In this talk, Zach explores one of the deepest human needs: the need for love, connection, and belonging. It’s normal to feel disconnected in our current isolated and atomized world. Our first step to cultivating belonging is by connecting to what is right here: our bodies and our hearts.
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Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.
Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?
– Hafiz
True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.
― Brené Brown
The sweetest thing in all my life
has been the longing – to reach the Mountain,
to find the place where all the beauty came from –
my country, the place where I ought to have been born.
Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing?
The longing for home?
For indeed it now feels not like going,
but like going back.
– C.S. Lewis
Our bodies know they belong; it is our minds that make our lives so homeless. – John O’Donohue
“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?
– Thomas Merton
If you can accept your body, then you have a chance to see your body as your home. You can rest in your body, settle in, relax, and feel joy and ease. If you don’t accept your body and your mind, you can’t be at home with yourself. You have to accept yourself as you are. This is a very important practice. As you practice building a home in yourself, you become more and more beautiful.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Come into the life of the body, the one body
granted to you in all the history of time.
Come into the body’s economy, its daily work,
and its replenishment at mealtimes and at night.
Come into the body’s thanksgiving, when it knows
and acknowledges itself a living soul.
Come into the dance of community, joined
in a circle, hand in hand, the dance of the eternal
love of women and men for one another
and of neighbors and friends for one another.
-Wendell Berry
To be human is to belong. Belonging is a circle that embraces everything; if we reject it, we damage our nature. The word “belonging” holds together the two fundamental aspects of life: Being and Longing, the longing of our Being and the being of our Longing.
Belonging is deep; only in a superficial sense does it refer to our external attachment to people places, and things. It is the living and passionate presence of the soul. Belonging is the heart and warmth of intimacy when we deny it, we grow cold and empty. Our life’s journey is the task of refining our belonging so that it may become more true, loving, good, and free.
We do not have to force belonging. The longing within us always draws us towards belonging and again towards new forms of belonging when we have outgrown the old ones. Postmodern culture tends to define identity in terms of ownership: possessions, status, and qualities. Yet the crucial essence of who you are is not owned by you.
True belonging is gracious receptivity. This is the appropriate art of belonging in friendship: friends do not belong to each other, but rather with each other. This with reaches to the very depths of their twinned souls.
– John O Donohue
