Belonging In Community

Belonging in Community inquiry and exploration. Do I belong here? Can I be authentic? Am I welcome? Can I relax and have fun? We need a place to take a deep breath and share our authentic truth. In this 5 part series of guided mindfulness inquiry, we explore feeling at home in the world from a nervous system lens, making the leap to stand tall and strong and turning toward people with trust and earned secure attachment.

Transcript

This particular inquiry and session is around community and belonging in community.

We can connect with people from literally all over the world if someone has an internet connection and a way to get online.

It used to be that if you felt like you didn't really belong in your community,

That you had to move someplace where you did.

And that's one of the reasons why a lot of LGBTQ2S people got into big cities because we moved from small towns where maybe we weren't accepted or our families were not happy with us.

And we moved to a big city where we could find our people.

And a lot of other reasons,

Too.

Lots of people just gravitate to places where we can feel like we belong.

Let's do a little connection practice with ourselves and then we'll go into some inquiry around belonging.

One of the things that we really know about belonging is that it happens in our nervous system.

And Resmaa Menikum,

Who many of us are familiar with from My Grandmother's Hands,

I had a chance to interview him a couple of years ago,

Talks about how if our body doesn't feel safe,

It will do anything to bring a sense of safety.

And that's a lot of what we're looking with around community is if we don't really feel welcome or if we don't feel like we're able to be who we really are.

We can often be tolerated in a community,

But to be welcomed in a community is a different thing.

It's a whole different level of safety and connection.

Sit back first and connect with ourselves.

Connect with the environment you're in.

You could look around a little bit.

Notice your felt experience of safety right now.

What does it feel like in your body right now as you're tuning in?

Notice your feet and your seat.

If you want,

You could hold your own hands.

That's a really lovely way to be here in our body.

Sometimes we'll give ourselves a hug or make some kind of contact with our body,

With our arms,

Our legs.

Oftentimes we'll put our hand on our hearts.

What does it feel like to be in connection with your own body and in this moment?

Take a few breaths.

As we do the inquiry practice,

A lot of what we're doing is checking to see if anything's changing.

If we're breathing pretty smooth and even our continuous breath,

There's a lot of ease in our system.

We don't have our shoulders up around our ears.

We've relaxed our body.

Then something changes.

Maybe we suddenly start holding our breath.

Maybe we notice that now we're clenching our teeth.

All of these different things that we do,

Our bodies do.

Then we can bring ourselves back to softening.

The big thing there is to be mindful,

To have a mindfulness practice where we're really tracking that.

Can I actually just be present in my body and notice what's here?

That is the shortcut to feeling safe.

Right now in the environment I'm in,

I'm looking around and there's nothing that's dangerous here.

There's nothing I'm concerned about.

What that means then is if there's a feeling of edginess or hypervigilance or something like that,

It just means that there's something from our history.

We have a pattern.

We have a way of being a little bit on edge or hypervigilant.

We haven't been able to settle our nervous system in this moment.

These patterns can be many decades long.

A lot of them come from when we're children.

When we really don't have a lot of resources to keep our body safe,

Keep our emotions,

Keep a connection with safe people.

We don't have control of that when we're children especially.

Now as an adult,

We can connect with ourselves.

We've been working with connection with ourselves,

Connecting with a friend or a romantic partner,

Intimate partner relationships.

We're looking at all these different ways that we belong or we don't belong.

Notice right now if you were to say,

I belong here.

Notice what comes to mind and notice if there's any shift in your breath,

If your body relaxes or tightens.

I belong here.

You really stay connected in your body and with your breath.

And as a thought experiment and partly it's just to see,

It's part of the inquiry,

But it's also very powerful because our brain doesn't really know the difference between something we vividly imagine and something that's actually happening.

So it's very helpful to really sink into a vividly imagined experience and then to notice what does that feel like in my body?

What's going on in my breath?

So bring to mind an example of when you are very much included,

You very much belong.

It might be your family,

It might be a friendship,

It might be present,

It might be in the past.

It could even be something that you're imagining.

But let yourself for a couple of minutes really bring that to life in your mind.

Who's there?

Where are you?

What's going on in the environment?

What are the circumstances?

And as you're noticing that,

Let yourself really be relaxed and grounded.

Keep noticing your body,

Your feet,

Your seat,

Your hands,

You can hold your hands.

Deep breaths.

I belong here.

And let yourself notice the smells,

The sounds,

The sights.

Use all of your senses to bring this little vignette to life in your mind.

And feel free to imagine something.

So maybe you feel mostly with this group of people,

I usually feel like I belong.

But let yourself really go over the top with it,

Like I 100% belong here with these people.

I can be free to say exactly what's going on.

I know that they really appreciate me.

I don't have to behave a certain way here.

