I have a strong belief that with greater intimacy, greater shadow gets revealed. Every close relationship I’ve ever had in my life has shown me this. Both in self and other.

Almost as if the the soul, after opening its heart, mind, and body to unprecedented levels says “ah, I can finally relax, and let my authentic self truly be known”...

By shadows I mean underdeveloped parts of us. Wounded parts. Distorted parts that life has not been kind to.

The parts we have trouble admitting to ourselves in private, and almost never admit to anyone in public.

Our unresolved emotional injuries. Our partial truths. Our big mistakes, and poor decisions. Our manipulations and strategies to get what we want. The patterns and kool aide we forced ourselves to drink as children in order to survive our environment. Our shit.

As I’m writing this I’m feeling deep shame in my body. As I think of my own shadows.

Of course deep shame is one of the ways my shadows stay in the dark. Festering and eroding my being from the inside out. Begging to be loved.

When I’m clear enough, I know these parts just need love!

I rush over to them and surround them with my biggest embrace. I let them cry, and kick, scream, and tell me why it hasn’t been fair, why it’s been ok for them to do what they have done. I choose to love and foster these parts. I soothe them with loving dialogue. “It’s alright, I get it. I still love you 100%”. I’m patient. I listen and validate, and point to an exit, in due time. I tell them it’s ok, and that forgiveness is something I’m willing to give day and night.

If I’m skilled enough at holding these parts, they release. Their turmoil recedes, and a divine space gets created in my being, or someone else’s. Literally real estate in the soul gets freed up. Sometimes a super power gets unleashed.

I had a client of mine today say “we can’t even look at ourselves in the eye anymore! We’re too ashamed of our true self.”

How apropos. Therein lies the opportunity.

When the love of intimacy grows larger than the fear of shadow, true wholeness awaits.

When the call to face ourselves in the muck grows larger than the drive to “look good” we can actually have ourselves.

We need courage here. To shift from blame, judging, and victimhood, to absolute personal responsibility. Complete ownership.

From an angry and entitled “You’re this... they’re that...” to a “this has me feeling... (or) I’m reminded of some pain from my past”.

From posture, superiority, and pride, to deep humility, true healing, and growth.

As a kid my mother always taught me to look for my part in a conflict. She taught me from a young age about my own shadow.

Say it with me now... “In any conflict, I always have my own part in it”.

If you’re gonna walk away from a relationship, you better be crystal clear what your part in it is, because you’re just going to repeat it with the next person you’re with.

Shadow work means I’m willing to face and deal with my experience without one word of blame or judgement towards someone else.

This isn’t about not having boundaries, or aims, or wants. It’s discerning my shit. It’s recognizing and being committed to liberating my wounds and deepest hurt. It’s living in a world where I admit that I, like everyone else, have shadow.

Whether it’s around money, or friends, family, or romance, or work, I’m 100% committed to healing and looking at my shadow. And I want you to as well. So we can stay intimate. So we don’t have to fire each other out of our lives when things get difficult.

Owning my shadow is a ticket to 100% empowerment. Instead of being a victim, I choose to be the author of my own life. Every single damn time, no matter what...

What really makes community flourish? This is a question I have been asking myself since I can remember. I grew up in a good community in Victoria BC, Canada. I have a large extended family with aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents. Canada is very relationship and family oriented. However in my family our deep communication skills were about average, and many conflicts and dramas stressed our relationships without much resolution, I felt this. It left me with an impression that something better was possible.

In 2006, I moved to Eslaen Institute in Big Sur, CA seeking a better way of being together. I spent 2 years here living in intentional community, definitely some of the best years of my life, with many moments of feeling like I was connected to a utopian place. However my experience of Esalen was that it’s priority was as a business, not as much to foster healthy community. Many people who I lived with washed out, and today the core community is largely gone. After Esalen I moved from CA to Boulder, CO and attended Naropa University. There I spent time in the Shambhala community and also in the Diamond Approach community. Naropa’s community was mainly centered around academics, with very little cohesive effort on supporting inter-dependance. The Shambhala community seemed very connected, I spent less time here than with Naropa or the Diamond Approach communities, but was sad to hear recently of the sexual misconduct perpetrated by the lead Rinpoche of their lineage. In the Diamond Approach community, my experience was they focused very little on interpersonal connection and quite heavily on inner-subjective experience. It is after-all a spiritual work school. Later I spent some time in the Integral community in Boulder, CO. Many interesting things happened around that place, with perhaps the most interesting to me personally being around authentic relating and circling. A literal interpersonal meditation practice. Mindfulness in connection. An intersection of relationships, spirituality, and psychology.

