By Christine Kern, Intuitive Empath
7-22-18
I am part of a local community of women led by a wonderful movement teacher who has dubbed our group the #circleoftrees. The classes and workshops that are offered by Christine focus on empowering women to become their truest selves through movement and self-reflection in the safe community of other women. It provides us a safe space to do our hardest work. And it is truly an amazing gift to be a part of this circle.
Yesterday, I was blessed to have participated in one of Christine’s workshops, focused on self-care through grounding. It was a particularly powerful day because one of our circle had just experienced a tragic loss in her family. So we gathered to support her through her grief.
As part of the workshop, we began by choosing an oracle card from the Sacred Rebels deck. I chose the “Faith in the Process” card. This card was especially a propos for me right now as I am still struggling with the loss of my mother, who died of metastasized lung cancer in April of this year. I have been working with Christine on some grief ritual and healing through movement, which is releasing a lot of deep-seated emotion and baggage.
The “Faith in the Process card” tells us that “No matter how powerful we are, how much courage and strength we have, there are times when we can’t quite move ourselves along to the next phase of life or creative exploration. At such times we need some divine intervention – a little help in pulling our trolley along, so to speak. When we are at the edge of our own limits and have no more personal resources, we might be left with only one spiritual power, that of faith. Fortunately, that is enough.”
But I have more than faith, because I also have the #circleoftrees.
I have been thinking a lot about our #circleoftrees and its fundamental meaning and purpose for me especially, but for all of its members. Last week in class, Christine emphasized again how the circle lets us support our own individuality in the context of community. It is about helping each other be independent while sharing the intertwined roots of the whole.
That is what is missing in our societal expectations of relationships. We no longer respect the individuality of those around us. We expect those who join our community to become “one of us” in the most sinister ways, stamping out original thought to create cookie-cutter copies of ourselves in an effort to eliminate conflict.
But that is not what being human is all about. We need to learn to be true neighbors once again, to live in harmony – which is not the same as living in unison.
As Henri Nouwen states,
“To become neighbors is to bridge the gap between people. As long as there is distance between us and we cannot look in each other's eyes, all sorts of false ideas and images arise. We give them names, make jokes about them, cover them with our prejudices, and avoid direct contact. We think of them as enemies. We forget that they love as we love, care for their children as we care for ours, become sick and die as we do. We forget that they are our brothers and sisters and treat them as objects that can be destroyed at will.”
Rather, Nouwen continues, “We become neighbors when we are willing to cross the road for one another. There is so much separation and segregation: between black people and white people, between gay people and straight people, between young people and old people, between sick people and healthy people, between prisoners and free people, between Jews and Gentiles, Muslims and Christians, Protestants and Catholics, Greek Catholics and Latin Catholics.”
Being neighborly is not that difficult, but it does require attention and intention. We must NOTICE that there are those across the road who need to be included.
And, Nouwen states,
“There is a lot of road crossing to do. We are all very busy in our own circles. We have our own people to go to and our own affairs to take care of. But if we could cross the street once in a while and pay attention to what is happening on the other side, we might become neighbors….Only when we have the courage to cross the street and look in one another's eyes can we see there that we are children of the same God and members of the same human family.”
Creating a true community means reaching out and accepting into your circle not just those whose beliefs and circumstances mirror your own, but also including those whose experiences are vastly different and challenge your comfort zone. Being in community does not mean that you must walk in lock-step together, or agree on every point of discussion; it means that you can accept and intelligently discuss the differences between you and respect them.
In Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer wrote, "The key to this form of community involves holding a paradox--the paradox of having relationships in which we protect each other's aloneness. We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soul, that avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other, that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery, never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs."
The “Faith in the Process” card reminds us that our individual lives serve the greater plan and that we are not separate from its genius. We are instrumental to the greater plan and therefore we must accept our role and allow ourselves to be moved, while also being empowered and protected as we make personal progress through our role in the that grander scheme. By faithfully surrendering to the process, we become the most empowered.
And that is true of the #circleoftrees. By surrendering ourselves to the power of the #circle, we draw strength to become our truth, our highest identity, each in our individual way.
Unison is boring.
Harmony is the magic that brings music to its complexity and compelling nature. We need to return to our human roots and embrace our neighborliness once more, taking the time to cross the street and invite those on the other side into our lives and into our hearts.
Within the circle, with our entwined roots, we stand strong as individual trees with our unique branches and foliage precisely BECAUSE we are confident of that subterranean support from those around us.
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