Who This Site is For

This community is intended for 50 and over. If younger people wish to be interacting with this age bracket, they are welcome. However, please be advised the topics, content and connections are intended for those over 50.

Our Mission

We exist to cultivate a connected community of ISTA Over 50 graduates. Together, we continue the exploration begun at ISTA through friendship, practice, play, and shared experience.

Our Guiding Principles

Recall an ISTA container in which you have taken part: its openness, and the sharing to which you contributed. This site seeks to reproduce that experience as faithfully as an online medium allows. Its features are designed to mirror the forms of exchange found within such a container:

• Posts are not confined to per-user pages. They are published to a communal forum, where every member may read them and respond with supportive comments, much as in a sharing circle.
• The public information in a profile corresponds to a first meeting: one learns another’s name, age and appearance.
• Messages resemble the informal conversations that arise between participants, perhaps over a shared meal.
• Pods correspond to the small groups that meet day after day within a training: a handful of participants who return to the same circle, come to know one another closely, and share in confidence.
• More intimate disclosures, which each member may choose to make, correspond to an RBDSMT conversation held with another participant.

When an ISTA training concludes, the close bonds formed within it often prove difficult to sustain. Addressing this difficulty is one of the principal reasons for the site’s existence. ISTA graduates may register and provide their name, approximate location, age and photographs, together with considerably more information if they wish. The “Members” page then enables them to locate other ISTA graduates over the age of fifty, and to renew contact or arrange to meet by means of the site’s private messaging.

Pods carry this work further. A community is more than a directory of its members; it grows from repeated, unhurried contact among people who come to trust one another. Each member who chooses to take part is placed in a pod of five to seven fellow graduates. The pod is a private room that only its members may enter, where they may drop in at any time, talk with whoever is present, catch up on what was said in their absence, and arrange to meet by video. Because the group is small and its membership stable, conversation can deepen as it does in a training’s small group. Because the pods are re-formed at regular intervals, each member comes in time to know a widening circle of others. Bonds that might otherwise have remained confined to a single training are thereby renewed, and new ones formed, across the whole community.

The site’s primary purpose is the cultivation of community. It is not intended as a dating service, although it may certainly serve that end. In this respect, too, it follows the example of ISTA itself, whose trainings are not designed for the finding of partners, though such connections can and do arise.