Inscendence
A participatory enquiry into awareness, presence and place
Pari, Italy · 31 May – 7 June 2027
What is Inscendence?
It is both a retreat and an enquiry – a time to reflect and recharge, and an immersive, experiential exploration of the nature of consciousness and matter, meaning and wholeness, experience and thought.
We will draw inspiration from the many thinkers, artists, and writers who have shaped events at Pari over the years, taking their ideas into a place-based investigation of how we can flourish in these complex times.
Philosopher Henri Bortoft suggests that authentic wholeness is everywhere, in everything, but it disappears the moment we try to think it. Inscendence takes up this challenge by starting from our embodied experience of the world and working upstream into a thinking — and acting — that is alive.
Inscendence—the impulse not to rise above the world but to climb into it, to seek its core.
Thomas Berry, via Robert Macfarlane
What will we do?
Beginning with our bodies and our senses, we will explore multiple modes of awareness and attending. Through these we will engage with the wooded hills, the olive and the grape, the stone buildings and the everyday moments of our human life. We will eat, talk and walk together, and find ways of dialogue and creative expression that remain true to the experiences that unfold.
Several strands of practice weave through the week, slowly unfolding day by day, and informing each other as they go.
Body, Senses and Awareness
We will explore body practices that expand the quality of our awareness. Akin to yoga or Tai Chi, they will help us cultivate a spacious, silent inner state that is somehow both still and fluid. Adjusting and enhancing the use of our senses will disclose the world and our relationship to it in suggestive ways. These practices will provide the foundation and touchstone for our engagement with the land, its diverse inhabitants, the river, the air, and much that normally passes unnoticed.
Plants and Place
We will encounter the plants that live in and around Pari, and then choose one (or perhaps be chosen by one) along with a place to sit with it. Being in this “Plant Place” regularly will provide time for observation, reflection and deep listening. We will engage with the plant in specific ways: through practices of sustained attention, through sensory reciprocity, with a listening heart. What arises for you there will feed writing, creativity and dialogue.
Making Fire
A central theme during the week is that of ‘lighting fires’. This is both metaphor and practical process. Kindling will engage us with the plant world as we find and fashion a bow, create hearthboards and gather tinder. Fire-lighting is also a collaborative exercise that invites us to attend deeply to how we work together, solve problems, navigate thresholds and share celebration. Fire has, since ancient times, provided us with insight into ourselves and our ways of being in the world.
Responding Creatively
Opportunities for a creative response to what surfaces during the week will be facilitated in various forms and places. There will be time for exploring different approaches to writing and image-making in whatever medium seems appropriate: pencil, crayons, paint. We will use the Palazzo, work by the fire and out on the land, creating alone, in twos or threes, or as a group endeavour.
Dialogue and Council
How do we bring language to experiences and encounters that often defy words? There will be plenty of space for silence as well as for dialogue: walking in pairs, and sitting in council by the fire. We will explore ways of speaking that don’t drift to our habitual logical-conceptual mode but stay close to the impressions we have picked up from our encounters with plants, land, fire and even our own bodies.
Micro-practices
In every moment of each day there is the possibility to attend to our awareness, to practise inscendence. Walking up through the village with presence in every step. Thirty seconds given to conscious breath during a lull in the day. Slow savouring of the first few mouthfuls of lunch. Pausing to touch the warm, rough stone of the house where you are staying. Sensing the evening breeze on your skin. Micro-practices lasting just moments, drawn from the longer exercises, may prove to be among the most potent elements of the week.
Ways of Knowing
In informal, facilitated discussion sessions, we will bring our explorations of the week full circle. Relating the experiences we have had to a broad field of ideas, such as Authentic Whole (Bortoft), Participative Consciousness (Barfield), Implicate Order / Holoflux (Bohm), New Animism (Abram/Kimmerer) and Divided Brain (McGilchrist), will help us find ways to carry the insights of Inscendence onwards.
Why Pari?
Pari is a small hilltop village in Tuscany, 30km south of Siena. Stone walls, narrow streets, undulating lands stretching off to Monte Amiata. The Pari Center has been here for over twenty years exploring questions at the meeting point of physics, psychology and the sacred.
Pari is more than just a stunning location for the week. The ancient village, with its landscape and its many inhabitants, both human and more-than-human, is the very ground of our enquiry. David Peat called it an alchemical vessel and it is the whole vessel that we’re curious about. What is it like to sit quietly outside the Palazzo? What do you notice as you stroll down that alley or go up that set of stairs? What comes to you as you sit day by day with a meadow flower or that gnarled and ancient olive tree?
Inscendence will run in other places in time, including in the UK. But for now, it begins here.
Who are we?
We met at a conference at the Pari Center in 2024. A coffee-break conversation found us talking about fire. We both invite it into our work — Jonathan with a bow drill, Alistair with a flint. Fire is, for us, as central to personal explorations as it is to engaging with social processes. During the week in 2024 Jonathan ran a day that began in medieval alchemy, passed through Goethean science and took us down into the gardens to encounter Grape. Early one morning, we went down to an olive grove, where Alistair led a group in nature awareness practices of his own. That was the point at which we knew there was something between us worth following.
Jonathan is a workshop leader, kindler, author and senior lecturer at an agricultural university in the UK. He brings three decades of the study of alchemy, fire-lighting and phenomenological practices of attending to plants to this unique collaboration.
Alistair spent twenty-five years working with corporate technologies, before moving on to run indoor and nature-based personal and leadership development programmes in universities and communities. He brings practices that deepen awareness of the body and the senses, and shift our sense of resonance and reciprocity with the natural world.
Our backgrounds, expertise and facilitation styles are both different and complementary. We see ourselves as two pebbles dropped into a still pond setting up a pattern of ripples in a field of experience which neither of us could create alone. And then, of course, every participant will add to this field too.
Though we have decades of land-based experiential facilitation between us, Inscendence feels like something new, inspired by the uniqueness of Pari. We know how to guide the path, but where it goes exactly, we are as eager to discover as any participant.
If you are curious about the week and have questions, please email us. We’d love to have a chat.
How can I book?
Here are the key practical details. More information on the Pari Center page – button below.
- Dates
- Monday 31 May – Monday 7 June 2027
Gather before dinner at 17:00, ends after lunch on last day - Place
- Pari, Grosseto, Tuscany
- Group
- Twenty people
- Cost
- €1,800 private accommodation
€1,650 shared accommodation
€200 deposit secures your booking - Included
- Seven nights, all meals at the village restaurant, wine and coffee with lunch and dinner, all sessions and materials.
The week is some way off. If you would like to hear how it takes shape — and to know first about other gatherings we run — leave your email and we will write occasionally. Not often.
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