We are here to change the world, but it starts with ourself, with others in community

I live in a community, and community has been a big part in my life. Now, I find it a more authentic and more efficient way of living, yet it also changed my life.

I was brought up in a very materialistic household, with modern concepts of freedom and success. With encouragement, I achieved well at school, and pass out of the academy with a chemistry PhD. I was independent, individualistic, arrogant, thought myself more intelligent then others, and I thought I knew of all there was to know. At the same time, I was acutely aware of how much there was to know, how specialised I was, and ultimately, how little I knew of it. 

Yet, that arrogance masked deep wounding; a deep in the sense of inferiority, that I was never good enough, and all my outer achievements masked a deep sense of something missing.

I went on to have a successful chemistry career, earning several promotions in the space of a few years. I had everything I’d learned that a successful life was about, and yet I felt unhappy and unfulfilled. I noticed a deep misanthropy within me, and at the same time, a yearning to be loved. I had an emptiness that I didn’t know how to fill; I needed answers, but didn’t even know the questions, let alone how to find the answers. I felt there must be more to life, but didn’t know what it might be. I decided to go find out. 

It was travelling that showed me a different way to be in society; one in which people need each other. It was conversations with Tibetan monks, exiled in India with no home or possessions, and yet so much happier than me, that made me question my ideas of what it meant to be happy and successful in life. It was vipassana meditation that silenced the inner monologue that I thought was me, and allowed me to experience silence for the first time in my life. I experienced a whole world of bodily sensation once I learned to escape the confines of my thinking mind and re-sensitise myself to it.  As a young, western educated scientist I thought I knew it all; yet my experience showed me I didn’t know anything about myself, and that there was so much more to discover. This lit a fire for self-discovery within me, but I didn’t know how to proceed.

I returned to the UK, in debt and needed to find work. I found another career job, associate principle scientist, specialist for a team of fourteen, working within well equipped lab to identify unknown chemical and foreign body contaminants. It was interesting work, especially when my problems solving expertise was required. Yet, it was no longer fulfilling, and it wasn’t really what I wanted to do, and it wasn’t really me. So, I decided to go find out who I was, and what I wanted to do. This is when my commitment to self-inquiry really began. 

I had learned lots about self-help, different tests and tools to understand oneself, constantly exploring what there was to know. Yet, it was one weekend that actually transformed my understanding of myself. A workshop called personal power, that was all group structures and experiential with no theory to accompany it; an emotional roller-coaster, both profound and left me wondering what happened. Indeed, it was only two days later when I noticed the transformative effect. A game of football same as every Tuesday before, and yet the experience could not have been more different. Everyone seemed much smaller, all the banter seemed like childish taunts, I skipped past opponents where previously I would lose the ball, and I organised a weaker side such that we won. It was this transformative effect after one experiential, irrational weekend that lit the fire for self-discovery, and is where my journey of self-inquiry began. I decided apply my scientific training to my own lived experience, and live my life as an experiment; to try new experience, with the intent to understand, to test understanding, and then continually refine it. 

Two years of group therapy experience followed; a form of group therapy originally designed for hard drug addicts, showed me that the patterns of addictive behaviours in myself, and trauma from my past, playing out in the present. The second year a repetition of the first, and yet entirely different, because I had changed along the way. As I saw more of my patterns of behaviour, I started to noticed the same patterns play out in those around me. As I learned more about myself, as I gained more self-understanding, I found I had more understanding of others, and so was better able to support them. Over time, I became more able to care. 

I learned to be less self-involved, and take responsibility to care for others, at the same time as caring for myself. Ultimately, I realised that the stories of my past, that I thought defined who I was, seemed less important than before; I was something other and I was in a process of finding out. 

It was in group therapy, made up of individuals with different backgrounds, stories and experience, where I learned to see the same patterns of behaviour, addictions and reactions to the past, strategies of staying safe and meeting needs, which were playing out in me, also play out in those around me. I learned to discern what makes us uniquely different, each with our own stories, background and experience, from what makes us also essentially the same. 

I learned to see myself more clearly, and consciously start to heal my past. I learned to be more articulate in what I was feeling in this moment, separate from the experiences and stories of the past. I learned how to communicate my understanding in a way that was relatable to those around me.

Yet, this was only the first stage. I was becoming more aware, healing trauma of the past, becoming more self-understanding, and more understanding of those around me. Yet, I now had to relearn how to be, and how to relate. I had to learn new behaviours that weren’t a product of my past. 

It was in community where the real changes started to happen; I had to practice what I had learned; to learn how to relate authentically, how to be vulnerable, how to come closer to others, and how not to play out the same patterns of behaviour I’d developed in the past. The deep shadow work I did in community helped me understand my past, yet it was time in community that helped to heal the wounds that I’ve suffered, and that I was unconsciously inflicting on everyone else; to learn a new way to relate, and a new way to be. 

Community is an experiment in learning how to be authentic, because all the deep stuff that lies hidden comes out in community. Everyone else in community with you is a mirror for yourself, and all your triggers, and a space in which the past plays out. The deepest darkest stuff within us gets brought out into the light.

And once it’s revealed, we can work with it, we can transform it and it can heal. I would never have believed it until I experienced it myself.

