As my patrons know, I've just moved house, and am now living in an amazing community with friends. Forming this community has been a powerful experience. It happened surprisingly quickly, from realising during the March lockdown that none of us wanted to live in isolation again, to moving in together at the end of September. In between were five months of weekly Zoom calls, two in-person socially distanced park meets, and some of the richest group work I've ever done. It's transformed the entire way I think about relating. 
 

Several of us have previous experience of attempting to form a community like this, myself included. It turns out that if you want to make it work, you have to do the work - both within yourself, and with the group. We've taken our learnings from our personal experience, from self-development work and our studies into how to form high-functioning relationships, and evolved an organic process which seems to be working really well for us. It's challenging, but so worth it.
 

I've identified five key principles which I think are absolutely essential if you want to build trust and connectedness with people, that will withstand all the difficult things that come up in our lives. In this post I'm going to share them with you, and I hope you find them useful.
 

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