Praxis Food residency: Pioneering the next Food culture
09/06 - 02/07/2023
What: A 3 weeks residency to empower yourself and others by learning conscious food practices and plant-based meal preparations which nourish mind, body and soul. This will redefine your relationship to food and have an impact on our collective mental health. Through a series of hands-on workshop, retreat, participatory cooking, and communal living you will experience how to bring peace within and around. When: 09/06/2023 - 02/07/2023 Where: Life Itself Praxis Hub, Bergerac, France (near Bordeaux). Who: cooking activists , bodhisattvas , people interested in food in conscious co-living communities, people curious to let themselves be in-formed by food and act from its teachings. (11 persons max) Facilitator: Valérie Duvauchelle Cost: From 1,200 € to 1,650 €, including 3 meals a day. **Early birds: 25% off for signing before the 9th of may **. Prices are for 3 weeks of retreat, training, and conscious community living.
This Residency is both a practical and embodied experience incorporating the basics of the benevolent kitchen that Valerie has actualised from the zen food temple practice and bridged it with permaculture, deep ecology, collective embodiment and food community organization to answer accordingly the questions of our time.
Context
Food is life in action, a circular process that allows us to receive as well as give. It is the most direct experience we can have with the world. When we eat, we literally eat the world, the earth, but we also eat what this earth is made of - its mycelium, the agreements found by the hundreds of cooks before us. It is also the whole history of our food that is tasted with each bite, the history of all the relationships it has woven between the land, the people, the animals, and the landscapes.
Cooking and eating are much more profound than we imagine, and today, perhaps more than ever in the history of humanity, they offer us the opportunity to remember and recognize that each meal is what binds us together, our depressed identity which bears the imprint of the past, while at the same time marking the future.
The transformation of the world depends on the way we look at it, and this can be activated by communion with our food. This can only be done through joy, not dogma. It is an activism of contemplation as powerful as militant activism. It is because we eat every day that we live. To reconnect with this reality is to reconnect with the joy of the community of the living which reactivated us, and we can easily spread this way of practicing food like a virus, just by cooking for people around us.
Program
During this residency you will experience a broader food territory and develop your capacity to contribute better to a new way of living, cooking food that matters in times of trouble.
Retreat
Starting with 3 days of deep time grounding to explore how we can cook our life to better nourish the world. During the retreat you will learn and live:
- The posture of receiving
- 6 tastes, colors and textures menus
- Basic 3-bowl temple food cooking frame
- 3 spirit of the (cook) practitioner
- Canevas base for main dishes, desserts, cookies
- Eating in 3 bowls (Oryoki) and contemplate our food
- Understand the meaning of the Temple food menus and rituals that can inspire us in our communities
- Feeling the nourishment of the inbetween
- Being supported by deep time and lineages.
Workshop
During this time you will explore an integrative food system that can brings a deep sense of body mind nourishment from plant based menus to your community. During the workshop you will learn experiment:
- Analyze our intimate relationship to food
- Explore the notion of personal need
- An integrative approach to food
- A food system meta-model awareness
- Roles and organization in the spirited kitchen
- An internalized scarcity syndrome
- The cross-disciplinary exploration of the relationship to food today
- A benevolent community cooking methodology
- Peace of mind in the kitchen
- Practice of the situation
- A way to compose balanced, gourmet vegan menus
- An inclusive self-perception
- A different types of satiety
- The art of recycling
Community Living
During this time you will integrate the collective food system and createspaces that inspires new forms of food activities and conversations. As a new formed organism you will see how the collective embodiment of food can activate and inspire your creativity. Our time will be rhythmic by our Praxis ecology and the 4 minimal viable practices (sitting, cooking, cleaning and regulating) and take the time to celebrate the beginning of summer, swimming in the dordogne, paddling; visiting the Dordogne caves etc… while getting the necessary time to work.
Daily Schedule
Here is the general frame of the 1st week:
- 7h30: posture awakening
- 8h00: just sitting meditation
- 8h30: free breakfast
- 10h00: cooking
- 12h30: lunch in silence and cleaning
- 16h30: just sitting 30 mn (during retreat)
- 17h00: cooking
- 18h30: dinner and cleaning
- 19h30: 3 min sharings in pairs
- 20h45: just sitting meditation (30 mn) (only during retreat)
The workshop will be the same hours with less sitting, then residency will be co designed to match the needs of this new formed organism. We will be off.
APPLY NOW please register your interest here and Valerie will quickly get back to you.Please mention if you want to come for a shorter stay, we will adjust regarding availibility.
The Bergerac hub: a space to explore community of practices
The Bergerac Hub is interested in the balance between collective sharing of community care and individual space. Exploring one's personal needs in light of those of the collective is finding the fluctuating middle ground between private and collective, solitary and group activities is the funambulist proposition we explore at the Praxis hub in Bergerac. For this we propose a dynamic framework of Praxis ecology with a structure based on 4 main practices ( sitting , cooking, cleaning and regulating) in which each group can evolve according to its proclivities.
Facilitation
Valérie Duvauchelle
(photo Eleonore Grigon pour Ilots Magazine)
Valerie is a passionate advocate for activating new ways of being in the world. She believes that to live fully we need to allow for a radically different relationship to the world and to ourselves. Her specific interest is in the application of new ways of being in community and seeks to understand the invisible evolutionary impulses that occur when we do things together. She is a Tenzo cook in the Zen tradition and through her books, programs and retreats brings the universal teachings of this tradition into conscious community living. Her dedicated practice is to cultivate a posture of "being witness” in her life. She embodies the balance between deep commitment and spontaneous playfulness. Valérie is a pioneer within Life Itself and co-curator of the Bergerac Praxis Hub.
Website: La Cuisine De La Bienveillance
She also wrote a book about the zen practice of food "the silent taste" (Actes Sud).
Full bio here.
Testimonials
Catherine Sengthavy, Kinésithérapeute, Shiatsu
The training proposed by Valerie Duvauchelle is unique and original,The strength of this teaching is to realize that questions that could be considered purely practical (how to compose a menu, what quantity, what ingredient to have) stem from a deeper personal reflection. The experience makes it possible to no longer distinguish the limits of what I think I am, the other, the others, the near and the far.
Ona Maioco, Vegan Chef
My encounter with Valérie has profoundly transformed my relationship with cooking. As a fan of "flashy" seasonings, I was able to discover another way of cooking allowing listening before any "voluntarist" intervention, erasing the ego and inviting us to a new dance. It's a priceless gift in these troubled times to put cooking back at the heart of our lives and communities, the indispensable engine of our joyful sustenance…and I am so grateful.
Sandra Dao, retreat Participant, facilitator and owner of La Source
One of the first things that touched me was the fluidity and simplicity with which everything was organized in the kitchen, in a true collaboration. Valerie was able to quickly establish a trust and sharing that was precious to me, and calling upon our own creativity.. There is something life changing about this teaching.
Tiernan Banks, poet and leader of Death Crash
This experience has led me to reflect on: the seeming benefits/importance of (measured) hunger; the importance of variety; the importance of raw foods and balanced flavours. What has been most striking has not just been the physical benefits from this, but the meditative / calming aspects too. It is very rare that a lunch/dinner will inspire this level of reflection in me, and so that in itself speaks volumes!
