"You do not carry this all alone..."

The New AI: Artificial Intimacy is a conversation between psychotherapist and relationship expert Esther Perel and social scientist and vulnerability researcher Brene Brown. 

​Esther Perel and Brene Brown are two of my favorite and most influential current thinkers on the topics of relationships, vulnerability, and true human connection in a world where digital, mechanistic, and virtual connections abound.  Even me sitting at my computer to write this blog post that will land in your inbox is indicative of this liminal space between actual connection and pseudo-connection.  

I don't know about you, but I am hard-wired for human engagement.  It's central to who I am as a person and what's important to me.  And I am generally not satisfied with the "hi, how are you?" kind of generic connection that we get at the grocery store and the bank, although, as Covid taught us, even these seemingly innocuous forms of human interaction matter in our efforts at connection.

One of the reasons I was so drawn to singing communities and the sharing of songs in circle when I first encountered them in 2014 was because of the dearth of meaningful human engagement that I was experiencing in my life at the time.  I had chosen to leave the church community I was a part of because of some very narrow thinking that I had outgrown.  I was in a very unsatisfying primary relationship, homeschooling my kids day in and day out in ways that were both joyful and exhausting, consciously walking first my mom and then my dad to the end of their lives as they increasingly struggled with the effects of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's respectively, and not really sure where to go and how to fill my own relational cup in meaningful ways.  I was becoming exhausted and burned out in ways I wasn't really aware of.  I didn't even know what was missing in my life exactly, I just knew that when I gathered in community and sang songs of aliveness that felt deeply true and connecting for me, I felt more at home and more at ease than I did anywhere else in my life.  No wonder I wanted more of that!

What I now understand on the other side of Covid and all that has been revealed in the past 10 years, that I couldn't have possibly realized prior, was that I was desperate to be known, seen, valued, and a part of something bigger than myself.  My daily experience had become unbearable and I wasn't able to make sense of it all yet.  I felt deeply alone and lost inside a life where I was doing the very best I could to practice gratitude and joy while I was unraveling from the inside out.  I was terrified of speaking the truth about my internal experience for fear that it would reflect poorly on the people I loved or worse still on myself for getting into and staying in what was an increasingly impossible situation.  I was buried in shame for the ways I felt conflicted by walking down a path of growth and expansion while feeling more and more disillusioned and uncertain than I ever had before.

I now realize that my cognitive dissonance was growing by leaps and bounds and my physical, mental, and emotional well-being was suffering under the weight of trying to hold things together that needed to fall apart.  There was much in my life I could not make sense of and I was trying to balance what I thought (and had been taught) was the "right thing" with an ever-louder internal compass shouting for my attention.  It became impossible for me to do "the right thing" by external standards AND continue to ignore my heart.  As it turned out, doing the right thing for me meant being human, letting go, falling apart, learning more than I cared to learn about what was actually true in a variety of my relationships, and finally calling a recovery program and completing an intake process for a 4-week inpatient program that I thought might provide the support I needed at the time.

Instead of checking myself into a treatment center for recovery from trauma, I began to prioritize my own well-being with increased rest, creative endeavors such as writing, singing, and art therapy, a growing discernment about who were safe people in my life and who most definitely were not, regular connection in a 12-step community where I felt seen and valued just as I was in the midst of all that felt so very messy, ongoing therapy, an ever-increasing awareness of the effects of ADHD and menopause on my overall wellbeing, and spiritual practices like meditation and yoga to ground into more presence and peace.  I began to listen to and value my own heart and the loud and gentle ways my internal compass was guiding me into more of what I wanted most.

Along the way my sense of isolation began to dissipate as I held my own heart close and continued to develop a greater tolerance for the unknown by being firmly present in the now.  "There is only this inhale; there is only this exhale" was a mantra that came to me in yoga and began to carry me through tsunami-sized waves of uncertainty and internal turmoil as I tried to understand the inexplicable.  As has been my lifelong practice, I asked for help and followed the breadcrumbs along a path that I could not have imagined, and as I've walked I've found my way...one little step at a time.

So, last week when I listened to this podcast interview on Artificial Intimacy and heard Esther Perel talk about the power of singing in community, my ears perked up and I was reminded that what I have found to be true and what I feel called to create in the world is not just something "extra" to our lives, but is in fact something so central to who we are as humans.  There is a kind of intimacy created in song circles that I don't find anywhere else in my life.  Singing with others is for me a sacred experience.  The best people I've encountered on the planet are those who are willing to dive in and sing with others.  Yes, there is a degree of vulnerability and that can be scary.  Yes, sometimes we're retraining very old patterning around our voices, our right to show up and be heard just as we are in this moment.  Yes, there are elements of singing together and using my own voice that still feel unnerving to me, but as Esther sang in the song by community Songleader Ahlay Blakeley, "You do not carry this all alone.  This is way too big for you to carry this on your own, so you do not carry this all alone."

Whatever else happens in singing circle, one thing has been for certain in my own journey: I am not alone...and neither are you.  This is a form of real intimacy.  Being seen, heard, valued, held, and known just as we are in the circle we co-create.  We can laugh, cry, and wonder together at the ways song and community meet us where we are and carry us when it all feels too big and overwhelming on our own.  

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Listen to Esther Perel and Brene Brown podcast interview here

Listen to Ahlay Blakeley's "Carry This all" here