An offering, in the
lineage of a tea house.
Beings Club is a room where curious people find each other.
At a tea house at Plum Village in 2019, I found myself in conversations over tea that expanded my sense of what is possible.
Whilst the retreat schedule was truly valuable, I was drawn again and again to that little tea house and the conversations that could happen there – free from a prescribed topic or theme.
Beings Club is an offering in the lineage of that atmosphere.
— John
Ground
What we grow from.
We hold each other as precious
Each life in the room, including the ones nothing like yours, are treated as real and valuable and worth our care.
A regular shape makes space for free contents
Our forms stay constant so that what happens inside them can be free. The shapes held create room for flexibility.
Curiosity connects //
Stay curious
We define curiosity as an orientation to experience that is open to discovery. It's a form of play.
Salons
Space for conversations that want to happen.
A Salon is a gathering, not a webinar.
There's no panel, no slides, and no content or prescribed theme. We open with time for intentional practice, we talk in duos and trios, and the space closes as a whole.
People arrive from different places — different geographies, different decades of life, different ways of seeing. The range is the point: it's what makes salon conversations something curiosity can expand into.
You don't need to prepare anything. You don't need to have it figured out. Come as you are, and see what happens.
Why salon
What a room of curious people gives back.
Connection
The moment a conversation stops being polite and starts being real. It usually arrives in the first half hour.
Perspective
Your own life handed back to you by someone standing decades, or continents, from where you're standing.
Inspiration
Someone describes how they're actually living, and something in you sits up. Not envy — a possibility, recognised.
Play
Ideas turned over for the pleasure of it, with no obligation to conclude, defend, or be right.
Friendship
What's still there weeks later — people who know something true about you, and you about them.
Surprise
The turn nobody planned — the thought, or the person, that stays with you long after the call ends.
Sits
Meditation classes for the curious.
A Sit is a meditation class that explores the fundamentals, simply.
The techniques are simple, there is no ladder of attainment, and no vocabulary you need to learn before you join. Fundamentals, practised properly — with time for questions.
Beings Club takes a contemporary approach to mindfulness, available to exploring tradition without relying on it for reassurance. What you learn here is portable: it works on a Tuesday morning, in a difficult conversation, and in the foothills of the Himalayas.
Why sit
What a regular practice cultivates.
Ease
Life gets easier when we're friends with ourselves and can bring the spirit of play to the realm of effort.
Resilience
The capacity to meet what is happening without being knocked over by it, built slowly and on purpose.
Clarity
Seeing what's actually happening, in ourselves first and then opening naturally into everything else.
Courage
The inner resource of knowing that you can meet what's happening and respond, without turning away.
Openness
Spaciousness that does not need to know and is not afraid to either, relaxed into as what makes life; life.
Kindness
The simple way of gentleness that recognises one's own happiness as equal to that of others, and acts on it.
Field notes
What the people are saying.
"A space to slow down, reflect together, and make sense of things out loud."
"90 minutes of nothing in particular could fly by and also be so energizing."
"Genuine encounters with people whose timelines wouldn't typically intersect with mine."
"Beings Club became my Sunday ritual."
"I have had several experiences of being seen, heard, and held."
"It was amazing. I found genuine connection on each call."
"It feels like a kind of therapy — really enriching to discover new ways of thinking."
"I'm so so grateful this space exists."
"Highly recommend it to anyone who's curious but on the fence."
"I leave every week feeling more human, more like a being."
Take part
Why else did you scroll this far down?
This is our front door
Register your interest in Salons, Sits, or both.
Wonderfool
Letters on being, every 1st and 3rd Tuesday. Written by John — the same voice that hosts the room.