Ekosophy
Lab
Life as Experiment
Learning to live life as a realworld laboratory
We are facing a crisis of human-ing—a breakdown not just in what we do, but in how what it means to be human. This lab is for those curious to experiment with other ways: to treat their own lives as sites of inquiry, testing what becomes possible when we stop trying to fix ourselves and get curious about what it means to be human in a more-than-human world.
The Crisis of Human-ing
Climate change, biodiversity loss, burnout, political polarisation, rising anxiety—we often address these as separate issues, each requiring its own specialised solutions. But such fragmentation obscures a deeper pattern. Beneath these crises is a shared condition: we no longer know how to live well together—neither with one another nor within the living systems that sustain us. We don't know how to be human in a more-than-human world.
The paradox of our time is not ignorance, but disconnection. We possess ample data, compelling narratives, and proven interventions. And yet, knowing does not translate into doing. Awareness does not reliably produce care. Responsibility does not consistently lead to action. This gap points to a failure of orientation rather than information. We are facing a crisis of meaning, belonging, and relationship.
What is missing is not another framework, not another set of targets, not another innovation. What is missing is a way of living that integrates thought, value, and practice—philosophy that is not merely studied but lived.
This lab is a response to the crisis of human-ing. For five days, we step out of the rhythms of efficiency and optimisation to ask more fundamental questions: What does it mean to be human within the web of life? How do we learn to live our lives as ongoing experiments in relating differently—to ourselves, to each other, to the living world? The goal is not answers, but a practice: learning to treat your own existence as a laboratory for discovering what makes life life-ing.
What is Ekosophy?
eko
From oikos (home, household) and ego (I, myself)—the self and the whole, not opposed but interwoven. We can only ever become fully actualised in relation to the whole.
sophy
From sophia—wisdom. Not knowledge about things, but lived wisdom: a way of being that emerges through relationship and practice.
Ekosophy—the lived wisdom of navigating one's life in the whole. It begins with a recognition: personal transformation and ecological transformation are not separate projects. We can't address planetary crises without addressing how we've constructed selfhood. The "I" is not separate from but constituted by the "we" and the "world."
At the heart of ekosophy lies a redefinition of love—not as sentiment but as disciplined attention, as a way of knowing, as a mode of being-with the world. Modern culture has split care for the self (endless self-optimisation) from care for the world (abstract guilt about global problems). This split exhausts us. Ekosophy speaks of radical self-authorship and radical love for the whole as inseparable. Neither can flourish without the other.
Life as Laboratory
Ekosophy understands life itself as the laboratory—not in the sense of experimentation upon the world, but as ongoing participation within it. It is the laboratory of the entangled, the emergent, the alive.
The question is not whether we experiment—we are always already experimenting with how to live. Every meal, every relationship, every choice about work and rest is an implicit experiment generating data about what enables and constrains flourishing. The question is how we engage with the experiments we are already running.
The old idea that "if I do this, I will become that" feels rigid and lifeless. We are not here to replicate someone else's life but to run an experiment of our own. Our variables are different. So is our hypothesis for how to live.
But this is not the laboratory of the white coat—sterile, controlled, seeking mastery. That posture asks: How does this work? How do I control it? Ekosophy proposes a different posture, closer to the explorer, the apprentice: Where am I, and what is this asking of me? The explorer knows by going, not by standing outside. The explorer accepts that knowledge changes the knower.
Sometimes the most vital information comes from a contaminated sample. And they always are contaminated—by paradoxes, pains, permeations we try so hard to purify. A laboratory understood this way is not a path toward a Better, but a slow apprenticeship to the strange, the entangled, the messy, the unfinished.
Five Days
DAY ONE
The Crisis Beneath the Crises
We begin by naming what we're up against. Not the separate crises—climate, burnout, polarisation—but the shared condition beneath them: a fundamental confusion about how to live well, how to relate, how to be human in a more-than-human world. Through contemplative practice and philosophical inquiry, we examine the dominant paradigm that shaped us—reductionism, dualism, the belief that reality can be controlled through detached analysis.
Opening circle
Philosophical inquiry
Solo nature time
Body practice
DAY TWO
The Knowledge-Action Gap
Why doesn't knowing translate into doing? We explore the gap between what we know and how we live—not as personal failure but as a collective condition shaped by centuries of mechanistic thinking. We examine how awareness doesn't reliably produce care, how responsibility doesn't consistently lead to action. And we begin to sense what might bridge that gap: not more information, but a different quality of relationship.
Deep reading
Somatic exploration
Dialogue practice
Forest immersion
DAY THREE
Love as Method
The heart of the lab. Ekosophy is fundamentally a practice of love—not sentiment but disciplined attention, a way of knowing, a mode of being-with the world. We work with the shift from technique to orientation: not "What intervention should we deploy?" but "How are we in relation to what is happening?" The quality of the response becomes inseparable from the quality of the relationship that generates it.
Relational practices
Contemplative walk
Sense-making session
Creative expression
DAY FOUR
Life as Laboratory
Now we turn to methodology. Change is not something that needs to be initiated—change is already always happening. The question is how we tune into it. We learn to design experiments for the laboratory of daily life: forming questions, living into the data, revising, questioning again. We practice navigating complexity, holding paradox, acting wisely from not-knowing.
PhilosophyGym practice
Small group inquiry
Movement session
Evening fire circle
DAY FIVE
Taking the Lab Home
The real experiment begins when you leave. We design personal experiments to run in the coming weeks—not productivity hacks but genuine inquiries into how to live. We consider what support structures help sustain a life lived as inquiry. And we make a commitment central to ekosophy: we do not ask of others what we have not first explored ourselves. Our lives are our laboratories.
Experiment design
Peer commitments
Closing ceremony
The Invitation.
What if Life is not a problem to be solved, But a question to be experienced ?
PhilosophyGyms are workouts to exercise your ethical imagination in good company. It’s not about mastering theories or reaching neat conclusions. It’s about strengthening your capacity to sit with complexity, to speak from curiosity, to fall in love with the awe of Life and to notice the wisdom that emerges when we gather around the questions that matter.