A testimonial from the Erasmus-Training 2025 in ZEGG from Zeynep Cekinmez: I first heard about ZEGG from a friend who had recently become interested in exploring ecovillages across Europe. We were both feeling stuck in the big city, yet unsure about moving somewhere smaller and leaving our lives behind.
It felt as if it might already be too late for us to reset our overstimulated minds back to its factory settings. Ecovillages, then, seemed like promising portals, ways to glimpse life beyond our perpetually hustling existences.
My friend had never been to ZEGG herself, but she described it to me like this:
“It’s one of the oldest ecovillages in Germany and known for being a sex-positive community, kind of like Berlin, but at the same time it seems to value much deeper connections and transparency, and not always associating everything with darkness, that’s how I understood it hahaha.”
Her message came with a Google Doc outlining a training that would take place in November. The title, “In Service to Life,” didn’t immediately tell me what the training would entail; it sounded vast and somewhat ambigious. Still, I sensed that it pointed toward a different mode of existence, something radically opposed to consumerism. A life not simply handed to us so we can fill it with tasks and achievement milestones, but one we are responsible for nurturing, strengthening, and savoring.
The training aimed to respond to the suffering in the world: wars, climate breakdown, rising mental-health challenges, and deepening social fragmentation. Its intention was to empower the youth workers to grow stronger by hearing each other’s practices and projects, reclaiming a sense of agency and responsibility, and developing tools for both inner and outside work that they can carry to their own work. There were no caround the youth work you were doing — it could be anything from offering workshops to nearby schools to envisioning an entire alternative educational or living institution.
What impressed me most was how clearly the program articulated the interdependence between the personal and the political. This was precisely the skill I wanted to deepen as: the flexibility to move between the global and the local, from systemic injustice to intimate gestures of care, and to contribute to liberation movements through small, grounded, everyday actions. It was beautiful and relieving to remember that caring for myself and my mental health was not separate from caring about crises and injustice. It is part of the same commitment to life.
So, I filled out the form and applied.
Our First Day at ZEGG
We are gathered in an attic, the floor soft with carpet, the large windows opening onto red-brown pine trees in Bad Belzig. Someone from our group sets an intention for the day and lights a candle. People look tired, perhaps from travel, perhaps from whatever they were holding before arriving here, yet there is light and compassion in their smiles. Everyone seems willing to move beyond their comfort zones and welcome whatever transformation the next ten days might bring…
When no one speaks, the room settles into a silence that feels to have its own character. It is not an empty silence. It has weight and warmth. It nourishes. It feels as though the silence itself is taking care of me, asking for nothing in return, yet offering space for inner listening and transformation.
The facilitator invites us to walk around the room. First at the pace of a large city, then gradually slowing into the rhythm of an ecovillage. While walking, we study one another with curious eyes. Who are these strangers? What paths led them here? How is it that people arriving from such different lives can feel strangely familiar to one another?
We stop in front of a partner and look directly into their eyes. I feel a ripple of nervousness. Are we really allowed to look so deeply into the eyes of a stranger? My hesitation meets a similar flicker in my partner’s gaze. In this shared uncertainty, I feel held. We switch partners again and again, and slowly the awkwardness loosens its grip. We dare to look longer, steadier, deeper.
“What do you see in the eyes of the person in front of you? What gifts do you think they bring to this world?”
The facilitator’s voice is gentle but incisive. We lean toward our partner and whisper what we see. It astonishes me how easily we feel seen by someone who knows almost nothing about us. The facilitator reminds us that we carry wisdom within us, and that recognition comes before training or education. What a striking way to begin. Instead of elevating the facilitators as the sole holders of knowledge, she invites us to recognize our own inner teacher. Their task is not to fill us but to guide us toward our own depths to help us uncover what lies beneath the mental noise we acquired as a response to hostility, neglect, or the absence of love.
The space invites us to unlearn habits and strategies once necessary for survival but which have become barriers to living with clarity, openness, and rootedness.
I enter this space through the eyes of the participants around me: those dark circles framed by rings of brown, green, blue…
A Typical Day in ZEGG
A typical day begins at 8 AM with a huge breakfast. The food seems endless here and a big part of it is growing in its gardens, if not provided by the neighbours. At 8:40, we gather in a circle in front of the restaurant to choose the community work we want to contribute to that day.
The tasks are diverse and flexible, offering something for everyone, and each one provides a unique opportunity to learn. One morning, you might find yourself at a table, carefully slicing pears and apples while a community member shares insights on about how food is produced and processed sustainably.
The next morning you could be donning gloves, picking up a hammer, and chopping wood to fuel the ecovillage’s heating system, all while learning about eco-friendly heating systems. It's an opportunity to understand the sustainable technologies that power the community, connecting hands-on work with environmental consciousness.
After community work, we often reflect on how physical tasks support the goals of the training - whether they expand our experience of the group sessions, deepen our learning, or simply give us the mental space to slow down and arrive at new insights.
One night, I found myself at the center of the forum which is a large circle where anyone can step forward to bring an emotional or political topic to the group. The facilitator guides the person in the middle to go deeper, and whenever she senses a blockage or a moment of dishonesty, she challenges it. Combined with the vulnerability of standing under everyone’s gaze, the exercise forces you to confront inner realities you might otherwise avoid. That night, my turn pulled me into very dark, unsettling memories that took a long time to work through. The next morning, I volunteered to chop wood, and the movement became unmistakably cathartic: my rage tore out of my body as I split tree trunks in half. I understood, viscerally, the importance of a holistic approach to trauma and how physical labor can accelerate the process of moving through heavy emotions and thoughts.
