In my last post I wrote about how belonging begins in quieter, more private places than we expect. A trail. A particular quality of afternoon light. The body’s slow recognition of being held by something larger than its worry. That kind of belonging is real, and it matters. It is the right start. Next, we need a place where we can find that with each other.
For about thirty years I’ve been convening groups exploring the connection between the inner-psychological and outer-political paths to freedom. I’ve learned that they have somehow been separated. They should not be separated. We must learn to work them with each other, in the same room, at the same time. Here we can also find a place to belong.
The groups I convene draw therapists and teachers, community leaders and activists, software engineers, other professionals, and parents whose primary identity is exactly that. Some meet in person; others on Zoom. They range from eight to twenty people. We are cultivating a willingness to attend to our inner life and our civic life at the same time.
We are meant to be together, to listen to one another, to help one another. Most of us know this already. The group is where we remember it, where we remember how to be a people.
A session often begins with a genuine check-in. Each person takes about a minute to say how they are. And then the next person reflects what they heard before offering their own words. I’ve borrowed this practice from two friends who bring people together at the local library to discuss community issues, mentioned in my first blog. It helps us to slow down and to stay connected, not to float or flit away into our own thoughts and opinions. It makes listening the foundational practice for everything that follows. It does something else too: it makes each of us visible. When we hear somebody reflecting us, we find the authority to say ‘yes, you got me, or no, you missed this part’. This may sound simple but is it anything but. We are not advocating nor performing. We are simply helping each other become visible, seen. This is the beginning of belonging.
This invitation to arrive whole is disorienting at first. Some people need a few meetings to get used to it, to trust it as valuable and not contrived or performative. It is not simply an exercise for beginning counseling students, it is a depth practice for everyone. Almost everyone eventually recognizes it not as a luxury or an indulgence, but as a return to something they once knew but had slipped away.
Next, we set an agenda. We bring our attention to community concerns, to members’ own projects and service work, to what is happening in the world. But the question is never simply: “what do you think about this?” It is always closer to, “what does this bring up for you?” We are learning to think and feel together, to reintegrate what our culture has spent generations separating, if not devaluing. I call this developing a public emotional intelligence, a recovery of common sense in the oldest meaning of that phrase: sense and feeling held in common.
Over time, something shifts. The conversations deepen. People notice that their political convictions are rooted in feelings they have rarely made space for or, simply never had the opportunity to consider. We seldom explore family wounds; we are not a psychotherapy group. Yet we are curious about the sufferings that influence our tribe over time or are in our community, from the past or in the present. Working together, we learn to tease apart the difference between values we have genuinely chosen and reactions we have simply inherited. Our ideological positions, it turns out, often hold something real and worth defending. But they can also be driven by unexplored feeling that mistakes other people for threats rather than seeing them as resources for our own learning. We are learning to ask ourselves, “what if each ideological position has some knowing in it?”
This is the work I have come to think of as a salve for what ails us. It does not replace political action, but does the work of exploring the patterns of thought and feeling that our impulse to act is rooted in. This deepens the integrity we bring to both our relationships and our political action.
When we do this depth exploration we sometimes land on the necessity of better self-care, recognizing that we are at risk for going too far out on a limb, which makes us prone to be reactive, even brittle. This guards against the overreach and burnout that come from acting without self-knowledge. Going the other direction, we also think that this can help us look for and find our unique contribution, not some cookie cutter image of activism, but something befitting our own sensitivities, intelligence, energy, and circumstance.
Through these explorations, we can stay connected to one another, we respond with kindness while maintaining an eye on individual and shared accountability. We know that our communities need our help. This is the work of a Belonging, Becoming, and Engaging group.
I think of this as a three-stage journey: belonging: being genuinely seen by others; becoming, growing in their company, shedding inherited reactions, finding what we value; and engaging, moving outward with a contribution that fits who we truly are. The group makes each stage possible. And it happens in that order. I’ve posted more about these groups on my website.
In the next blog, I’ll say more about why the sequence matters — and bring in some research that I think illuminates exactly what’s at stake when we get it right. I see this as the work of activating our moral attention.
