Do You Have Old Wounding About Community?
I have a big dream for community. Don’t you??
Almost everyone I know has this dream – a BIG DREAM of living on land, in community with people you love and a huge garden – living in harmony with the earth, with people, with a new kind of human tribe and family. It’s a new paradigm vision and an ancient calling back to more tribal, interconnected and earth-centered ways of living.
It’s the new “white picket fence” – a calling to some sense of order, home and rightness in the world.
And, very few of us are living it.
Why?
We have a lot of old, mostly sub-conscious, wounding in community and family relationships and few containers for addressing and healing those wounds.
What interests me is – what will it take to actually live it, sustain it and grow the dream we hold?
A lot. Aside from the obvious architectural, financial, organizational and legal challenges embedded in community models, if we can’t heal the wounding that happens in community dynamics, we simply can’t build or sustain the dream.
I recently recognized (and not for the first time) is that the greatest obstacle to my creating and staying in community is the pain I harbor about past experiences and relationships. All the unresolved feelings I have about betrayal, abandonment, misinterpretation, my own and other people’s stubbornness and strong opinions, the boredom of meetings, the subtle undercurrents of sexual tensions and jealousy… these are all in in the way of me showing up with presence, curiosity, non-judgement, passion and willingness. These are all in the way of me feeling safe. And, because I don’t feel safe, I don’t behave in a safe way. I subtly control who I connect with and why, how much I’m willing to give, how much I’m willing to listen, who I’m open to connection with.
When these feelings and behaviors are consciously or unconsciously running the show, I don’t, at a core level, come from an empowered place in myself or from a fully integrated capacity to empower others. Ultimately, it comes down to TRUST.
- Am I willing to trust myself and others enough to fully show up?
- Am I willing to trust that there is space within the community to heal things that are unresolved?
- Am I willing to see others as myself and myself in others so that I can sit in relationship with presence and compassion?
- Am I willing to explore my charge and to discharge, disclose and clear that charge within the context of community?
- Am I willing to risk – again?
What if we explore trust and intimacy as THE central issues of the sustainability equation? Intimacy implies transparent, authentic connection that genuinely allows for an exchange of heart and mind. It implies being open to being changed by the other. It means you might get hurt. It means you might have to stretch. It means that all your family stuff might come up. And yet, it’s a risk worth taking. It’s the currency that makes things work – or creates road blocks, drama, dissolution and stagnancy.
This is all super timely… it’s the eve of 2012…. no time not to work together.
A suggestion for practice:
Take 5-10 minutes today to contemplate where you are carrying old wounds in regards to community.
- How do these wounds sit in your body?
- How do they they play out as attraction or aversion to people around you?
- How they play out in internal self-talk that takes the form of comparison, judgement, or putting people on pedestals.
- How do you shape your energy and attention to attract what feels safe and avoid what feels challenging, confronting or dangerous?
See what comes up. Embrace it. Listen to it. Just presencing WHAT IS will help you to make new choices about how you hold yourself and show up in community.
… in my next blog, I’ll share two practices that can help you (and your community!) to deepen, sustain and create lasting spaces for long-term continuity and joyful healing in your relationships.
Love,
Samantha
Wow!!! This post really resonated with me because I want to manifest this in the near future!!! I met Lydia at Omega this summer and experienced Dancing Freedom with her. Of course it was utterly transformational and opened up a whole new aspect of using dance as a vessel for healing!! I’m studying different types of healing methods and hope to add Dancing Freedom on to my repertoire. I look forward to working with you and Lydia soon!
by Elli Bird
I agree with your sentiment and the place this article takes me, as I do live in an intentional community that is focused on sustainability in all aspect of life, is to ask, “How do we deepen the trust and is it possible even to deepen it enough, if we are not in alignment with our core spiritual/emotional values?”
We 16 adults are swimming in a soup of random and various distresses, amidst our underlying vision and hopes for community. The distress seems to have a way of resurfacing and leading people’s actions, words and energies in a way that harm our goal.
