Do you know about the Blue Zones studies?
It’s a popular bit of research done on the longest-living societies around the world.
The major, most significant thread between them all is daily community with their neighbors (and they all eat pork, but nobody talks about that).
I’ve been brimming with enthusiasm for a week because I remembered what it’s like to have friends. In person.
Last week I got to hang out with God’s gift, my friend Brandi, and her baby Ray.
I was buzzing for the rest of the day.
A morning of sunshine and in-person conversation reminded me of the importance of humans in my life and what it does to me as a person.
Since then I’ve been perusing meetup.com for free events, went to a women’s circle hosted by another of God’s gifts, Azimah (who does women’s pleasure coaching fyi), and tried going to church!
I was shriveling up and losing control over my psyche because I’d spent most of the last few months without real conversation. Most of my interactions were taking place over DMs, texts, and voice memos — all things that fake conversation, poorly. There is no shaving off of rough edges of who I am as a person or stretching out of my ideas when I’m mostly talking to myself, with no rhythm and no authentic timing or engagement. Don’t get me wrong - I love the friends I do this with. But I’m also a different person by the time they get back to me sometimes. It’s not a “conversation.” There should be another word for the staccato exchanges and playing catch-up with whatever was happening and alive (two or three days ago).
As a coach I’m working with said,
This makes sense. Connection is the bridge to nourishment and safety. Social media and other things are faux connection vs spending time with friends and loved ones, or being of service to others.
It took weeks of pondering what situations bring me the most flow and energy to remember this.
Not everyone is going to be energizing to be around
It takes some measure of authentic connection to energize the grid of humanity. There are plenty of people I could be around that I find draining. I can overstay my welcome with anyone as well. And I’m always going to have my own internal conflicts to tend to.
Let’s talk about how it can be easy to find an energizing environment.
What Brings You the Most Energy?
I started with remembering my highest moments:
Being at the Tantra festival in Hawaii pre-Covid. A few days of connection-based games, dances, and workshops had me at the upper edge of my psychic powers and shooting laser beams out of my eyeballs. At least it felt that way.
With this in mind, I investigated whether Tantra was the answer to recapturing that flame. I found Tantra Speed Dating and attended two events, gaining one friend and going on zero dates.
They play connection and authenticity games aiming at higher imagining for our lives, reminiscent of things that I experienced in Hawaii. I left feeling better and more focused on what I wanted in my life. It is marvelous to think about and share those things aloud with other people. It’s magnifying! Most people never talk about their hopes and dreams with their friends even.
It turned out that I don’t like the guy running it locally enough to go more often. Going on more speed dates wasn’t the answer.
Doing those exercises might be. Most were scripted in order to make it easy for people to move through them, like saying what you want to bring into your life but your partner has a scripted response like saying, “…and so it is,” and then they shut up, after each thing you say, or something similar regarding the things you’re wanting to let go of. If it feels corny, don’t worry, I think it is too. But if you and a friend can laugh about it together and get through, you’ll find it incredibly energizing as well.
Maybe it’s just the room
There is nothing so vitalizing as being in a room full of interested people. Not necessarily interested in you, but interested in one subject and making something better and taking personal responsibility for that. It’s one of the two ingredients that made attending mobility seminars 2016-18 or whatever so addictive, the other being an extremely competent leader that doesn’t mind being questioned.
On a minor scale you can find this togetherness by simply joining any group of people doing something that sounds interesting to you. Go to a concert or a comedy club, a game night, a class, or a discussion. The fact that you are all interested in one thing gives you common ground to build energy from.
You’d be surprised how much local stuff is happening near you, I bet. Synchronicities have a way of finding and opening doors that weren’t there before when you (and I) make a felt decision to step forward towards a goal.
The things that interest you are energy-giving. There is something magical to that. Where there is lack of choice there is energy drained. When you decide to move forward, the world rises with you.
Comparing my mental state with in-person vs phone interactions
The after effects of adding more real-time conversation:
More focused and able to own a clear yes or no to things
More confident. Less afraid of rejection
More skeptical of social media
More optimistic
More motivated to exercise(?)
