Welcome to The Grow Free Community
Transforming Trauma Together: A Playground to Reconnect, Resource & Re-frame.
About Us
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To watch our video updates, subscribe to The GrowFree Community YouTube Channel
Being Held is Miraculous.
Grow Free is an approach to living that holds and informs us while we untangle the imprints of trauma and re-birth anew, individually and collectively. The Grow Free Community is the sentient space and constellation of people that brings this to life.
Through our programme, courses and training, we offer education and nurture awareness.
Through community, we offer ongoing support and meaningful relationship.
Through culture we offer safety, re-connection with self, other and nature, with love and loss, joy and grief, tears and laughter.
Through peer support and informal apprenticeship we model imperfect, authentic worthiness, inviting us all to value ourselves and our whole experience.
Through creativity we offer infinite ways to be involved.
We love being and coming together outdoors, yet we value the opportunities that digital technology and an online home space creates.
The Story
Grow Free was becoming for a long time before we could see it.
My name is Emma B. I am a co-founder of Grow Free. We created the first Grow Free course in 2019 yet the vision and gathering of like-minds had started some years prior.
Trauma had been grinding the brakes for Grow Free, along with other aspects of our personal and collective lives. So many of us have been living in acute and chronic states of hyper- and hypo- arousal (fight, flight, freeze); sometimes stuck, maybe spinning, and often compulsively defending or distracting ourselves from modern life and its assault and overwhelm.
There are many different labels and diagnoses that get put on our experience. From ADHD, depression, anxiety, addiction, food or personality disorders, bipolar, chronic fatigue, and other chronic conditions, to moral and behavioural problems or racial, gender or age-related issues.
Recognising a root cause and understandable response as ‘trauma’ was a surprising yet pivotal discovery.
Trauma is a big word and while it can result from big, obvious events, there can be many little 't' traumas in our daily lives, especially when we are vulnerable infants and children. Unresolved and unsupported, these set the scene for how we experience our lives and how resilient we are within them.
Now that we have this trauma lens, we can recognise the imprints of trauma everywhere in our personal and collective lives. We can also see how recognising and transforming trauma opens the door to WHOLE new worlds. When we face and feel our fighty-flighty-frozen selves, we also find and set our True Selves free. We regain a trust in life and in each other that we had forgotten possible.
I am trained in Yoga, Yoga Therapy, Anthropology & Permaculture. I have studied psychological, indigenous and somatic approaches to recovering from trauma and experienced many more. I curate courses and collaborative projects, support people to commune with the plants, and delight in standing alongside others as they empower themselves to shine. I have equally needed similar support and perspective opening from others, and it has come through peers as much as practitioners.
This inspired me to bring them together and map the essential aspects of effective approaches. We have combined these in a simple program adaptable by anyone who picks it up. We came to appreciate the miracle of feeling held and heard, of creating safe spaces that nurture as well as the importance of mutual support, community and reciprocity for growth and wellbeing. We noticed that what we need for 'recovery' is often the same as we need in childhood for learning and growth and it starts with feeling safe in our body and relationships.
This is at the basis of all of our offerings at GrowFree where we aim to provide an infrastructure of offerings and models for wellbeing, dialogue and decision-making, and learning and growth.
The Community
Grow Free is now a community where personal and professional experience are combined and valued equally. We are people who open up and offer our WHOLE experience (rather than hide, mask, avoid, deny or defend it) to support each other and invite others to Grow Free.
At Grow Free we have created an approach to transforming trauma underpinned by a flexible programme, supported by community and peer support and brought to life through events, courses and resources.
Our early founders and on-the-ground community sites are in North East Scotland, and yet we have members across the world - from the Isle of Sheppey to Brazil, France & The Netherlands. We imagine micro-hubs growing wherever members are. Wherever you are, however you feel, you are welcome here.
To receive our email updates, go to: subscribepage.io/GrowFree
To watch our video updates, subscribe to The GrowFree Community YouTube Channel
Growing Free
Growing Free requires dedication and consistency.
It requires awareness and attention on a daily basis.
Through our culture, collaborations and offerings, we create the support
we all need and long for to grow beyond the limits, reactions and beliefs
that trauma has embedded within and around us.
We create safety and opportunities for expressing our WHOLE selves -the old stories and the sparkly new potential - and reawakening our purpose, desires and creativity within the nurturing cloth of connection, compassion and curiosity.
Why You Might Join Us
In 2024, there is a palpable desire to RISE.
Depending on how much of our trauma has been integrated, we will feel it as excitement or overwhelm, and maybe swing between the two.
WE are so READY to move into our true personal power while being held in community.
We are ready to leave behind and transform trauma.
We are ready to re-birth ourselves and bring new ways to life.
If you feel anything stir or whisper within, you are as ready as you need to be to jump lives, take hold of new light-filled lifelines, and join the new. The Grow Free Community will bring you together with people equally, imperfectly, and powerfully ready for something new.
The GrowFree Community brings together peers, parents and practitioners with a common purpose of transforming trauma as a root cause of ill-health and inequality into resilience, creativity and connection. By creating resources and infrastructure, joint-learning and training, therapeutic community and cultural events that are accessible, we aim to break harmful intergenerational and systemic cycles by nurturing new models for wellbeing, dialogue and decision-making..
If you would like to create a world where our bodies and communities are safe and vital places to live; where we all feel the seen and unseen support available within and around us; where we all Grow Free together, JOIN us here.
All of our courses and offerings are provided on a sliding-pay-scale and where possible offered on a donation or free basis where helpful. We cannot always list all of these options below or on our marketing, but please ask about them. We'd rather you joined for free than not at all.
A Big Shout . . .
. . . to those who believed and joined already.
Together we are making this come to life.
This community is ordinary and personal.
Personal in that the tiny, ordinary moments of our everyday life change our worlds.
And in this way, it is radical, evolutionary and political.
When we know ourselves in the tiny moments, we set ourselves free.
When we set ourselves free, we share our freedom with the world.
