‘Safety is not the absence of threat, but the presence of connection.’ — Gabor Mate.

I’ve been thinking about this quote.

I wonder if you can tell what nervous system state you’re in, as you attempt to take this in… Safety is not the absence of threat, but the presence of connection…

I wonder if your brain is screaming right now, “THAT’S WRONG!” You know that you can still be in danger if you are in the presence of others. You know that everything is a mess, so no matter what is going on, there is an existential threat right now!

I’m not going to dispute that.

This quote refers to how our bodies decipher safety and threat. As social critters, we are far more likely to survive anything when we are connected to others. More eyes, more ears, more people to stave off a threat, or build something to change the level of threat. 

Whatever comes, we are better together. 

As a communal species, our upbringing, our trauma, our generation, may have taught us to feel that we are best alone, that we either can’t or shouldn’t count on anyone else.

We need each other for connection, community, sharing tasks, and producing food, shelter, clothing, and comfort.

And. We can be an individual, with personal space and boundaries, unmeshed with others.

In considering the quote again, on a basic nervous system level, we sense less threat when we feel held, seen, known, and protected by others.

That can start with one human connection. That’s what I do with many of my clients. I hold the space for someone’s system to feel connected and safer. This is an opportunity for the nervous system to feel safe enough to work through some of the things it doesn’t feel safe enough to do on its own.

I begin by doing the same in groups. Within almost no time, though, we are all holding that space. It’s a magical moment when the group space becomes exponentially more special.

I can only imagine what ancient family groups, troops, tribes, and villages felt like. I have never been in a situation where everyone knows everyone, and even if they don’t like each other, they are there for each other. We have passed into a time of alienation and separation. 

Because of my passion for the environment and my following of climate change for over twenty years, I am interested in working directly and indirectly with the unraveling—the collapse—at a human-to-human level.

I attended a phenomenal workshop with Dr. Peter Levine and Thomas Hubl on healing collective grief and trauma worldwide.

The workshop took place in Zurich, Switzerland (I attended online), beautifully portraying that it’s not just about us in the States.

A lot is happening, all over the world. Most of us know about Ukraine and Israel. There’s also unrest in Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America.

And the entire world is being devastated by climate change, ecological collapse, and mass extinctions.

The fragmentation of the individual and collective could be considered a reflection of the fragmentation we have created in our environment. 

One of the things I was reminded of at the workshop last weekend is that we can’t heal the individual without healing the collective, and we can’t heal the collective without healing the individual.

I’d add that we can’t heal any of it while continuing to exploit the Earth.

Seems like a pretty big project.

But there are lots of us out here doing this work.

You are doing this work.

If you’re even considering doing your own work, you’re already doing it.

And if you are doing your own work, then you are rippling out into the world with a different, perhaps more coherent, energy, as I’ve talked about before.

Another thing that I was reminded of is that we wouldn’t be grieving if we didn’t care.

Because of my background and original interests, I care about the natural world, the environment, and this Earth. Therefore, I grieve the injury to it.

I care, therefore I grieve.

Because I care about and grieve the natural world and how we have been exploiting and destroying it, I also grieve how that lack of care echoes through to the human level.

If we don’t care—if we exploit the earth—it’s not a far leap to exploit a human we’ve never met. It’s not a far leap to exploit our neighbor or our friend.

And with that lack of care comes a lack of grief, a numbness.

We were made to care-physically, on a biological level.

Our nervous system is inextricably linked to this planet, to this climate, to this environment, and to each other.

I believe healing, in the broader context of defragmentation, can come from care, grief, and awe.

When we are touched together, when we protest together, when we come together for a workshop or a group, a class, or a picnic, we come together. We are touched by our similarities, by our differences.

We are touched. 

And if we are touched, if we find awe in each other in the world, in the environment, in the trees, in the animals, in the bedrock, in the way this earth works, in the way that we work – if we can feel collective grief, it is the first step in healing.

We are in this together in every way, and we must be together instead of fragmenting.

Instead of being incoherent, we need to be coherent.

On the individual level, on the collective level, and everything in between.

A tree planted next to a road on a sidewalk is fragmented. It will never be the tree that it would be in a forest. It is incoherent. It cannot tap into the mycorrhizal network in a forest or landscape.

That doesn’t mean we don’t love it, that we can’t feel it, or that we don’t feel its influence on us.

But we understand that that’s not the natural environment for a tree.

Our natural environment is together as well.

But it’s hard. We barely know how to be together, as a community, as a collective.

We have been fragmented. We have been purposefully separated from each other.

We must come back together for each other and for the world.

It’s why I run groups.  It is to help us relearn how to heal together at a nervous system level.

This is the work of a lifetime, a generation, several generations.  But if we don’t do it, who will?!?

This week’s Collapse Resilience group session was a tough one.  We needed to be able to settle and be ok, talk it through, and feel through the current events that have hit each person the hardest.

One of the things we do every time is share and talk about good news or things that have happened.  It’s so easy to get lost in all the bad that we purposefully linger for a short (or long) while in awe, cheer, or positivity. 

This week, I even opened the Good News Network to find some headlines to balance out our upcoming tough conversation.

We all came to the session with some form of activation. 

But by the time we were ready to delve into the crazy, horrible stuff happening right now, everyone was feeling more balanced and engaged.

We spent a good half hour discussing the dreadful stuff.

And.

Because it has become a tight community, and because of who everyone is, and because we begin the conversations from a place of relative regulation, we can have genuine, productive, heartfelt discussions, and end soon after- without anyone being the worse for wear.

A common theme emerged from this week’s session. 

We need each other.

We need relationships where we can process the hard things that are happening without ramping up or having to hide our feelings.

We need community where we can feel safe enough to know it’s not just us and our close friends who are having a rough time.

We need to help one another and be helped by one another.

The very cultural norms and trauma that have made us more and more individualistic and separated from each other are what are making it hard for us to change what is happening.

Only together can we make a difference- in our own nervous systems and for the greater good.  Social media is not enough.

That has always been true, but in these heartbreaking times, it’s truer than ever.

We are all living in, existing in, working in, healing in, the greater context of what is happening. 

The fragmentation, the unraveling of the world as we have known it.

Therefore, everybody who is doing healing work, everybody who is doing any work, is dealing with this.

Period.

Full stop.