Alchemy School of Healing Arts - ASHA - is a Retreat & Community Centre located at the edge of a medieval village in Southern Tuscany. This Centre is the cornerstone of an initiative to regenerate and revitalise the local village into a thriving Intentional Community. Our pilot project in Italy will become a land-based academy and healing centre dedicated to ethically, environmentally, and socially responsible living, commerce, and business.
ASHA’s Village Project in Tuscany is the physical manifestation of an active online community of over 50 thousand people who seek a place to land. After three decades of exploration, investigation and involvement in community building - at this pivotal moment in history - Anthony and Amy have found the perfect location to ground their vision for a new way of living.
ASHA’s soft opening in the Fall of 2020 was a heart-warming and motivating experience. After 5,000 volunteer hours from our incredible on-site team, we were finally ready to welcome 20 guests for a 10-day BreathCamp in September. We were humbled by the outpouring of love and support we received and look forward to beginning this next chapter together as a community. Our goal is to be fully open to the public in the Spring of 2021.
Follow us on Facebook to join the ASHA community and learn more about future retreats and programs.
Although we are not fully launched yet, the Centre is currently open for community use only. Members have begun hosting meditations, breathwork sessions, yoga classes, ceremonies, and group talks in our Dharma Den.
If you are interested in visiting our Retreat & Community Centre or if you are local and want to get involved, please reach out by emailing us.
ASHA’s Village Project in Tuscany is our conscious experiment in collaborating and co-creating similar communities around the world. The first purchase of land and buildings provides the venue for retreats as well as a community hub for those who choose to relocate here. We see the town and surrounding area as a safe-haven dedicated to ethically, environmentally, and socially responsible living, commerce, and business.
Our vision for the village is grounded in business innovation, job creation, and community giveback. Our pilot project in Italy is based in and around a historic mining town in Southern Tuscany. Since the mines were closed some 25 years ago, most of the youth have left to find work in cities.
With the support of the ASHA Foundation, we seek to regenerate the village and its surroundings by attracting the younger generation back with zero-impact industry initiatives, driving property sales and local commerce as our numbers grow, and creating a nomad oasis (with fiber-optic internet connection) for those who may have roamed the world in the past but now yearn for harmony and community in these challenging times.
Our vision for the community is founded on selfless service and integrating a complimentary economy that interweaves with existing cultural heritage. With the understanding and commitment that creating a new community is an inside-out job, we seek members who are stable and self-sufficient, and who share a common ethos dedicated to co-creativity and inspired living. Our community culture is guided by the teachings of the 10 Co-Commitments.
In the future, we aim to develop leadership and business programs, apprenticeships and scholarships, a children’s school, elder mentorship and outreach programs, hospice care, and a digital centre for the creation and broadcast of teaching initiatives with global outreach.
Our vision for the Centre is to create a community hub where we can all come together to learn, share, and connect with one another and our neighbours in the village. Once we are fully open, we plan to provide healing modalities and education that includes services and schooling for residential and visiting guests, as well as a calendar of community events around storytelling, music, dance, performance and visual arts.
Our vision for the land is to use and take care of the natural waterways as a central part of healing, growing food and generating power, as well as for beauty, pleasure and play. In the future, we envision permaculture gardens which will supply the local community and villagers, hot spring mineral pools, and renewable energy initiatives.
In the future, we hope to develop co-working spaces, a restaurant/café, spa and gym, and offer yoga, martial arts, pilates, and movement classes.
ASHA is an antidote to the current global crisis we collectively face, providing sustainable solutions for a holistic culture. Our innovative new technologies, progressive people and platforms, are here to birth a new way of living in troubled times.
Our pilot project in Italy is an experiment in applying the ASHA community model. Our mission is to support the regeneration of a thriving economy that is attractive to conscious investment. We plan to achieve this through introducing green business initiatives, driving local real estate investment, providing business consulting and financing services, and developing sustainable community programs founded on education, outreach, and support.
Anthony and Amy are dedicated to spearheading this movement along with their progressive team – and other way-paving thought leaders – all committed to bringing positive and impactful change now.
Anthony and Amy have been looking for the right property to bring their community, colleagues, friends, and family after leaving Bali in 2015.
On the verge of giving up, and longing for home and a place to ground the vision, a dear friend who used to work with Anthony in his property business in Tuscany in the 80’s and 90’s found an abandoned retreat center – and village in the mountains of southern Tuscany. After contemplating it for 3 years, and influenced by the troubled times we live in, Anthony and Amy bought the retreat center in January 2020.
They decided on the name ASHA (Alchemy School of Healing Arts), as Anthony’s Alchemy of Breath first came from the restaurant and community hub in Bali that Anthony co-founded in Ubud. And Anthony and Amy believe in the alchemy we each bring to community, and that it’s magic, culture, and creation stems from what each person brings to it.
As healers, this name was also born out of their love for to see a human soul flourish to a community – and the planet thrive as old structures naturally die, and more conducive ones birth.
