When you’re reactive, you might stuff your emotions, distract yourself, or act out. You dismiss a person, perspective, or whole community. When we are reactive, we meet things for what we think they are. When we belong, we meet things with the curiosity to see how they really are.

Embodied awareness, self-knowledge, and self-love are the foundations. When we love ourselves in every moment, we experience the external world through love and can support our own sense of belonging.

When we truly love ourselves, we don’t need to be someone or something else. When we love ourselves, our sense of separation softens, the need to dominate dissolves. Comparison and competition clear away in the presence of self-love. Hierarchy and oppression crumble. We belong.

Here are four areas where I am focusing my nos (and they are also messily interrelated): No to obligations—not saying yes to things out of guilt or shame. No to (the need for) confirmations—not needing approval for every decision. No to distractions—not allowing my attention to get hijacked by the priorities of others. No to compulsions—not allowin

Our belonging is sacrificed to ideas about success rather than the enjoyment of life.

Belonging is revealed through awareness. When we cultivate the capacity to know what is happening in any moment (minus our opinion of it), then we can connect to belonging.

Being is lost in the pressure of activity (and accumulation).

Epistemicide has the same root as epistemology—“knowing.” Its suffix is the one we find in the words suicide and genocide—“to kill.” Epistemicide is the killing of knowledge. It refers to the wiping out of ancient ways of knowing. There was a rationalist/scientific paradigm within European Enlightenment that spread from the hard sciences to the soc

“You think you’re thinking your thoughts. You are not. You are thinking the culture’s thoughts.”