Story at a glance
The early bond with mother calls us into being and into a reciprocal relationship with life
It’s often disrupted and disconnected leading to a host of personal difficulties and striving for resolution.
Manipulative algorithms and strategies exploit our dislocation for their own ends and make the disconnects harder to see and correct.
Reconnection is certainly available; we’re wired for it and a vast spiritual heritage is there to serve us.
Relational practices are emerging as powerful methodologies that can help us deepen our connection. They’re a powerful complement to traditional spiritual practices and can be a way of their own.
Widespread Social Disconnection
We start off as infants being called into being by the gaze and the holding, and the deep welcoming attention of our mothers. Our neural networks and our wiring into the world start there. Attachment theory, first formulated in the 30s and increasingly known and accepted, recognizes that bonding in the earliest years is tremendously impactful and the early connection to caregivers formative.
This early connection is never perfect and ideal. We’re here to learn and mature and find out who we really are, not to be forever in the womb. While a baseline sense of safety and connection and belonging is the foundation of psychological health, if we don’t learn it in our infancy we can still learn it later.
Many of us need work on this. The loss of intact families with two parents in a clear loving relationship have weakened parental bonds over generations so that the family connection is less secure and the way back less clear.
In addition to personal conditioning our culture imposes its own imperatives - like in The Matrix - that expoits our uncertainty about who we are and where we belong.
Social Conditioning
Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider, describing the phenomenon of the not-belongers, was a seminal book in the 60s. Around the same time Albert Camus wrote The Stranger, a novel about a man who murdered but had no sense of why. (Doestoevsky had a similar theme much earlier in Crime and Punishment.)
Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote in 1920 in his poem The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
…
Alienation from self and society is a marker of the modern era. Here in the postmodern era that dislocation has taken another step away from itself. It’s became institutionalized. We’re pulled toward a personal and social situation that makes our center hard to find and stand strongly in.
We can though. The spiritual traditions bear witness to it, the new directions of psycholology and neuroscience acknowledge it and legions of individuals are awakening to it in their own way and their own time.
It’s possible to recover and rewire even the earliest sense of trauma and dislocation, given enough time an attention. I think it’s a best use of our time and attention. Without inner work, we’re tempted to accept the distractions and reliefs offered to us by the military-industrial-pharmaceutical-intelligence-technocratic-government complex, the HQ of the Matrix. They exploit us for their own ends of greed and power.
Social conditioning is intense. If we’re disconnected from our living in-the-moment connection to who we really are, we can fall for it. We can give the Matrix permission to be the boss in our lives without noticing.
Inner work is much (much) helped by micro-cultures of connection, by islands of sanity where we’re seen and heard and welcomed as we are, by places where we don’t have to fake it and perform in order to belong. In such places we can discover our own way.
I noticed early on that being in groups where I can speak and listen helps me with this. In recent years that’s looked like dyad meditation - relational meditation done in a clear and coherent structured way with another.
Being intensively with others helps me come into inner resonance, helps heal that earlier disconnection. It also provides a springboard for personal evolution and discerning the path forward. Tweaks in the group structure can support us finding our own direction, bringing out our unique gifts and living them. Relational spaces and what’s available in them are still in their infancy with a bright and necessary future ahead.
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Practice Opportunities
I plan to have a number of exploration opportunities starting in the fall.
In the meantime, some small practice opportunities for you.
Dyad Practice noon Eastern time each Monday now through to September. Register and receive the link here. I’ll introduce the basics of dyad practice, we’ll do a dyad and explore what comes up. Men and women, free. Come join us.
Men’s and Women’s Accountability Group, currently August 18th at noon Eastern time (may change). Two hours. Here’s the link to register.
We use dyads (pairs) to explore together in a mutual space of respect. We do our best to make this group safe and also deep. The set-up encouragespeople to stay in their own lane, being accountable for our own experience, not knowing what’s best for the other.
You’re welcome to attend either or both. Free but wonderful when we share the cost of a shared endeavour. Consider a paid subscription as a way to do this.
Your friend on the journey,
Andrew
Thanks for writing this. I appreciated your articulation of the possibility of healing from trauma and why it's so important and restacked it.
Andrew, thank you for this invitation to all of us to find our "islands of sanity"! I loved most the reminder that the solution is so close, so available and so easy: "reconnection is certainly available; we’re wired for it and a vast spiritual heritage is there to serve us."