Often the afternoons have two sessions of collective learning and workshopping. The themes are as varied as the community work. Sometimes the facilitators introduce tools from nonviolent communication, helping us stay present with ourselves, remain mindful of our limits, and offer our attention to others without overwhelming our own nervous systems. Some sessions turn into open conversations about our frustration with the state of the world. We speak about unhelpful coping mechanisms such as white guilt or “white savior complex” and explore how our predominantly white European group can move beyond paralysis, self-blame, or performative care, toward forms of conscious, meaningful engagement and action.
During the breaks, conversations rarely pause. People are animated with the desire to know one another more intimately. The exercises reveal, again and again, that other human beings are gateways to deeper understanding of ourselves and of life itself. We carry so many differences and yet so many shared longings. We are reminded that we are not numbers, not replaceable bodies, but vast beings through whom nature and time express their teachings. By recognizing the singularity of each person and the force this person carries within themselves, we begin to restore our trust and hope in humanity.
One of the most striking aspects of doing trauma-informed work in an ecovillage is the search for ways psychological support can become sustainable. ZEGG combines community-based practices and embodied group work with some of the familiar benefits of therapy. Participants deepen their awareness of their mental and emotional patterns, learn relaxation techniques for the nervous system, and explore how their struggles are embedded in larger social and political structures. Most importantly, we learn that healing does not have to rely solely on trained professionals. Non-professionals can support one another by attentive witnessing, mirroring, sharing their own stories, and offering presence without trying to fix or diagnose.
Once relationships between people are allowed to unfold naturally - no longer obstructed by oppressive work structures, fragmented identities, and constant economic or health anxieties - we begin to see that healing can happen outside of clinical settings too. It can be woven back into the daily life.
This approach is especially valuable for youth workers: by creating spaces where young people are encouraged to share, witness, and support each other without judgment, we can foster an environment built on empathy, presence, and mutual support. In doing so, we help create a sense of community that empowers youth to be more resilient and develop a stronger ability to collaborate and support each other.
How Do I Leave?
I leave the training restored to my strength: hearing my own voice more clearly, daring to speak the truths I hold close to my heart, and feeling confident enough to facilitate workshops for the youth. Most importantly, the training reminded me how much easier it is to love the people around us simply because we share a common humanity. Once that becomes tangible, so much of the mental burden, the hopelessness about the world’s future, and the hesitation around our own work begins to dissolve.
In my case, the transformation was visible to everyone. I moved quickly from a shy person who struggled to speak in front of the group to someone organizing political-awareness workshops, naming the blind spots in people’s narratives, and crafting peace signs to broaden the ecovillage’s political consciousness. Standing in front of others became effortless. It necessitated no planning, no choreography, just presence. And suddenly, trusting strangers felt possible again.
I relearned how to see people beyond the categories and judgments I once relied on. I began to love them for who they were and for what they might bring into the world, rather than through the distorting lens of my defenses – whether they were cis men, highly educated, not educated at all, eccentric… whatever markers had once signaled danger or hierarchy to me. I could feel how many of my prejudices were actually old protection mechanisms that had kept me safe at one time but were now blocking me from forming deep, sustaining connections. Instead of shielding me, they had turned inward, becoming self-judgments that filled my body with fear and ignited panic whenever the world felt too large.
The training gave me practical tools to navigate these inner landscapes and loosen the knots in my thinking. For this, I am profoundly grateful. I leave ZEGG with a different sense of myself in relation to others: more anchored, more spacious, more capable of standing in my needs and voicing them, not with the expectation of always being understood, but with the hope that there are ears willing to receive, reflect, and transform alongside me.
I can confidently say that I will carry these teachings into my own youth work. For the workshop I’m organizing at my university in Berlin this winter, I plan to use the techniques I learned here to deepen interpersonal relationships within the groups that I will be facilitating. I also came to understand how essential it is to foreground psychological and bodily realities, individual traumas, and differences, not as obstacles, but as the foundation for creating an equal and inclusive space. To truly meet everyone’s needs, activities should adapt to the people present, not the other way around.
I will also use the forum as a method for group discussions. It has an almost magnetic power to shift collective awareness and emotion toward new horizons, precisely because it is rooted in honesty and transparency. I’ll hold onto the belief that by becoming more honest, conscious, and transparent in our own actions, we contribute to greater peace and harmony in our immediate environments. This orientation has given me a sense of groundedness and direction that will guide the work I hope to do in the future.
Lastly, I will take the connection between nature and the body far more seriously. Having spent most of my life in academic environments, this dimension had been almost entirely absent from my work. I leave remembering how nourishing and fulfilling it is simply to walk through a forest and how, at times, that quiet movement can bring as much awareness and understanding as weeks of theoretical discussion. I want to find ways to imagine universities and urban spaces in relation to the nature that still surrounds us, and to raise questions about the sustainability of our practices and the impact they have on the world we share.
I still see the crises that surround us, political, social, ecological, but I feel less crushed by them after spending 10 days at ZEGG. I know now that these struggles are not mine alone to hold. Healing from trauma is slow and tender work, and I no longer believe it must happen in isolation or in strictly clinical rooms. In the presence of a good listener, real change becomes possible.
I leave having allowed the world to witness the corners of my mind I once guarded in silence, and I carry with me the love and compassion our group cultivated – ready to let it shape the world beyond this ecovillage.