We Build The Village

I have been thinking a lot about community lately, although maybe what I have really been thinking about is belonging. The kind that exists beyond being invited somewhere, beyond being known, beyond having people recognize your name or your work. I mean the quieter experience of knowing there is a place for you among other people without having to constantly earn your place there. A place where someone else’s expansion doesn’t require your contraction. Where your gifts can sit beside mine without either of us needing to decide whose are more valuable. Where we can become more fully ourselves because we are in relationship, rather than despite it.

There is a strange loneliness available to us now. We can know what hundreds of people are doing before breakfast and still go entire days without being deeply witnessed by another human being. We can build audiences and call them communities. We can work beside one another, teach in the same studios, serve the same neighborhoods, attend the same events, know the same people, and still experience one another primarily through comparison. Who filled the room. Who got invited. Who was given the opportunity. Who is growing. Who is making more money. Who seems further along. Who was remembered. Who was forgotten.

I know this because I am human enough to have felt all of it.

There have been moments when someone else received something I wanted and my first internal response was smaller than the person I want to be. Moments when comparison arrived before celebration. Moments when I wondered why someone else was brought into the room and I wasn’t. Moments when another person’s visibility touched some tender place in me that wondered whether there would still be enough room left.

I’m less interested these days in pretending those parts of us don’t exist. I’m much more curious about what they are trying to protect. Because underneath competition, I often find fear. Underneath comparison, longing. Underneath jealousy, some version of I want to know there is room for me, too. And I wonder how much of what we call competition is really the nervous system responding to a world that has taught us to organize ourselves around scarcity. There are only so many seats. Only so much money. Only so many opportunities. Only so many people who can be chosen. So get there first. Become indispensable. Make yourself exceptional. Build something no one else can replicate. Protect what you have. Keep producing so no one forgets you. Those messages live deeper than thought after a while. They become ways of moving through the world.

And then we wonder why collaboration can feel vulnerable. Real collaboration asks us to loosen something. To trust that sharing knowledge does not diminish its value. To say someone else’s name in a room that could have held ours. To let another person be brilliant without immediately measuring ourselves against their brilliance. To receive support without turning receiving into indebtedness. To offer something without keeping a secret ledger of what should return. This doesn’t mean abandoning discernment. Community without boundaries can become another place where we disappear. Collaboration without reciprocity becomes extraction. Generosity without choice eventually becomes resentment. A village is not a place where everyone gets unlimited access to everyone else.

Maybe the work is learning how to belong without abandoning ourselves. How to have edges and remain connected. How to be deeply rooted in our own work while still turning toward the person beside us. How to say this is mine to tend without needing to say therefore there is less for you.

I keep thinking about how differently the living world organizes itself. A forest is not a collection of independent trees succeeding beside one another. Beneath what we can see exists exchange. Nutrients move. Fungi connect root systems. Shade protects what is tender enough to need it. Decay feeds what comes next. One organism’s existence changes the conditions of life for another. The health of the whole is relational.

And I wonder when we became so enamored with the mythology of doing everything ourselves. We praise independence as though needing one another were some developmental failure we should eventually outgrow. We celebrate the person who built the business alone, traveled alone, healed alone, figured it out alone. We speak reverently about being self-made while conveniently forgetting every teacher, friend, ancestor, stranger, caregiver, worker, piece of land, meal, conversation, heartbreak, privilege, opportunity, and act of generosity that participated in making us.

Nobody is self-made. We are relationship-made. Our bodies know this even when our culture forgets. A nervous system develops in relationship. We learn safety in relationship. We learn language because someone speaks to us. We discover parts of ourselves because another human being reflects something back. We laugh harder with people. Grief changes when someone is willing to sit beside it. Courage becomes more accessible when we witness someone else choosing it. Sometimes another person's belief in us holds the possibility long enough for us to eventually believe it ourselves.

There are parts of ourselves we can meet only in solitude, and there are parts that become visible only when someone else enters the room. I want both. I love solitude. I love mornings when nobody needs anything from me. I love listening long enough for my own voice to become distinguishable from all the noise I have absorbed. This summer gave me a lot of that. Space. Distance. Quiet. Enough unfamiliarity to notice which parts of my life had become automatic.

And somewhere inside all that solitude, I began craving the table. The circle. The friend who stays longer than expected. Someone else's laughter interrupting the seriousness. People making food while conversations overlap. Bodies breathing beside one another. The strange intimacy of practicing yoga with people whose names you may never know. The moment after an event when everyone could leave, but nobody quite does. I began craving community that had very little to do with networking and everything to do with being alive together.

