For those of us who feel deficient, ashamed, or like we are lacking in connection to our ancestral lineage, for those of us who feel that we are in a dark time due to our collective disconnection from our ancestral, indigenous, or “traditional” cultures, maybe we actually are enough, maybe we are doing enough, maybe that disconnection provides an opportunity.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem that many of us are disconnected from ancestral, indigenous, or “traditional” cultures.
I think it’s a problem that we feel disconnected more generally.
I think it’s a problem that we are without ground, without home, that many of us feel lost.
I don’t think this is solved by simply studying the indigenous, traditional, or past culture of our lineage — or practicing the practices of old. I think we can let ourselves off the hook a bit with our frantic search for — our our shame around — ancestral connection.
Why do I say this? Psychologically speaking, what matters for human beings is the perception of a sense of order in the world. Human beings naturally use belief systems or culture to create that sense of order in the world. One issue with our Western, industrialized culture is that it is a culture built on disconnection — meaning that the order we have been socialized and conditioned to believe in is an order of violence, destruction, division, and disconnection. We are grounded in ungroundedness, oh my! We have been conditioned to believe that we are disconnected.
I applaud so many of us for reconnecting (or at least uncovering the existing connection) to our ancestors and lineages.
And yet we actually have done enough.
We can search within past cultures and even our own lineages for that absolute belief system that will offer us grounding, home — but ultimately we do not have to be dependent on this search to provide us with grounding. I say this because:
Cultures are not created communally, democratically, rationally, or with each individual’s sense of truth in mind. Culture is co-created by people, heavily influenced by groups in power who desire to enforce or promote certain attitudes and behaviors that will sustain their economic and political power. Culture and power & culture and economics are inextricably linked.
What I’m saying is that all cultures are formed in response to a desire for conformity in the least — and as far as I know, a desire for the continuation of some form of political and economic stability (read: lack of change). Cultures and institutions form out of the desire to resist change.
When we look at cultures for a sense of grounding, the individual can be lost, left. You can, I can certainly be lost.
What we do not find when we study communal culture (which by definition culture is — communal) seems to be individual truth, individual sense of purpose, individual internal grounding.
The beauty of our time, this time in history in this culture, is that we are seeing that all cultures are made up of not “truth”, but beliefs that were formed out of a very specific economic, social, and political environment.
We may study past cultures, our lineages, and how those show up in our own bodies. And the beauty is that the full, complete answer is still within us. We are already enough. We do not necessarily need to be dependent on homogenous culture. Our time, for many of us, is a time of heterogeneity, where individuals get to choose and create their cultures, belief systems, practices.
We at this time get to choose and discern these learnings: what do we believe? What grounds us? We get to pick and choose what resonates with our souls. We get to choose! And maybe it’s not homogenous, shared across a whole community or country (and therefore may feel less grounding), but because it is not, we get to bypass the “cult” of culture, the smashing of our individuality, our own internal truth.
Perhaps what many of us long for from the past — those shared rituals and cultural beliefs, that homogeneity — perhaps we can remind ourselves that all of that was made up. What was before was not really “true” at all. It only felt like truth because it was shared as culture. And because it was shared, it felt safer but it was only the feeling of safety, of order. Culture creates the illusion of safety, of security, of grounding. There is no need to clamor for it, because it does not exist.
If we are brave we can practice accepting that the order of the world is of ordered disorder. But that is difficult to be with, which is perfectly fine. If we are powerful, we can choose to create our own individual and small-group cultures where we get to choose: What is our paradigm that grounds us? What is true for us?
These ideas and questions are central to Raw Movement, an approach to inquiring about and experimenting with co-creating spaces of deep connection through collective (movement) practice. If you’re in the practice of creating grounding, deep connection, home, family, and desire to experiment with co-creating spaces of deep connection, find out more about Raw Movement (soon) at: www.rawmovement.org.
This writing is a part of my Conversations on Deep Connection series. If you’re also in the practice of creating grounding, deep connection, home, family and would like to get notified of new conversations, click here to get notified of new conversations.