SPIRITUAL ECOLOGY FESTIVAL PROGRAMME

Join us on Saturday 6th June as we begin our walk towards the festival with an Overnight Planting Pilgrimage, creating a ring of sacred trees around central London. Weaving together faith and ecological sites on a magical night walk, we'll journey a circle of the city and will close at St Ethelburga's. We'll be hosted by hidden community gardens and diverse places of worship, planting trees by moonlight and sharing food, song, music, prayer and ceremony. Join us as we come together in prayer to set our intention for the festival.

Following his powerful contribution to last year’s festival, Sicelo Mbatha returns to St Ethelburga’s to share once again the wisdom of deeper nature connection and spiritual ecology. Drawing on his Zulu heritage and a lifetime of close relationship with the wild, Sicelo invites us to explore what it means to belong within the larger web of life. In a time of ecological and social fracture, this keynote offers a grounding vision of connection, responsibility and reverence for the living Earth.

European fairy tales provide us with insight into every level of our interconnected stories, reminding us of the moral codes that allow all of us – human, other-than-human, planet – to flourish. They offer up a world in which we humans are fully enmeshed, showing us how to be in service to something bigger than ourselves. Their focus on community, relationship, respect, reciprocity and the embrace of the gift economy is an antidote to the individualistic discourse that’s prevalent in the West today. In this way, they remind us of the values, and offer up the meaning that we’ve lost.

What does it mean to belong to the land at a time of ecological breakdown, social fracture, and rising tensions around identity, faith and place? In this timely conversation, Daze Aghaji, Abel Pearson, Claire Ratinon and Sharon Blackie, chaired by Francesca Price, bring rural and urban, practical and mythic, activist and regenerative perspectives into dialogue. Together, they will explore how our relationships with land are shaped by story, food and stewardship, while honestly engaging the tensions that arise where land, identity and community meet.

Meet some of the festival’s featured authors and have your book signed. These sessions offer a lovely opportunity to connect with festival contributors whose work speaks to the festival’s themes of land, belonging, story and spiritual ecology. Final details of participating authors will be announced soon.

Meet Sharon Blackie for a special festival signing of her new book, Ripening. Come by to purchase a copy of Ripening, have it signed, and meet one of the festival’s most beloved voices.

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee will join us to discuss ecological crisis as a form of spiritual forgetfulness and the possibility of a renewed relationship with the Earth grounded in awareness, reciprocity, and care. Drawing from his forthcoming book, Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology, Sufi teachings, and storytelling, he will explore themes of grief, transformation, and the sacred nature of the living world, and offer a framework for how spiritual ecology can inform both personal practice and collective response at this critical moment.

What becomes possible when two friends sit down to speak with openness, shared reflection and care? In this conversation, good friends Sicelo Mbatha and Jo Winsloe explore the meaning of Indigeneity through story, friendship, land and lived experience. Speaking from a place of trust and shared reflection, they will open up questions of belonging, identity, memory and relationship with place. At a time when competing stories of identity, indigeneity and belonging to land are to the fore of both ecological movements and political movements around the world, this will be an honest and wide-ranging conversation exploring Indigeneity from a South African and British perspective.

In a time of growing division and environmental crisis, how do Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions guide our care for the Earth and for one another in times of conflict? Chine McDonald, Rabbi Jonathan and Dr Zaza Johnson Elsheikh, in conversation with Rebecca Brierley, explore how their faith perspectives shape our relationship with the natural world and each other. Together, they reflect on the role of interfaith relations in deepening understanding, strengthening shared responsibility, and caring for both people and planet.

In a time of deep division, how do we stay in relationship across difference? This interactive workshop offers a taster of St Ethelburga’s depolarisation training, introducing our 5-step framework for holding a radical centre in divided times. Not a political middle ground, but a place of moral courage and curiosity, the Radical Centre invites us to stay in dialogue where it would be easier to retreat or react. Through reflection and simple dialogue practices, you’ll explore how to connect with your values, understand the deeper drivers of conflict, and begin to build the skills to stay present in difficult conversations. Rooted in peacebuilding, this session offers practical tools to help you build trust and prioritise relationship over persuasion in your work, communities, and everyday life.

In a time of ecological loss, social fragmentation, and rising conflict, many of us carry grief, often alone. This session offers an embodied, relational space to acknowledge and tend what is here, together. Through circle practice, ritual, somatic awareness, and shared witness, we explore grief as something that can connect us to ourselves, each other, and the living world. When met, even gently, many people experience a sense of renewed connection. Open to all. No experience is needed. Come as you are. Tanya Forgan works at the intersection of relational practice, embodied presence, and ceremony, and has been gathering people in circles for many years.

