Step off the Tightrope, Dance in the Ocean

The beautiful balance between enoughness and belonging

I will never forget the club we made against Sheila in the 5th grade. My three closest friends and I – all of us Asian-American girls – decided at the beginning of the school year that we wouldn't be friends with this new kid, a young white girl. Instead, we would passive-aggressively make fun of her in the classroom, passing notes about her, refusing to be her partner or to sit with her, whispering about her with others. I can’t remember the original impetus for the club, beyond Sheila hitting puberty early; she was getting breasts and pimples and growing tall, way before any of us. Somehow, this ‘difference’ was noteworthy and made it important for us to exclude her.

I am so thankful that Sheila told her mom, who called the principal and got us in trouble — a first-time experience for all of us ‘good students’. The real turning point for me, though, wasn't being scolded by the principal or punished with detention at school. Rather, it was the disappointment and wonder from my father, when I had to take home the punishment slip for him to sign. “You're a nice girl, friendly and kind to everyone. Why would you do something like that?” he asked me in a patient and curious voice. “I don't know,” I said, and then cried from the shame. And the truth was, I really did not know. I was just following along to be included with these other girls. Looking back, I guess I just wanted to belong.

That moment with my father shifted something deep in me. I decided I didn't want to casually and carelessly follow anyone ever again. I wanted to know why I did something, to have my own clear reasons that I could share with anyone who asked. I wanted to be my own person, to be authentic in my actions and words. I made a vow to be friendly to the new kids and make them feel welcome from there on out, starting with an apology to Sheila and befriending her. I decided I did not care about being popular or with the in-crowd. In doing that, for the rest of my school days, I wasn’t cool, and I wasn’t uncool. I was just me, finding the friends who could see me and who allowed me to see them, and letting go of other people who needed labels or needed me to check a box. And that felt like enough for me. That's what I took away from that 5^th grade, 10-year-old Shilpa moment, and it's been with me ever since.

I want to explore this relationship between a sense of enoughness — which I relate to self-assurance and self-acceptance — and a sense of belonging — which I relate to the interdependent, interconnected whole. How is enoughness cultivated internally and externally? How does expanding our personal and collective sense of enoughness support the conditions for robust community? How can growing our personal and collective sense of belonging help us navigate the inevitable conflicts in community?

This last week, I was at the Bioneers conference in Berkeley, and listening to the beautiful reflections of john a. powell and Yuria Celidwen, both from the Othering & Belonging Institute. As they each shared in their brief presentations, they had been ‘other-ed’ at various points in their own lives, and yet, they were both committed to contributing towards a world in which everyone belongs. I felt like they had alchemized the iron of othering into the gold of belonging. In the generous way they each held their dignity, I sensed that, first and foremost, they belonged to themselves and they belonged to the earth. Everything else flowed from there.

I don’t know enough of john’s and Yuria’s stories to know exactly how they did this alchemy. And yet, I could draw from their presence this clear insight: self-love and self-acceptance — of believing I am enough — sends out a signal to others, that you too are enough, and that we are together enough. While scarcity leads to separation, as we fight and struggle for crumbs of an ever-smaller pie, this personal and collective enoughness creates many more pies, cupcakes, cookies, and more — even gluten-free and vegan desserts. Everyone belongs, because there is space (and sugar) for everyone.

This sense of self-love and self-acceptance emerges for some of us as children in how our families love and trust us. I had a lot of freedom as a child, being a latch-key kid from age 7.5 onwards, which definitely helped me learn to trust myself and my abilities, as my parents trusted me to be safe at home alone for several hours a day. In my childhood, my parents also told me I was smart and capable and encouraged my different interests and curiosities, without getting in the way of them. So I learned to express and explore in an open way, which built my confidence and capacity to grow from my mistakes.

(Note: This probably explains why we clashed so much when I became a teenager, because I think they stopped trusting me and wanted to assert control in a way that they had never done before. And I wasn’t having that — which, pretty much, blew things up. But that’s another story, for another day.)

