I attended one of my closest friend Lisa’s Rosh Hashanah Zoom services on Friday night and Saturday. Lisa and I met as teenagers, and she became a rabbi several years ago. I love attending her services not only because she’s a font of wisdom and inspiration but also because it thoroughly delights me to see her in her element, leading her congregation with profound elegance, humility, and compassion. I’m so proud that she’s my friend.

At the Saturday service, a brilliant young woman from the congregation gave the drash (main speech). She told a story about the miracle of her birth – how she wasn’t supposed to live because of a significant heart defect. Despite her loving parents, she grew up with a sense that she was wrong – that there was something fundamentally wrong about her. It wasn’t until she met her rabbi (my friend Lisa) and became a part of her community that the wrongness started to dissipate. And then, in her old-soul-in-a-young-body wisdom she said:

“The antidote to a sense of wrongness is finding people who make you feel right.”

That took my breath away.

The antidote to a sense of wrongness is finding people who make you feel right. 

She’s absolutely correct. As shame is relational (we only know shame because of our relationships with other people), the medicine is also relational. Yet it wasn’t enough for this young woman to feel seen and loved by her parents or her rabbi. She needed the love of the entire community.

What I’ve come to know is that it’s not enough for one or two people to make you feel right. We need a tribe. We need a circle of people around us who reflect our rightness, the essential goodness of who we are. It’s why you can be raised in a loving family with two parents who affirm your rightness and still feel like there’s something wrong with you.

Our world has become too small.

The nuclear family sequestered in a house separated from all the other houses on the street is too small.

Growing up with one or two other siblings, or none at all, is too small.

But the world is also too big.

We yell out into a void of social media where hundreds or thousands of people might be listening, but none of them are listening in a way that makes us feel heard. None of them know you, see you, love you.

We’re spread out across this vast globe, billions of people on islands of loneliness, massive beyond belief yet isolated beyond measure.

But then, by that sweetest meeting of grace with effort, we find ourselves with a group of people who see us. It might take some time to believe that we’re being seen and receive the love, but when we do, layers and layers of shame fall away. When we consider that our deepest fear is of being cut off from a community, it makes sense that the antidote is being accepted into a group, taken into the soft wings and folds of their loving. In being seen, we also see. And in seeing others’ beauty and rightness, we see ourselves.

I’m remembering a moment at the Another Way retreat last June when one of the participants said, “I’ve been looking around this circle for days in awe at everyone’s wisdom and compassion, and then I thought, ‘But I’m here, too. If all of these sensitive humans are good, does that mean I’m good, too?”

Yes. Yes, it does. It’s through being in a group of loving people that we know our own goodness.

Of course, many of you were raised in groups that weren’t loving: religious communities that were harmful; large families that were layered in trauma; school environments that left scars; spiritual communities that turned out to be cults.

Where does that leave us?

I don’t know. I don’t have the answers. I know there are no perfect communities, and that many communities who espouse “love” and “goodness” can be toxic and dangerous at the core, themselves propagators of shame.

But I also know that when we seek loving communities as adults, we find them. And I do believe that one of our global tasks right now as things are falling apart is to build ourselves back together on the pillars of loving community. I’m not sure what that means yet, but I hope to find out in my lifetime. As Rabbi Lisa said on Friday night, “The antidote to despair is community.”

As I’ve been sharing lately, this is the direction my work is moving; I love witnessing the layers of shame that fall away when a group of conscious, loving, committed learners gather together. I love the creative magic that happens when wise souls offer their compassion, often in the form of story. It’s like watching a spider weave her miraculous web, when a thread leaps across the circle from one heart to another, and then to another and another. Before we know it, we’re sitting in our own, newly-invented dreamcatcher.

In two weeks, the 8th round of Break Free From Anxiety: A 9-month course on the art of living will begin. In the vessel of safe community, we will walk alongside one another with a roadmap for navigating anxiety’s bumpy terrain. We will cry and laugh. We will struggle with resistance and learn about radical responsibility. And, most of all, we will watch the dark cloak of shame rise up and be healed in the light of love.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m limiting enrollment to facilitate connection. As of now, there are 5 spots left. I look forward to seeing you there.

Note: We will meet over Zoom every two weeks from 3:30-4:45pm EST starting on Tuesday, September 29th. True community requires a commitment to showing up, so for this round I’m asking that participants show up to live meetings as much as possible (as opposed to listening to the recording.) Of course I understand that life can get in the way and not everyone will be able to attend every meeting, so you will receive the recording afterwards.