Again, Americans have a huge blindspot about groups. We just don’t seem to get that not everything is just about me. When I try to explain this to people I sometimes get frustrated until I remember it took me an entire year of living in Japan and married to a Japanese woman to get this — no wonder most Americans don’t get it. It is like trying to talk to fish about the water they are swimming in. Water? What are you talking about? And yet we are all floating around in this trance of the rugged individualist. I see it in all sorts of places. It is what makes driving so scary sometimes. When I drive in California I have to remember that most of the other drivers seem to believe they are in a driving game and consider all the other drivers to be just npc’s — not real. To stay safe I have to just assume people will act in selfish, random ways and not get too flustered by the occasional road rage incident. Again, I’m not real to them. And they certainly don’t have any conception of being part of a greater whole — at least not while they are driving. This attitude shows up in how we do our healing work as well.
Many people are discovering the power of therapy. A lot of therapists are now actually worth visiting; they have practical, useful techniques that really help. It wasn’t always that way, but I think those bad days are mostly past. But therapy is a very individualistic path. It is incredibly necessary and useful for healing work around, say, deep trauma work, but it doesn’t have much to say about the wisdom traditions that we also need. People do great healing work with a therapist, and get to a point where they want to continue their journey even deeper. And then both they and the therapist don’t really know what to do. This is where group work comes in. It is how people get to that next level.
We are meant to be in groups. We are born for it. Put people together and magic can happen. People connect and become one. We are a deeply social animal — we even have mirror neurons dedicated to this task. If someone is grieving I grieve too. If someone is in pain I hurt also. When someone does some work for themselves they are doing work for me as well. This is partly why HAI creates so much space for sharing; because we can learn so much from each other. The other reason is that when we are in a safe, deeply connected group like this, people become our sacred witness. When I stood up, naked, and committed to loving my hurt little boy inside it became a sacred vow. It is incredibly healing to be witnessed in this way.
HAI encourages and empowers us to show up as who we truly are. Not just the facade that we want people to see, but all of us. And when we see someone nakedly and vulnerably sharing the full extent of their pain, we quite often have a moment of “Oh! That is me! I have that too!”. They are doing the work for everyone in the room — we start to take on that work as well. One person’s courage gives rise to another person’s. It is a beautiful, upward spiral towards healing. People come up to the front of the room to share all sorts of diverse ways of being human. And we start to recognize all parts of ourself. We start to recognize that people are just a different kind of mirror we can look into.
Does that make sense? That other people are a mirror for us? Some people get this right away, but others struggle with it. There is a healthy way to do this and an unhealthy way. The unhealthy way is called “projection”, and the idea is that almost everything we see in others is our own projection onto that person. When we project we don’t even really see the other person just our own illusions. But there is also a deeper, healthier way to hold this. When we do this mirror work we recognize that there is no place of being human that we ourselves can’t get to. No matter how strange a place a person lands in, we all have the potential to go there too. This is easy to believe when you see someone who shares many things with you, like a friend. So you can see how they might be a mirror for you. It is harder to believe when you look at someone so different from you that you don’t even understand them. When I look at people like that I recognize that they have journeyed to a very different place than I have. I wonder what I might be like if I went to that same place. I know that it is possible. They are a mirror into that part of myself I have not yet discovered.
The only problem with the HAI workshops is that at the end we go back to into the “real world” where we are so isolated from each other. And a big reason why we feel so isolated is that we are going home to a unit that was built to make it easy to buy and sell rather than to connect with others. Not knowing the people living right next to us is just so weird. We need our tribe.
You may have heard about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The basic idea is that there are certain needs that take priority over anything else. First we need simple things like food and water. If am starving it is hard to have time for anything else. Then we need basic safety — if I’m running away from a fire that is my immediate priority. I would call those concerns of Beige. But next we come to the needs for belonging and connection. Those are basic survival needs too. We are tribal animals. It may no longer be true that if we don’t have a tribe we are going to die, but it sure feels like it. Our society is suffering an epidemic of loneliness. Over half the American population says they are lonely.
There is a simple solution. We need to take that tremendously vulnerable risk of allowing people to love us. But as the Indigo girls put it so well — the hardest to learn was the least complicated. Let’s go back to love now.