“Only as we are in communion with ourselves can we find community with others.”
Last week, I started a yearlong journey with a new mastermind group of entrepreneurs, creatives, and thought leaders.
I have known the facilitator as both a fellow parent and a colleague for nearly a decade. It turns out that I also knew three of the other four women in our intimate group of five, even though they are scattered across the US.
That’s the nature of twenty-first century life, isn’t it? I haven’t learned the names of several of my closest neighbors, but I know a tremendous number of like-minded souls from around the world. I would venture to guess that your experience is much the same.
That quote above is from Parker Palmer in a book called The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life. I admit I have never read it, but I trust my new coach and I feel the truth of my own lived experience echo through this single neat line: “Only as we are in communion with ourselves can we find community with others.”
Hmmm... His “communion” sounds a lot like my living definition of sovereignty.
Being in communion with the self in order to connect to others is a lot like standing sovereign in your own being in order to fully participate in the collective.
Because, for me and for those who walk with me through The Sovereignty Knot, sovereignty is never a lone endeavor. We tend to our own inner sense of wisdom, passion, and worth so we can hold the door and hold hands with others who are ready to step onto their own sovereign path.
Communion Within Community: Now, More Than Ever
I have community on my mind (in the most sovereign sense) because the Sovereign Writers’ Knot had its first group coaching call of the season yesterday. (We write just about every week of our 13 weeks together and also have these monthly deep dive conversations.)
“Group coaching call” is a terribly bland phrase, isn't it? I also call them our Collective Story Healing Sessions, but even that may not fully capture what we share together.
Our most recent gathering felt more like… well, here is a sampling of the phrases folks offered at the end our 90-minute voyage into story, memoir, mysticism, poetry, and a healthy dose of sacred confusion:
a golden thread being passed from hand to hand to weave a tapestry
a portal to another dimension and way of knowing
A relational circle united by a shared theme: what it means to be human
A couple of members summed up their experience (so deliciously overlapping) with “lifted and woven” and “we are women weaving.”
And this is from a group of sovereign writers who, by the very definition of what we commonly understand writing to be — sitting alone with a page, setting out one word after another in silent contemplation — might be considered somewhat solitary creatures. (As it turns out, even introverts need writing buddies and sisterhood after all! But, of course, we already knew that, right?)
All of this is yet another reminder of what we've learned across a lifetime but so often forget: strengthening our own individual vessel of self enables us to hold and be held by the shared cauldron of a trusting and trusted community.
I invite you to get curious about your own experiences with community.
Test this idea of “being in communion with yourself” as well as what it means to “stand sovereign” and consider how that influences your ability to experience true connection to others.
If we have learned anything in the last eighteen months, it is that community (or its lack) has consequences.
Community matters when we are isolated and we are bereft of connection.
Community matters when we recognize that our individual responsibility to attend to our health (and get vaccinated!) is vital to the health of the collective.
Community matters when we watch people coalesce around shared misunderstandings, conspiracies, and false narratives.
Community matters when we gather in compassionate, grounded circles and realize, together, that there is hope, even in the most divisive of times.
Can you see yourself in a “Collective Story Healing Session” in the Sovereign Writers’ Knot? The current group is closed to new member, but we’ll begin a fresh season together at the end of January/beginning of February.
Head over to my website to learn more and enter your email so I can let you know when I’m accepting applications for the next season.
