Programme

Arrive at St Giles House.

Settle into your accommodation and explore the grounds.

Drinks in the main house.

Gather in the Library, in the main house.

Welcomes from our host, Nick Ashley-Cooper, and other members of The Realisation Team.

Meet your small group.

Dinner in the marquee.

Ceilidh in the marquee with The Ceilidh Tree.

Running, with Ed Haddon
A light jog around the grounds.

Wild swimming in the stream
Self-led. Ask for directions to the stream.

Yoga, with Rowan Cobelli
While the mind weaves narratives that shape our perception, true wisdom often resides in the quieter, innermost parts of our body. By practicing attentive listening, maintaining honesty, and cultivating an embodied connection, one can navigate the layers of personal depth. This exploration involves discerning between the authentic Self, the constructed self-image, and the mechanisms of self-protection.  We will explore this through meditation, gentle movement and softening into the body – appropriate for all levels of experience.

Breakfast

How to stay human in the midst of flux,
with Sarah Wilson
The sense that things are shifting, even collapsing, has become palpable. People now experience changes that are profoundly disturbing directly and daily. But what if the goal is not just to survive but to become more human, as old assumptions break down? How might islands of sanity seed new ways of living? Sarah Wilson will explore her own trajectory from awakening to the crises of our times towards developing a rich, informed response, which includes considering how to radiate the kind of mindset that aids and connects with others. This is our moment to rise, she stresses. This session we will launch our time together of realising afresh what is being asked of us and how we might respond.

Break

Panel discussion with Sarah Wilson joined by Jyoti Banerjee, Elizabeth Oldfield, and Mark Vernon, followed by Q&A

Lunch will be available throughout this time to enjoy in the marquee or to take away for a quiet moment. You may also like to enjoy one, all or none of these three little Discoveries:

Discoveries

1pm Moves that Matter, with Jonathan Rowson
A chance to ask Jonathan anything, or play a Grandmaster at chess, or both at once.

1.15pm The Realisation Players
Instant Poems

1.30pm Swuš: of water and love, with Dominique Savitri Bonarjee
Swuš: the rushing sound and swirling dynamic of water. Dominique’s new art series began during her recent residency at the Khajuraho Shaivite and Jain temple complex in India. Taking her inspiration from the watery inscriptions that frame the interplay of sensual and divine Tantric imagery carved into the sandstone, Dominique has created movement scores for embodying water’s more-than-human knowing. The rituals composed from these markings imagine ways of moving-being that are attuned to the eroticism of water as the matter-realisation of love and life.
Repeated on Saturday

Workshops
A chance to explore becoming more real through a choice of practices, thinking, embodiments.

Oaks in the parkland, with Benedict Pollard
Benedict will lead an informal walk around the perimeter of the house and into the parkland, stopping en route to connect with some of the 100+ species of oak that he and Nick have planted here over the last decade and more. This mini-pilgrimage will be infused with a weaving together of storytelling, synchronicity, ecology, horticulture, spirit, mysticism and science. It will culminate in an immersive ceremonial planting of one of Benedict’s special oaks, hand-reared from an acorn gathered off one of the oldest oaks in Britain.

What truly matters to you, with Juliette Otterburn Hall
This workshop is an invitation to step into bold self-inquiry. Through a process of reflection, discussion, and uncovering recurring themes, participants will distill their personal mission, vision, and core values – articulating them with clarity and conviction. This is about fearless expression: giving voice to the purpose that drives you and the principles that shape your path. In a world that often demands action before understanding, this session offers the space to define who you are and what you stand for.

Spontaneous wisdom, with The Realisation Players
There is a magic that happens when we learn to play – when we meet our thoughts in a space that has a twinkle in its eye. In this workshop, we will be exploring how the techniques of improvisation can create instant moments of clarity and hilarity. This is a practical workshop, inviting participants to trust in their skills and their gut to create something that can only exist because the other was there. Come play.

Lessons from the front line, with Jyoti Banerjee and Roc Sandford
How might diverse individuals and organisations come together to tackle complex problems? What does a useful mix of prophetic voice, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, intellectual rigour, sensitivity to evidence, humility and practical activity look like? How has activism itself been broken and what is required to fix it? Jyoti and Roc work on the vanguard, seeking fresh ways of highlighting and addressing environmental and other concerns. This open conversation will draw on hard-won experience and insight, seeking a shared wisdom that leads to a better tomorrow.

Spiritual pathways or the return of God? With Elizabeth Oldfield
The language of the sacred and spiritual is coming increasingly to the fore as people grow more aware of the challenges that present themselves today. Is it time to grasp the nettle and be honest: at root, what we are grappling with is the place of the divine in our lives? If so, how might we re-engage the benefits of a way of life oriented towards the transcendent, given all we know about how much harm religious institutions have and still can cause? God and religious traditions – Christianity in particular – are loaded. But could this is moment admit we need this ground and to relate afresh to it?

Tea

Small Groups meet to reflect on the day.

Bar and Bookshop open

Dinner

The flickering light, the ever-present tale, with Martin Shaw
Martin will bring his remarkable story-telling, myth-invoking powers to add another dimension to the day. Stories have a wonderful capacity to hold us in difficult times, to light horizons that guide and encourage. Myths reach across ages and connect inner worlds with external verities. Join him by the fireside as the drum beats, the ancestors are remembered, the little people are recalled, and half-forgotten domains emerge to the imagination.

