What is it like to trust and feel belonging?
Belonging is neither fixed nor static. It is akin to the way love and attachment brighten and dim. Like any loving relationship, we need regular, repeated practices, patterns, and rhythms that bring us back in harmony with each other.
Is belonging an actual condition, such as an organization to which we pay membership dues, or sign a covenant agreement? You can be a dues-paying member of an organization and feel totally alienated, no sense of belonging whatsoever beyond on paper?
I make a distinction between the feeling of belonging, and state of belonging as a fixed description. Be-Longing is a process.
People want to align themselves with “the winning team.“ they wear specific clothing, hats, sing, special songs, and fight chants to cultivate the sense of belonging to their team. And if their team is sold or moves away, often the feeling of longing is ruptured, and there is a deep sense of betrayal and loss.
Then there is the unexpected surprise of belonging, and the feeling of belonging when you are suddenly a member of a club that you didn’t choose, such as the dead mothers’ club. Those people become your people.
Belonging is also shaped by ancestral and historical legacies. How does the history of slavery shape African American people’s sense of belonging? How does forcibly being snatched from the homeland, experiencing the trauma of the Middle Passage and generations of slavery impact individual and collective belonging? Similarly, how does ancestral Jewish trauma because of historical antisemitic persecution shape belonging? What practices provide healing and repair?
So many questions…
What does belonging feel like in the body? Softening, releasing, solid and tender, inherently protected. Belonging is more warm than cold. There is a somatic impulse toward connection, almost like a magnetic pull toward toward aliveness, which could be another person, a tree, nature, creativity.
If belonging is a relational process that thrives with conscious, ongoing tending and repair then what does activism and spiritual practice look like?