InterBeing Festival welcomes collaboration, vulnerability and play

Ever since Tropical Storm Helene, the importance of community has been at the forefront of local thought and conversation. But what gives community its life and what will keep it going beyond the crisis? For Vinit Allen, founder and organizer of the InterBeing Festival, the answer includes authenticity, embodied expression, meaningful ceremony, sharing and listening.

“I had noticed that when I attended festivals, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area where I’d come from before, I had a great time, but there wasn’t a lot of deeper connection,” he says. “When I left, I know I felt entertained, but I didn’t feel like I really gained anything particularly useful.”

Thus stirred his first inspiration for an annual benefit gathering named after Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of interconnection: a venue “where people would learn about themselves and interact with each other in novel ways that can really make a difference,” Allen says. Samasati Sanctuary in Weaverville, founded in 2020 by Allen and his wife, Rajyo Allen, will set the scene for conscious engagement with its intimate sanctuaries and 16 contemplative altars spread over 10 acres of trails, gardens, meadow and forest.

Now in its third year, the InterBeing Festival aims to create a safe space for people to open their hearts and weave connections through sessions such as breath work, improv, ecstatic movement, trance music, shadow work, live art creation, song and drum circles, tea ceremonies and — for the first time this year — a roundtable conversation involving local community-building organizations.

As in previous years, Allen says 100% of the proceeds from ticket sales will benefit BeLoved Asheville, a local organization that he recognizes as a force of empowerment for the diverse populations that make up the Asheville-area community, especially in its recent role of supporting the storm relief effort. Since Allen spoke with Xpress for this article, the event has sold out. 

Regrowing stronger

Just like the Samasati Sanctuary space itself — which opened in March 2020 at the onset of COVID-19 — the InterBeing Festival is a survivor. The festival took place in 2021 and 2023, with enthusiastic community feedback; but it was canceled in 2022 due to heavy rain and again in October of last year because of Helene.

Even before the storm, Allen had chosen an unexpectedly auspicious theme for the upcoming festival: “Community — Refuge in a Changing World.” The aftermath of Helene only strengthened his intention, convincing him that “we’re on the right track.” As he managed to reschedule almost all performances, workshops and presentations for the Saturday, April 26, event, he worked with a renewed sense of commitment, having witnessed the generosity, determination and heroism of people coming together during that time.

Festival sessions address community at multiple levels of human experience. “All of these arts are designed to actually get us to confront some of the challenges that are coming our way and that we read about every day … [from] climate change to allies shifting and breaking wars all over the place,” he says. “It’s obviously a time where more connection, more compassion is needed — not less, not pulling into ourselves.”

Allen notes that expressive arts such as theater improv and Sufi Zikir (a Sufi dance practice that he describes as “meditation in motion”) help people connect with their authentic selves and others. So does shadow work, led by Banks Anderson, which he says teaches people to befriend and discuss “the dark side … that we tend to normally avoid talking about.”

Allen believes that when people go deeper in their conversations, “we automatically feel more bonded because we’ve been willing to be vulnerable with each other and let our guard down.”

The roundtable conversation

At a roundtable discussion on the main stage, Allen will moderate questions and interactive dialogue among representatives from The Center for Conscious Living and Dying (CCLD), LEAF Global Arts, Asheville Movement Collective, BeLoved Asheville, Earthaven Ecovillage and The Mankind Project.

“I wanted to … get a variety of sectors of the culture and society represented,” Allen says. “To my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened, where this level of diversity and organizations come together to discuss meaningful things like how do you respond to some of these challenges? How can we work better together? What kind of values do we stand for … and how might we share some of the solutions we found … and how can we share resources too? So that we can mutually benefit.”

Aditi Sethi, founder and director of CCLD, says she sees the potential for participating organizations to “amplify” each other’s work beyond the festival. Her nonprofit’s mission, she notes, is to reclaim “a way of being with death that is communal in nature.” She adds that she was drawn to participate in the InterBeing Festival because it focuses on experientially deepening relationship, sharing learnings and helping people “collectively remember our interconnectedness” in relation to both living and dying — a healing that feels even more important in the wake of Helene.

Conversations among participants in the festival will echo this collaborative sharing through sessions about caring for the planet or about love, sex and relationship, which Allen hopes will encourage partnerships of all kinds, a sense of belonging and an “inherent sense of well-being.” From his own personal experience, he believes such sessions can “move the needle” for people in terms of how willing they are to open up to others, become aware of others’ feelings in relationship and believe in their interdependence.

Glimpse of a better world

One moment during a previous InterBeing Festival moved Allen to tears — and remains with him as inspiration for the gathering’s potential. He remembers looking out at various groups of people involved in sessions or at altars and feeling a sense of thrill and gratitude that he was witnessing an “ideal world.”

In that moment, he saw the festival as planting a seed for “a world where we actually were free to be who we know we can be, to be playing with each other, to be learning and growing with each other and being involved in things,” he says. “It just felt healthy and important and right that we’re contributing to the world that we wanted to see, that we wanted to live in, and for a day, we actually could live in that world with others who also wanted to live in that world, so everything was safe. Everything was welcome.”

Sethi, too, speaks of looking to the festival for a moment of collective healing, a “respite” from the divisiveness of the current societal climate —“like another way of being in the world that isn’t so activated and fearful.” She hopes for people to find “some deep stillness” in the conscious container the festival provides, reconnecting with an understanding of themselves as one.

“It’s so important that we can keep that seed alive,” says Allen. “We are the living seeds of the new world. … We’re helping to foster a new humanity that is being born through us, we [are] moving out of the old, you know, business-transactional, stuff-oriented world into a world of values and caring and connection.”