into their own relationship with AI.
Much of my work now sits around robustness (resilience), collaboration and creativity in times of big change and uncertainty, and the increasingly non-human speeds at which these changes happen. I work with teams and organisations through facilitation, and with individuals through coaching and mentoring.
I also host The Breath of Life podcast where I continue many of these inquiries through conversations around ecology, creativity, transformation, the body and different ways of knowing.