#51 REFLECT | The intimacy lens to community re-building
“This idea of our oneness, our interconnectedness, that we can say to anything around us, you are a part of me I do not yet know. It’s not just a spiritual truth anymore. It’s also a biological fact, a cosmological fact. ”
How can we re-imagine community re-building through the intimacy lens to preserve the emotion and spiritualism in the process of reconnecting to community? In what ways can intimacy revolutionise collective healing and our current understanding of what community means?
For the final episode of this year, Agrita brings to us a Reflection episode where she shares her awakening about, and gifted opportunities to relearn, Indigenous teachings on optimising community functionality through respecting and valuing all individuals and relationships which connect together to form the system of community. Agrita emphasises the need for intimacy to be contexualised as the foundation for all relationships, not just romantic/sexual ones, to re-centre love and openness in our collective effort to re-build a culture of community and relationality.
What to look out for:
Intimacy being the foundation of healthy and lasting relationships
Intimacy as a medium for setting boundaries and allowing us to centre pleasure and happiness in relationships
Need for intimacy to be desexualised and contexualised as foundational for all relationships, not just romantic/sexual ones, to boost relationship longevity and health
Intimacy-building as a pre-requisite to community building
Legitimising intimacy and deep love, often portrayed as limited to romantic relationships, within platonic/familial relationships
Need for the "hierarchy of relationships" to be dismantled so that everyone, and all relationships, are valued and respected
Need for re-adopting Indigenous teachings of community and everyone being involved in community and Nature stewardship
Valarie Kaur's vision of "seeing no stranger" to also involve those who are wounded, who have hurt others, in community for holistic community rebuilding
Resources:
Valarie Kaur on the Ancient Call to Love episode on For the Wild Podcast