You’ve found your way to a special place – a community where your story matters, your creativity is valued, and your well-being is at the heart of everything we do. The School of Being is a community built on respect, creativity, and care. Thank you for bringing your unique self.
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What can you expect to find here?
• Creative Workshops – Paint, craft, explore digital media like Adobe Creative Cloud, or simply enjoy making something with your hands.
• Wellness Activities – Gentle movement, mindful breathing, and quiet moments to reconnect with your body and breath.
• Caring Presence Companions – Friendly people who’ve been through their own challenges and are here to share their stories, no judging, no pressure, no manipulation, just kindness.
• Community Spaces – Busy or quietly focused spaces to contemplate, remember, restore, or just share a cup or meal you’ve prepared yourself, or just to be with others of like mind.
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A sample workshop
The Lens of Being:
Creative Photography in a Social Age
Overview
An engaging workshop exploring the creative, personal, and social dimensions of photography — from traditional analogue methods to the ever-evolving digital and smartphone culture. Participants will learn how photography can be both a tool of self-expression and a way to observe, document, and reconnect with the world and people around them.
This workshop is ideal for people with varied experience — from absolute beginners to casual smartphone photographers and analogue enthusiasts — and offers both a hands-on and reflective experience.
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Workshop Goals
• To explore photography as a medium of observation, self-awareness, and social presence
• To learn basic principles of image-making (composition, light, framing, story)
• To understand the complexities and comparisons between instant/social media photography, considered/archival photography and optimal processing, categorising and archiving.
• To introduce or revisit analogue processes (film, instant, darkroom-style developing)
• To foster discussion on the ethics, intimacy, and implications of photographing others
• To encourage personal visual storytelling and creative journaling using photography
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Format & Key Activities
Duration: 4–6 sessions (modular structure – flexible for 1-week intensive or weekly series)
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Session 1: Seeing Through the Lens
• Introduction to visual literacy – What is a photograph?
• Smartphones vs DSLR vs Film – medium, speed, intention
• Quick “look around” assignment – 5 photos on theme: What I notice when I slow down
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Session 2: The Language of Light and Composition
• Rule of thirds, perspective, depth, light, contrast
• Portraits vs environments vs object studies
• Practice walk: “Photographing Stillness”
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Session 3: Archives & Emotion
• How we collect and store images (albums, social media, memory cards, shoeboxes)
• Archival vs ephemeral photography – what do we keep and why?
• Introduction to journaling with photos (print or digital zine-making)
• Creative collage activity: My Photo Story
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Session 4: Social Sharing vs Private Seeing
• Discussion: the pressure and performance of social media photography
• Consent and presence in photographing others
• The “quiet photograph” – making images for meaning, not likes
• Project: A series of 3–5 images that reflect a moment of personal truth or connection
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Optional Sessions: Analogue Experiments / Portrait & Print Studio
• Introduction to film cameras / pinhole / instant formats
• Developing images or working with physical prints
• Curating a small exhibition or photo-journal (for group sharing or zine)
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Who It’s For
• Participants exploring creative identity and expression
• Those seeking non-verbal ways to process experience
• Anyone interested in mindful observation, storytelling, or documenting daily life
• Individuals who want to use smartphone photography in deeper, less performative ways
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Outcomes
• A personal photo-journal or image series
• Increased confidence in visual self-expression
• Awareness of photography’s role in social and emotional communication
• Respectful image-making practices (especially in shared spaces)
• Optional small exhibition, print zine, or digital showcase
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Value for the School of Being
• Photography as a gentle, accessible art form suitable for trauma recovery and social reconnection
• Encourages personal agency, aesthetic appreciation, and presence
• Blends creative practice with reflection, ethics, and modern tools
• Offers pathways to further learning or mentoring roles within the community
Living & Creating at the School of Being
Slow Living Studio Residences
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Spatial Living at the School of Being
We shape our environments, and they shape us.
At the School of Being, architecture is not neutral – it’s part of the pedagogy.
- Open, adaptive layouts foster fluid relationships between solitude and encounter.
- Partitioned privacy, not sealed isolation, protects inner space without severing connection.
- The form invites feeling: soft edges, natural materials, lightplay, warm acoustics.
- Every resident is both a guest and a co-maker — of their space, rhythm, and presence.
- Longitudinal orientation allows for zonal progression: rest and making in respectful collaboration
- Light-filled lofts ideal for north/south daylight flows — balanced and stable throughout the day
Contained Privacy and Modular Sleeping Habitats
To create a nest within the open, where sleep, dreaming, and soft decompression can happen in safety.
- Semi-enclosed wooden “sleep boxes” or curtained niches, acoustically softened
- Each includes a bed, personal storage, warm lighting, and a small desk or altar-space
- Configured in clusters with optional shared en-suite bathrooms per 3–4 boxes
- Layouts ensure privacy without full isolation – people can hear each other stirring, without intrusion
- Materials: natural wood, fabric, organic textures; nothing clinical or industrial
Inspirations: Japanese cottage homes, monastic dwellings, Bauhaus student studios
Open living with self contained rest and sleeping habitats
- Large shared lofts with modular studio-living setups:
Each person gets ~10–15 m² of flexible floor space
Work table, shelves, tools, floor cushions or tatami zones - Soundscaping tools (curtains, rugs, dividers) let individuals shape their auditory field
- Morning light or golden hour windows are positioned for quiet activation
Philosophy: You are never only “resting” or “working” — you are always being. Let the space hold both.
Collaborative congregation around the long table
Giving each floor a center of gravity and communion, invitation, nourishment, conversation and gathering.
- Long communal table for meals, drawing, writing, arguments, laughter
- Small communal kitchen with open shelves and “donate/share/keep” zones
- Soft chairs, rugs, mismatched stools, herbs in jars, drying flowers
- Tea and conversation nooks with low lighting for night rhythm
- Walls available for rotating displays of residents’ works or provocations
Optional Elements to Deepen the Experience
- Night and Light Protocols: Encourage soft lighting in living spaces with optional studio lighting in functioning spaces, creating an atmosphere of circadian respect
- Silence Considerations: Between set hours, the overall corridor space should be repectful but not too rigid.
- Material Memory as Home: Residents can inscribe or subtly mark their sleep pods or working areas – building layers of human presence over time
- Shared Spaces for Collaboartive Projects: Residents can leave in storage or leave out works in progress in amicable arrangement with fellow residents
Implementation Tips
- Use repurposed materials from the factory itself — doors, panels, wood beams — to construct pods and partitions
- Invite residents and local craftspeople to co-design the layout during the pre-opening period
- Use color and textile to create nonverbal wayfinding: e.g., blue tones in sleep zones, ochres in hearth areas
- Design for maintenance and adaptability — rooms can grow, shrink, migrate as seasons and needs evolve
Summary Phrase
“Each floor is a rhythm: breathing in to rest, breathing out to create. You sleep beside your paintbrush. You wake near the hearth. You belong to your space — and it belongs to you.”