Anna is an established musician from Zimbabwe playing both the Mbira and Nyunga Nyunga instruments. Her career as a singer, dancer, musician and educator spans over three decades. Anna uses song and storytelling to share the oral stories of Zimbabwe which she learned from her grandmother, uncle and mentor Baba Simba. Prepare to be immersed into the vibrant people of Zimbabwe with songs that reflect a rich culture deeply embedded within the Shona culture of Zimbabwe.

Join us to share contemplative silence for the sake of our world. Those of all faiths and none are warmly welcome. There’s no need to have a prayer or meditation practice, or a spiritual belief of any kind. Whatever your preferred mode of contemplative practice, you are welcome to bring it to this gathering.

Studies show that divided Britain is united on two issues. A majority of the country feels exhausted with the divisive tone of our civic conversations. And a majority of people are deeply worried about climate. How can we depolarise our conversations with one another? How can we bridge divides for the sake of the Earth? This will be an interactive, participatory workshop exploring how we can step into the shoes of the ‘other’, and become more functional and united in our response to climate.

What could it mean for us to come into relationship with rivers as living kin? Drawing on both Indigenous perspectives and contemporary science, this workshop will: consider different ways of understanding rivers and water as animate; make story-maps of our own waterways; learn about legal rights and personhood for rivers; make simple river offerings. Together, we’ll ask what impact it would have on river stewardship to reflect a more animate and relational experience of the living world, where our rivers are both vital physical systems and also holders of meaning, awareness and presence.

As old systems falter and new possibilities emerge, leadership must evolve. This session explores adaptive leadership as a response to our rapidly changing world—where uncertainty, conflict and transformation are ever-present. Dana Karout, Aarif Abraham and Saya Snow Kitasei bring perspectives from human rights, cultural work and leadership development to explore how we lead across difference and disruption. Connecting to the festival’s call to bridge divides and deepen our relationship with Earth, the panel will ask: how do we cultivate resilience, listen deeply, and act with integrity? What tools, stories and practices can help us to lead more wisely in times of transition?

In this session, storyteller and author Martin Shaw explores Bronze Age stories that speak to the conditions of modern life. From Esther to Job, from Joseph to Ruth, what do these strange and extraordinary tales tell us about life and how to live it? Expect oral storytelling, not PowerPoint.

This festival represents a set of aspirations for the world and for various communities within it. As with all aspirations, these come into contact with the reality of how change actually happens: more slowly than we hope, often resisted by the very people we are trying to serve, and sometimes even by ourselves. This workshop takes up that tension through the lens of adaptive leadership: a problem-centred framework focused on the collective work a community must do when technical fixes fall short and mindsets, loyalties or values have to shift. Together, we will bring this framework into practice and explore practical tools for diagnosing persistent challenges in groups, communities and organisations.

Meet some of the festival’s featured authors and have your book signed. These sessions offer a lovely opportunity to connect with festival contributors whose work speaks to the festival’s themes of land, belonging, story and spiritual ecology. Final details of participating authors will be announced soon.

How can music help us reconnect with the living world? In this soulful workshop, violinist and composer Simmy Singh explores the role of music, and especially song, in spiritual practice and in our relationship with the web of life. She invites participants to reconnect with both their inner landscapes and the more-than-human world. Rooted in a love of nature, this workshop is an invitation to attune to the Earth through sound.

Simmy Singh is a violinist and composer whose work flows across classical, electronic, jazz and folk traditions. With Indian, English and Welsh roots, and a passion for diversity and connection, Simmy brings a rich, emotive voice to her instrument. Deeply inspired by the natural world, she sees music as a bridge to help others reconnect with the earth and their inner landscapes. Whether performing with orchestras at the Royal Albert Hall or collaborating with electronic artists in intimate settings, her music invites deep listening and heartfelt response. At the Spiritual Ecology Festival, Simmy offers a soulful performance that draws on her cross-genre explorations—an invitation to pause, feel, reconnect and reflect on our intimate and magical relationship to the web of life.

For a few hours, humans become “living books,” offering personal stories of land, belonging, and identity in a time of intensifying social fragmentation and geopolitical conflict. Our Human Books will include a rich mix of festival speakers, faith leaders, artists, activists, growers, storytellers and community practitioners, each bringing their own lived experience of land, faith and belonging. Books will explore a wide range of questions and themes, including reflections on spiritual ecology across a huge range of traditions and perspectives, celebrations of the deep bond between people and landscape, explorations of what lies in the shadow of spiritual ecology spaces, and much more. Browse the catalogue, choose your book, settle down to listen, and journey through the themes of this festival, through the lens of another’s experience.

Old and modern storytelling from an Irish mind deeply influenced by John Moriarty, Billy Connolly and Martin Shaw.

Tommy Tiernan and Martin Shaw talk myth, God, despair, joy, and how stories may wish to be told. Mythologist, storyteller and cultural activist Martin Shaw, and actor, comedian, podcaster and chat show host Tommy Tiernan, each bring depth, wit and wild imagination to the conversation. This promises to be a rare and memorable encounter, alive with mystery, humour and insight.