The Gifts of Community

Your own quest for peace and happiness cannot be complete without exploring your connections to community. Sometimes the most spiritually enlightened are the most separate. Much of the teaching about finding your spiritual path is about going within, exploring the depths of your own thought and intentions, and keeping yourself isolated from negative influences and energy. The importance of those lessons cannot be minimized. Self-examination is important. Focusing on your personal soul journey should be a daily endeavor. And in fact, your practice must continue in earnest for you to have a successful experience of community and to make an impact on your world.
But you cannot complete your personal journey without at some point, giving the same attention and examination to your external relationships as you do to your internal inner dialogue. This is not just because you have a soul obligation to do good. The people in your life and community are here to teach you and help you find your way. They will support and nurture your journey. They will mirror the aspects of your self that need special attention. You will not arrive at peace without others because the destination you are seeking is one of wholeness.
At a certain point you must move from exploring the I that is “me” to exploring the I that is “we”. Just as it is important for you to find balance in self love, health, prosperity and spirituality – you must also find balance in community.
You can never achieve personal wholeness by being separate. Our world will never be healed as long as it remains full of people who are ambivalent about beging together.
Deep down we know this. We feel the pull of community, we know we are supposed to be there, engaged and helping. But this is not about feeling guilty for what society thinks you should be doing, or being the kind of person who will do the right thing. It is not about paying it forward or paying your dues. True community can not be approached with this sense of obligation. To experience the fullness of community, you must approach it without feeling any sense of duty, coercion or martyrdom.
Instead, you should approach community work with excitement and anticipation, knowing that you have chosen a spiritual and emotional accelerant that will give your soul an exhilarating adventure. You should be prepared not only to see the world around you change dramatically, but to experience dramatic changes at a deeply personal level.
When you are successfully in community, everything will fall in place for you personally. You discover your passion. You lose time, as you work because you are immersed in joy and productivity. The universe crackles and sparks with possibility. The resources you need rush to your fingertips. You meet your soul mates, in friendship and even romance. Every experience you ever had in your life becomes useful and makes sense. Every dormant talent you were ever blessed with is called upon for service.
As wonderful as it sounds, it isn’t always easy. Community will challenge you. It will force you to confront life’s most difficult lessons: patience, forgiveness, understanding, and empathy. It isn’t an easy road, but the skills you learn in community will propel you forward on your personal journey and elevate your consciousness to new heights.
Community is a virtual learning laboratory for taking on every soul challenge you will ever face. Here is a brief look at what being in community will teach you.

1. Community will teach you to listen to God and then to act.
When you are experiencing true community you have to reject all of the false assumptions that society has taught you about where you should share your gifts and with whom. Your call from community, will come in subtle, quiet ways and you have to watch and listen carefully. Sometimes the message won’t make sense. But you will learn to recognize the signs and trust the map that the world gives you. And you will learn to act on those messages. Your response to the call will be one of complete faith and you will be prepared to give your gift unconditionally. And you will find that the work you are called to is always exactly what you need to enrich your own life.

2. Community will teach you to put your ego aside.
Our egos are quite simply, an internal and persuasive force advocating for separateness. We all know that ego has a way of blocking our path to self-realization and that it is a sneaky monster to deal with. Brace yourself for the way that egos behave when they get together with other egos. No matter how much you feel you may have tamed the beast, look out! When you are working in community with others you will be shocked at the lengths your ego will go to attack and conquer. You will not experience true success in community work without learning to recognize ego and put it aside. It isn’t easy, but it is doable – and you will become a more fulfilled person as you learn how to keep it under control.

3. Community will teach you to let go.
When you are working successfully in community, you can’t be the Boss. The people you work with all have important contributions to add to yours. Community is the blending of different personalities, different ideas, and different goals. It is a co-creative manifestation that only the Universe can interpret and not many humans appreciate. You can’t get too attached to your personal outcomes because they will be shaped by the many different goals of the collective. When you are in community you learn that any attempt to overtly control others spoils the work and limits its impact. So you have to learn to let go and trust the process.

4. Community will teach you to trust the goodness in others.
We live in a cynical world. We often fear other peoples’ motives and distrust their actions. But when you are in community you learn that the world is a good place. You see that you may disagree with how people do things, but at the core of their intentions is goodness. Internalizing this lesson will deplete conflict in your life, improve your ability to empathize and give you a new awareness of your capacity to choose acceptance over judgment.

5. Community will teach you about your own strengths and challenges.
The people you interact with in community serve as a barometer for personal issues that you may need to deal with, but haven’t been able to identify on your own. The responses and reactions of others to your ideas and participation are a reflection of the energy you are projecting. If you are being controlling and overbearing, you will see them withdraw. If you are being authentic and optimistic, they will gravitate toward you. Other people are also mirrors that reflect back your private spiritual challenges. Is someone’s stubbornness aggravating you? Then most likely you are being stubborn as well.

Engaging in community will result in a fantastic payoff for yourself. But the beauty of community is that receiving its gifts is completely unselfish. What is right for you is right for all. When you use community to focus on your own self-work and ultimately find the true you, you will begin to interact with others in an authentic, rather than an egoic fashion. When this is true of a critical mass of people, the world will begin to heal. You will become a quick believer because you will immediately see the world transform around you in ways you never imagined.