HowTheLightGetsIn Festival

Perfect For

Anyone who feels most alive when they’re learning something new. For the curious, the restless, the thinkers and the dreamers—the ones who want their minds moved as much as their bodies.

Why You’ll Love it

Ideas sit so close to wonder here. New thinking propels your imagination forward, with academics out of the universities and into fairground fields, dancing late into the night.

You’ll spend your days soaking up mind-expanding discussions on subjects like black holes, AI, anxiety, and epidemiology, and your evenings beneath glitter balls at riverside discos or swaying to live music.

It’s a rare space where Nobel Prize winners and Grammy award-winners share the same billing—and where you leave feeling stretched in the best way.

What Makes It Special

HowTheLightGetsIn is the world’s largest philosophy and music festival (that these go together says it all). It’s not just about intellectual sparring or abstract debate—it’s about weaving ideas into real life, combining heavyweight talks with laughter, connection, and dance.

The magic comes from the mix: sitting under a tent roof in the afternoon listening to leading thinkers, then catching comedy sets or live bands as the sun goes down.

The Story Behind It

It all starts with the name.

“There is a crack in everything… that’s how the light gets in.”

These Leonard Cohen lyrics trace the festival’s origin story and tone. The “light” here is unarguably ideas—but also a reminder that light comes through imperfections, through play, through music, and through gathering. Held bi-annually, the festival takes over Hay-on-Wye each spring for one long, invigorating weekend, and Greenwich in the autumn for a shorter city edition.

The If Lost Take

HowTheLightGetsIn isn’t just about absorbing knowledge—it’s about feeling the spark of aliveness that comes when we expand. This festival offers intellectual adventure and playful escape all at once: a space to be both serious and silly, thoughtful and joyful, stretched and soothed. For anyone seeking a festival that feeds both brain and soul, this is your place.

Practical details

Location: Hay-on-Wye, Wales

Tickets: A range of options available, including day and Flexi passes. Under-25s and students receive a 40% discount; children under 12 attend free.

Accommodation: Choose from self-pitch camping, pre-pitched tents, or glamping.

Accessibility: The festival is committed to inclusivity, with accessible facilities and support.

More info & booking here

The Good Life Experience

What is it: Billed as a festival like no other, The Good Life Experience takes place over a long autumn weekend on a castle estate in North Wales and has all the things that you’d hope to have in your regular life — great music, creative expression, inspirational books, time in the great outdoors, incredible food — to give you a taster of The Good Life. Founded by Cerys Matthews, Steve Abbot, and Charlie and Caroline Gladstone in 2014 to be ‘more than just’, from its starting point of “powerful, memorable and — most importantly — FUN experiences.”, it has since expanded to include Summer Camps, a dog-diving competition, and a range of activities for our grown-up inner children like fairground rides, ax throwing, and blacksmithing!

Why you’ll love it: Sometimes we think of The Good Life like our guide made in festival format: it has all the components that we try to weave together in the way that we approach the world: connection, nature, wellness, untethering, purpose, meaning, awe, creativity and doing good. All that is needed for our wellbeing.

Or see it like a favorite lifestyle magazine that makes all the things recommended and talked about happen in the real world rather than just on the page, so there’s the latest authors talking about their writings, top chefs cooking their recipes with us, sustainably produced fashion and small independent makers to shop, and travel spreads on glamping that you get to inhabit for a few nights. It's all there for real-world engagement. 

Or consider it like how kids feel when they get to a theme park and want to do all the things and they have that squeaky voice and excitement inside, but here it’s us grown-ups (though many of us with our kids) wanting to do all the things too. On our list are floristry and weaving, dancing to new bands then star gazing, faery card reading, and campfire cooking sessions.

In short, The Good Life Experience is a playground of the thoughtfully curated and frankly just fun for the curious and the seekers among us.

What you need to know: Are we allowed to plan ahead yet? If so, booking a slot at The Good Life Experience is high on our list of things to do for making 2021 nothing like 2020. (Tickets are already available for next year’s festival taking place from 29 April to 2 May and the waitlist for them has already started — which we’re now also on, sigh).

How to bring this into your life: The Good Life Experience is not just a festival anymore, it’s becoming a way of life to access year-round. And when lockdown happened (and is happening again) the team behind it got active: see a community shop in a pub, new podcasts and daily posters, Some Good Ideas, and a whole array of Good Life Experiences to do at home. At the time of writing, you can participate in the new project Lockdown Radio and an All Day Communion, a partnership with writer Mark Shayler. Out of festival hours, there are also weekend camps at sister project Glen Dye in Scotland and open through all the times their farm shop on Hawarden Estates.

