On Individuality & Community

I recently gave a talk to a room of fellow lay practitioners during which I referenced our western culture’s dominant messaging that centers around individuality. While it was not my central focus of the talk, I posited that individuality – as a way of life – has both assets and detriments. And it is this particular topic on which I would like to further elaborate my way of thinking. Ya know, just for the fun & challenge of it. 

The ways in which our western culture promotes, and I would say glorifies, individuality is often not in good service or aid to generating a genuine, balanced felt-sense of well-being. The type of individuality that gets touted and celebrated tends to have a consumeristic quality built in, a certain buy this product to validate or improve your self-worth situation. It also tends to have an element of needing to prove something to someone, which also means it is steeped in playing the dreadful comparison game. A game based on pitting us against one another; of constantly weighing who’s better and who’s worse. A game, by the way, that no one wins at. 

Some of us may be tempted to counteract this unhealthy form of individuality by then swinging all the way over into the realm of community. In my view, this too can be unhealthy. Doing so, we lose sight of the healthy, helpful ways in which individuality can be of benefit and service to us. 

It’s important to investigate and understand the distinctions between what healthy individualism is and looks like and what unhealthy individualism is and looks like; and what healthy community involvement is and looks like and what unhealthy community involvement is and looks like. 

For me, it’s important to have a balance and blend of both healthy individualism and healthy community involvement. 

Here’s how I’m thinking about things right now:

Unhealthy individualism involves:

• Lone wolfing it 
• Abiding by the motto that “hell is other people”
• Having something to prove 
• Seeing ourself as a separate self-entity 
• Thinking we don’t need other people
• Perpetually playing the comparison game (superiority/inferiority complex)

Move to Greatness

I am currently reading & whole-heartedly enjoying a book by Ginny Whitelaw and Betsy Wetzig called Move to Greatness: Focusing the Four Essential Energies of a Whole and Balanced Leader. 

Excerpt from the back of the book:

“Move to Greatness reveals that to lead and live wholly, basic energy patterns must be brought into balance…Success and failure originate in our use (or misuse) of four fundamental patterns in the nervous system that have been studied for decades:

• The Driver; pushes into every barrier with speed, directness and intensity. The Driver as leader puts a focus on priorities, actions and the bottom line!
• The Organizer; does the right thing with discipline and order. The Organizer establishes processes, clarifies roles and assigns responsibility. 
• The Collaborator; swings into playful engagement with life and the people in it. As a leader, the Collaborator is oriented to customers, employees, loyalty and fun. 
• The Visionary; goes with the flow, hangs out in the chaos and leaps to new possibilities. The Visionary leader thinks outside of the box and creates the future. 

“Using these patterns as a map, you will understand people more easily and more deeply, and see how to lead them more effectively. Moreover, you’ll learn how to move yourself to your highest potential.” 

I would posit that even if we don’t self-identify as being a leader, we are all leaders to a certain degree. If nothing else, we are the leaders of our own life (truly), and the ways in which we show up and interact with the world has an affect and creates an impact on others. Even if we don’t see it this way, we are leading others by way of our actions, speech, and thoughts. Everything we do, say and think influences the people around us. 

While this book has a focus on leadership as it pertains to our field of work, in my way of thinking, this book can easily be applied to other areas, whether we’re leading our life as a single person; involved in a romantic partnership; helping to lead a family; serving in a volunteer capacity within an organization; or caretaking for a family member. 

If we have an interest in personal growth-work; in cultivating or deepening self-awareness; better understanding others; in becoming more skillful when it comes to how we relate to others; and/or in learning how to harness our strengths and develop our weaknesses, I see this book as being a potent form of support. 

My Practice for 2024

At the start of January, for the past number of years, I pick up and start a new mindfulness related practice, with the aim of carrying it with me through the year. I then set down that practice at the end of December, in order to pick up a new one. (To read about the practice I did through 2023, please click here.)

For the past couple of months, I’ve been percolating on what my practice in 2024 will be. One idea was to follow a practice that I recently read about in a great book I just finished by the late great Zen teacher Bernie Glassman called Bearing Witness. In the book, he shared about a practice that he did for many years. It involved stopping every day at noon for 1-minute to meditate for world peace. While the world peace angle didn’t personally grab me, I figured I could modify it to fit my own proclivities. 

Another idea was to follow a practice that my friend Ashly told me about. There is a small movement centered around developing a complaint free world, which is now apparently a trademarked thing: A Complaint Free World™. There are purple rubber bracelets associated with said movement – which she generously gifted me with – and the mission, should one choose to accept it, is to wear it and move it to the other wrist whenever we complain, whether inwardly in thought or outwardly in words spoken or written. When I looked up this movement online, I read on their website that the challenge is to go 21-days without needing to move the bracelet. In other words, 21-days in a row without complaining.