Let yourself imagine,

Bring that to mind,

Notice your body and your breath.

And then let that kind of come to rest and bring to mind another situation where it doesn't feel quite so wholehearted like you belong there.

This is probably the case for most of us most of the time.

We have a sense of what we have to do to fit in.

Sometimes that's a very strong part of the experience.

Other times we're mostly feeling pretty relaxed.

If you were to ask yourself,

Bring together to mind this different situation,

Different group of people,

Maybe it could be family of origin,

Could be a friendship group,

Could be at work.

Do I fit in here?

And will they turn away from me if I'm really honest about who I am?

And that could be anything.

It could be if I reveal that I grew up really poor or that there was an addiction or violence in my family when I was a child.

It could be some kind of mental health issue.

There's all kinds of things that we don't bring forward at the beginning.

It could be a gender identity.

Let yourself experiment with that for a couple of minutes.

There's something about this group that I don't really feel like I can be completely authentic.

And then notice what that feels like.

So we're always staying very connected in our body.

Keep noticing your breath.

What does that feel like and how is that different from a few minutes ago when we were bringing to mind or imagining a time and a group where we feel really connected,

Like 100% I can do and say anything and I know they've got my back.

You know,

Sometimes there's a different energy.

There might be a bit of a nervousness or anxiety or we're careful.

We're not sure that we're going to be accepted.

We're not really sure that we belong no matter what.

We're careful.

And one of the ways that might show up is we're not as funny.

We're not as creative.

And this is really our nervous system at work,

Our primitive brain.

The purpose of shame,

Which is often what we're worried about,

Is to keep us in line so that we don't contravene the norms of the group of people that we're in.

So if the norm is everybody's heterosexual and you're not,

Then you might still be open about that,

But you're not going to feel completely comfortable.

Whatever it is that makes us not the norm,

Makes us vulnerable to being excluded,

Isolated,

Shamed,

Contempt,

Maybe.

There's a very big continuum of our experiences here.

Some of them are relatively less toxic than others.

Someone is assumed to be something that they're not.

And when we know that,

Notice what it feels like in your body.

And if you're having a lot of intensity with any of this,

You could always just stop.

You could also just open your eyes and put whatever it is that's kind of intense on the wall on the other side of the room,

Put it in a frame.

Look at the picture over there or the words.

You could tap on your forehead,

Just taking your attention into the sound and the sensation of the tapping away from the thoughts.

You could notice empty space around the frame.

There's all those tools that we use.

So we're not at the mercy of the thoughts that are here.

So if you feel like you're being kind of dragged a little bit into a thought stream,

You just come back,

Notice your body again,

Get grounded in your body.

Let your breath feel a little bit more full,

Especially if you're holding your breath.

Relax.

Let yourself kind of come back into feeling OK in this moment.

One of the things that's happening is that we're doing some thought feeling experiments.

We're doing some inquiry.

We're not actually with a group of people right now.

And then come back to another time when you felt really included.

But maybe this isn't quite so personal.

I'm thinking maybe it's a sports team or it's a debating club or the drama club.

Some environment where you felt like you were part of the team.

Sometimes work situations feel like that.

Volunteer settings.

So everybody has some common situation or goal or experience,

Some kind of a team sport.

Then you might all have that in common.

You don't have a lot of other things in common,

Maybe,

But you have that.

Or maybe you're a sports fan.

So you have that in common.

So we have a lot of different ways that we belong and we don't belong.

Feeling rejection and outcast.

That's how we feel when we're not included in a group.

Sometimes we do a lot of work around childhood experiences or teen years when we're talking about inclusion.

But in fact,

We're very vulnerable to that all through our adult lives.

We have more resources as adults,

But we also have that vulnerability of,

I need to fit in.

I need to have a group of people that get me.

Otherwise life is just kind of gray.

There's not much fun if we don't have connection with people.

And sometimes we can't easily change a job or we can't easily change a social situation.

Notice what that feels like,

Whatever it is that's coming up for you.

What does that feel like?

And use your breath and your awareness of your body to stay really grounded.

Greta Thunberg,

The climate activist,

Comes to mind.

So she started the school strike all by herself and there's pictures of her sitting there with that sign and she's on strike all by herself.

And what must it have felt like for her?

She didn't belong really to a group at that point.

She just had a real passion and a belief that it had to be done now.

She had to speak out now.

So have you ever been in a situation,

Maybe not as public?

For me,

I've been in situations with my family,

Siblings,

Parents,

Where I challenged something that they said that I felt was racist or sexist.

And I was the one who was not very welcome to be saying those things.

Because people can get into a fight,

Flight,

Freeze response when we do.

Or they can kind of band together and make us feel like the oddball.

Many of us have had experiences of being on both sides of this.

It's very complex,

Our social interactions.

