Reflections on the Life Itself Spring Gathering 2025

The air was convivial and caring; intellectually curious and creative. A lot of joy and delight in being together, and in being touched by encounters with new people, ideas, and ways of being.

May 05, 2025

This year’s Life Itself Spring Gathering took place at the Bergerac Hub from Thursday 27th March to Sunday 30th March. We had 18 participants from the UK, Italy, Belgium, Canada, France, and Spain over the weekend and around 8 people staying for a community co-living/co-working week afterwards.

The air was convivial and caring; intellectually curious and creative. A lot of joy and delight was found in being together, and in being touched by encounters with new people, ideas, and ways of being — as we saw in our Closing Circle, during which appreciations of each other were more than the short time we had could hold.

Over the weekend, the hosting team, led by Catherine Tran and Esther Montmany, facilitated some light structures to support us in landing together, feeding ourselves nourishing meals (very important!), taking care of each other and the space, and departing well — while the main happenings of the Gathering were sourced from the desires, talents, inspirations, and questions of our pop-up community.

We used Open Space Technology to create together an agenda of workshops, talks, and activities, which included: a nighttime Resonance Singing workshop in the cellar; a discussion on ‘How to Make Intellectual Spaces Accessible’; a 5Rhythms dance party enjoyed by children and adults alike; collective painting, chats, and tea in the garden; a discussion about ‘Community Planning and How to add Faith and Vision Beyond Economics and Politics’; riverside walks in pairs; a workshop on Creativity for Living/Creativity as Wisdom Cultivation; a discussion around the question ‘Is Capitalism Bad or Are We Just Doing it Wrong?’; morning meditation and Qi Gong; and much more.

Finn, who came to the Bergerac Hub for the first time for the Spring Gathering, shared about his experience:

It's really just been the most extraordinary bunch of people coming together—a real mix of insanely interesting and unusual characters, each with their own unique blend of wisdom. It's kind of been this experience of peering into all of these different universes which are so distinct from one another, but with so much beauty and intelligence in all of these different worlds. So yeah, really, the people who've come here have made it. It's been, honestly, the most amazing bunch of people I’ve met in a long time. …
I suppose each Gathering will be different depending on who's there. For this one, the reason why I loved it was that there was this really nice blend of intellectual rigour and stimulation—lots of people thinking about ideas around Metamodernism, and this really sort of juicy food for thought. But it was also balanced with this really beautiful embodied way of being—lots of music and dance and attunement, and this kind of yin side, you could say. …
100% with all my heart recommend it. It was the best weekend I’ve had in such a long time. If you get the opportunity to go, I would say 100% go for it. It was a really, really amazing experience.

Watch the full video here:

Esther shared:

What they do here [is] they create very real conditions for togetherness, for practice, for growth, but they're not really cut off from what could be a real life; they're very close to what could be a real life. …
There is a structure and there is some of us who take care of this structure, but it’s very open, very flexible, and there is a lot of space for self-organisation. And then we become like a family, where everyone can bring what they can offer, and what they want to receive, and we just organise it—and what comes up is out of this uniqueness of each of us. And that’s really beautiful.
And another thing that I really loved is that there is a lot of happiness in this togetherness, in this capacity to listen to each other and to value each uniqueness. And then we don't need to smoke, we don't need alcohol, we don't need a TV… [just] the joy of being together. And you could see moments where someone was talking, other people were playing music, other people were playing chess. So there was space that everything could flow together in harmony, and that was amazing.
And the other thing is that the cleaning, the cooking, everything, was done in a community way, and there was no difference for age or gender or anything. So everyone was participating in everything, and that made an experience of true community with richness, happiness, and inclusiveness possible—to experience it, not only to talk about it.

Watch the full video here: