Pioneering Next Food Culture, June 2023

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 challenges of our time. Prices are for 3 weeks of retreat, training, and community living. Shorter stay for training week only is possible . If interest but in financial strech please contact us.

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 experience ancient zen food practice:

• The posture of receiving
• 6 tastes, colors and textures menus
• Basic 3-bowl temple food cooking frame
• Feeling the nourishment of the inbetween
• 5 contemplations
• shared silence with O ryoki ( 3 bowls)

Workshop

During this time you will explore how to bridge this ancient tradition to consious food practuce in an integrative food system that can brings a deep sense of body mind nourishment from plant based menus for yourself and your community. During the workshop you will learn experiment:

• Analyze our intimate relationship to food
• Roles and organization in the spirited kitchen
• 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 plant based menus
• 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:

• 7h00: posture awakening ( during retreat)
• 7h30: just sitting meditation
• 8h10: free breakfast
• 10h00: cooking
• 12h30: silent lunch and cleaning
• 14h00: integrative space where questions will be contemplate
• 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 only 1 morning sitting. Residential time will be regular Praxis frame with cooking at 11h30 and 17h30 including Food Lab process ( deshydratation, lacto fermentation and maybe koji) . Residencial time will leaves 5 hours for your own work per day . Evenings will be emergent propositions. WE will be off with the possibility to go to Plum village.

APPLY NOW please register your interest here and Valerie will quickly get back to you.

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.org

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!

The Praxis Hub

The Bergerac Praxis Hub is gathering groups and communities interested in radically committing, together, to be in kinship with the world as it is. We will respond to uncertainty together, with collective embodied practices that include deep attention to humble activities like breathing, creating living space, or preparing food together. 

Beyond the seemingly paradoxical nature of contemplative activism, we carry the intention of the ungraspable concept of a metamodern monastery.

Our vision is to create a space where individuals can come together to explore, practice, and embody new ways of being and relating to each other and the world.

See more about the Praxis Hub here.

The Praxis Lab 

The  Praxis Lab is an evolutionary research space within the Praxis Hub aiming to define and document through scientific observations the ecologies of practices that foster a disposition of engaging differently in the world.

In particular through collecting data and studying the interrelations between spaces, structures and practices, it aims to make visible how the interplay/relational  identity between individuals and their environment (space, structure, practices) shapes their emotional, spiritual and intellectual disposition. 

The Ouroboros Residencies and Praxis Lab team will work together to identify, define and articulate how by focussing on the way we practice, i.e the collective “posture”, can catalyze an intentional state of receptivity, of being “in-formed” rather than, or as a premise of, being “trans-formed” into a collective field.

How to Apply

Residency Application Process:

1. A preliminary Expression of Interest is completed by participants on the Life Itself website.
2. The Hosting Team contacts you to discuss your participation in the residency.

 Apply: Praxis residency pre-registration link