You can also feel not part of it when you have complex chronic health problems or disability.

And it can be that you don't have the energy to participate and then people might think that you're shunning them or that you don't care about them.

It could be that you feel left out when they're all going for a hike and you can't do that.

There's all kinds of complexities with that too.

Back in the day when people used to smoke everywhere and I have asthma,

That made it very difficult for me.

And I noticed there was a real power differential.

So if I had less power than the person I was around and they wanted to smoke,

It was hard for me to just say,

You know,

I'm sorry,

But I'd like to ask you to not smoke around me.

I have asthma.

Some of them would say yes and some would go like,

No,

You leave.

I'm going to smoke.

There's just so many ways that this works and it's such a shifting social dynamic.

And then we respond to it as we do.

And then that brings up all the stereotypes that people have about that and all the judgments and assumptions they might make about us if they know that one piece of information about us.

And people make assumptions about other people all the time.

It's the shortcut that our brains take all the time.

We get a little bit of information and then we predict what's going to happen.

We predict based on appearances,

Based on all kinds of things,

What somebody is going to be like.

Are they safe for us?

Are they not?

Are we going to have another bad experience with that same person or maybe with someone who just reminds us of that person?

They have a similar tone of voice.

A lot of this feeling of I belong and I don't belong is due to the primitive brain and the nervous system and that unconscious perception of am I safe,

Am I included or not.

And our history comes into it.

Stereotypes leads to projections instead of seeing the truth of the person because once we feel like we know who they are,

Then we stop paying attention.

We stop looking.

And that feels so invalidating and objectifying to people on the receiving end of that.

Notice now again that the inquiry come to a rest a little bit.

There's something that's persistent.

You could always do the tapping or put it in a frame,

Open your eyes.

You can always look around the room.

You could do some box breathing or something if you're feeling kind of really tightly engaged with this and you want to pull back or just some long exhales.

Maybe we could do that together for a moment.

So just to breathe in deeply and then purse your lips as you breathe out.

And as you breathe out,

Let your exhale go longer.

Let yourself feel like the air is coming out of your balloon.

Let yourself soften as you breathe in and out.

And then if you reflect back on the experience,

Notice what you were feeling in your body and what kind of energy was going on,

What was happening with your breath.

As you move from I feel really included to those were the times when I didn't really feel like I could be who I was.

I'm hiding something in order to be included.

I can't really show up as who I am.

Go back and forth between those a little bit.

Remember in your nervous system and in your body what it feels like.

When you're with people who you feel very,

Very comfortable with,

You're not hiding anything.

Let yourself kind of breathe that in.

And then bring to mind those situations at work or in other social situations or wherever it might be in your personal life where you don't feel so included.

Where you feel like you have to manage things.

Can't really relax because you have to remember not to say this thing or that thing.

We have to kind of manage our inclusion.

So notice that too.

Let's bring in the kindness and compassion piece before we finish.

Whatever it is you're feeling right now,

If you're feeling,

You know,

You're kind of still in that glow of feeling loved and included.

Or if you're remembering times when you didn't feel that way.

Or when you're kind of thinking about other people who don't feel that way.

Other people may be at work or different environments where you can tell that they don't feel very comfortable.

How would you just cultivate some compassion and kindness for them or for yourself?

So what happens when we don't feel included is we tend to turn against ourselves.

And we might be impatient.

We may be kind of saying,

Well,

You know,

You should feel better or you're an adult.

You shouldn't,

You know,

You shouldn't be bothered by this or something.

So see if you could let all of that go.

If you want to put a hand or two on your heart and just kind of notice.

I'm in social situations sometimes that are very uncomfortable.

And could I at least extend some compassion and kindness to myself?

And let yourself breathe that in.

And we really have to start with feeling safe and accepted internally.

We have to accept ourselves.

It's wonderful when other people do.

And if we're not really on our own side,

It's hard to take that in that somebody else might really enjoy who we are and want us there.

So there's this process of internal love and compassion and kindness.

And then being able to extend that out to other people as well.

And that can certainly be our experience in the world.

And that's really sad when we think about that,

That we never really feel like we can be who we are when we're around other people.

And to not give ourselves a hard time about that,

Because what that is,

Is our primitive brain,

Our nervous system is saying,

This is my experience that I'm never really accepted.

I never really feel safe.

And so we protect ourselves against that experience.

And so if that's our experience,

Then that's what it is.

A self-compassion and a self-kindness practice might be really helpful.

We're really dealing with other people's primitive brain a lot of the time.

We're dealing with our own nervous system.

But when someone is unkind to us or someone is bullying or they're excluding someone,

A lot of the times there's some real pain and hurt at the core of that.

Reviews

Thanks Lynn, you gave great insight and helped deepen my understanding around belonging. Such an important inquiry