Beyond the Self: How to Build Authentic Community Today

Patriarchy is a social system that touches every part of our lives today.

This unconscious collective shadow has been projected and reflects back to us in societies' systems of oppression.

These systems operate by enforcing the dominance of the 'one' over the 'many,' creating a dualistic rift that replaces natural friendliness with a destructive sense of individualism.

When exposed to this, each person's sense of humanity is  pushed away and repressed.

Patriarchy is what racism is built on, it is what abuse is built on; predatory-capitalism is built on it, and this is what war, rape, manipulation, and ecological destruction are symptoms of. It built a caste system in America.

The word Patriarchy translates  as “rule of the father”. Fraternity means “the state of being brothers.”

Patriarchy literally means ‘dominion-over,’ while fraternity describes a way of being; an attitude; a natural state.

The truth is our natural state is more than fraternal, it's eternal.

We share a unified biosphere, and more than  wellbeing depends on remembering this; Life itself does.

Can we opt out of this system that has already caused so much destruction? When people feel fragmented—(which is the result of patriarchal systems,) everyone loses. We can end it this very moment.

The first thing to acknowledge is that one cannot offer openness while being at war with themselves.

Systemic violence is built into how we think, and not by choice. The antidote to violence is unconditional love. Our inner state mirrors what is outside, so turning compassion inwardly is the first step to outer care. Read this amazing book for how to resist through rest.

Integration means meeting our own fears, biases, and shadows with tenderness.

I don’t know about you, but I learned about community young.

At church potlucks, at after-school events like parent -teacher conferences, and in relationships with small-businesses like the hairdresser who cut my family’s hair out of her home.

In leaving home and talking to people that lived nearby I learned about neighborliness.

Hating any part of ourselves silently isolates us from those we share our being with. Integrating our internal divisions stops projecting chaos onto the world and others. Through fostering balance and inclusivity within, we become a calm center in the global storm.

Next comes fostering community from a balanced center. One cannot build from a divided core, so reclaiming balance through rest, inward tenderness, and speaking with compassion to parts that have been living under patriarchy (men included!) is how inner peace becomes outer community.

Although community arose to survive Covid-19, much was lost. A result of ‘social distancing’. was a lot of emotional distancing that came, settled,  and stayed in the aftermath.

In that space the weight of the world fell from where it had been hanging over our heads. For so many the weight of isolating systems landed right on our chests.

It felt natural to be in community in childhood, but I’ll admit as a woman in my thirties I wonder if people have enough energy today to gather— especially after striving to make ends meet under patriarchy.

Can that strain be processed together? Can closeness repair?
I think so.

See, what patriarchy cannot touch is the fundamental truth we all share: we are not divided. We share our Core Essence, all of us. Regardless of gender, wealth, status, race, nationality, intelligence, mobility, or safety-net: we have no distinguishing features at the source-level. What is God? All people can agree there is no answer sufficient to the question. What is the source of the big bang? A mystery, of course— and we, too are that mystery!

There is no doubt that we share our being with everyone and everything. We have much more in common than we have that divides. This is very good news—community is not something we need to learn how to do, it is what we are.

And all we need to do is literally get out of our homes and be with other people.

This is how community builds itself.

All this requires is a single tactic, summed up neatly  in one word...

Vulnerability.

However, vulnerability needs to be tangible to work. In other words, it needs to be felt in experience. Bringing vulnerability forward is what each of us can do.
Here’s how.

Join groups that exist near where you live. Free organizations, like book clubs, sewing circles, meditation groups, pickle-ball courts, community centers, the local library, cooking clubs, gardening clubs etc. Go for a walk where you live and keep your eyes open.

Look at bulletin boards posted in public places and attend free events that are being held. Talk to the people working at businesses that you already patronize: the grocery store; the pharmacy; the post office. Bring humanity to the exchange by demonstrating vulnerability in the simplest ways: ask clerks how they are, offer a joke or a reason to connect.

Even if you aren’t met with the same amount of effort, this is vulnerability and that’s what allows community to build itself.

See the most vulnerable members of your neighborhood and support them. Donate blankets and clothing to the local shelters and churches. Offer a ride. You don’t need to donate blood: donate eye contact, donate attention.

Donate blood if you can, but also donate friendliness. Show the most vulnerable people that you are with them, talk to them, look them in the eye.

Recognize the most vulnerable that are disenfranchised through patriarchy: black and brown women. Know them, love them, create safe spaces for them to be taken in and allowed to Be, fully.

Befriend people who don’t have the same experiences you do on the surface, befriend the old, befriend the widower, mother's, and befriend the disabled. Then go about destroying those classifications from your mind by getting to know them really, underneath the classifications.

Discover unconditional love through being vulnerable with them—simply being with them.

Why be vulnerable with these folks?

Because they are you. To shun and deny them only benefits a system of oppression—
it benefits zero people.

Caring for the most vulnerable members of humanity under patriarchy is a return to wholeness.

From Twoness to Wholeness

A system that thrives on the defeat of others in the pursuit of gain denies what we really are: unified.

Dissolving twoness is stepping into a natural way of being, even more natural than the ideal of fraternal love. We are undivided love.

And that, I believe, is the real meaning of community that we all share—at the essential core of who and what we are.

Friendliness For The Most Vulnerable

How to Let Community Build Itself

What No System Can Destroy

Start With Tenderness

Emotional Echoes
of Covid

Vulnerability In Neighborliness

When So Much Seems Doomed To Fail

Patriarchy and What We Can Do (Now) To End It

A Heartless Market

The Truth: Our Natural State of Being

This system is not designed for people to thrive, it is designed for ‘the market’ to thrive.

Does the market have feelings, does it support more than growth? Is an individualistic society good for people?

No. It is good for patriarchy, which is holding power-over.

A Shared Struggle of Exhaustion and Futility

Whether I'm speaking with women in their 60s, male veterans, or my own peers in their thirties—there is a shared sense of struggle imparted through living under patriarchy. Like Sisyphus, we feel condemned to roll a boulder uphill... forever.

We try to keep up with society’s relentless demands:

work harder, take care of yourself, stop expecting so much, shut up and pay what you owe, ...and take care of ‘your people,’ too (because nobody else will)!

A collective fatigue is deeply felt, regardless of age, gender, or background.

Peace under these conditions is increasingly out of reach and the invisible forces that enforce them seem too entrenched to fight.

Of course we are angry, grieving, fearful, and most of all exhausted.

Beyond the Self

How to Build Authentic Community Today

Are you carrying the weight of the world too? Where does all that weight come from? I’ll sum it up in three words: patriarchal generational trauma.

Most of us are exhausted by constant threats. Economic instability, the defunding of social support networks, and wars at home or on the horizon have been fueling the sense of separation that has been alive and growing in the United States for as long as I can remember. I speak of the US because that’s where I live.

However, I know this dis-ease is a global phenomenon; a symptom of the enterprise of domination over peoples and nature in the pursuit of abstract success, called ‘economic growth’… but what does that mean, really?

The Weight of a Divided World