July 2025 Newsletter
Welcome to our July 2025 Newsletter. Here you will find our community, research, Second Renaissance, and the Bergerac Praxis Hub updates from the month of July.
🚀 Upcoming Explorations 🚀
Come join the party - September 5th-7th!
Second Renaissance Festival 2025
This summer, on September 5th-7th we’re hosting the first-ever Second Renaissance Festival in prototype form at the Life Itself Farmhouse Hub in Bergerac.
We’re imagining a small, intimate gathering filled with music, dance, storytelling, shared practice, and self-organised workshops - a space to connect, co-create, and envision what a wiser, more compassionate world might look like.
We will come together for 3 days at the end of summer - September 5th-7th. The weekend will be largely shaped by the participants themselves and we’re looking for 20–40 participants for our first party. Read more and register here.
Autumn Praxis Residency (October to December 2025)
Live together with others who are exploring regenerative ways of being and doing.
You are invited to join us for our Autumn conscious co-living residency to transform how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the wider world.
A 2.5-month-long container, where you can join for 1 week up to the full 2.5months, for contemplative, relational, and embodied practice in community. You’ll live together with others who are actively exploring how to live and work in ways of being that transform the world, and you’ll experience the frame of collective rhythms and practices for conscious community living which have been developed at the Hub over the past 5 years.
🌻Conscious Collectives🌻
This month we had Sylvie Barbier and Theo Dawson on the Life Itself podcast. Listen to both below.
Listen to Rufus Pollock on:
🌅 Second Renaissance 🌅
At the Oasis, and Experiments in Spiritual Spaceholding
This month, we conjured a Magic Budget through collective wishing, mapped our shared experience with Community Self-Sensing, and stepped into playful insight with the Guru Game. Our Community bonding practice, the Weaving Stories Circle, invited deep listening and connection. We also hosted our Experiments in Spiritual Spaceholding - our special edition Oasis call on the 5th Tuesday of the month, opening new ground for shared inquiry and presence into our individual and collective experience of spirituality. Across our vibrant ecosystem, tents sprang up - Red World, Givewiser, Weaving the Cultural Fabric, and the Collab-a-thon, alongside Field Building, Research & Sensemaking, and Intentional Ventures. Spontaneous Pop-up Tents also emerged, fueling the creativity and co-creation.
Join us for a call in August here.
Read a reflective piece on the Experiments in Spiritual Spaceholding from Naeema here.
Seeds Issue 6
Second Renaissance Forum
Some of our top forum posts over the past month have included:
From Metacrisis to a Second Renaissance - Explorer Course
Our July course, From Metacrisis to a Second Renaissance, brought together a diverse group of 24 participants from across the globe to explore the deep patterns of civilizational breakdown and the possibilities for renewal. Through four interactive sessions led by Rufus Pollock and Sylvie Barbier, we uncovered the roots of the metacrisis, glimpsed seeds of a new paradigm, and shared our personal journeys of awareness and hope.
To keep the conversation alive, you are invited to join us and course participants for a weekly pop-up tent at the Oasis throughout August - where we will continue the dialogue, reflect, and explore how to live into a Second Renaissance together. The first one takes place on August 5th - register here.
Second Renaissance London: 'Leviathan' screening
On Thursday 31st July, London Second Renaissancers gathered at Newspeak House for the 4th London meet-up to watch and discuss the recently released Leviathan documentary from Kainos.
The screening was followed by structured discussion of the film and it’s themes, and many insightful perspectives were shared and generated in a warm and intellectually curious atmosphere.
💡Life Itself Research💡
In July, Life Itself Research continued it’s active programme of calls, with recordings available at the new research substack.
Anna Riedl gave a fascinating talk on her recent work on Autopoiethics, connecting it to her previous work with John Vervaeke on Relevance Realisation, rationality and wisdom.
Valerie Duvauchelle shared her experience of using insights from Zen monastic practice in developing co-living framework at Life Itself's Bergerac Hub.
Gen Zendahl led a session of the Glass Bead Game, an intellectual and poetic relational practice she helped pioneer.
Jonah Wilberg gave a presentation on the intellectual history of the Metacrisis: discussing both the history of that specific term, and the broader history of related ideas within 19th and 20th century philosophy.
🌳The Bergerac Praxis Hub🌳
SenseMaking Summer School: Exploring the Metacrisis and a Second Renaissance, September 17th - 24th 2025
Join us for the inaugural SenseMaking Summer School 2025, a week-long gathering of inquiry, learning and connection. The school will bring together 20 participants to share new perspectives on catastrophic risk, collective action, and governance — grounded in a
