Community is such a big part of our DNA… It’s the feeling we all long for in one way or another. It is about being truly seen, being accepted, being loved. It’s about belonging to something bigger than ourselves, living our gift to others, and seing our purpose in the world unfold.
At the end of March this year, I spent one week in the North of Sweden in the middle of nowhere together with nine other people. The only thing that we knew about each other were, that we were all interested in native lifeways and learning about Sami culture and crafts.
We lived together in a small house in pretty close quarters for a week, with no contact to other people or the “outside” world, and the only thing to do was either being in the house (with others) or being outside in knee-high snow (sometimes even higher). So with these preconditions, I was reminded on a deeper level, what community really can be.
It’s a lot about commitment to being there, commitment to the processes that are going on, and commitment to hold the space together for whoever needs being held. It’s about going deep into your longings and fears, your patterns and being open to break out of them by acknowledging that they are there, and (as a next step) doing it differently.
What also held us together, were some basic, but fundamental concepts and methods of living together. Those were Sacred Speech (the Way of Truthspeaking), working with our dream messages and The Circle Way. This commitment to creating space for sharing your truth and your feelings and actively listening to the others openly and without judgement is the most powerful of all methods to reconnect with yourself and others.
Sidenote: Basically it is the same basis as what Brené Brown‘s work has found around the topic of rumbling with vulnerability and shame and how we can adress those issues when they come up. She talk about being brave to be whole-hearted people – even in the workplace.
Combined with observing my own patterns – both in doing and in thinking – this helped me access some of my deepest fears that had been shaping big parts of my life, holding me back from really stepping into my power (the content of that realization is so layerd, that it deserves its own blog entry – coming soon).
In a group, there is always some kind of dynamic going on, and certain patterns are coming up. So having the time and someone holding the space to explore and share those patterns and what we can learn from them has always been such a big potential to be a self-healing experience.
The other thing that fascinates me every time I experience a tight community for some time is, that you don’t need to know the others very well in order to connect and learn from each other.
So, who of you would be interested in such a weeklong community immersion experience? – To get a glimpse of what’s possible, you can join one of my Weekend-Retreats to “find your clarity – through nature connection and community” (only available in german at the moment).
