ABOUT US

Our community came about unintentionally. We experimented with continuing to share how each of us felt once we’d all gone our separate ways after a week’s intimate residential retreat. We connected online, as a group, or in clusters of 3s or 4s, and from time to time met again in person. It worked. Somehow, we found a way to foster a sustainably loving and caring community even through multiple difficulties, both personal and collective.

We’re continually learning… how to live more lovingly and vibrantly as our unique selves whilst properly listening to everyone else, and learning from each other. That’s recognising in ourselves, and setting aside, prejudice, anticipation and expectation. And allowing others to know us not from our standpoint, our opinion or our personal story (where we tend to warm to our never-ending starring role), but how we feel, what we experience in ourselves in relationship to others. 

People are free to come and go. Many have. Those who joined, and stayed, have always arrived via the experience of spending time off with us on retreat. We’re not imagining lots of people joining our Foundation Community. But we know what works, and how well it works, and know we’ve discovered something worth sharing. We’re here to support others in exploring new ways of being in relationship with themselves, with others and with

the world at large.

Our forever-experimenting Foundation Community currently numbers 23, with slightly more women than men. There’s been little change in participants in the last five years. That constancy has highlighted for us how much our personal and professional relationships outside this experiment are now more rewarding and enjoyable.

We didn’t go looking for variety. But we are a truly mixed bunch:

Afro-Caribbean, European, Indian, part-Asian, tall, short, wide, slight, bald, hairy. Straight, gay, single parent, co-parenting, retired, mid-career, overstretched working mums, people who live alone, some challenged by mental or physical illness, those who are married, single, divorced, in partnership, caring for elderly parents… and a handful free as birds.

More than a third are first- or second-generation immigrants.

Inevitably, our training, education and work experiences are part of who we are and what we bring. Here’s where you would have found some of us:

The theatre (backstage and very much onstage), medicine (doctors and nurses), accountancy, business (global and local), gardening, painting and decorating, therapy, property, music, academia (physics, physiotherapy and sustainability), wildlife, psychology,

qi gong and yoga, bike maintenance, self-defence, massage, teaching and training.

We’re contemplating setting up a new long weekend’s residential retreat. If you’d like to join us, possibly with a view to dipping your toe into how it is to be ongoingly a part of this lively experiment, let us know: hello@alltogetherlydifferent.co.uk.