Call to the community (reconceiving trauma, part 6)
Soon after hearing my diagnostic, I strongly realized I needed moral support like never in my life. I was longing for a family showing me love, praying for me. Of course my natural family has been the first and most important support. But the need was larger and extended to a larger sample of my human fellows.
It felt very natural for me to turn to my precious sisters and brothers from Rasa Yoga tribe, and I decided too to associate my friends and colleagues from office. I wrote a mail explaining what I was passing through and expressing how much I needed their encouragements, prayers, support in any ways they could imagine. I left aside my Swiss reserve and reluctance to talk about myself and went resolutely out of my confort zone to share about my intimacy.
And many of them answered, to my surprise I must say. I received messages, daily for some of them. Some made me know they were praying and sending healing energy, some even committed to do that for me on a daily basis, and did during weeks and months. Some became precious friends and some showed me a love and interest I would never have expected from them. I haven't spent a day without receiving one or several encouragements in diverse forms, and retrospectively I can say it has been helping, supporting and healing over my expectations.
I know in my heart that some of what I passed through would have been much worse without that help.
This experience has been intense for me, and revealed me how much I was part of the human tribe and how much I needed it. It has been the first side of this call to community: revealing me my need of it. I'm infinitely grateful to have received it, and I must say that I realized the beauty of the social medias, because they have made possible an important part of it.
The second side of this call I'm discovering now.
Having been through all of it, having become an amputee, a handicapped man, having faced illness, trauma and the possibility of an imminent death, I've touched dimensions of life I wasn't aware of. And I feel now an urge to share it with my human tribe. As I said in a previous post, I feel like this Neandertal man that explored new territories and comes back to his tribe to share what ressources he found and what lessons he learned.
Some of them are in the range of what we call spirituality, but truly it is mostly about human experience, and our perception of frailty, death, life, frontiers between them, so much ignored in our society of denial and illusion of control over everything.
That's what I had to explore, and still am exploring, with more and more curiosity, and with this feeling that I make precious experiences and find ressources to share with this human tribe I received so much from.