Why we think it’s different: There was a moment not that long ago when making anything other than toast for breakfast was seen as the norm and self-care extended to a long bath. Maybe we learned knitting from our nans, or we tried Jamie Oliver when we needed to cook, or we got into the National Trust to go outdoors. But then something shifted, hugely. With the constant demands of our working and online lives, a planet on a horribly destructive path, and daily life that’s getting harder on our minds and souls, many of us are now seeking out the different and the good and the life-affirming. We’re looking for ways to connect with something slower, more meaningful, and dare we say it more human.

Such pastimes as wild swimming, crafting, and poetry, have become newly popular and widely sought out. Just think about those sourdough starters and new crocheted wall pieces that you started in Lockdown. We turn to other things when the world turns inside out, and often these are simple pleasures, the people around us, and the natural world.

Where once The Good Life Experience was a singular way of being, now more of us are open to experiences that help us find new ways of navigating our lives and having better, more joyful, and sustainable days as we do so. If The Good Life Experience becomes just an interruption in the year from all the things that make modern life what it is than that’s great, but taking new discoveries beyond the weekend has the capacity to help year-round. 

In their own words: “At its core, this movement can best be defined, perhaps, as The Search for The Good Life; a life that’s fulfilled and considered, yes, but is also fun and values the things that matter... family, friends, a real connection with The Great Outdoors, proper food and drink, discovery, music that comes from the soul, great books, craft. All the things that don’t cost a great deal but that make life richer, more rewarding, and better fun.”

To find out more: Website / Instagram / Twitter / Facebook

Additionally try: The Big Retreat

The Canvas: Vegan Cafe | Creative Venue | Community Hub

“What started as one woman’s idea has now evolved to become a living, breathing embodiment of all the best parts of humanity: generosity, positivity, kindness, hope and love. This is thanks to the people who have joined The Canvas along its journey, adding their voices, ideas and energy, nurturing the space so that it’s constantly growing and evolving to be something greater.”

Brick Lane’s Canvas Café is part of Action for Happiness’ network of Happy Cafes (yes there are more) throughout the world. In fact it was London’s first. 

But what exactly is a Happy Café? What differentiates it from any other kind of caffeine-oriented place? Well, there’s a clue there—it’s less about the lattes served and more about what this space creates, the connections and the activity that happens here. 

From the outside this yellow splash of a storefront just off Brick Lane is not exactly what it seems. You can just treat The Canvas like any other café—and if you do we recommend the freakshakes, unbelievably a slab of cake perched precariously on top of a ceramic mug of your choice (we chose the cloud/ rainbow one) filled with a creamy, non-dairy milkshake. But there are hints of something else afoot with the invitation to draw on the wall and answer questions like ‘what does community mean to you?’ and ‘what’s your happy place’.

There’s also the pay-it-forward board which invites you to add a drink or meal to your order for someone who might not be able to afford it. And this café is 100% vegan and all the food served is homemade. A mission to do good, to be good, determines everything in this café. All those buzzwords: sustainablilty, local, low-footprint, form the foundations of the Canvas Cafe. This extends to the suppliers that it works with, which includes local coffee purveyor Square Mile Coffee and Pip+Nut which doesn’t use any palm oil.

Beyond its café appearance it’s kind of the dream of positivity, exactly the kind of place that we find ourselves longing for at If Lost Start Here. The Canvas puts people—their ideas, their needs, their lives—at the center of what it does. That means there’s true generosity in how it operates. And if there’s a bit of cynicism there, let’s get that out the way right now. This isn’t some wishy-washy place that makes nice aphorisms and cute branding. It fundamentally operates from a place of living its values and combats such lifestyle nasties as loneliness, mental ill health, and climate change.

This is all encapsulated in the Community Hub, a white-walled blank canvas of a space for individuals, organizations and charities to try out their ideas for positive activitism. Renting space is expensive in London but this one room is offered for free to incubate ideas that can make people’s lives better. In return The Canvas just asks for donations to its Pay It Forward program.

