About The Festival of Listening 2026

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It is a joy to offer the Second Festival of Listening to you!  The idea of the first gathering in 2025 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.  This has long been the basis of the mediation and negotiation courses that the Society of Mediators presents and came into focus during our work in Corfu, Greece, South Africa, Ireland, 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 (back) to Corfu.  

Tristana is the co-founder of the Festival of Listening.  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, 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.  

 Jonathan has for more than 25 years played a leading role in conflict resolution through what became known as non-violent communication, and is an award-winning mediator accepted as an international thought-leader. Faculty Director  of the Society, and a former Judge Advocate, he relinquished the Navy's bench to work from India to Ireland, and Cape Town to Corfu: his special teaching of mediation and Restorative Justice is iconic - as is his commitment to directing the flow of the Society's Faculty.  Founder of the UK's Civil Mediation Council and later of the Society of Mediators charity, he continues to develop ideas that inspire, motivate and change dispute resolution.   Jonathan is a member of the Council for Non-Violent Communication and presents workshops around the world.  Still crazy after all these years, he relishes learning and so the chance to join the Festival was irresistible.  He will lead five Festival sessions, a live Masterclass, three CPD workshops, and an RJ workshop featuring Listening to Crime with  international input.