The gift of community

Healing is a communal act.

I wrote those words in a sweet little instagram post over a year and a half ago. It was during a time where I was emerging out of a period of necessary and chosen isolation. I found that after doing so much work independently, I needed the support and love of the beautiful souls in my life to continue the next steps in my journey. I was so grateful that I had cultivated such a supportive and loving community of people around me that could hold me through it all.

These same words, healing is a communal act, have been rattling around in my brain this past month. At least once a day, I have let this thought bubble up to the surface.

It all began after I booked my flight to Guatemala this past fall. I decided I needed some more yoga in my life (because there is no such thing as too much yoga!) so I began looking up yoga retreat centers where I could stay. One of the first places to pop up in my google search was this, way out of my comfort zone, conscious community of yoga loving hippies. A place called the mystical yoga farm. I decided to apply to be a karma yoga, aka a work exchange, thinking I wouldn’t hear back from them. Lo and behold, I was invited to spend the month of December on the farm.

I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting myself into. I told my friends that I might be joining a cult and perhaps they should check in on me after a few days! Up until the moment I arrived on the farm, I was still skeptical about this place even existing and what my experience here would be. It ended up being absolutely nothing like I expected and more than I could ever know I needed.

My second day here, while still deeply in an adjustment period of settling into farm life, I wrote, “this place is going to heal me.” I didn’t know how or what that would look like, I simply knew it to be true. I can whole heartedly say, that intuitive knowing of mine was far more true than I can fully comprehend. This place is healing me, and will continue to far after I left this magical land.

I have understood for many years on an intellectual level how important community is for humans. We are social beings that require physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual interaction to feel safe and secure in this world. We are currently living in a world that is more connected yet more isolated than ever.

I am grateful enough to say that I have so many people that love me in my life. The problem is, those people, are spread out across the globe. Thankfully with modern technology, I feel so connected to them, even when they are physically quite distant. But there is something primal within us that needs a physically present community. Technology is amazing but still incredibly confusing for our human physiology in many ways. My physiology has been needing this type of community for a long time.

Living at this farm, in a space where people are actively choosing to live in a communal way, is showing me how primal this need truly is. I have healed so much within the presence of my inner circle of soul mate level friends. But there is something so vastly different when you let yourself be supported and loved by absolute strangers that become soul family or farmily within a short span of time.

This healing, that I needed to experience, arrived with a very high level of discomfort for me. Which reminded me why I have been doing the work of learning to be in the discomfort of life. Sometimes healing is flowers and rainbows. Other times it’s dark and painful. I found both here at different times, which is almost always how it happens for me.

Near the end of my time here, I had a repiphany, aka a remembering of an epiphany I have had many times this past year. (Kudos to one of the beautiful souls I met on the farm for giving me this new word) I was reminded that it all comes back to self trust. Only when I trust myself, can I turn that trust towards the world around me. As soon as I lose my own trust, the world feels unsafe.

I had a few tough days of feeling a huge lack of trust in myself creep in. As soon as I would lose this precious trust, that I have worked so hard to cultivate, my brain would spiral me into old patterns and stories. All of a sudden, the people I felt so safe and loved by the day before, became complete strangers again. It was truly fascinating to experience my brain and body swing, sometimes violently, between these extremes in real time.

At times, I felt like a fish out of water. The story of, “I am not a communal person, I shouldn’t be here”, would pop up. But the beautiful thing is that my farmily didn’t let me struggle around on the land, gasping for breath, pretending not to be a fish. They lovingly placed me back in the water every time they saw me flopping around on land. They didn’t force me to be anything other than who I was. But in that act, they destroyed so many lies my brain has held onto, thinking it was keeping me safe.

I’ve said it too many times to count at this point but the universe knows exactly what we need and where we need to be. We just need to get better at slowing down and listening. Not an easy task to do in a world that pushes us to stay busy, keeps the volume high, and asks us to move so fast.

Once we step onto a healing journey, there is a point where we must let go of controlling the process. Complete surrendering is often a necessary medicine on this path. For many years, I was choosing where and how I traveled down this road. This past year has been lesson after lesson of surrendering to the path that appears in front of me rather than blazing it on my own. I’ve gotten really good at blazing my own trail, now it is time to learn a new way.

Coming to the Mystical Yoga Farm to be in community, was a path that appeared in front of me. I had a choice to walk down it or turn the other way and forge my own path. My comfort zone asked me to keep forging my own path but my heart told me I needed to step in this new direction.

I needed to be in a community of people like this. A community where individual autonomy and self expression is practically a requirement. While at the same time, the sacredness and beauty of each individual is held in reverence. Trust in the self to trust in the community. A model that works so magically but is often not honored in today’s world. A world that often asks us to break trust in ourselves and give it away along with our own power.

Being in a community that encourages trust to begin at the level of the self has altered me. I needed to bear witness to this way of being. I needed to understand that the work I have been doing on my own is a tiny piece of the puzzle of what is possible.

Self trust is not the end, it is the beginning. When I find trust and safety within myself, all of a sudden the entire world is a trusted and safe community for me. How beautiful is that!?

So yes, healing is a communal act. There are a million paths to every point. For me, I had to walk a long way alone, forging my own way. I then needed to wander alongside my soul family for support. Now I appreciate that my community is everywhere I ask for it to be, I just have to listen to my heart and trust myself.

I don’t believe our hearts understand loneliness. It is our mind that create this illusion. When we begin to walk through the world with our hearts leading the way, surrendering to the path, the universe will allow us to collide with the community designed for us.

Begin by cultivating trust in the self and witness what happens to the heart. I am pretty sure it will open up exactly when it needs to. And community will arrive out of the blue…or it may arrive as a bunch of damn hippies living in the mountains of Guatemala…either way, surrender to it.