Mutual Support

prototyping more sustainable, compassionate and joyful ways of living together.

As the trauma specialist Bessel Van Der Kolk surmises ‘being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.’35

A Sense Of Contribution - First identifying, and then offering up our unique gifts to our community, and feeling valued and appreciated for this. A Sense Of Purpose - Feeling as if the interactions we share with our fellow community members are having a positive impact upon wider society.

As Richard Bartlett explores in his series of articles on Microsolidarity,40 becoming a Community Creature involves finding harmony between the many aspects that compose our inner ’community of one’, but also includes improving our ability to maintain highly cohesive relationships at the one to one level, ’Pod’ level (3-6 people) and ‘Collective’

forming Collectives gives us an opportunity to do exactly that, to create small pockets of the kind of futures we wish to inhabit, right here in the world today. But rather than going it alone, or with just a couple of close friends, we get to run the experiment with up to two hundred other people who all share our same values and dreams.

while the grand stories of the day underpin virtually every aspect of our modern lives, they can often hide in plain sight, behind a veneer of what is generally considered as either ‘accepted truth’ or ‘common sense’. We tend to have a blindspot regarding the baseline assumptions of our mother culture, which can make it challenging for us to

But when we increase the complexity of our communities, then we must also increase our ability to maintain healthy and supportive cultures within them. Part of this process involves learning to consider what kind of impacts the less integrated parts of our personalities may be having on the communities of people around us.