The EDE adventure continued in France for the second successive year!

In October 2022, 25 participants gathered in the ecovillage Sainte-Camelle to explore community living and a regenerative lifestyle – a deep, transformative, joyful and rich experience, at the heart of Life!

As an EDE team, we took this opportunity for a second edition to strengthen the foundations of the program in a French context and to take further steps towards enriching this transformative experience
aiming for a regenerative culture. The list of highlights and learnings is vast but we choose to extract 4 precious stones to share with you:

● The power of the matrix

One of the focuses in our EDE’s preparation was to bring more consistency in the skeleton of the program: What is the red thread of this EDE? What is the participant’s journey?

On top of the EDE curriculum, we brought different systems together like: the CLIPS model, Dragon Dreaming, Work that reconnects, The Medicine Wheel, the seasons and elements, and to design what
we called the Miro’s journey; our main frame (“miro/miraud” in french means somebody who does not see well, so it’s for us, the journey to open our eyes … to Life). It involved 4 main steps: Me and
You, Me and Us, Us and the World, and At the heart of Life. This frame helped us to place the different EDE’s modules in our program with more structure and coherency and to design a clearer container for us, participants and speakers.

In co-creation and co-facilitation with participants, we opened and closed each week with meditation and activities in connection with the week’s intention; element and keywords. It helps us to walk
together, hand in hand, through each step of the journey.

● The power of the interdependency

“Fractal” was one of our key words as a team this year! We realized the immense correlation between what was happening within the organizational EDE team and its reflection within the group of
participants. For example, if we saw that when we were not fully aligned together as a team, or if there was anything unsaid between us; as small as it was, we could observe some signals of tensions
present within the main group of participants - like a mirror. It felt like we were moving together and impacting each other. Thus, it invited us to step even more into our responsibility by taking care of anything raising within our small “EDE team” container (like a tension, discomfort, annoyance, etc.) and to embody this new culture within ourselves fully and within our group to offer the most authentic container to the participants. It showed us also how interdependency is so present in our life ‘s canvas.

● The power of the tribe

As one of our objectives is to create a hearted, supportive and self-managed human family which grows together towards the manifestation of a regenerative culture, we organized 4 days of festival
after the EDE where the previous year participants were invited. The days were filled with open-space time and tribe gatherings for dancing, singing and sharing our stories and projects. It was heart-
blowing to see the encounter of past and new “members” and the growth of this beautiful family and tribe.

● The power of Nature

To finish this article with a celebration, we were delighted to welcome a Druid as a special guest of the art and heart of life! In the last week of the EDE, he guided us through the celebration of Samhain, a
celtic festivity which marks the end of a cycle and the opening of a new chapter! And as icing on the cake, two students have been very inspired and are going to follow the way of Druidism, one as a bard
and the other as a plant healer.