See also our retreat aimed at researchers the previous week.
Facilitator: Pavel Chvykov pchvykov@umich.edu
This is a meditation retreat. It's also a time you can be productive in your work. But most importantly, it's a time to intentionally lean deeper into the joy of doing the work we love, together with like-minded people, surrounded by beautiful mountains.
The core of this will be a guided exploration of how to make our work itself a deep and joyful meditation practice. We will combine focused mindfulness practices (like yoga, breathwork, meditations), with guided co-working (where we use specific exercises to meditate as we work), independent work blocks (where we practice what we learned), and community bonding times (like music and conversation). We will systematically study where our personal meditative and our work practices are now, so we can find how to bridge them together.
NOTE: we'll have about 4 hours of focused research time scheduled per day - so don't plan for 8. But hey, most of us don’t do more than 4 hours of actual work per day anyway, no matter how long we spend at our desks.
You’ll need to have some work you can do remote at a table with the rest of the group in our guided co-working sessions. E.g., while you can step out a couple times to take a call, that should not be your primary mode of work (and try to take those during the “independent work” blocks).
Location: The INTP campus in the French Pyrenees, see directions here.
Duration and dates: 1 week retreat
- Arrival on Sunday 27 July, 2025 evening (after 5pm).
- Departure by Sunday 3 August.
Applications: First-come first-serve (12 spots available) on a rolling basis.
Fees: 580 euros (incl. accommodation for the week + food on weekdays)
[Note: if you’d love to join, but the price is a challenge, sign up for the intro call and we can discuss]
Accommodation: Mostly shared rooms of 2 people (same gender). We will try to accommodate special needs.
Meals: Vegetarian, prepared in teams. A communal session will serve as a warmup practice for mindful work in an easier context than intellectual activities.
Register Reach out to us at pchvykov@umich.edu and we will set up a call to share questions.
Once your application is confirmed, we will ask for a nonrefundable deposit of 100 euros to reserve your spot.
Turning work itself into a meditation practice, we hope to restore the lightness, joy and curiosity that originally drives us to live, build, create, collaborate and share this world together. This will not be an easy task -- we are so attached to "success" and "getting it right" in our work that equanimity and peace are hard to find. But it's an important task. In fact, we believe it is THE important task - to bring compassion and wonder to guide our systems and efforts, not vanity and ego. We forget to play, thinking our work is serious business. If the fruits of our work reflect our intentions in the process, then perhaps the global polycrisis we now face can be traced back to the rat-race that guides much of our work.
In this retreat we will explore together if another way is possible. We hope to develop ways to deconstruct the opposition we’ve been taught between work and pleasure, instead making them mutually enhancing.
Weekend: free time (no activities or meals planned) – we can go together to explore the mountains, hikes, painted caves, historical towns, etc.
Pavel Chvykov, https://www.pchvykov.com/
I got my PhD in theoretical physics at MIT in 2019, working on complex systems, specifically looking for fundamental principles for origins of life - how inert matter can become intentional. Since then I continued that research independently, worked in AI, and branched into other fields. At the same time, starting in 2017, mindfulness and Eastern introspective practices became the focus of my life. After years of meditation retreats, travels, and monasteries, I still find truly bringing mindfulness into my intellectual work to be the greatest and most valuable challenge of all. I spent much time thinking and experimenting with ways to do this, borrowing techniques from different traditions and practices, but I never found a system that I would consider to have succeeded in this. So I started running such workshops myself, and so far with surprising success: participants expressed that before these, they never imagined they could look forward to opening their laptop. Now, this retreat setting offers a much deeper opportunity for progressive skill development and learning, and I’m excited to co-create and develop this practice together.
