16 Jul Belonging
Belonging.
One of my coaching clients mentioned it today. Was it just that I was listening for it?
I’d been thinking about it for weeks now. Is that why the topic showed up? Or is it just that much more present in the world than I had thought?
My client spoke of needing to find something to belong to. Having been unemployed for well over a year now she no longer wanted to belong to that world, she wanted to work, to find her belongingness in another realm. It’s not, as she said to me, that she doesn’t belong to her partner, her mother, her family, but she wanted more.
She wanted more.
I thought once again of a conversation I had many years ago with the poet David Whyte. We were talking about my work with trauma survivors. He pointed out that everyone belongs to something, even if it’s their depression, their rage, their commitment that nothing good happens to them. David gave me a gift that day. In pointing out that we all belong to something, the psychic itch to support people to belong in more empowering ways began.
“….this is where
I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to
love.
David Whyte wrote those lines in a poem, The House of Belonging. It speaks of the necessary shift to love the things it has taken so long to learn to love.
How often I hear clients long for this life they haven’t yet learned to live. It’s just as often that I hear clients, and myself, riveted to their stories of what isn’t there, what isn’t working, and why it can’t, and won’t, work in the future.
What does it take to learn to love, to belong to something more meaningful?
That questions brings us right into the heart of our lives. It’s an inquiry that takes us deeply without ever knowing the exact answer.
Over the years, as I listen to clients and hear their profound longing, I marvel at our world which has us live so disconnected from the energy of life that springs unbidden. I watch as people struggle to let go of what they’re supposed to do, who they are supposed to be, to slowly grasp for the energy inside that bubbles and bursts with joy and well being.
Why is it so hard to listen to that well-spring? Why do we struggle to follow it? That is a thread to follow for another day.
Today, I write of belonging, of knowing the gentle letting go that comes from holding a baby or an animal, feeling it’s breath going in, and out, and in, and out.
Today I want to remember the feeling of my nervous system letting go, one synapse at a time.
I want to remember and relax into the groundswell of wisdom that arises in those precious moments of letting go and opening to something new.
“….
Now their loneliness
feels familiar, one small thing
I’ve learned all
these years,
how to be alone,
and at the edge of aloneness,
how to
be found by the world.”
— David Whyte Ten Years Later