Villa Unspunnen, Interlaken, Switzerland · August 25–29, 2025

A Living Field for the Integral City

There are moments when a gathering becomes more than a retreat. More than a program. More even than a shared intention.

The Spirit of Oneness Retreat, held at Villa Unspunnen in the heart of Europe, was one such moment — a field event for the Human Hive, where individual transformation, collective coherence, and planetary intelligence met in lived experience.

For those steeped in Integral City and Living Cities work, this retreat can be understood as a micro-city of practice: a temporary but potent social holon where inner, outer, individual, and collective intelligences were consciously invited into alignment.

Thirty‑three participants — leaders, artists, scientists, healers, strategists, elders, and emerging voices — gathered not to discuss Oneness conceptually, but to embody it across all quadrants and scales.

Why This Gathering Matters Now

Integral City teaches us that cities — and humanity itself — evolve when Soul Power is activated: when care, coherence, and consciousness are woven through our systems, cultures, and daily practices.

The Spirit of Oneness Retreat arose from a shared sensing that:

Gaia is calling humanity to mature — from fragmentation toward conscious participation in life’s unfolding.

This is the evolutionary invitation of our time.

Co‑facilitated by Annette Kaiser, Dr. Jude Currivan, and Anne‑Marie Voorhoeve, the retreat served as a living laboratory for Gaia’s Code of Care:

  • Care for Self — deep inner listening, healing, and embodiment
  • Care for Others — relational presence, trust, and mutual witnessing
  • Care for Place — attunement to land, lineage, and context
  • Care for Planet — planetary consciousness and evolutionary responsibility

Rather than privileging any single intelligence, the retreat honoured the full spectrum of Integral City intelligences — spiritual, cultural, social, structural, ecological, and evolutionary.

The Architecture of AQtivating Soul Power

The retreat unfolded through three interwoven movements — not stages to be completed, but currents of learning and becoming:

Instigation · Inner‑Tuition · Integration

In Integral City terms, this was a triple‑loop learning journey — engaging action, reflection, and re‑configuration of Being.

  • Instigation invited participants to share stories of essence: moments when their lives touched unity, love, loss, courage, or awakening. These stories revealed the deep motivational drivers — the Soul Power — each person brought into the field.
  • Inner‑Tuition opened space for Not‑Knowing, allowing intuition, creativity, and the Knowing Field itself to guide inquiry. Through poetry, movement, song, ritual, systemic constellation work, and artistic exploration, participants accessed non‑linear intelligences often excluded from formal leadership and city‑making.
  • Integration grounded insight into the body and the collective — through dance, Qi Gong, nature immersion, laughter, and shared reflection — ensuring that awareness translated into embodied capacity rather than abstract insight.

The Golden Thread: A Systemic Insight

A central inquiry of the retreat asked:

What does the Knowing Field want us to know about an emergent Golden Thread?

Through Constellating for the Collective, participants experienced the Golden Thread not as a metaphor alone, but as a living systemic pattern — connecting past and future, chaos and coherence, human intention and planetary intelligence.

For an Integral City audience, this Golden Thread can be understood as:

  • the relational fabric that links individuals, organisations, cities, and ecosystems
  • the Soul Power current that enables regeneration rather than extraction
  • the movement from either/or toward both/and — a hallmark of mature integral consciousness

What emerged was a felt recognition that Love‑in‑Action is not sentimental. It is structural. It reorganises systems. It shapes futures.

The Human Hive in Joyful Practice

True to Integral City’s insistence that cities are living systems, the retreat placed strong emphasis on embodiment and joy.

There was sacred dance and spontaneous play. There was silence and raucous laughter. There were moments of grief, and moments of exquisite lightness.

Again and again, a catalytic question surfaced:

What if it’s easy?

What if coherence arises not from control, but from trust? What if Soul Power flows most freely when people feel safe, seen, and celebrated?

These questions matter not only for retreats — but for cities, organisations, and governance systems seeking regeneration.

Impacts Across the Integral City Quadrants

From an Integral City perspective, the retreat generated impact across all domains (as explored in Integral City Book 2) :

  • Deep Impact (Inner / Mindsets): renewed trust in life, softened identities, awakened planetary belonging
  • Wide Impact (Relationships): strengthened networks, inter‑generational trust, cross‑sectoral coherence
  • Clear Impact (Behaviours): embodied practices of care, listening, movement, and presence
  • High Impact (Systems): new collaborations, shared practices, and strengthened morphic fields supporting regenerative futures

Participants did not leave with a checklist of actions — but with re‑patterned ways of sensing, relating, and responding.

Memory · Meaning · Momentum

The Harvest of the Spirit of Oneness can be understood through three lenses:

  • Memory — stories, images, gestures, friendships, artefacts
  • Meaning — reflection, insight, re‑orientation of purpose
  • Momentum — ongoing connections, daily Golden Thread meditation, emerging collaborations

Together, these form a distributed field of impact — rippling outward into families, organisations, cities, and planetary initiatives.

An Invitation to the Integral City Community

This retreat was never intended as a one‑off event.

It was a threshold experience — a reminder of what becomes possible when the Human Hive listens deeply to Gaia, to each other, and to the quiet wisdom within.

For Integral City practitioners, leaders, and city‑makers, the Spirit of Oneness Retreat offers a lived demonstration of what AQtivating Soul Power can look like — not as theory, but as practice.

As one participant said:

“We are all Golden Threads now — weaving the future together.”

May that weaving continue — in our cities, our institutions, and our daily acts of care.