Separation Anxiety

Who would've thought being part of a tribe could be so challenging?
It's amazing to me that we as humans lived in small tribes or communities for most of our history, and yet when you stick a bunch of us "modern Americans" together, you realize we no longer know how to act in community.

It took such a short time to culturalize us as the ultimate individuals. Even just 50 years ago we lived with extended family, or at least larger nuclear family. Many families lived in small communities, where much of what was consumed was locally produced. The Grocer, the Postmaster, the Butcher, were still friendly faces on a first name basis.

Now, thanks to the miracle of plastic currency, self check out, texting, cell phones, computers....
we can go through our entire day without having a face to face conversation with another human being.

So what?

We are losing something vital.

It is much easier to dehumanize everyone when you have few honest human connections. Its much easier to care only about yourself; to numb yourself to the fear and depression and anger all these other poor trapped rats are feeling, when you never look someone in the eye long enough to see their soul.

I got tired of numbing myself, of killing my soul just to survive in "consensus reality". So I left consensus reality behind.

But once I got out here I realize just how broken we are.
Just how enslaved we are.

We don't know how to communicate. We are used to being hurt and scared and trampled upon and talked down to and brainwashed into liking it. It's quite a novel experience to communicate honestly with people who are trying to cooperate, not to conquer.

We have been trained in divisiveness our entire lives, so it's almost funny when we wind up arguing a point, only to find that we are making the same point.
"I'm an individual!"
"No, I am!"
"You don't know what I want!"
"You don't speak for me!"
"You don't understand my needs!"

All negative emotions; fear, anger, resentment, guilt, happen because our needs are not being met. We have learned very poor ways to communicate our needs, and in many instances we are not even aware we have an unmet need. So we get frustrated, confused, and angry. We attack or defend. We send out these angry, confused vibrations, and they are reflected back at us by nearly everyone we contact. So we have a confused, angry, hurting world.

I think I found a piece of the solution.
Last week I read Non Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.
"Nonviolent Communication contains nothing new. It is based on historical principles of nonviolence-- the natural state of compassion when no violence is present in the heart.

NVC reminds us what we already instinctively know about how good it feels to authentically connect to another human being.

With NVC we learn to hear our own deeper needs and those of others. Through its emphasis on deep listening—to ourselves as well as others—NVC helps us discover the depth of our own compassion. This language reveals the awareness that all human beings are only trying to honor universal values and needs, every minute, every day.

NVC can be seen as both a spiritual practice that helps us see our common humanity, using our power in a way that honors everyone's needs, and a concrete set of skills which help us create life-serving families and communities.

The form is simple, yet powerfully transformative.

Through the practice of NVC, we can learn to clarify what we are observing, what emotions we are feeling, what values we want to live by, and what we want to ask of ourselves and others. We will no longer need to use the language of blame, judgment or domination. We can experience the deep pleasure of contributing to each others' well being."

This description was taken from the NVC website;
http://www.cnvc.org/

This might sound like a bunch of hippy dippy happy speak, but the proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
I have experienced good results so far with the minimal efforts I have made to apply this style of communication.

In community we have two choices:

We can choose to communicate honestly and with thoughtful compassion to create a beautiful, loving reality.
Or we can choose to keep our old patterns and create so much stupid painful drama for ourselves that we decide community is too difficult; too real.
So we go crawling back to our comfortable little cage.

There may soon come a day when we no longer have the second option.
Might as well be ahead of the curve.