I want more rooms where nobody is secretly delivering an elevator pitch. More teachers taking other teachers’ classes because we remain students of one another. More therapists sharing resources and referrals because one person cannot possibly be the right human for everyone. More artists making strange things together without needing to know whether they will become profitable. More women saying one another’s names in rooms the other isn't standing in. More people sharing opportunities that would be perfect for someone else. More tables where nobody has to demonstrate why they deserve a chair. I want circles. A ladder asks who is above you and who is below. A circle asks who is here. There is no front. No finish line. Everyone can see everyone else. What each person brings changes the experience of the whole.

I wonder what our lives would look like if we organized more of them that way. What if the question shifted from How far can I go? to What can we build here? From How do I differentiate myself? to What can only become possible through our difference? From Who is my competition? to Who might be my collaborator? From Why them? to What is their becoming showing me is possible? From Where is my village? to How am I participating in building one?

That last question has stayed with me. Because I think sometimes we speak about community as something we are waiting to find. I wish I had more community. I want deeper friendships. I want a village. I understand that longing deeply. And I am beginning to wonder whether the village is less something we stumble upon and more something we repeatedly choose into existence.

A village is built when you send the text first. When you make the introduction. When you buy a ticket to your friend’s thing. When you tell someone about an opportunity even though you would have loved it yourself. When you stay after class and learn somebody's name. When you ask for help before you've completely exhausted yourself. When you allow someone to show up for you without immediately planning how to repay them. When you repair after getting it wrong. When you invite the person who might otherwise assume there isn't a seat for them. When you tell someone, while they are still alive and standing in front of you, how much their presence has changed yours.

Maybe those tiny acts are how culture changes. Not through one grand declaration of collective consciousness, but through thousands of ordinary decisions to behave as though we actually belong to one another. And I don't mean belonging in the sense of ownership. I mean responsibility.

Your humanity matters to mine. Your freedom expands what I can imagine for my own. Your grief deserves witnesses. Your joy is allowed to take up space. Your success doesn't steal mine. Your wisdom can teach me without diminishing what I know. My boundaries can exist without making you my enemy. My gifts can be fully mine and still participate in something larger than me.

Perhaps this is one of the places our spiritual practices are meant to lead us. Yoga has given me countless ways to study the self, but the self was never meant to become the end of the inquiry. What happens to all that awareness when we leave the mat? What does embodiment mean when another person's needs enter the room? What does ahimsa ask of us in conflict? What does aparigraha (non-grasping) have to teach us about opportunity, recognition, and the fear that there isn't enough? What does sangha ask us to practice beyond simply gathering in the same place?

The mat can teach us how to listen inward. Community asks whether we can keep listening when someone else's experience is different from ours. The mat can teach us presence. Community asks us to offer that presence. The mat can reveal our edges. Community gives us somewhere to practice having them with love.

Maybe that is why I keep returning to gathering as part of my work. The sound matters. The movement matters. The meditation matters. The philosophy matters. And something else happens when people enter a room together with the intention of being present. Someone sighs and another body realizes it can exhale. Someone cries without explaining why. Someone laughs. Someone takes the modification and unknowingly gives the person beside them permission to do the same. Someone comes alone and leaves with a phone number. Someone hears a sentence they needed because another person was brave enough to speak first. The practice moves between us.

As I return to Austin, this is the kind of community I want to participate in building. I want to collaborate more. I want to create with people who know things I don't. I want to send opportunities outward. I want to make spaces where people who would have otherwise remained strangers find one another. I want Sona Shala to be less about gathering around one person and more about what becomes possible when all of us arrive carrying our particular medicine. I want to keep practicing abundance when scarcity would be easier. And I know I won't do that perfectly.

There will still be comparison. There will be days someone else's success touches an old bruise. There will be moments when I want to protect what I have built. There will be times when I need to close the door, choose myself, or say no. Those parts get a seat in the circle, too.

Maybe collective consciousness doesn't require us to transcend our humanness. Maybe it asks us to bring our humanness into relationship. To notice the fear and choose generosity when we have the capacity. To notice comparison and become curious about the longing underneath. To notice the instinct to isolate and ask whether solitude is truly what we need or whether we are afraid to be seen. To notice abundance when it arrives and let some of it move through our hands. Receive. Circulate. Receive again.

That feels especially alive to me as August closes. Late summer carries its own kind of fullness. Things have ripened. Some seeds became exactly what we imagined. Others became something entirely different. Some are still underground, doing their work beyond our ability to see them. Maybe harvest is collective, too. Maybe we get to look around and ask: What grew here because we grew it together?

I don't know exactly what this next season will become. I know I want to enter it with my hands a little more open. I know I want more tables than pedestals. More circles than ladders. More introductions than comparisons. More collaboration than competition. More opportunities passed hand to hand. More places where we can be witnessed without being fixed. More willingness to admit that we need each other. The village will not appear fully formed. We build it. A conversation at a time. A seat at a time. A risk at a time. A return at a time.

And perhaps the question I want to leave us with is less Where are my people? And more: What kind of person am I becoming in the lives of my people? How am I practicing being community?