Running, with Ed Haddon
A light jog around the grounds.

Wild swimming in the stream
Self-led. Ask for directions to the stream.

Yoga, with Rowan Cobelli
While the mind weaves narratives that shape our perception, true wisdom often resides in the quieter, innermost parts of our body. By practicing attentive listening, maintaining honesty, and cultivating an embodied connection, one can navigate the layers of personal depth. This exploration involves discerning between the authentic Self, the constructed self-image, and the mechanisms of self-protection.  We will explore this through meditation, gentle movement and softening into the body – appropriate for all levels of experience.

Breakfast

After Hospicing Modernity, with Vanessa Andreotti
Vanessa is a Brazilian educator, author, philosopher and activist, as well as Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. For decades, she has been at the forefront of rethinking education, questioning the dominant assumptions that shape our understanding of progress, knowledge and change. She will be in extended conversation with Jonathan Rowson to explore her latest work and ideas.

Break

Breakout groups or panel discussion with Vanessa Andreotti, Roc Sandford, Indra Adnan

Lunch will be available throughout this time to enjoy in the marquee or to take away for a quiet moment. You may also like to enjoy one, all or none of these three little Discoveries:

Discoveries 

1pm Nick Shaftesbury
Share your lunch with Nick to explore more of life at St Giles House.

1.15pm The Realisation Players
Instant Poems

1.30pm Swuš: of water and love, with Dominique Savitri Bonarjee
Swuš: the rushing sound and swirling dynamic of water. Dominique’s new art series began during her recent residency at the Khajuraho Shaivite and Jain temple complex in India. Taking her inspiration from the watery inscriptions that frame the interplay of sensual and divine Tantric imagery carved into the sandstone, Dominique has created movement scores for embodying water’s more-than-human knowing. The rituals composed from these markings imagine ways of moving-being that are attuned to the eroticism of water as the matter-realisation of love and life.
Repeated on Friday

Workshops
A chance to explore getting more real through a choice of practices, thinking, embodiments.

Beetles in the parkland, with Benedict Pollard
Benedict will lead an informal walk into the parkland, to talk about some of the unseen, ‘invisible’, forgotten little beasts that live all around us: the beetles. This journey will share glimpses of mythology, ecology, conservation, mycology and more. We’ll start off with a chance to see some beetle specimens through a microscope, to give us an idea of the extraordinary wealth of British beetles and the amazing variety of shapes, sizes, colours and habits, and stories of the amazing life histories. Equipment will be provided for participants to have a go at sampling the wild beetles of St Giles to get an introduction to their diversity and beauty.

Resonance dialogue and healing the world, with Jacob Kishere and Matthew Green
This session will explore a form of group inquiry. drawing on the Dialogos practice of David Bohm and Jon Vervaeke, that shifts from focusing on the content of what is being discussed, and attuning to the context. The resulting field can host more of the depth of fragmentation in the world today. The aim is to evoke a form of collective intelligence that can lead to new perspectives, insights and inspirations to act that individuals could not access alone.

The Four Elements of Being, with Michael Bready
The four elements of Earth, Water, Air and Fire, appear time and again across wisdom traditions, signifying not just the basic constituents of the physical world, but fundamental aspects of the human psyche – spiritual resources that can be cultivated. In this workshop – through breath, movement, imaginal and relational practices, we will inhabit these four elements within our own body, learning to activate them as living intelligences. In a time of planetary crisis, where it is natural to feel helpless, the four elements offer a model of mature agency, enabling a dynamic engagement with the present moment as an active field of change.

Instant harmonies, with The Realisation Players
It is said we sang before we spoke but harmony can only exist with more than one singer. As we listen to one another and combine our voices, we’ll create something bigger than ourselves. Join the Realisation Players as we explore singing together as a powerful tool of connection, working with both written and spontaneous song.  A practical workshop which invites you to meet everyone harmonically. All voices welcome, no experience necessary.

What is going on for you? With Vanessa Chamberlin
Vanessa will host a creative space that helps you process the festival so far, using art materials, mark-making exercises and periods of individual and collective reflection. We will pay attention to what is most live in us, and will try to allow that aliveness to find its voice, however bold or tentative, through a shame-free use of colour and form. Art materials will be provided and no prior artistic experience is needed. Uncomfortable feelings welcome. We’ll just be familiarising ourselves with what is.

Tea

Small Groups meet to reflect on the day.

Dinner.

The Realisation Players present Realisation: The Musical!

Followed by Dance Party in the Bat Cave.

Running, with Ed Haddon
A light jog around the grounds.

Wild swimming in the stream
Self-led. Ask for directions to the stream.

Yoga, with Rowan Cobelli
While the mind weaves narratives that shape our perception, true wisdom often resides in the quieter, innermost parts of our body. By practicing attentive listening, maintaining honesty, and cultivating an embodied connection, one can navigate the layers of personal depth. This exploration involves discerning between the authentic Self, the constructed self-image, and the mechanisms of self-protection.  We will explore this through meditation, gentle movement and softening into the body – appropriate for all levels of experience.

Breakfast

Pack up rooms and tents.

Open Space
This has been a rich weekend of many threads. As we come to the end of our time together, what conversations do you want to have? We will take on the roles of Hosts, Participants, Witnesses and Wanderers as we create our own agenda.

Meet in Small Groups

Ending Ceremony

Followed by Lunch

Departure from St Giles