The Field Festival
It is the second day of the Field festival. I am looking at a young woman licking her fingers sensually. Her hips are swaying and she is softly moaning as she is moving around the circle. We are 4 people standing around her, just spectating. Moments later we are looking at a large man screaming and humping the floor as he is embodying his “primal fuck”. The large hall at Ängsbacka is reverberating with screams from 100 people doing the same accompanied by noise from the musicians on the stage.
In august 2025 I went to the Field festival. I had been invited to be part of the facilitator team and lead Circling workshops at the festival. It was the first year of the festival and it was presented as:
“..the first large-scale gathering dedicated to exploring and amplifying our innate capacity for coherent, connected presence. Imagine a festival (or even a world) where we come together, not as isolated individuals, but as one unified organism.A Gathering at the Edge of Human Potential
A living experiment in group resonance.
We’re placing the group field — our invisible but palpable interconnectedness — at the center of our shared experience.
Through embodiment, emergence, and attunement, we’ll listen deeply to what wants to happen between us, and through the collective soul.
Looking back I should maybe have reacted to the language used. I don’t like large claims so much and this is definitely somewhat more high-strung than what I usually prefer. But I got excited about meeting a community of leaders with a shared interest in listening and presence and was charmed by being invited.
I wouldn’t say that I had a bad experience at the Field festival. I met some wonderful people and it was interesting to see Ängsbacka. I generally liked the vibe around meals and in breaks, where people would hang out on the lawns and do all the stuff that humans do. I also had some nice experiences leading workshops and although I had mixed experiences in the workshops I took part in, some of them were really good. However I did also have quite an intense experience of anger and disgust throughout a lot of the festival and ended up pretty disappointed by how “listening to the field” was interpreted and put into action at the festival.
I was particularly disappointed that the common gatherings happening after breakfast every morning were focused on guiding the group, rather than listening. For me it felt more like facilitated collective rituals, meant to lead the group into a particular state of coherence – which for me (and quite a few others I talked to during the festival) made experiences that didn’t fit into the particular idea of “Tribe” seem unwelcome. Looking back I think that these gatherings (in some conjunction with the team meetings) was what made the whole festival feel offputting for me.
What we were doing was presented as a movement from independence to interdependence. I believe that this is a misunderstanding. Interdependence for me is a fact of being, that we can become increasingly aware of, it is not something that we should try to create or enforce. I have a strong stand for healthy independence AND healthy interdependence. Surrender can be beautiful, but so can discernment. Intimacy for me comes when we are open to being with what is (including tensions, separation, independence, lack of trust) and when we dare to show up (and listen) to what is. Then we sometimes find our way into an experience of togetherness and the inherent interdependence of being. It can’t be forced. And it felt forced at the Field festival.
My experience of workshops at the festival ranged from a deeply sincere and touching interactive concert experience, a really good workshop on public speaking and a few lovely embodiment practices to a pretty mediocre qigong workshop labeled as an “energy field experience” and a lecture about “Radical responsibility” that I found intellectually offensive.
I felt quite lonely in the facilitator team. I felt rather sceptical about the way the festival was going and kept meeting participants who were disappointed or angry, but the general vibe in the team meetings was that everything was going really well and it was confusing for me to experience this dissonance. I was particularly impacted by having one of the other facilitators suggest that the reason why people were unhappy at the festival was that they were triggered, because they were “not used to being in such a high frequency environment”.
My own karma
Something I love about the practices I lead is that they show me as well as others something important about ourselves. They are a mirror that shows us how we are in the world and we get a chance to reflect on it, as we have a bit more time and presence than what is usual in everyday life, to become conscious of our own doing. In some way every experience has this potential. If I am willing to listen I am constantly getting feedback from the world.
At my own workshops I emphasize this aspect. Whether it is “silence and touch” or “circling and surrendered leadership” I tell the participants that the way I see it, nothing shows up in the space that we are not bringing with us. We carry our own rules with us into the spaces we inhabit and we are thus experiencing our own karma (our doing) in action. The work is to become more aware of our unconscious doing.
This is also true for the field festival.
Reflecting on the experience I definitely dropped my own leadership at several points during the festival. I didn’t want to “create trouble” being a newcomer in the leaders group and at Ängsbacka. I pulled back and became more of an observer than I would have liked to be and I didn’t bring my concerns and struggles directly to the people they concerned. Now, when I am out of it, I wonder why it seemed so unavailable for me to simply tell the main organizers how I felt about the sessions during the festival, why I didn’t protest more at the team meetings or didn’t voice my frustration during the workshops that I didn’t like. In other words: I could have shown up more.
However, this idea of “karma” (or self-responsibility or whatever you choose to call it) can also be weaponized in a way where any experience you have is something that arises in you and thus something you need to deal with yourself. In the context of the field festival I was afraid that people would try to fix me if I brought myself forth, rather than listen to me.
What was the Field festival trying to achieve?
Something very important for me was not part of this festival and it mattered enough that I wasn’t able or willing to be part of the field (as in the field that the festival organizers wanted to create, not the actual emergent field that is always there). I did not feel safe (in the facilitation team) and my assumption was that if I brought my experience it would be seen as a disease to be treated rather than as important information about the collective field. That I would be gaslit rather than welcomed.
If the field had been presented as a “taster style” festival where you could go to try out various practices and leaders I think I would have been less frustrated with some of the workshops I went to. If it had been presented as a “guided journey towards group coherence” I would have been less surprised with the vibe of the big gatherings (maybe I wouldn’t have come to the festival at all). But I came in with a strong, if not expectation, then hope of finding an aligned community of leaders, focused on really listening to what is happening in the group field – and my experience was that a lot of experiences were ignored or made wrong.
This was the first year of the Field festival and I imagine that the organizers will have a lot of thoughts about what to improve before next year. It is very likely that my experiences has a lot to do with this being the first year of a very ambitious project. However I am wondering if there was a more fundamental misalingnment on purpose in play here.
The answer to what I want is something like this: I want to lead a more effortless life with less suffering and I would like to support others, in whatever way I am able, to do the same. I am still in the unknown about what the leaders of the field festival were trying to achieve.
