Join Antanas Grizas, a harm‑reduction educator rooted in compassion and science, for a grounded exploration of how we relate to substances with care and clarity. In Substances & Self‑Care, Antanas brings research‑backed tools and real‑world insight to help you understand how to navigate use with awareness, respect, and safety.

This session isn’t about judgment or rules — it’s about empowering you with practical strategies to support your wellbeing, reduce harm, and make informed choices. Through clear guidance and approachable discussion, you’ll learn how intention, self‑care, and mindful awareness can transform your relationship to altered states and everyday experience alike.

A thoughtful space to explore, ask questions, and hold kindness for yourself and others in your community.

Festivals are intense sensory worlds - loud music, shifting lights, unfamiliar smells, crowds, heat, and long days. For us, it’s celebration. For animals, it can be overwhelming and even dangerous.

This lecture-discussion explores why music and arts festivals are rarely suitable environments for pets. We’ll look at how dogs, cats, and other companion animals experience the world through their heightened senses - especially hearing, smell and vision - and how festival settings can trigger stress and harmful reactions.

Participants will learn to recognize key stress signals and better understand the risks such events pose to animal wellbeing. If bringing a pet to a festival is unavoidable, we’ll also discuss essential preparation, responsible care during the event, and practical ways to reduce harm.

This session invites reflection on empathy and responsibility – ensuring that our freedom to celebrate does not come at the expense of those who depend on us.

Miglė Zuokaitė is a certified practicing canine-assisted therapy specialist working with animal behavior challenges. Together with her animals, she educates and raises public awareness on a variety of pet-related topics, helping people better understand and care for their companions.

Miglė's animal family is quite large: dogs, cats, chickens, and turkeys roam freely at home, and a retired service horse has lovingly taken over the role of lawnmower. This ever-changing family shares one important thing in common - each animal has its own unique life story, and before finding their way to her, most of these stories were far from easy.

Yaga is a full-spectrum sensory field — deep bass, shifting lights, forest air, crowds, movement, heat. In this intensity, the nervous system becomes our anchor and guide. This session explores how the vagal system shapes our sense of safety and why festival environments can nudge us into fight-or-flight or overwhelm.

Jovita will introduce how gentle practices — breath, micro-movement, grounding rituals, and simple self-regulation tools can help you to return to your body even in the busiest moments. These techniques are lightweight, practical, and ready to use anywhere: between stages, in the forest, or right in the middle of a sunrise dance. The aim is not to escape the experience but to stay present enough to truly feel it.

Jovita Kiežė is a Lithuanian facilitator working at the intersection of psychology, somatic awareness, and creative therapeutic practices. She guides people toward deeper embodiment through accessible nervous-system education, writing therapy, and restorative techniques. Her approach is warm, grounded, and trauma-aware, offering participants simple ways to reconnect with themselves — in daily life and in high-intensity environments like festivals.

In this engaging talk, we will explore the impact of contemporary digital reality on humanity and why it is existentially important to return to analog values. We’ll examine the significance of letting go of certain cyber habits and embracing digital minimalism.

How does digital “fast food” with virtual flavor and scent enhancers affect us? We'll delve into the dopamine loop that algorithms use to keep us hooked and how this influences our creativity and emotional states.

Furthermore, we’ll discuss the nature of social connections - prioritizing quality over quantity, transforming the electronic ""Like"" into a genuine analog ""Hug."" Finally, we will touch on digital hygiene and its positive effects on health and mental well-being. You’ll hear practical tips on securing your data and understand why, when you use free products, you might be the product yourself.

Join us as we seek ways to navigate back from the digital stepmother to the warmth of our analog mother, rediscovering the joys and meaning of culture in our modern world. Gražvydas Om –lecturer, mindfulness and critical thinking mentor, DJ and music producer, event host, podcast creator.

