Do you feel a deep sense of belonging?
It is common in colonised countries for people to not feel a deep sense of belonging.
Indigenous people all over the world have been colonised, including the original peoples living in what is now Britain.
Colonisation has spread all over the world like a virus, disconnecting people from belonging, from land, from a deep sense of interconnectedness.
There are so many ways that we can support ourselves to return to a lived experience of belonging and interconnectedness.
I wonder what your own journey with this has been?
I’d love to share about my own journey from alienation to belonging.
As a child, I never felt a sense of belonging.
I was born premature and was in an incubator for the first 5 weeks of this life. So my initial experience was one of separation and disconnection.
At school, I always felt different. I didn’t feel a sense of belonging there.
As a teen, the sense of isolation and difference was deeply painful.
My experience now is a million miles away from that.
I feel a deep sense of belonging and interconnectedness in my day to day life.
There have been a few threads to that coming into being.
One has been listening to the feelings of baby Marion, little Marion and teen Marion, and giving deep compassion to all the loss, sadness and grief of those younger parts of me.
Another has been developing relationships with my Inner Loving Presences, particularly my Inner Loving Mother.
And the third key piece has been through experiencing synchronicities, signs and messages from Life.
From the power turning off at my 30th birthday party as I was about to dance to, “I want to show you what I’m capable of”;
to the birthing woman ink blot that showed up 20 years ago when I was contemplating training as a HypnoBirthing Instructor;
to the funeral happening on the beach as my ex-husband and I were talking about ending our marriage;
to the myriad ways that I read Messages from Life in my day to day life,
including in sessions and groups with clients.
The songs, the signposts, the symptoms, all part of the Conversations with Life.
I feel such a deep sense of belonging with life.
I wouldn’t have believed that that was possible, knowing my experience of alienation as a younger person.
Yesterday I was swimming, as I do every day, and in the tree very close by were three kookaburras.
I often hear the kookaburras laugh at times where there’s something being talked or thought about, and they’re communicating a big YES to whatever that conversation is about.
Yesterday, i gazed at them as I swam, and felt such deep love for them. I felt so full of love and gratitude to simply be able to watch them, and to feel so connected with them, and to simply be alive.
Since I experience so many messages – from the trees, the birds, the signposts, my body, from everywhere, my ongoing experience is of being a part of life. Of being a thread in the tapestry of life.
I believe that feeling a deep sense of connection and belonging with all that is, is part of us returning to our true nature as Love.
I believe that it was our original disconnection from interconnectedness and belonging (Love) that led to the use of power-over (a distortion of Will).
The more we experience belonging and interconnectedness, the less likely we are to feel disconnected from our sacred power, and the less likely we are to use power-over others, and the more likely we are to create power-with relationships and structures.
So, a deep sense of belonging not only makes life more wonderful, meaningful and fulfilling, it also helps create social change.
The Room: a place for Conversations with Life is opening very soon, and so much of it is about facilitating a felt sense of belonging and interconnectedness.
Mary Walker and I will be sharing more about it in upcoming days.
Big love,
Marion
xoxox