Community Is an Internal Job

Community represents connection, love, and belonging, the primal human needs that everybody has. If somebody is looking for community, what they're really looking for is love, connection, and belonging. And that cannot come from outside. You cannot find it in community. Once you have found it inside of yourself, then you will create community naturally and organically.

What does community even mean?

There are people who know exactly what they want. They say, I want community. I want the community to be spiritual. I want the spiritual people to have deep, meaningful conversations. And they think that that's what's going to make them happy. But it won't.

And what does community even mean, or to be spiritual? What does meaningful mean? They are very individual things that keep changing, like everything in life. What happens when you're within your community for hours and then the day ends? Everybody goes home, some alone. Community doesn't exist 100% of the time.

Being spiritual. The ultimate spiritual state is death, being a spirit. If you're alive on earth, then that means you feel. There is physical, emotional and psychological pain that many people don't want to experience. They want to avoid it, so they numb themselves, and community is one of the ways.

The quick fix

If you feel lonely and you feel you need a community, the community will not fix your loneliness and your neediness. Let's say you get it with people, you feel connected, safe and loved, you have a good time. And then you go home and the community is gone. You're all alone on your bed overnight.

If you recognise this, that you get a kind of high from being with people and afterwards you feel lonely, then you can see it's just like a drug that gives you a quick fix. And it doesn't matter whether the drug is community, some herbal medicine, or yoga to feel more connected spiritually. It's the same thing.

And all of us have our drugs. Some are more harmful than others, some are more obvious than others. It isn't only the cigarettes, alcohol, sex or social media. It's also distracting ourselves with the things we would call a hobby, reading a book, learning, working. It's even the things that look like we're taking good care of ourselves. If you go for that exercise driven by a need to feel better, connected, to be happier, then that's a quick fix too.

So in that moment, instead of reaching for the exercise, the book, the work, look and feel within, and where that need for love, connection and belonging is coming from.

Start where you are

If the need for community is coming from an unmet need, the first thing to do is look within and heal your wounds. Then you will be able to connect to others easily. You first have to be okay with your own company, completely alone with yourself, and still feel loved, connected and like you belong. Then you'll feel the same for your family, the people who are around you every day. And then other people in your neighborhood, or in the different little communities that you join now and again.

Where it actually comes from

When we seek community, it's because of unmet needs from early childhood. Trying and forcing to build community will never give you that sense of love, connection, and belonging.

The inner child must be listened and tended to, because whatever you feel now has nothing to do with what's happening here in front of you, but everything to do with how you felt as a little child: a disconnect from your parents, unloved, lonely and unsafe. And it doesn't matter what caused it. It doesn't have to be anything dramatic. A child doesn't need a reason we would consider good enough.

The inner child

When you feel that physical, emotional, or psychological discomfort, it’s when you have the opportunity, and there are countless opportunities every single day, to meet what your inner child didn't receive.

Here is what I do, and what I have been doing for many months now. The moment you feel a trigger, imagine hugging your inner child and say, either in your mind or out loud, everything is well, and you are safe. That's it. That's the whole thing.

And it isn't only the difficult emotions. If you catch yourself feeling a high, an unnatural high, where something outside of you suddenly makes you really happy, that's a trigger too. It's the same move. Hug the inner child, everything is well, and you are safe.

I would keep this one phrase and use it every single time. It's hard enough to become aware of the trigger in the moment, and to do that step of imagining the hug instead of just going with the emotion, screaming at somebody, getting angry, crying, whatever you feel like doing. You don't want to also be deciding whether this phrase is better than that phrase. Keep it simple. One phrase, every time.

The amazing thing is you don't need to practise it. It works in the moment. I've noticed it most clearly with my daughters, Lima and Bo. There have been times when they were sad or angry or in distress, and I simply said, everything is fine, and you are safe. And I could feel their energy lowering, their nervous system relaxing, right there. It gives them the safety they need in that moment to relax and be present, and not get caught up in their mind and in the emotion. It's the same for your own inner child.

Sometimes you'll have a bigger trigger, sometimes a smaller one, and it works better in some moments than others. Sometimes the shift is very subtle and I don't even know if it did anything. But I notice I don't keep hanging onto the emotion, and the trigger just disappears. Even the first time you try it, it might make a huge difference.

Hug your inner child. Or hug an actual person. You can ask your husband, your wife, your child, I need a hug. Or just hug them without saying anything at all.

Do this, and then you can be fine being alone and with any emotion, and the rest will follow.

The trouble with likeminded people

Community, spirituality, meaningfulness, Bitcoin, unschooling, vegan, vegetarian, carnivore. These are words. They are labels. Each one comes with a long invisible list of how a person carrying that label is supposed to be and behave. And none of us are any of them 100% of the time.

Yet we try to fit the list, and we go looking for our fellow likeminded people by representing the term. What it actually does is the opposite. Anybody who is not that label is immediately different, separate from who we are.

Of course language makes it easier to communicate. But the moment a word stops describing what you do and starts describing who you are, it decides in advance who you're allowed to belong with. So I've stopped labelling us, and just describe what we do or don't do. We're into Bitcoin, rather than we're Bitcoiners. We don't send our kids to school, rather than we're unschoolers.

It's already happening

Because community isn't about a certain number of people confined to one group. When people come together, it doesn't matter the amount, two people, three, ten, fifty. Everybody knows other people outside 'their' community and belongs to different groups from time to time. I am part of the jiu-jitsu, the yoga, the unschooling, the Bitcoin community, and many others. Nothing exists 100%. You cannot always have community.

Yesterday is a perfect example. In the morning I went to yoga class and there were Thalia, John, and Christine, and that was my community in that moment. Later I met my friend's children at the beach with my two girls, that was my community then. In the evening their parents came and extended the community by two more people, and we had a lovely time laughing and just connecting non-stop. When we came home my husband was there, and that was our community even overnight. We all sleep together with our dog, all on the same floor in the same room.

Every moment brings you a different type of community with different people. And whether you're able to connect with them only depends on whether you are connected to yourself.

And the great thing about this is that when we live side by side like we will at A Place To Be, it stops being something you have to arrange. No driving somewhere to feel connected. It's the kids running between houses, the shared meals that nobody planned, somebody noticing you're having a hard day and just sitting down next to you, your neighbour helping with the laundry.

There's only one thing people need to have in common for that to work, and it isn't unschooling, or Bitcoin, or being spiritual. It's a live-and-let-live mindset. Nobody expecting anybody else to be vegan, or carnivore, or a hundred percent anything. Everyone free to live their own life without having to change to fit in or be liked.

That's what we're building at A Place To Be. Not an event you attend. A life you live.

Love to you

Sylvia