Alchemy School of Healing Arts

Eco-retreat village & community centre

A Tuscan Renaissance ~ Regeneration & Renewal

Alchemy School of Healing Arts

Concept

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.

Our highest purpose is to build a global community of conscious teachers and students, thought leaders and changemakers, and anyone on a path of healing or growth.

When will we open?

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.

When can you come?

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.

Vision

We envision a new culture and paradigm — the co-creation of a holistic and sustainable path for living in harmony with nature and each other.

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.

The Village

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.

Above all, we seek to integrate into and serve the local village.

The Community

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.

The Centre

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.

Mission

Through regeneration, innovation, education, art, and healing, ASHA aims to build a scalable blueprint for land-based Conscious Communities.

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.

12 Co-Commitments

1. I commit to feeling all my feelings.

2. I commit to telling the "microscopic" truth.

3. I commit to keeping my agreements.

4. I commit myself to full closeness, and to clearing up anything within me that stands in the way.

5. I commit myself to my own complete development as an individual.

6. I commit myself to the full empowerment of people around me.

7. I commit to revealing myself fully in the relationship and not to concealing myself.

8. I commit myself to acting from the awareness that I am 100 percent the source of my reality.

9. I commit myself to having a good time in my close relationships.

10. I commit to asking myself what my outer world reflects to me about my own being and my own inner leadership.

11. I commit to seeing myself and others as complete, resourceful, and whole.

12. I commit to the awareness that I may screw up the co-commitments and need to keep (re)learning them.

SELF-DEVELOPMENT

The first word of ASHA’s name is “alchemy”, and if there was ever a moment for alchemy to be here, then this is it. With most of the world wishing for positive change alongside us, can we look deep inside ourselves to see what we can do to become the change we wish to see outside us? Our community is founded on practices and activities (individual and collective) aimed at creating self-awareness, emotional intelligence, empathic dialogue, deep listening and conscious conflict resolution. We are committed to doing the work within ourselves so that we can thrive together in harmony and co-creativity.

SUSTAINABILITY

We recognize that sustainability is a philosophy which extends far beyond carbon footprint. Community can provide the reflection and support we need to further ourselves towards our highest self-value. This quality of support is based on supporting the strength in each of us, rather than indulging the weakness. If each member of the community is willing to bring more than they need to take, there will be abundance. This abundance can then spread from the individual to others, and from our human community to serve the land and environment in which we live. It can be applied to everything we do, including our approach to ethical, zero-impact business, and sustaining a virtuous circle that does not weigh on the world, but rather serves its interest.

HEALING

With the right tools at our disposal, each of us has the power to heal ourselves. Every healing journey is complex and challenging, and it is our responsibility to seek the teachers and lessons we need to live our life in a healthy and fulfilling way. The foundation of our community is a belief in the power of holistic education, performing arts and storytelling to create the understanding, comfort, and support we all need to navigate change and personal growth. Through coming together in expression, presence and love, we will heal each other.

OPENNESS

Our community is built around openness and a willingness to show up and be present. We come to the table with the courage to confront and work through whatever stories, patterns, and judgments are no longer serving us. We seek to foster an environment of harmony, communication, collaboration and creative awareness within the community and its surroundings.

TRUST

Trust is the gateway to connection and growth. Our community is called to trust in ourselves and our personal journeys of inner work and healing, as well as in each other and the power of co-creation. We are called to trust community elders and teachers, the stewards of knowledge and truth. We trust those who came before us and the ancient wisdom of our ancestors. We believe that by trusting the universe and our power within it, we can become the conscious creators of our lives.

INTEGRITY

Every one of us has a personal journey and struggle, but we choose how to respond to life. We are in control of whether we are held back by our past or choose to alchemise pain into growth. We can benefit from the power of the collective, and offer our own support to it too, in order to harvest all that has held us back, has weighed upon us or triggered us, and to consciously transform it into the fuel we need to step into leadership and example.

RESPECT

Our community embraces the other and has a profound respect for all people - their differences, opinions, origins, backgrounds, life experiences and problems - and all forms of life. We have respect for each other and for ourselves, for mother nature and her resources, and for the many communities we are a part of (and those we are not). We respect local customs and cultures around the world. We respect the many different paths to spiritual awareness and truth, and the many different approaches to healing and wellness.

About

Co-founders:
Anthony Abbagnano and Amy Rachelle

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.

Combining Anthony and Amy’s passion for community, love for people, and belief in the human spirit to not only survive - yet thrive - they are dedicated to creating a safe haven to birth a new world.

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.

Get Involved

There are many ways you can get involved with our village project:

Join our monthly newsletter to learn more about our community, properties, events, retreats, opportunities, and more ❤️

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Join our monthly newsletter to learn more about our community, properties, events, retreats, opportunities, and more ❤️

Join our monthly newsletter to learn more about our community, properties, events, retreats, opportunities, and more ❤️