Before asking about what it means to thrive in community, I’m curious what it really means to be aligned with the universe? Not as an idea, but the experience of that in human form. To have wellness in our mental space, our psychology, to have fullness in our heart, freedom, openness, love and connection, to not be jaded, to be expansive and generous of heart. What does it mean to have wellness in our body? To have good nutrition, to be physically strong, to have good blood flow, and ease of breath, to be able to sleep consistently and deeply, to have physical flexibility. To have a healthy sex life. Full of play, intensity, connection, vulnerability, consistency, novelty, and safety. A healthy relationship to basic survival, our foundations, our resources. To have our voice be heard and exercised regularly. To feel connected to a greater power, something bigger, and more profound than ourselves.

What lifestyle, what orientation serves all of those different centers in our being, and supports us to maintain them? By studying this, we have a much stronger compass on how to support aligned societal life.

I would struggle to believe that the majority of people can claim that wellness and alignment in the categories I have just mentioned is their everyday existence. So why? Why can’t we say that we’re supported to be aligned and well in all those different ways? I believe that one of the main reasons why we’re not aligned in that way is because of an absence of connection and closeness with each other.

The mainstream is an individualistic culture. That means that we’re fed that the right way of being is on us each individually, instead of us as a group. We’re separated. We do not look at each other as a family. We’re oriented around the self and being independent, instead of working together. We live in closed off boxes from one another. Property lines, cars, cubicles, my stuff and your stuff.

Individualism does not bode well for how I believe we’re really built. I see humans as pack creatures. We don’t typically do well in extended isolation. In fact, one of the worst punishments we have in our society is to be imprisoned, literally sent to a prison. And in prison, basically the worst place you can go is in to solitary confinement, where you’re locked in a cell 23 hours a day, with an 1 hour a day of some sunlight and pacing in an outdoor cage.

So this is pretty indicative of exactly what I’m talking about. Our nervous system, does not typically flourish in extended isolation from other people. Yet we have an individualistic society, my achievements, my beliefs, my positions, my direction is the most important thing, in fact I am competitive with you. I will try to best you, and I will be celebrated if I best you. If I achieve more than you, if am better looking than you, if I get more people to like me. Fame, and fortune, looks, and competitiveness for resources all fall in to this individualistic culture.

To find an antidote, what if we look at the antithesis to all that? An interdependent culture. What about devoting a life to finding a deep connection to who you truly are inside yourself, in service of being a stronger member of your community? This would mean an inclusion of all of your parts, securely relating and knowing true self love within yourself. It would include the importance of deeply connected, interdependant one-to-one relationships, including romantic relationships. Where you see and support each other as friends, there’s strong erotic polarity, and also major capacity for healing between each other. What about raising children? The commitment to a lifetime of child development, the commitment to parenting as a path. Attuning, orienting, soothing, and seeing children with secure attachment principles, and helping those children become the best versions of exactly who they are. What does true interdependence look like in larger community outside of family? Where there is constant collaboration, self-governance, diversity of perspectives amidst a shared vision, connection, play, and self-realization in community. Where there is a shift from the importance of “me”, to the importance of “we”.

How do we make an interdependent culture, an interdependant community, and interdependent one-to-one relationships that truly flourish?

Below are a few principles I think could guide us in an attempt to create truly healthy, flourishing, and interdependent society.

