Belonging: Remembering Ourselves home

For those whose lives are relentlessly structured, there can be a deep exhaustion in the body which is barely satisfied by a full night’s sleep. That exhaustion is less of a need for rest than it is the bone-deep dispiritedness that comes from our slavery to schedules and directedness. In such cases, it’s best to follow the exhaustion, despite how

Western Apache, the names of places are not only descriptive of their landscape, but are embedded with stories in which are contained codes of wisdom and morals.

Like an ecosystem, yin considers all components essential. Ideas that emerge from this level of imagination serve more than the individual cause—they serve the great togetherness unto which we are all responsible.

Ella showed up only sporadically for Carrie, suggesting that she didn’t value the friendship—but Carrie tolerated it out of fear of losing her. In a sense they were both contributing to the falseness between them. Rather than staying in chronic disappointment, we could bring that conversation into the open, risking the loss of that relationship for

there is magic in sacrifice. Life is calling you toward it, and your severance of the tethers that bind you to outgrown forms is the answering of that call. Your willingness to step into the emptiness from which all life springs is a show of devotion to your own belonging.

If you have invited such a person or group to move consciously through conflict, and they’ve refused you, first you must give yourself wholeheartedly to grief. In French, instead of “I miss you,” we say, “Tu me manques” which means “you are missing from me.” In your grief, you are valuing the impact of your separation, the missing they’ve left behi

In its infinite intelligence, my body only broke down when the conditions of my life were supportive enough to withstand that level of collapse. I began to think of my injury as an ally, who could only emerge at a time when my life was hospitable enough to welcome it.

To ask for help would burden others with my pain, which I feared might mean my rejection from belonging. So my instinct was to hide away, to absent myself until I was better.

My desire to power through the difficulty was so great and habitual within me that whenever I’d feel a little better, I’d do far too much and set my healing back again.