What happens when a viral TikTok challenge is stretched into a 26-day endurance ritual? I started with a 960 g stone and kicked it day after day, documenting its erosion down to 545 g until, on day 26, it split in half.

This lecture uses the Stone Test to think through the acceleration of society and ecology: Paul Virilio’s grey ecology of speed and systems, and Timothy Morton’s dark ecology of uncomfortable closeness to the world and nature. What begins as a simple act of kicking a rock turns into a symbolic ritual that resists the cult of productivity. The slow push toward a sphere is less about perfection and more about perception. Meaning is made through friction, repetition, and material limits. Along the way, the lecture challenges our sense of what counts as meaningful work in a life governed by speed.

The lecture will be delivered in Lithuanian.

In life, we are often less conscious than we think - convinced we’re in control, believing that “I” does the choosing, while deeper patterns quietly choose for us. Think of the forest: tall and strong, but beneath your feet the roots and the mycelium run the real network - carrying signals, sharing resources, shaping what thrives and what fades. In the same way our fears, desires, habits and cognitive functions weave an inner network that quietly steers our attention, relationships and even our sense of reality. Step into this Discovery space with me to see the hidden world of our connected minds.

Darius Andrijauskas is an Objective Personality System expert who helps people to understand themselves and each other through relationship and communication work.

Join Eliza Kurcevic-Ramone, a scientific analyst in harm reduction, for an eye-opening, grounded, and deeply human look at how to use cannabis with intention and safety.

With years of research and international work in the field, Eliza offers practical tips, science-based insights, and gentle guidance for navigating cannabis in a way that supports wellbeing rather than overwhelms it. A clear, caring session for anyone wishing to cultivate a healthier, more conscious relationship with the plant.

What if the people who irritate us the most could become our greatest teachers?

This experiential and interactive workshop is rooted in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and invites participants to explore a different way of relating to annoying people, triggering situations, and challenging traits - both in others and within ourselves. Rather than speaking about NVC as a theory, Elzyte and Lex create a space where empathy can be directly experienced through practices, active dialogue, reflection, and human connection.

Using NVC tools, participants will be guided to uncover the deeper needs, beauty, and humanity behind irritation and judgment. As we soften our perspectives, more inner space, compassion, and understanding naturally emerge for all sides involved.

Elzyte and Lex met during an NVC training and encountered their first conflict within three days of knowing each other. Three months later, they set off on a cycling journey from the Netherlands to Mallorca. Since then, they have been exploring life together and consciously building a relationship grounded in care, transparency, vulnerability, and trust.

Being in the NVC field for around six years, both have experienced how deeply this practice transforms the way we relate to ourselves and others. Today, they are devoted to embodying empathy in everyday life and supporting others through workshops, courses, and one-on-one sessions.

Living between Europe and India, Elzyte and Lex embrace a slower rhythm of life rooted in presence, harmony with nature, mindfulness practices, creativity, and play.

Everyone knows that a bad trip can leave a mark. But what about a good one - especially when someone else is holding the map?

Decades of clinical research have established that psychedelics don't just open the mind and also open it to whoever is in the room. LSD measurably increases suggestibility. Patients in early psychedelic therapy sessions regularly fell into intense, rapid emotional attachment to their guides - an effect so reliable it was built into the treatment model, and so dangerous it was regularly exploited. Timothy Leary knew this, writing explicitly about using the first psychedelic experience to ""imprint"" a desired worldview onto the person having it.

MDMA therapy trials have been rocked by allegations that therapists used their patients' chemically - induced openness to implant narratives, reframe memories, and cross lines that the drugs made it nearly impossible to resist. So, when you come out of a ceremony or a session with a profound new story about who you are and why you suffered - how much of that was yours?

Dr. Tamošaitis has been involved in drug harm reduction activism for the past 10 years and he is the head of NVO Young Wave that is one of the main information hubs for harm reduction knowledge.

Young Wave often comments in media ant public space on drug related topics in addition to organizing lectures, workshops and discussions at both the regional and international level.

