Longing for Belonging
Reclaiming the sacred currents of life from a culture of separation, domination, and extraction.
The core thesis of this essay is that we all long for belonging, and that it is that longing that is both a leverage point for our manipulation by systems of power that would keep us in cycles of separation, domination, and extraction — and also that it is that longing that points us toward liberation and the truth of our interdependence.
These days I am in deep preparation and orientation mode for our summer course Sex, G⟡d, & Money, so it’s through those three lenses that I’ll be exploring these threads. This course takes a highly personalized and deeply somatic look at these three currents in our lives: excavating the old stories, connecting the institutional patterns underlying them, and empowering each of us with choosing how we want to relate to them in a conscious, embodied, empowered way for the rest of our lives. So though I’m bringing those lenses into this essay, as I’ve been writing, I’ve been reflecting on how this focus on this universal longing for belonging is present in everything else I’m thinking about and working on, and perhaps in fact, this idea is central to everything I’ve ever done or created.
That might be true for you in some way. I’d love to hear from you if you feel yourself in this!
Quick note on language: We live within what I call extraction culture in this essay: a dominant paradigm shaped by disconnection from the living world, by the extraction of life from land and body, and by the domination of people, ecosystems, and the sacred. Throughout this essay, when I speak of extraction culture, I am referring to this complex weave of systems that trains us to sever, to consume, and to control rather than to belong.
The core takeaway that I want to bring to you, beloved reader, is greater awareness of the patterns in your own life, and ultimately, a remembrance that you already, always, indelibly, belong to the Living World. And that when you remember this, and live from this place, you and I both are less likely to be manipulated by the powers that would keep us in cycles of separation, extraction, and domination.
Not only that, but by living from a place of powerful remembrance of this belonging, you and I both can more proactively shape change, shape culture, shape the world around us to embody and express and actualize the interdependent belonging that is the birthright of all living beings, and when enough of us live this care and connection, we will grow the power to leave this world better than we found it.
Money
The Flow We Long For, the Dam We Must See
We long for safety. For the assurance that we can meet our needs. For the dignity of being able to care for ourselves and those we love. This longing is ancient, born from the simple truth that life, when flowing in dynamic harmony, provides for itself abundantly.
Money, at its purest, can help us honor this longing. It can enable the flow of resources, the circulation of gifts, the weaving of community across distances. It can be a tool of shared flourishing.
But within extraction culture, money has been distorted into a tool of separation and control. Rather than connecting us, it isolates; rather than securing life, it secures domination. We are taught to measure our worth in currency, to stake our survival on accumulation, to fear scarcity even in the midst of abundance. Wealth is hoarded, not circulated. Value is stripped from the living web and assigned to dead digits.
We see this in our families, in our careers, in the institutions we all depend on. When I feel into the hoarding of resources for a perceived sense of safety that is so common in our world, the image that comes to mind is that of a dam. I sense that the water of a river wants to flow downstream, bringing nutrients, hydration, nourishment to the watershed below, to the flood planes, to the delta, ultimately to the ocean cycling back to the Whole.
A living system flowing with integrity, with reciprocity, enabling sacred resources to go where they are most needed, that is an anti-fragile system. That is real security.
But in forgetting this truth, what do humans tend to do? To hoard. To block. To accumulate. To keep resources away from those who need them, as a carrot and as a stick. This is present within our governments, within business, and perhaps most painfully, within families.
Yet when we see this distortion clearly, we are invited to remember: true wealth is not something we can hoard. It is something we can only participate in and enable in others as we grow in it in ourselves. Wealth comes from the word weal which refers to the wealth of the community, the general good.
I often have visions and dreams about the very real dams in our world what are carefully and thoughtfully being removed in order to restore flow to life. Nutrients flow downstream. Salmon swim upstream to their ancestral hatching grounds. The flow of life and belonging is restored. I have visions of the money hoarded in our world being unblocked and returned to flow just like this. I sense that this is a core part of my life’s work.
Like the flow of these rivers, true wealth and the belonging it is able to reveal when the flows are regenerated moves in cycles of offering and receiving, sustaining and transforming. Our security lies not in what we own, but in how deeply we are woven into the ecosystems of care.
So I welcome you to ask yourself:
What assumptions do I have about money? Where did they come from?
In what ways has money been a tool used against me?
How can I, with the resources available to me, use money as a tool of reconnection?
What would the world look like if just 10% of people who had more than enough offered their surplus to the people, projects, and systems regenerating life flows on this planet?
