Festival of Listening 2025

It is a joy to offer The Festival of Listening to you! The idea of this first gathering was born from the belief that to heal and succeed, we need to truly listen, to be present, and to be able to show others that we are engaged.

It is now happening at Corfu Buddha Hall from 28th April to 2nd May 2025 with the gift of seminal workshop contributions from Ruby May, John Thompson, Roula Papathanasiou, Jonathan Dingle FRSA, Arianna Artioli, - and many others as well as music from Igor Olivier Ezendam, Jagaspace Gong SPA, and special guests from the international scene.

Tristana Lauro - Tristana is the co-founder of the Festival of Listening. She says:

"At the heart of this Festival’s creation there is a vulnerable and deep desire to explore the complexity of human relating. I feel that listening is the thread that connects us all and can truly deepen our individual and collective relationships. Sadly we often fail at it.

As Rachel Naomi Remen says, “A loving silence often has more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words”. Many of us didn’t have anyone showing us this precious feature of being human, we were perhaps invited to listen to what was said on the television but not to what we were saying to each other.. Slowly finding refuge and developing coping mechanisms that make it even more difficult to listen to one another, we are becoming a society that is not able to individually take responsibility for what we are creating.

This festival is a manifestation of this desire, to connect, to understand, to evolve.

I worked as a Coach for the last 13 years expanding on Mindfulness and Tantra. Most recently I moved into Community and Employment Mediation ; helping people to move from a place of struggle to a place of freedom, I recently had the blessing of supporting The Society Of Mediators in an extraordinary Restorative Justice project involving members of Alexandra’s township in Johannesburg, South Africa, a project that brought the universal tools of mediation to Social Workers, Lawyers and members of the community who want to be catalysts for change.

This passion for listening has long been the basis of the mediation and negotiation courses that the Society of Mediators presents and came into focus in 2024 during our work in Corfu, South Africa, the Caribbean and Europe. We decided we would try to bring together some of the great leaders in listening, in mediation, restorative justice, and conflict resolution - internally and externally - to help guide those interested in finding greater awareness to new knowledge.

That started with us: we have invited the amazing facilitators listed on this page because we want to listen, love, and learn from them. And we figured if we found them inspiring others would too! So here we are - with a week of discourses, music, sessions, learning and skills workshops this week to help in building Deep Listening.

Thank you to everyone who has accepted and made this happen. We look forward to welcoming you to Corfu. To the first Festival of Listening!