The Community Hub has become a vital early supporter of innovative ideas for those things that we’re now finding we need in our lives to function better. Future events on the schedule include Hugs and Cuddle workshops, free meditation sessions from Inner Space, and improv for life. It already has an impactful history of supporting great causes in their early days: Places like the Museum for Happiness and Mike’s Table (which serves refugees) got their start here. 

Since it was founded in 2014, by Ruth Rogers (not River Café, but the actress and puppeteer) as the blank space for the community and an outlet for both creativity and positivity, The Canvas has flourished. It now has an active program of partnerships. Each month sees 50-60 events with everyone from the perfectly named Revolting Vegans Supper Club—which offers a 6-course menu while taking on issues around food waste and the environmental impact of what we don’t get to eat—to Raining Sessions, where twenty-somethings get to share their stories and receive support. And The Canvas roams off-site too: over the summer they provided free meals and sport and craft activities to kids in Tower Hamlets. 

Exhausted yet? The Canvas wants to do even more. They have just completed a fundraising campaign to renovate the Community Hub space which means more events, more support of great ideas, more people helped, more grass roots beneficial social change. Add another 5-years, we hope, and The Canvas will have brought even more people together in that big ole-city of London around positivity, innovation and creativity. 

To find out more: website www.thecanvascafe.org / Instragram @thecanvascafee1 / Twitter @thecanvascafe / Facebook @thecanvascafeE1

The Chapel

“Warm and friendly place to shop, meet, drink and eat the very best seasonal, local food. ”

This was not the place that we thought we’d find in a gorgeous village in Somerset. But then Bruton is not defined by its countryside location or its picturesque look. There’s a lot going on within these country lanes. You might even, sometimes, think a tiny piece of London has just got off the train. Hey, even John Steinbeck said of Bruton: ‘I feel more at home here than I have ever felt in my life in any place.’ 

So maybe it makes sense to find The Chapel right at the center of it all. We want to write lots of naff sentences saying things like worship at the culinary altar of the chapel, or bread is our gospel, or a church for modern life, but though it threads a desirable religiosity through its space, the Chapel is very much to the side of that. Yes, it’s a serene update of a Grade II Listed, 19th-century space, which is itself a remodel of an 18th century former congregational chapel. And yes, you very much sense that history within its walls. But it’s also much less ethereally focused in its update of the purpose for these spaces: it now contains all the things we need to build the modern good life. 

There’s the artisan bakery headed by Tom Hitchmough using a traditional long fermented process. We’re bread believers: bakeries can be the souls of our communities. Just think about the hours involved in creating a loaf, that nighttime toil, the scents and bustle created around the storefront, the taking home of packages of warmth, and the mindful in the moment-ness of breaking bread. 

Then there’s the award-winning all day-restaurant which though is buzzes with conversation and contemporary needs (a bar where the altar would be) somehow manages to instill tranquility (and even quiet our kids) with its high ceilings and windows, streaming natural light, and figurative sculpture looking down on the dining congregates. It holds us in our days: somehow moves from loungey to kitchen table to posh restaurant, and from solo coffee to dinner for two to group dining, depending on where you are seated, what you need, and the time you are there. 

More behind the scenes are the clubhouse, a private resident’s lounge from which to work (free Wifi) and relax. And the eight bedrooms that offer a tranquil pause. Oh, and there’s a carefully curated wine store that focuses on local producers. 

But the thing we’re struck by is that The Chapel also offers this, public events for the curious that attract some big names and introduce some life-changing ideas: like a talk by Ed Bullmore, author of The Inflamed Mind, connecting the mind and the body through inflammation, an evening with Martin Shaw, a storyteller of ancient myths for modern times, and a film screening with campaigner Nimco Ali discussing female genital mutilation. 

The Chapel pulls people together, over food, over wine, over conversation, over ideas. That is does so in a space long held for purpose and meaning, gives the idea of the communal a modern finish.

Website www.atthechapel.co.uk / instagram @thechapel / Facebook @thechapel / Twitter @thechapel

While you are here: For that creativity piece, head to Hauser & Wirth, an internationally renowned gallery that brings major art world players to a converted rural farm. For Nature + Wonder, visit The Bishops Place, where history is being interwoven with play in the cathedral town of Wells. And for spirituality of a pagan kind, walk to the top of Glastonbury Tor, and allow the legend and views to sweep over you. And you can do this from anywhere, buy a Mad Girl / Mad Boy sweatshirt by Bruton based Selfish Mother in collaboration with Bryony Gordon / Mental Health Mates.