Facilitator: Pavel Chvykov pchvykov@ncis.org

This is a meditation retreat. It's also a time you can be productive in your research. 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 research 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.

Practical details & Applications

Duration and dates: 1 week retreat + 1 week (optional deep dive)
- Arrival on Sunday 20 July, 2025 evening (after 5pm).
- Departure by Sunday 27 (1 week) or Saturday 2 August at the latest (2 weeks).

Applications: First-come first-serve (10 spots available) until May 15, 2025.

Fees: 500 euros/week (accommodation for the week + food on weekdays)

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.

If you're interested, reach out to us at pchvykov@ncis.org 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.

The grand vision

Turning research itself into a meditation practice, we hope to restore the lightness, joy and curiosity that originally drew most of us to science. 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 science and technology, rather than vanity and ego. We forget to play, thinking science 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. Instead, perhaps we could take inspiration remembering that many of the early scientists were monks, whose main research goal was to deepen one's own wisdom.

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.

Sample day schedule:

8-9am: morning practice (yoga, meditation, etc)
9-10am: breakfast
10-11am: mindfulness exercise (theory and practice)
11-1pm: guided co-working
1-3pm: lunch break
3-6pm: independent work
6-8pm dinner break
8-9pm: group reflection of the day

Weekend: free time (no activities or meals planned), we can direct you to mountaineering activities, hikes, painted caves, historical towns etc.

Second week (optional): silent retreat

After a week of learning and practicing together, you are invited to stay for the second week where we really dive deep into the transformative power of this work in a silent retreat format.

The silence immersion will last 3 days (Tu-Th), with a day before (Mon) and after (Fri) to prep and decompress. On these 3 days, besides the morning practice and silent meditation that we will keep doing together, you are invited to work / meditate all day, deeply immersing yourself in your flow-state, while observing what your work brings up and teaches you about yourself.

As with all meditation retreats, it is best not to have expectations, as this is a chance to go into the unknown beyond ourselves. At the same time, you can have an intention to get a lot done in this time – so prepare yourself a well-defined chunk of work you can dive into (I personally find writing to work best for such retreats).

About the facilitator:

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 their work could be such a joyful and transformative self-inquiry practice. 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.

INTP campus