This lecture will focus on the therapeutic and ceremonial use of combined modalities for working with altered states of consciousness. It will explore the nuances of setting and ceremony design, harm reduction principles, theoretical and philosophical reference points, possible mechanisms of action, case examples, and a Q&A. The lecturer is Aliaksandr Yankelevich, a psychotherapist based in Barcelona.

Dr. Mindaugas Šarpis is a particle physicist at CERN, where he works on the LHCb experiment — one of the four major detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. His research focuses on exotic forms of matter, including pentaquarks: rare, multi-quark particles that challenge our understanding of how the strong force binds matter together. Beyond research, he is active in science communication and in strengthening Lithuania’s ties to CERN — most recently as one of the organizers of LHCb Week 2026, set to become the largest event in the history of Lithuanian science, bringing hundreds of physicists from around the world to Vilnius this September.

Storytelling is an ancient, universal practice that weaves together individual and collective experiences, shaping our identities and communities. This talk explores the profound role of stories in transformational festivals, highlighting how storytelling can inspire personal growth, foster communal connection, and create a collective narrative of transformation. This lecture begins with an introduction to the historical significance of storytelling, framing it as a cornerstone of human culture and a powerful tool for shared meaning-making.

The presentation then transitions into a deep dive into how transformational festivals like Fusion, Mo:dem, Burning Man, BOOM, and Ozora can positively impact humanity.
Drawing on findings from 14 festivals and a total of 6 years of fieldwork conducted by the Burning Stories science-art collective that Jukka-Pekka founded in 2018, the lecture reveals key themes that emerge from the stories shared by participants. These narratives illuminate the pathways through which festivals enable individual and communal transformation, grounded in scientific insights and enriched by artistic expression. Audience is also invited to explore the concept of [radical] psychological safety, a key ingredient for transformation. Based on recent academic research, this concept underscores the importance of creating environments where individuals feel safe to express themselves authentically, embrace vulnerability, and engage in transformative experiences.

Through a blend of storytelling, research, and artistic interaction, this session offers an immersive, thought-provoking journey into the heart of transformation at festivals. It aspires to inspire the conTent participants about the stories that unite us and to envision the transformative potential of music festivals as spaces for growth, connection, and positive societal impact. The talk invites critical reflection and discussion, encouraging participants to explore questions such as: What does transformation truly mean in a festival context? What might be the barriers to transformation, and how can we, as a community, overcome them to foster deeper, more sustainable change?

To bring the insights to life, the following workshop concludes with an engaging, interactive activity centered around storytelling. Participants will interact with 2-3 custom-designed wooden cubes, tools inspired by research and crafted specifically to facilitate storytelling during and after festive events. These Story Sharing Cubes serve as platforms for participants to share their personal festival experiences. Stories collected are anonymized and later shared back with the community in text format, enriching a collective narrative of transformation.

The science-driven workshop focuses on one of humanity's oldest and most profound forms of knowledge transfer: story sharing. Following a brief introduction to the power and importance of storytelling in transformational settings, participants will be invited to share a story. This could be an experience from Yaga or any other meaningful moment that resonates with them—any style, format, or theme is welcomed. The story-sharing process is facilitated through the Story Sharing Cube, a device designed for data collection at transformational festivals. Alternatively, participants may opt to write their story on paper, allowing for greater flexibility and comfort in expression.

This workshop offers participants a reflective space to connect with their festival experiences on a deeper level, fostering personal insight and communal connection. By participating, individuals not only gain a richer understanding of their own journeys but also contribute to a growing body of narratives that highlight the transformative potential of festivals. For the Fusion community, these anonymized stories will be shared via online platforms, making them accessible to artists, researchers, and community builders. This participatory element reinforces the power of storytelling as a tool for self-expression, understanding, and collective growth, inviting the community to celebrate and contribute to the transformative magic of shared human experiences.