Deep listening and attunement with Self: A few guide posts; do not believe anything anybody else says without verifying it for yourself first. Consider multiple perspectives. Hold complexity. Understand shadow. Organizing complexity in to “right view”. Actions have consequences, we have likely come from an upbringing that was not perfect, and internalized beliefs and experiences that are not our own. We must adopt a path of finding out who we truly are. What do I care about the most? What are my values? What are my dreams, what is my purpose in this lifetime, what I am here for? Who am I? Understanding karma. We may find that we are spiritual beings, consciousness itself is the Self. The commitment to ongoing contemplative practice. Living to self-inquire, and learn more of who we are.

Deep listening and attunement in one-to-one relationships: A commitment to exploring how to feel deeply connected, celebrated in our authenticity, and feeling truly secure in our relationships with each other. Securely attached love, learning how the nervous system truly thrives, learning secure attachment principles. A quest, guided by our inner compass to learn how to really do relationships over time. Relational practice, including deep support in shadow work.

Deep listening and attunement with community: The practice of regular council. Practice that involves bringing people together in a circle to bear witness and share authentically. Participants agree to speak one-at-a-time, sharing their personal stories and experiences, rather than opinions, and listening non-judgmentally while others do the same. Listening and speaking from the heart, being “lean of expression”, principles of a talking piece to encourage mindfulness of sharing. Opening to feedback from others, shadows come up most poignantly in community.

Holy work in self: inner work. As consciousness we are tasked with managing a human life. This includes coming in to harmonious relationship with our instincts, survival, sex, and belonging. It also includes understanding ego vs essence, and the art of the middle path, being fully human - caught somewhere in between spirit and animal.

Holy work in one-to-one relationship: relationship as a spiritual path. Embracing conflict, celebrating the joys of connection, and a commitment to doing our shadow work. In times of reactivity towards other, I “stop, drop in to my body, feel, get real, and deal”. I commit to owning experience first, exploring what this may have to do with my past, and after having sat and gotten clear within myself, seek to engage the other and clear energy in relationship. “I noticed I experienced this with you, would you be willing to explore a conversation with the intention of understand each other better?”.

Holy work in community: Karma yoga. Giving as much or more than you are receiving. Sociocracy, a system of governance which seeks to create harmonious social environments and productive organizations. Use of consent, rather than majority voting, in decision-making, and of discussion by people who know each other. Using rites of passage to initiate and foster childhood parts towards maturity. Becoming an agent of cultural evolution.

Observation of nature for self: The time of day affects the body in subtle and not so subtle ways. The weather and seasons affect the body in subtle and not so subtle ways. By synchronizing with the natural rhythms, we can find strong harmony with our physical body, maximizing energy, and connecting with the sacred. Simple things like open our eyes at sunrise, close our eyes at sunset, at least waking and sleeping around the same times of day. A consistent morning routine, eating around the same time everyday, working around the same time everyday, playing around the same time everyday, making love around the same time everyday.

Observation of nature for one-to-one relationship: From a new friend David McConaghay who’s work helped inspire this post: “Close connection to the land, hands in the dirt, daily direct awareness of the fact that we “live off the land” and consistent honoring of all the beings, seen and unseen, that support our continued existence. The power of nature therapy is felt here in full effect. The opportunity to receive personal feedback from the land is endless.” What can we learn from nature to come in to harmonious relationship with each other?

Observation of nature for community: How are we as a community in use vs overuse? Giving vs taking of the land and with nature? Simple things like creating new community goals in the spring, celebrating through intense play and expression in the summer, harvesting what has expanded in the fall, contemplating and hibernation/gestating in the winter, storing up energy for later. Unsure if it’s sustainable? Just ask, “Can I/we do this forever?” Following the rhythms of nature, in observation of harmonization of community.

Whether it’s connection to self, one-to-one, or in community, over the long term one of the most common themes I’ve seen in healthy relationships is the creation of explicit, shared, and co-created guidelines - an ethos, shared beliefs. Systems like non-violent communication believe all conflicts are based in the deprivation of human need. At the very least, if we know ourselves, we can begin to advocate for the values we know will help us thrive if met. In collaboration, we can do our holy work together and evolve with the spirit of connection, and the the humility of self-effacement when confronted with our bumpy parts. I truly believe human society will not evolve in to a place of true thriving without the large scale application of these kinds of guidelines amidst an inter-dependant society.