But the work that we do in community, is complemented by the opportunity for experimentation and practice that we can only get in community. It is a space where we can make mistakes and then make amends and know that that’s okay; where we can test different behaviours in response to circumstances that might trigger us, and test to see what response we get instead; to break our pattern of interpretation, expectation and behaviour shaped by our experience of the past, and the strategies to survive or succeed, that we developed along the way.

We get the opportunity to get feedback from the others around us in the space. In a community built on the intention of healing, the intention towards becoming more self-aware, towards helping each other and towards coming closer together. We can learn that the others around us don’t react as we might have learned to expect, or push us away when we share our hurts and deepest fears, or punish us further when we try to make amends for our mistakes.

We can break the patterns that have defined our life so far, and start to trust that others really do care. Then we reciprocate, learn how to care also for each other, and that’s when we really change.

So community is an experimental lab; a space to change, and to do our own inner healing work, and to help each other in process. For it’s hard to see our blindspots when we’re doing inquiry all alone.

In community we learn the very tools, of collective understanding and inter-personal relating, that we need to then take out into the world; tools that can create change in the world as well. It is a foundation for action and activism that actually can speak beyond manifest difference, help us see each other, recohere into undies movement to create real changes in the world.

Because in community, you’re seeing others, and come to understand, through experience, that we’re not as different as you might ever have supposed.

In community, I’ve met hundreds of people from all across the social and political spectrum, each with their own perspectives, but with their own past, wounding and their hurts. We all have our own history that we bare.

Yet, I’ve seen these same people, learn to be with each other. I’ve seen these same people see their own biases, their reactions, and learn to see the other, as someone with their own hurts and history that they bare.

I’ve seen people realise that the cause of their reactions, actually lies within, and then start to change.

I’ve seen people do the necessary work, to start to heal the wounds of their past, and start to come closer together as a result. 

““History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” – Maya Angelou

In community, in inter-relation, we provide mirrors for each other, we trigger the unconscious into awareness, use inter-relation feedback to identify what is ours, recognise past trauma as it’s cause, gain insight through self-reflection, do the necessary healing work, and re-integrate all the exiled parts into a coherent, conscious whole. 

In community, we learn the essence of our humanity; seeing through the spectrum of difference, we see the common patterns that connect us, and the essence that is the same.

Only when we see the other, in their humanity, and understand differences that make us all unique, can we communicate our meaning in a way that they can hear, and such that they can understand, and such that they can see our humanity as well. 

“Study the past if you would define the future.” – Confucius

This is as true for individuals as it is for culture. 

For, all the work we do in community, is again just another stage in the process. The work we do inside, and the skills we learn in community, we must then take out into the world. Once we understand our history, once we learn new ways to relate and change our behavioural patterns of the past, we must then go out and change the dynamics of our life. The changes that we create within and our relation to the past, and the practice in community, to change our behaviours and the way we inter-relate in the present, we must then go out and apply to our life outside of community, and change the established interpersonal dynamics of our life. 

Then our life becomes more harmonious, and the changes in our way of being then create effects in those we meet, and ripples outwards into the wider world. If we stay committed to the process and the intention towards change, then the changes that we create within, create changes in the world around us. As we make progress, our world becomes ever bigger, and our capacity for creating change becomes ever larger, and at increasing scales. Eventually, we will become a movement, and together we will then change the world. 

"A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history." Mohandas Gandhi

This is how we can change the world and it starts with ourself, to do the inner work and create transformative changes in our life; to change the dynamics of our relationships, break out the patterns of reaction and behaviours from the past. We bring harmony to our being and the world around us, then this harmony ripples outwards into the wider world.

Only then can we change the world, because it is with an understanding of oneself, and an understanding of others, can we speak in a way that no longer provokes a reactionary response; we speak such that others can understand, and we invite others in to our common purpose. For the world won't change by asking for it to change, or asking others to change it on our behalf. We need to first do the work to first become, in order to be, the change we want to see; it is a process not an action; just as progress is a process, not a cause and the hope of an effect.

To be part of the process means doing the work, and following the path, however long that it takes, and wherever it may lead. For when we make the intention to change, and are persistent in our effort, then change will come. We will be ready to play our part when the path to creating changes in the world becomes clear. Just know, that we don’t need to do it all by ourself. There are others who are there to help, who have been working for a long time, and working to create changes in the world on the scale that we need. 

It is the changes that we make in our whole way of being that then create changes in the world.

For me, my journey has led me to philosophy; not to learn as it is taught, but to understand what is missing and how to introduce it. The depth of self-understanding, of understanding interpersonal difference and common human sameness, that is evidently missing from the academy and manifestly missing from the world; the commitment to the process;  striving towards become ever conscious, progressing towards towards wisdom, becoming understanding and a universal love for all. 

Yet, the journey does not still there; again that is merely one part of the process. The understanding, we have striven hard to attain, must then be taken into the world; to help others understand ourselves, and the history we have lived through. A chaotic phase of history, and time of uncertainty, self-reflection, exploration and experiments in being. This is what so many of us have been doing, a collective endeavour by trial and error, of navigating lived experience and individual experiments in being.  by trial and error in different ways to engage with lived experience.   of invite others into the experience, engage in the process, and become part of this transformative  movement that is finding its way in to emergence into conscious consciousness. 

“Nothing great in this world has been accomplished without passion.” Hegel GFW