Are WE Losing Our Sense of Community and Connection With Others?
Our communities need to be safe and our children need to feel loved. It takes a community of conscious and concerned individuals to connect with others as a way of living life. I remember a time when we knew our neighbors well and we shared the joys, burdens, concerns and sorrows of everyday life. We looked out for one another and for the well-being of each other’s children as well as our own. Today our dysfunctional communities are showing up in the form of depression in our children and overwhelm in their parents.
The doorway to social consciousness depends upon our feeling interconnected. There are many different ways of being responsive to this call to action and there are different gifts each of us possess. Some of us will respond through study or conversation, others with art, theater or public office. Using the diversities of our gifts, we can interweave them to enrich our neighborhoods. Sharing them with others, sets us on the path toward building conscious caring communities. Each of us can be the catalyst or “tipping point” by which new forms of behavior can spread.
Communities that Promote a Clear Message of Safety
Our children need to feel safe, knowing they are living in a community that holds them securely. They are biologically wired to give and receive love, we all are. From what we see and hear in the news, we are wreaking havoc on the quality of life in our school systems and in our communities.
Our priorities have become distorted and unclear as we attempt to meet so many conflicting needs at once. Without boundaries, expectations and support within our community we feel less safe and more anxious. Our children feel our anxious energy. They are listening to our conversations, speaking about their fears with their friends. They feel restless, anxious, confused and often rebellious.
We Need to Cultivate Change
We are living in a society that has physically and energetically restructured itself around an unacceptable set of priorities. It’s a profit before people model. This model threatens the well-being of nearly everything we love and are wired to protect. Community services have been cut, teachers, music and art programs that benefit our children have also been cut.
Our neighborhood community centers, that were once within walking distance, are now placed in major centers to handle the masses. Parents need to drive to them and they are operated as profit centers. Neighbors that are not within walking distance or no longer drive, feel lonely and unseen. They were happier when they were surrounded by people in small local community centers.
Many families are struggling to make ends meet. They are being forced to create all that has been cut, as they continue to hold tight to old ideals of parenting. Some parents cannot afford to provide their children with the costly outsourced community services. This is especially true for single parents. There is a permeating feeling of discontent and disconnect within our communities.
Have We Forgotten What “Normal” Looks and Feels Like?
Children’s natural ways of loving, caring, expressing and simply being a kid is compromised. In most neighborhoods and communities, we no longer see children playing, exploring, creating, and nurturing their curiosity. Instead they are addicted to their electronics and as a result have greatly diminished social skills. At the same time, parents rely heavily on social media for a sense of connection. These behaviors lead to feelings of even more isolation and inadequacies as a family unit.
Parents have been asked to replace what was once normal in their communities. Now they are drowning with feelings of we’re not doing enough, or enough of the “right” things. They are running around like crazy trying to make up for the lack of music, arts, languages and yes social interaction, stimulation and learning opportunities. They are feeling guilty for just about everything. Guilty for not having time to be their children’s primary playmates, for not working enough, or working too much. Questions are popping up like, “are we allowing too much screen time for our children in order to keep up with our never-ending responsibilities?”
We Need to Enhance Our Children’s Sense of Self
Many of our youth are troubled by depression and suicide rates among our youth are climbing to highs like never before. Joy, lightness and fun are hard to access and happiness is even harder to find when one spends too much time worrying and alone. When one cannot walk to a local community center to meet with friends. Gone are the days when we used to play in the school yard after school with our friends. It’s not a safe place anymore.
On another level and tragically so, the absence of the conscious community is causing many parents to feel helpless. It’s causing some to feel that their inadequacies are to blame for their struggles. This further perpetuates the feeling that they must do even more to make their children happy.
This behavior and attitude become a self-perpetuating cycle. It becomes a distorted reality that derives its strength from the old mindset of what good parenting means. The parenting model that is not working is still in place despite our freedom to make difference choices.
Parents and caregivers, you are not the problem at all. YOU ARE DOING PLENTY. That makes you HEROES, not failures. Sometimes you may feel inadequate, but that’s because you’re on the front lines of the problem, which means you’re the ones being hardest hit. You are the first ones struggling and absorbing the impact of a broken, still-oppressive social structure. Many of you do this so that our children won’t have to. I’m referring to oppression as the absence of the conscious community. We’re disadvantaged like never before. We may have more stuff, more freedoms, but our burden remains disproportionately, oppressively heavy.
Reflection and Correction
In the past and in some cultures to this day, parents are lucky to complete their daily chores while laughing at splashing toddlers. They take timeout to mourn the latest loss of love or life; gifting themselves with time to rejuvenate and balance their energy. In their busyness, they weave, sew, pick, pickle, can jam, bake, tidy, or mend; all this while swapping stories, minding aging mothers and grandmothers. They tend to one another’s wounds, both physical and emotional. When times are tough, they rely on one another for strength. Counsel is sought from their community’s wise, experienced, and cherished elders. Community life inherently fosters a sense of safety, inclusivity, purpose, acceptance, and importance. These essential elements of thriving were what we used to call normal.
I’m optimistic and hopeful by nature, but this has me pondering on how entire communities can shift this massive concern. We are being individually and collectively weakened by the absence of the very thing we so desperately need…. LOVE and UNITY.
Resetting Society’s Sails
Major shifts in prioritization of what’s important need to be looked at and acted upon. Our schools are not offering the kind of education required for our children to deal with the world and to take a leadership role. Our depressed, confused and isolated youth need new a new tool box. They need skills and support to turn fear and despair about the kind of world they are inheriting into momentum and progress.
The practice of “teaching to test” must end and we must re-structure our classroom environments. Our school curriculum need to be infused with new programs that teach emotional intelligence, personal empowerment, diversity and unity.
Each of us need make a choice to commit to doing our unique and essential part in creating change. We begin within ourselves, our families and work our way out into our communities and into our world.
Although we may not experience what it’s like to raise children in a conscious community in our lifetime, that’s okay. Perhaps this generation is about waking up to who we really are and what we really want, and resetting society’s sails accordingly.
…..Love and Light Christina
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Born in Toronto, Canada, Christina is a Holistic Life Coach and Energy Psychologist. She is also an accomplished author, speaker, and facilitator, hosting workshops, seminars and lectures in North America and Internationally. Following a successful career as an entrepreneur, mentor and coach, she made a conscious choice to shift her focus to one she was passionate about and one with a stronger bottom line than simply commerce for commerce sake. Over the past fifteen years she has developed her own programs for assisting others in the process of self-discovery and personal transformation. The Writing on Our Walls is one such program. Working from her clinic and training facility she continues to share her methodologies and techniques mentoring and supporting others to take responsibility in reaching their full potential while guiding them towards enjoying a joyful and happy life.
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