When I associate community with Heartspace, I am talking about all forms of community that exist around us, whether geographical, identity-oriented, or anything else.
When we consciously engage in community in order to sustainably connect with others, we activate Heartspace. Community instantaneously becomes groups of loving, caring people who support our well-being. Within community we grow by supporting others’ growth, watching each other flourish in genuine love for one another. Its not automatic bliss, either: As humans, we still go through the rhythms of humanity while in community. We may wrestle and hug, struggle and nurture; challenge becomes opportunity in an instant though, and we recognize the truth about those we commune with.
Heartspace allows community to be about more than potlucks, shared cultural activities, or common work. It is more holistic, acknowledging the broad nature of all the people within, allowing us to have our perceived foibles and inabilities, insecurities and hurts. It allows community to be unlimited, and in that, community can become a lot for each of us. By consciously sustaining engagement, communities can become non-exclusive, allowing room for many people from many perspectives to come through our lives in the natural order of life, like tides washing on a beach and back out again. They hold and nurture all, while encouraging journey and outgrowth.
While all that happens, communities engaged through Heartspace enact an apparently contradictory purpose: By connecting people more effectively with each other, communities serve to connect individuals more effectively within themselves. This is the wonderful power and possibility represented by Heartspace. We become more connected within ourselves when we’re more connected to others! This means that we do not have to give up our families or neighborhoods, or move to remote monasteries in distant lands. We don’t have to sacrifice anything, ultimately. All our terrible experiences, all our misgivings and transgressions… In Heartspace-centered communities these become learning spaces that unveil the depth, breadth, and purpose of humanity. Its wonderful.
If you are concerned that none of your communities seem to be built on Heartspace, do not fret. If you look within yourself and find your own sustained connections to the world within you and around you, you will quickly discover that your Heartspace is intact right now. When we see our Heartspace, it will start becoming apparent in the world around us, including the communities we belong to. You can start expressing Heartspace right now, no matter where you are. Build community in your favorite coffee shop or at work, among your best friends or at church. You can build community at a pickup basketball game or even at the bar, simply by living your truth and not lying to yourself or others. Because ultimately, that is what Heartspace connects us to: Our selves.
The more people who act together through Heartspace within a community, the more integrity is expressed within, throughout, among, and by that community. That is what Heartspace truly is, as well: integrity. Speaking of the integrity of his struggling nation, Abraham Lincoln once powerfully declared, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” In the same way, it is the integrity within that allows us to demonstrate integrity outside ourselves. A community devoid interior integrity cannot express integrity, just like a person who is does not have integrity within themselves cannot act in integrity towards others, despite their best intentions. Discovering your Heartspace is the surest, most powerful, most effective way to come into alignment with your integrity, and to live that integrity every single day.
Heartspace is the invisible binding force that simultaneously draws everything inward while connecting everything outwardly in an eternal agreement called universal engagement. Community allows us to experience universal engagement directly. Connect within yourself to build community – this is the only real way.