Each person is in a different place with their personal growth path and thus we are not necessarily equally yoked in the vision for living together…or I should say, the vision for how each person would be self responsible for their own distress.
The heart comes around time and time again and says to the community, “I want to love you guys, I want to be open and trust you and surrender to the process….” But the next day, the distress surfaces again and hurtful interactions are driving us further apart.
I’ve felt drawn to do something about it and although I am willing to try, I really have little idea what that will look like.
We are familiar with the personal growth workshop, Heart of Now, and many of us have attended it. Just attending doesn’t promise the ability to stay aligned enough to remain sustainable in our energetic exchanges with eachother, but it does allow for a common ground to come back to; a language to toss out that has potential to reground the group…but not the whole group, as there are not 100% open minds about this angle on personal growth. Other members have different perspectives and thus we have a hard time seeing eye to eye and heart to heart.
I know it is possible to affect the whole with inspiration, light and possibilities…for deeper trust and enacted oneness. I am trying on the idea that I could become strong enough to offer this. I have decided that means that I have to go out there and find the inspiration and bring it home. I believe that also includes me having a strong support system of my own, as I face the resistances that are before me in the community.
My great challenge, in this kind of a position, appears to be how to enroll the resistant, lure them in, encourage more openess, and willingness to take risks. How to…open hearts, bring people face to face/heart to heart and facilitate safety that is needed for more vulnerbility, the path to love and intimacy.
There has been too much distress upon distress causing wounds that shut people down. We have people living here who carry deep wounds from the past and they surface as self-protection. This energy, carried out over months and months, festers and stews. One might even feel like just giving up at this point. I would not disagree with the idea that that is kind of what has happened.
People have seemingly given up, but continued to remain in intentional community together. Their giving up looks like remaining in the group, but disassociating from those that threaten and blaming others for being wrong. There are stubborn characters on multiple places in the circle and a real need for clearing, and new skill building.
I would say the community, despite it’s recent effort to have a 4 hour clearing, is stuck temporarily, until it can find a way too see itself….the individuals.
I am passionate about the benefits and beauty of living in community. I am daily learning what that entails, for me to be part of the whole, in what ways I have to soften, transform, re-think and evolve. Part of my personal development may include stepping up to the plate in this way, and offering healing for the group.
I am now opening myself to finding solutions for this kind of problem and to learn from other groups that have had similar dynamics. I know, however, that each group dynamic is different depending on the reality of the individuals.
I have heard time and time again that “SUCCESSFUL COMMUNICATION” is the most vital tool for the sustainability of groups of any kind, especially those who live together everyday. What I see, as our road block is that members are not aware enough of the way in which their negative communication style, emotional processing style, blaming nature, self-victimizing patterns, self-isolating habits, fear and scarcity energies affect the whole. I would dare to say that it is all a source of self-protection that is in our way.
Members say they need it more safe, they need others to be open to communicate, or they want to be respected and valued, or they want to recieve the benefits of community without really accepting and offering their part back to support the collective effort.
We are coming from so many different personal and cultural backgrounds and trying to agree on how to co-create community and even though we each have a vision, that to us, seems beautiful and rich in our own way, we haven’t found the golden road as of yet, that aligns us as one, in spirit.
That has been my thought…that in order for a community to succeed and be sustainable, no matter what the other legistical factors, as you mentioned in your article, if there is not a spiritual alignment/perhaps an alignment in the area of emotional processing and personal growth values, then the hopes for the community to succeed may sadly be very low.
So, my intention is to find inspiration and bring it back, to make a difference, but light of my thought process shared with you today, I wonder if that is at all worth my time, if we do not agree on the most important, core values. How then could we ever move forward.
And then lastly, as I continue in my own experiment of community living and how it could or doesn’t work……with the vast variety of how differently we all think, how really could we be in alignment enough, to ever have that utopia, unless we were a smaller group with less differences possible, or a tribe with a clear leader who causes the general sense of unity that we need to work together? Are we reaching for a shooting star that is too hard to reach, or are we within reach of our hopes and dreams?