Consciousness Has a Plan

Mireia Martínez Catalan programmes almost everything that happens at the Festival of Consciousness. The talks, the workshops, the moments built to put strangers in the same room. She does not design any of it to change someone's life.

"I never design an experience thinking, 'This is going to transform someone,'" she says. "I create from a place of deep conviction: does this resonate with me? Does it feel true to what FOC is trying to explore?"

People tell her it changed their lives anyway. Five editions in, she still hasn't got used to hearing it. "Even though the festival has been deeply transformative for me personally, every time someone tells me it changed something fundamental for them, I'm still surprised."

Perhaps, she says, that is because of how she works. "When I'm creating, I try to remain quite detached from how something might be received. If you are constantly looking outside yourself for the answer, you probably won't find it."

Mireia Martínez Catalan, co-founder of the Festival of Consciousness. Photo @eu.clarissamena

Her co-founder, Xavi Ginesta, describes the same thing from the other side. "The FOC does not transform you, but it provides a context where transformation, if you allow it, may happen to you."

Everything else about the festival follows from that one word, allow.

Mireia had never worked in events before FOC, and has since declined offers to produce others. "It simply doesn't interest me," she says. What she wanted was a community, "a network of people and relationships that can bring some sense of hope into the world. A space where people feel supported, held, and connected to something beyond themselves."

Xavi remembers the beginning as a pull rather than a plan. "More than a question of urgency, what we felt was the sense of resonance with something we still didn't know quite well what wanted to be." Today he calls it a social experiment, and gives it the lightest possible description: "an event where you can have fun expanding your consciousness instead of losing it."

It has since grown into alliances, social initiatives and a video podcast, with the festival at the centre. Mireia is clear about the order of things. "The festival is one manifestation of it, but it was never the destination."

Jamie Beron, who led Hearts on Fire at the Festival of Consciousness, 10 July 2026. Photo: @NaroaStudio.

Asked what he got most wrong, Xavi is direct. "Not listening to the Festival and letting my own personal expectations define the strategy. I've learned, the hard way, that when it comes to designing an event about consciousness, letting consciousness take the lead is a good idea."

He has turned that lesson into a working rule.

Intuition sets the direction now, he says, and rational thinking handles the execution.

Xavi Ginesta, co-founder of the Festival of Consciousness, who gave the talk "What is this festival really about?" on 11 July 2026. Photo: @sanletnjenoci.

Mireia arrived at the same place by a different road. Asked what people misunderstand about her role, she declines to defend it. "I see myself more as a representative of a community, or as someone through whom the festival passes, rather than as the person at the centre of it. In that sense, my relationship with consciousness is also connected to trying to step outside of myself and my own identity, and to listen to what the project needs rather than what I personally want from it."

She has no need for her role to be understood, and thinks some of the work is "better left unseen." The festival has many leaders, she says, "but no single person owns the whole thing."

In the programme itself, that discipline becomes a balance. Some moments at FOC are built deliberately for connection, and some are deliberately uncomfortable. "But the proposal has to be honest." The rest is surrender. "There is something very Burning Man about that: you create the conditions, and then you let go. You allow things to happen that you could never have programmed. Not fighting against what the festival wants to create naturally is itself a form of intentional programming."

What happens inside those conditions can't be promised. Xavi calls the festival "a minefield for your mindset: once you set your feet on a stage, you don't know what part of your mindset may be blown away." For him, what happens next depends on "how strong the shell of their mindset is." Mireia is careful not to oversell it. "I'd love to say that every sceptic is transformed, but that simply wouldn't be true." Some people arrive curious and find themselves completely at home. Others leave uneasy. She considers both part of the design. "That tension between invitation and discomfort is an important part of the festival."

Mireia programmes almost all of it herself, and the deciding factor is rarely the one an outsider would guess. "We have said no to people with huge platforms and very large audiences, and yes to people with almost no public profile at all."

She tries to step outside her own taste, "outside of Mireia," as she puts it, and listen for something no profile on paper can show. "What I'm listening for is something much harder to measure: coherence. I want to feel that there is a real alignment between the person, what they believe, how they live, and what they are proposing to bring into the festival."

She doesn't programme for a particular audience either. "I don't design FOC with a specific type of person in mind. I prefer to create the space and let it invite whoever feels drawn to it." Xavi sees the same thing at work in the crowd itself. The context, he says, "attracts the type of audience that resonates with it."

The same rule governs the money. When we asked how FOC chooses between corporate sponsors, Mireia corrected the question. "I would actually challenge part of the premise of the question: FOC doesn't have corporate sponsors in the traditional sense." There are no brands on display at FOC, and organisations that fund it get no extra visibility for giving more. When large companies have offered significant sums in exchange for being seen, the answer has been no. "The moment financial contribution starts determining who gets seen, heard or represented," Mireia says, "it would begin to change the nature of FOC."

