Journey to the Collective

So I go to the Tai Chi camp and I was just thinking about this Sanga, this group of people that I get bound together with in my journey. The friends I see at camp are a different ring in the circles of friends I am usually training with, I mean there are people you see all the time; training partners, classmates, and there are those you see yearly or every several years. Well, I go into this outer ring very deeply this camp and really feel the depth of these “occasional” relationships. How is this possible? Some of the connection that we feel is so direct and important as we come together over our love and devotion to this thing in our lives, our Tai Chi. This kind of makes the conversation safe, it is about something centrally important in our lives but it is not about our own narrative directly.

Well, I was giving this one gal my thesis about group progression and she says she learned that some of the closest relationships that people can have are with those they care for but do not see often. Actually, this woman was someone I hadn’t seen at a camp for 4 years but we picked up where we left off, immediately upgraded the relationship over the conversation to account for the growth we had both had over the period. My God! Look how easily we renegotiated our friendship. Look at how difficult it is to alter the trajectory of our permanent relationships.

I still have not communicated accurately why the quality of this interaction is fundamentally different than any other relationship type I have ever had. There is a feeling that comes from the interactions that feels really important or meaningful to me. It doesn’t have to be connected to our narrative. We can see the struggles and the burdens and the achievements without really going there and connect over things that we have discovered in our internal work. So the conversation might wind up around folding and sinking and spiraling the energy and who we think has a lovely form and meanwhile it’s all there right out in the open. We are talking about ourselves and our journey and just how much it means to us. And we are telling that story to one of the few people in the world who could really understand that story. This is a wonderful moment and it informs me of who I am and how I have traveled and I take that back to my inner circle and I am fuller from it and softer from it. Thank you my band of fellow travelers, until the next time we meet I wish you good journeys.