I’m aware of other cofactors like experimenting with prayer, microdosing, my own energy work, what part of my hormonal cycle I’m on, outdoor time, and exercise.
However, I truly think and have reason to believe the conversations are the linchpin. As an adult, it seems like the most positively disruptive thing you can do is to decide to try a new social thing.
Being in a new city and relatively new state, I’m in a rarer position to go and find new people.
A “new social thing” can be finding new people but it can be a new social experience with the people you’re with. Card games like We’re Not Really Strangers (below, linked in the photo) can help with creativity, setting a container, and trying new things to bring you more closely in connection with the people you already know.
Maybe it’s just being honest
What exactly happens when you talk to people? Why is it sometimes so terrible and others it’s the best thing that ever happened?
Philosophically, we are all a part of the All, right? There is a network, or a web, that binds us energetically to the rest of the world and to other humans in particular.
But we are also our own network, inside which we may have areas cordoned off, darkened, or disguised. The shame of those places bleeds into our personal embodiment and gives us a false sense of ourselves.
When you start being a little more honest, you tend to become calmer and more connected to yourself, which makes you more available for connection to the right other people.
For example - Vern, my 77-year-old roommate, kept saying the same words over and over about an accident he experienced when he was moving into the apartment we share right now. Not in a psychotic, repetitive way, but in the way people with unprocessed events just tend to say the same things frequently enough that you get sick of hearing it again. The same words, complaining about the same things from the past, especially when they’re described as hurtful, are an indication of something needing attention to move on.
I convinced him to let me guide a session around the accident. In the end, he got help in the psychic realms, and now when he thinks about the table that fell on his head it’s “like a blank space” instead of a triggering demonstration of “how much shit he has to go through and how much shit he’s been through” like it’s been for 11 years.
I’m writing this at the library.
I just witnessed a woman on one of the library computers speaking loudly and cursing, and when asked to leave she screamed more, threw chairs over the partitions at another woman, and broke two computer screens.
The police came.
I see it all the time, the idea or question about, “Why would I go into my pain.”
It’s left all of this debris across our culture of unprocessed and seemingly infinite pain, bloated and inflamed bodies that are trying to protect us with a barrier to the rest of the world.
She’s gone now, led screaming through the parking lot to be charged with vandalism and probably a few other things. She was screaming about how this whole town is full of child molesters, and was INTENSELY triggered after perceiving that this other library patron had “moaned like pornography.” (I didn’t hear or see that). I would be shocked if she wasn’t molested, possibly prostituted, and abused herself. She said something about how they took her kids. She didn’t look like a fit mother.
Everyone at the library has moved on. There is no sharing circle to process what they witnessed. Emotions are not considered medicine in this country. There is no sense of humans …being humans.
Before things had escalated I had been sitting wondering about how much focus we have on tasks rather than people. When she was merely loudly mumbling curse words, and I could see her inflamed calves and ankles beneath the desk.
I don’t know what to do about this. It’s too big, right?
She’s still yelling outside; guess she’s not gone yet.
Excusing the behavior isn’t the way, and it still seems very weird for a person’s pain to become just an interesting story that people laugh about later while avoiding their own pain (judging by what I saw in the face and body of the woman the chair was aiming for). I’d actually like it to be both meaningful and something we laugh about. Both are healing.
My sense is that jail will protect her. But it won’t process her pain.
I guess this is just a reflection of what I’m seeing.
My hands are pulsing with energy work hearing that the library employee that intervened has a slight numbness where the monitor struck his arm.
I guess I don’t know what to do with a culture that has to be convinced to sit and let energy work transform how they feel, filled with nervous and awkward skepticism, instead of one that seeks out someone like me to heal them.
This woman was catastrophically disconnected from herself. It would be very difficult to connect to her and no one was interested in trying.
We can personally do better. That’s all I got right now.
It also made me think of this book, which teaches how to de-escalate situations and win for both parties: