The next 15 day practice begins September 18th. We’ll be honoring the emergence of Fall with a daily live (& recorded) 30-minute kundalini breathwork practice to support you in shedding, letting go, and welcoming the change of seasons. I’ll be providing holistic and integrative resources to support your mind, body, and soul with this transition. Think: ancient Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine techniques and tools on how to manage the emotions that come with this transition, nourishing recipes to support the body, altar building, and more. You’ll be invited into a community space to connect with myself and others. To join us you must be a paid subscriber:
"To be somewhere as opposed to nowhere.”
Perhaps the biggest heartbreak of our modern world is belonging. More specifically, lack thereof. What does it mean to belong in today’s global world? What does it mean to belong not only to others, but also to the earth? To our Selves?
I’ve been circling around some ideas around belonging for a while. Namely, the intersection of attachment theory, polyvagal theory, the energetic body (i.e. the Chakra system), our sense of place, and how these things all play a significant role in our sense of belonging.
Because much like everything, belonging is not so black and white. As our coconut tree girl Kamala Harris says, “[we] exist in the context of all in which [we] live and what came before [us].”
Belonging, or rather, not feeling like you belong, is what we in the biz call a core wound. A core wound is a deep-seated emotional pain or belief that typically originates in early childhood and profoundly influences a person's thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and relationships throughout their life. It can also be intergenerational.
For many reasons I won’t go into here, not feeling like I belong is a core wound of mine (for all my fellow Enneagram Four’s out there, you know what I’m talking about).
It’s partly why I ventured away from home at 18. It’s partly why I spent years searching and seeking. I suspect that many “seekers” feel, on some level, this core wound. Why seek if you feel 100% seen and heard in the house you grew up in?
It can be hard to remember in our modern world that our capacity and ability to belong is innate. Early attachment patterns with primary caregivers play a big role in our ability to connect with our Selves and with others. The care we receive (or more accurately didn’t receive) as children form the foundations of our nervous systems: what feels safe and unsafe, whether we feel alone and isolated, or supported and connected.
Attachment theory emphasizes the importance of secure attachments in early life. Secure attachments provide a stable emotional foundation, helping a child feel safe and secure in relationship to others; a crucial component for healthy psychological development.
As Bessel Van Der Kolk says, “early attachment patterns create the inner maps that chart our relationships throughout life, not only in terms of what we expect from others, but also in terms of how much comfort and pleasure we can experience in their presence.” To maybe state the obvious, these patterns play a significant role in our ability to feel like we belong.
Polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges, explains how our autonomic nervous system (ANS) shifts between three different states depending on perceived safety or threat. The ventral vagal state, associated with feelings of safety, calmness, and social engagement is key to forming secure relationships and feeling safe in our own bodies.
Babies are born with only two of the ANS states developed: sympathetic and dorsal (i.e. activation or shutdown…i.e. crying/digestive discomfort or sleeping/pooping). It’s believed that the third state, the ventral vagal state, is not completely developed until a child is 12 or 13 years old. In other words, our ventral vagal complex -our ability to feel safe and connected within the container of our body- is impacted by our caregivers’ ventral vagal system. If we don’t feel like we belong or are not shown secure and safe attachment in our earlier years, our ventral vagal “muscle” is underdeveloped and we will have to do a lot of work later in life to strengthen our ventral vagal state. Not impossible, but certainly much harder to do than if we were shown consistent and predictable love and safety growing up.
It’s not hard to see how attachment and polyvagal theories connect. If we consistently feel fear, anxiety, or disconnection early in life, our ability to feel safe in our bodies will be underdeveloped, making it hard to form secure attachment patterns in our relationships and regulate our emotions and nervous system. Belonging, in a way, becomes a source of threat and fear rather than connection and safety.
How does this relate to the chakra system?
The Chakra system is an ancient traditional Vedic system that looks at various energy centers and points within the body. Each of the seven energy centers have different qualities and can be in a state of deficiency, excess, or balance. The root chakra is believed to be the center most related to our ability to feel secure in our sense of belonging.
The root chakra is located at the base of the spine and serves as the foundation of the entire system. It is connected to the earth element, feelings of safety, stability, survival, and belonging both to one’s body and to the broader environment. When the root chakra is balanced, it helps elicit a deep sense of feeling at home; of belonging. When this center is balanced, we feel connected to our Selves, but also to the earth beneath us.
We can look at our capacity for belonging holistically; mind, body, and spirit. All these systems and theories emphasize the importance of safety, regulation, and connection, both internally and environmentally. Each framework offers insights into how our nervous system, emotional attachments, environments, and energetic bodies play a role in our sense of belonging. Most importantly, each framework offers us ways to begin to heal any deficiencies in our capacity to feel safe; in our capacity to belong.
Because belonging requires us to not only build safety and connection within our Selves and with the earth, but to also choose to belong to a community; to a place.
Speak to your fellow humans as your place
has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you.
Speak its dialect as your old compatriots spoke it
before they had heard a radio. Speak
publicly what cannot be taught or learned in public.
Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up
from the pages of books and from your own heart.
Be still and listen to the voices that belong
to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields.
There are songs and sayings that belong to this place,
by which it speaks for itself and no other.
-Wendell Berry, Excerpt from This Place That You Belong To
A community is defined as a group of people who come together through shared interests, values, or goals. According to a theoretical cognitive limit called Dunbar’s Number, humans can maintain about 150 stable social relationships where trust is maintained. Anthropologically speaking, most societies throughout human history show that about 100-200 people is the sweet spot for optimal well-being and social cohesion (yes you could live in a city with 9 million people, but we are biologically designed to create smaller sub-groups within that population to support mental and emotional well-being; when we don’t do this it can feel extremely isolating and lonely).
A person can do all the nervous system regulation exercises they want, but it won’t support them in feeling a sense of belonging within a community. They can do all the magic mushrooms on earth to feel a deep sense of connection and oneness with the earth, but it won’t solve the very primal need of belonging to a group of people.
This is the travesty of the modern world: the internalization that belonging is somehow a solo-endeavor. Once again our world has made us believe that the onus is on us to belong, without promoting the actual things needed to feel like we belong.
In essay “Local Matters” by Scott Russell Sanders he writes:
“It is rare for any of us, by deliberate choice, to sit still and weave ourselves into a place, so that we know the wildflowers and rocks and politicians, so that we recognize faces wherever we turn, so that we feel a bond with everything in sight. The challenge, these days, is to be somewhere as opposed to nowhere, actually to belong to some particular place, invest oneself in it, draw strength and courage from it, to dwell not simply in career or a bank account but in a community…Once you commit yourself to a place, you begin to share responsibility for what happens there.”
Because of our traumas and attachment wounds, committing “to be somewhere as opposed to nowhere” can be terrifying. It’s safer to be a floater. It’s safer to dwell in a career or bank account - both important to well-being but ultimately lacking in the reciprocity only true belonging can give us - than to commit to a place or group of people. It’s safer to believe that all we need is to belong to and within ourselves, when in reality that often only causes more isolation, more suffering, more pain.
My own work over the last decade has been about building the pillars of belonging in which I’ve been successful, to a degree. I’ve met incredible people along my path and feel lucky to have friends in all corners of the world. I feel a oneness with the Earth. I know my Self inside and out. All of these things have ultimately given me the courage I now have to pursue the thing I’ve longed for the most: to belong fully and whole-heartedly to a place and to a group of people, even if some of those people aren’t necessarily “my people” (see below to learn more about what I mean).
We start the journey back to New England tomorrow. I’m scared. I’m thrilled. I just want to get there. I want to wander just a little while longer.
But more important than any of those passing emotions, I want to be somewhere as opposed to nowhere. I want to sit still for a while.
I’m curious, do you feel like you’re weaved into a place? Do you feel like you belong? To a place? To the earth? To your Self? To others? Why or why not?
I’ll meet you in the comments,
Xx The part who’s ready to sit still
Random things I’ve enjoyed recently:
I was inspired by
’s piece entitled “You need 50 people.” In it she explains that this perpetual search for “our people” is keeping us from just simply being connected to the people around us. Although it’s important to feel seen and heard with your closest friends, we don’t need to close ourselves off to connection just because our barista doesn’t seem like “your kind of person.”Love learning all about medicinal herbs from
! She leaves no detail out, and I’m here for it.Fell in love with Dylan Gossett when I first moved to Austin, it’s only fitting that I’m seeing him in concert this week at Austin’s legendary Stubb’s Amphitheatre as one of my last night’s in Texas:
I feel this deeply. I am craving connection and community, but I terrified to put myself out there. I partially think I do not feel connected to this place, and I don’t want to put down roots here. But I need connection, and even if I loved where I am, I would probably have the same story playing in my head. A part of me is terrier to let people into my life because what if they reject me, or hurt me, or leave me. Thank you for this, I am going to go take my feelings and processing to my journal 😅
Love this so much Eliza. I feel so unbelievably lucky that where I live now is the first place in my life I've felt truly connected to the place and community and have found a place I hope I will call home for a long long time. We moved here - Lewes, in East Sussex - two years ago and have built up such amazing connections with the local community. Parents and families, in our street (we got added to the WhatsApp group the day we moved and there are regular gatherings that take place), my husband with the skateboarding community, and in so many other ways. It's the kind of place where you can't leave the house without bumping into someone you know - which actually I can find a bit tricky as an introvert who sometimes wants to be alone!! But overall it's amazing. I hope you find the sense of place and community you're looking for in New England.