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Community
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March 30 - April 24, 2025
Community, I wrote later in my journal, is made in part by proximity, the shared experience of living in one place, but it is also made of something much more ineffable. Community, at its core, is who you are willing to care about and for.
There’s something revolutionary about creating a space for people to lay down what burdens them.
To vision futures is to conjure something that sits outside of your time and circumstance while being firmly rooted in the moment.
want to know how to love,” I said. “I want to be able to give love, show the love I feel, and I want to let it in when someone says they love me back.”
Underneath our current reality is a future waiting to be conjured.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
We are most powerful when sourcing our energy from possibility, from our visions, not from the pain we know, but from the world just outside of what we can now see. Our energy is most potent when we make room for our
grief and anger, when we allow ourselves to feel, and our direction becomes clearer.
However, when what we face overwhelms our ability to respond and/or to escape unscathed, or when we are given the message to suppress the body’s reactions, our nervous systems don’t know that the traumatic experience has ended, and our survival response continues to exist in our bodies.
Whoever we are, we pour our stuff into our work. We bring our habits, our coping mechanisms, behaviors, and patterns to whatever it is we do, and that becomes the basis of the cultures we build.
Healing is the process, often lifelong, of restoring and reawakening the capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of trauma.
I touch my own skin, and it tells me that before there was any harm, there was miracle.
“What does stopping yourself from crying take care of for you?”
“I don’t think I really get to know how hurt I am, and I just end up holding on to it.”
a heaviness in my body was my sign that there might be something I was holding.
For healing to take place, for it to be felt, for it to root, remake, and rearrange us, it has to happen not only in the realm of our thinking, but in the soil of our bodies. Healing has to be embodied.
We can build our awareness of what it is we do automatically, how we do it, and how it came to be—which gives us the possibility to change.
To transform and become who we intend to be more often, we have to practice being who we are becoming.
I think, therefore I am.
Our bodies are much more than the fleshy vehicles for our brains, much more than objects for another’s desire, much more than cogs in a wheel.
Everything that happens happens in our bodies. Everything we feel, say, think, risk, every connection we ever have is experienced there. Our bodies are the expression and container of our lives. The tissues and muscles that can hold on to a trauma can also learn a dance, can live out a vision, can pick up a habit, can grow and age. It’s through our bodies that we experience and engage life, and it’s in our bodies that we heal.
To deny the life of our emotions and the process of feeling is to deny how alive we are and how inseparably bound up we are with one another.
My therapist says this to me when I don’t know how to describe exactly what it is I feel. I know this means that I am holding on too tight for control. A significant part of feeling is not allowing ourselves to fall too quickly into naming or categorizing what we feel, but to allow and witness.
Numbing is one way that we protect ourselves from feeling something we are afraid to or are under-resourced to feel. Or that we may not have the support or time to feel. We numb with all the coping strategies we know: work, alcohol, drugs, sex, food, social media, and any other activity humans do that can be made into distraction or an eject button to leave our bodies.
In our bodies, in feeling, are experiences not yet felt, sensations not yet known, and solutions we have not yet imagined.
I feel, therefore I can be free.”5
Empathy, mutuality, and connection are dangerous to injustice. They can unravel what is otherwise a fragile, imposed order. For safety reasons, then, we are all taught to push our emotions down and away rather than feel them. If we felt, imagine what we might change.
Authenticity so that we can come to know the self who lies underneath our conditioning. Boundaries to help us learn to navigate our changing needs and maintain love and connection. Trust so that we can do things together, build, play, and create.
BEHIND THE MASK IS WHO we are.
They are not preoccupied with appearing right. Authenticity is almost best understood in negative terms. It is achieved when we are not doing, when we stop trying so hard to be who we think we should be, who others expect us to be. When we allow ourselves to be more as we are.
“BOUNDARIES ARE THE DISTANCE AT WHICH I can love you and me simultaneously.”
Because despite the pain, I found that I loved him.
Do you know how to listen to the boundaries of your body? Do you know how to leave when the time is right for you? Your body holds the answer. You just have to listen to it.
When trust is not present, we get stuck, unable to act, unable to build, unable to work toward human achievements. Trust is the connective tissue, the lubricant, that makes things go.
Trust is a risk we take with one another to do something bigger than we could have done alone.
Trust is a two-way street. Just as we need to be able to trust others to build connection, we need to be trustworthy for others to trust us.
We all carry with us our habits and personal stories about trust because it is easier than being vulnerable enough to build and maintain trust.
Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it.
When we dig in together, when our ideas are tested and held up to another’s light, we become more than we could have been on our own.
“Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other.
Empathy is listening with an open chest that allows us to understand.
Conflict is not only natural to us; it’s needed for change.
We destroy parts of other people on a memory we can’t shake or a feeling we can’t tolerate. It happens every day. We enter conflicts unaware of the baggage we bring and how we inflict it on one another.
A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.
All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.
CHANGE DOES NOT TAKE PLACE OVERNIGHT.