Without sponsors, the festival runs on something else. Speakers, artists, facilitators and volunteers give their work, and donors give without expecting anything back, which lets FOC happen at a fraction of what an event of its size would normally cost. "Generosity has become the fuel of the festival," Xavi says, and every year volunteers tell him how their generosity "has returned to them in completely unexpected life-changing ways."

When Mireia looks back across five editions, the moment she returns to is the team. "Watching people give their time, attention, energy and care to something they believe in, often without anyone outside the team ever seeing the extent of what they are doing, continues to amaze me."

She is also the one who names what that asks of people. "One of the biggest lessons has been learning how to make sure that a project built around service doesn't become extractive towards the very people who create it." There have been times, she says, when that balance was lost, and she has had to recognise it and repair it. The cost has reached her own life too, "both in my personal and family life." So has the growth. "It has completely transformed my understanding of leadership, particularly what feminine leadership can mean for me, and it has also changed my relationship with my own femininity."

"So perhaps the biggest learning has been that growth cannot only be measured by what the festival achieves externally," she says. "It also has to be measured by how we care for the people who make that growth possible."

That is where her attention sits now. "One of my deepest areas of focus right now is not constantly thinking about the audience or about reaching more people, but about strengthening the relationships and networks that sustain the project from within."

This year's theme came out of something the whole team felt. "We are living through a moment in which many of us have become almost numb to extremely difficult realities," Mireia says. Too much information, too much suffering, and no clear way to hold it without shutting down.

For her, the words mean hope, "the reminder that we always have the possibility to reinvent ourselves, to rebuild, and to be creative." The team also wanted the theme to close a gap they see in their own world, where spirituality drifts away from what is happening on the ground. "We wanted to build a bridge between the two, between inner transformation and our responsibility to engage with the world around us."

"So Start Again is not about erasing what came before," she says. "It is about finding the hope, awareness and creativity to meet reality again, and to choose what we want to build from here."

The theme shaped the staging, the artistic direction and the brief given to every speaker, and across disciplines that rarely share a room, the same thread surfaced. "A scientist, an artist, an activist or someone coming from a spiritual tradition may use entirely different languages," she says, "but underneath, they can be exploring something very similar: the possibility that things do not have to remain as they are."

Idan Hojman, who led Cómo desbloquear las emociones a través del cuerpo (how to release emotions through the body) at the Festival of Consciousness, 11 July 2026. Photo: @gemmabenet.

We asked Xavi what all the optimising is actually for: the supplements, the sleep tracking, the infrared sessions. His answer turned the question around. "So the question here is why are we doing what we are doing? The same action, for example, going to the gym, can be ego-driven or love-driven. Optimising your biology as an act of love and respect for your body does not vibrate at the same frequency as, for example, doing it for fear of looking old."

Keeping body, mind and consciousness connected is, in his view, "fundamental. When these three aspects are not properly balanced, an emotional or somatic manifestation arises sooner or later."

Mireia reaches for the same word she uses to choose her speakers. "The connection between body, mind and consciousness is, to me, the most fundamentally human connection we have. I don't really see them as separate things. Finding coherence between them is essential to how we move through life. When that connection breaks, when one part becomes disconnected from the others, I think it creates a great deal of pain and unhappiness. Ultimately, much of our wellbeing comes from finding that coherence within ourselves."

On technology, the two founders part ways. Xavi calls it neutral, its effect depending on "the level of consciousness we use it with," and sees the festival as a counterweight: "a pause button at the heart of a society that moves at breakneck speed forcing us to live disconnected from our essence." Mireia is less diplomatic.

She is careful about what she means. Electricity, running water and medicine, she says, have radically improved human life. Her doubt is about the newest wave of digital tools and the promise that they will make us healthier and more connected. "I think that what brings us back to our humanity ultimately has to come through humanity itself. Through other people, through presence, through our bodies, through nature, through real relationships and through the inner work that no device can do on our behalf."

"So no, I'm probably not the optimist in the room when it comes to this question," she adds. "The more technology advances, the more important I think it becomes to protect and cultivate the parts of being human that cannot be outsourced to it."

Her own version of that work is a single practice. After months of decisions, a team to hold and thousands of people arriving, she goes to Vipassana. This year she travelled to a retreat in Mexico, and served there instead of sitting. She has practised it for three years, drawn by what she calls "the purity and rigour of the method." "There is something important about going deeper into one path rather than constantly searching for the next one," she says. It brings her back to "something very simple. Silence, observation, service and presence."

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