What if we are not given this solid foundation of self-acceptance from our families at young age? Over the years, I have heard so many stories from friends and colleagues who never received this kind of support and trust. Instead, the converse was true —their families actually undermined the very core of their self-assurance as children — through their own violence, disconnection, addictions, and unhealed trauma in all its forms. With this kind of foundational scarcity, is it any wonder that so many people struggle with belonging, of feeling part of the whole and that their presence matters?

I remember once at a Jam in Anatolia (Turkey), a participant began to weep, saying, “I have spent my whole life trying to achieve, just so I could get my father to love me. I competed in swimming, and I rose to the top of my class, and I started a business and successfully earned lots of money. And all of that to get my father to say, ‘I love you.’ And I am here, at this Jam for just a few days, and people are looking at me with tenderness, and caring for me, and telling me they love me, and I have done nothing for them. Nothing. And they love me. What is this world?”

Indeed. What is to be part of a circle and know that you simply being is enough to belong? I remember being so moved, because after someone would share anything in the circle, there was a response in Turkish that translated into, “Thank you for your existence.” And I thought, what kind of world would we make if we started there with every single being? No one to be thrown away, no one to be dropped; all existence to be honored with the deepest gratitude.

For enoughness to grow, I see that we need communities where belonging rests at the heart. Here, all who are present are welcome — as are those guiding spirits we cannot see and those beings in non-human form. And all who are present are seen as having enough, being enough, doing enough, with nothing to prove and no one to impress. This kind of belonging makes it easier to navigate conflicts, because no one can be quickly discarded for their ‘mistakes’ and we are more apt to find ways to work through them together. Our conflicts, therefore, do not signal our not-enoughness; they signal where we can learn and grow and root even more into our belonging.

The Asian Diaspora Jam is coming up next week, and I am excited for the opportunity to once again practice this kind of community. I, like many of the folks gathering, have felt other-ed by wider North American society, having been told to ‘go back to our own country’ or attacked with discrimination and/or physical violence. On top of it, many Asian-Americans, like me, have felt ourselves standing between two (or more) cultures, being part, and not a part of them, at the same time. The sense of belonging and not belonging can change with each breath, like shifting weight from one foot to the other, and never quite landing. It’s like walking a chasm of loneliness on a tightrope: Where do I go to belong? Where am I enough?

In YES! Jam space, we come together to share our truths and co-generate a welcoming space for our whole selves and each other. We share in practices of conscious container-building, like listening without JIF-ing (judging, interpreting or fixing) and speaking from the ‘I’, sharing our truths and vulnerabilities, which is based in the knowledge that each presence matters, that each person is enough.

As we practice together, we begin to stand more firmly, with both feet on the ground. We leave the tightrope of not enoughness and enter the ocean of belonging: There is enough, I am enough, and we are enough. Being part of the diaspora is enough. Being part of the earth is enough. Just being me is enough.

I came across this bill of rights a few years ago, and I feel it could apply to each and all of us in our own ways. Enoughness means each of us get to inhabit our own bodies with our own fluidity, and belonging means that each of us accept this complexity in others. I know this is what it is to be a whole human. And, it feels extra important in a context where so many people are being told they don’t belong with their own body expressions.

(I’m sending love to my trans siblings out there.) There are so many checkboxes that try to make people fit in one box or another — around race, gender, class, sexuality, age, religion, nationality, and more. Sometimes, those boxes can connect us, and more often than not, they can separate us — not just from each other, but from our own complex and fluid sense of who we each are and how we each express our divine self-truths.

Perhaps the most important checkboxes I can release are the ones inside my own head. When I remember that everyone out there is also wrestling with their own demon of belonging and not belonging, it helps to dissolve the ‘in-group, out-group’ illusion perpetuated by these systems rooted in scarcity and separation. I can sit, instead, with my own enoughness and allow that to radiate outward. I can co-create communities of belonging. I can soften my eyes and my heart. And I can welcome each of us into the ocean, swimming together, buoyed by each other’s presence.

More thoughts will emerge, and for now, this is enough.