An ecology of conscious community living
Come explore. Come share. Come make sense of community, together.
Rooted in an ancestral way of life, anchored in zen tradition, this course invites you to design your own praxis ecology, a living structure for how you build, sustain, and belong to community.
Key info
- When: Starting 15 September 2026
- Format: 6 sessions across 3 months
- Where: Online
- Recordings: Available for anyone who can't attend live
- Led by: Valérie Duvauchelle · Life Itself
- Price: €250 · Early bird 30% off before 15 August
Course structure
6 sessions across 3 months
The program opens with a free, one-hour introductory webinar, live and recorded, allowing prospective participants to assess whether the framework fits their context. It then unfolds over six sessions across three months, combining short self-paced videos, questionnaires, and paired design tasks with live sessions led by Valérie every two weeks.
At the center of the course is the ARC, a set of five Minimum Viable Practices that participants use to build their own project:
- Sitting in the Trouble: staying present with difficulty rather than reacting or escaping
- Activating the Body: using embodiment to stabilize awareness and ground action
- Moving Together: building shared rhythms, roles, and coordination
- Cooking Together: organizing food as a daily collective anchor
- Connecting: cultivating belonging, trust, and perspective-sharing
Each session guides participants to design their own Minimum Viable Practice, culminating in a sixth live session where the full cohort presents their individual Praxis Ecology designs, plans that can be applied to settings ranging from a one-week retreat to a three-day gathering, a three-month co-living experiment, or ongoing community life.
Schedule
- 15 Sep · Free introductory webinar
- 22 Sep · Module 1
- 29 Sep · Live session 1
- 6 Oct · Module 2
- 13 Oct · Live session 2
- 20 Oct · Module 3
- 27 Oct · Live session 3
- 3 Nov · Module 4
- 10 Nov · Live session 4
- 17 Nov · Module 5
- 24 Nov · Live session 5
- 1 Dec · Live session 6 · cohort presentations
Each module includes:
- 2 to 4 videos, including guest videos
- Supporting documents and links related to the theme
- Reflection questions to support your own design process
- A live session where we all share
Your facilitator
Valérie Duvauchelle
Valérie Duvauchelle is a contemplative activist and secular Zen nun in the Sōtō tradition. For the past fifteen years, she has carried the spirit of the tenzo, the Zen role of the one who "activates" food, into conscious communities around the world.
A pioneer of the Life Itself movement, she has spent years developing, at the Riverside Life Itself Hub in Bergerac, France, a praxis ecology for what she calls the cosmic monks of the Second Renaissance.
She is the author of two French-language books, Le goût du silence, la pratique zen de l'alimentation (Actes Sud) and Shōjin, la cuisine zen des temples (Hachette), in which she shows how sitting, cooking, working, and celebrating are equally sacred acts: each one a way of manifesting a fully lived life.
You can see her journey here.
Contact Valérie for any questions at [email protected].