What can I do, today, to help regenerate the flows of resources as expressions of care within my family and community?
Last year I explored this in a podcast episode, which you are welcome to listen to here:
Money as Water
This episode navigates the complexities of our emotional and practical relationships with money. Weaving connections between water and currency to dig deep into the essence of money flow and the dynamics of wealth in our lives, the discussion revolves around how money, like water, is life-sustaining and flows throughout society, impacting growth and ena…
G⟡d
Wound and Wonder
We long to be held by something larger than ourselves. We long to belong to a story wider than our own lifeline, to know that our existence matters beyond the small urgencies of survival. That our life pulses, hums, with meaning, coherence, and care.
This longing is ancient, born of the same impulse that turns sunflowers toward the sun and rivers toward the sea.
The idea of G⟡d, or Spirit, or Source, the Mystery, or the Web of Interbeing, however we name it, can answer this longing.
In its purest form, our relationship to the divine opens us to awe, to humility, to a reverence that roots us deeper into life itself. It reminds us that we are participants in an intricate, sacred unfolding, not isolated accidents in a meaningless world.
But within extraction culture, even the sacred has been distorted. In fact, the distortion of the sacred is essential for empire to be upheld. The divine has been dislocated from the living world and relocated into distant heavens, or sequestered into the spiritual authority of those who hold power.
Hierarchical institutions have mediated our relationship to Spirit through control, dogma, and fear. This may be obvious in some of the larger institutions that have become bloated with their power and wealth and hypocrisy. But a painful truth is that this is true even in the spaces you wouldn’t expect. I was born and raised in an interfaith, women-founded and led, humanitarian, activism-oriented religious community, and even there there were awful abuses of power and cult dynamics which we as the second generation are still deconstructing.
I share this because it is important to know that rejecting mainstream religion and seeking alternative spiritual paths can be an incredible, powerful journey. And that it’s not exempt from the pattern of separation, domination, and extraction that is a core sickness in our world.
We see this in rigid religious institutions, in spiritual traditions that demand disembodiment, in teachings that tell us we must earn our worthiness or ascend away from the body, away from trust in our direct relationship with the divine, away from the earth.
Spiritual longing has been weaponized into shame, exclusion, and obedience in both mainstream and subcultural religious and spiritual communities. The vastness of divine presence is reduced to a conditional transaction, and money and sex are often involved or restricted as a part of this story. The doors of our perception narrow. Many of us grow jaded in heartbreak, and reject the divine entirely.
Yet when we see these distortions clearly, we are invited to remember:
The sacred has never been elsewhere.
The sacred is here. Dancing through the play of sunlight on water, humming in the mycelial networks beneath our feet, pulsing in the tender beating of our own hearts.
We do not need permission to belong to the divine current.
We need only to remember, and to arrive in presence with all of the holiness that is, that we belong to, that has never forgotten about us.
So I welcome you to ask yourself:
What assumptions do I have about God, spirituality, divinity, and religion? Where did they come from?
Where have I been taught that my worthiness or belonging to the sacred is conditional?
How have systems of spiritual control shaped my relationship to my body, my life, my sense of belonging or not-belonging?
Where do I already feel the pulse of the sacred moving in my daily life, without mediation?
What practices, relationships, or moments reconnect me directly to the living Mystery?
How would I live if I learned to pray not with words alone, but with presence and profound trust in the sacredness imbued in all of creation?
Last year I also created a podcast episode exploring some of the panentheistic understanding of the divine that is present in my own life and worldview, which you can listen to here:
Sex
A Sacred Return to Sensation
We long for intimacy. For the sweet collapse of separateness. For the moment when the touch of a lover says: I see you, I feel you, I know you belong here with me in this moment of radical presence, love, connection.
We long not only for pleasure, but for presence — an experience of being wholly here, wholly alive, wholly embraced by life itself.
This longing is not shameful or trivial. It is sacred. It is life yearning for life. Sex, at its most alive and truthful, can answer this longing. It can bring us home to our bodies, to our senses, to the exquisite permeability between self and world.
It can teach us the languages of tenderness, surrender, mutual transformation.
It can be a living prayer of belonging.
But within extraction culture, sex too has been distorted. It is commodified, severed from its sacred roots, twisted into transaction, conquest, spectacle.
Desire is manipulated. Bodies are objectified. Connection becomes performance.
How readily do we bypass, ignore, distort, or make a joke of this core, deep, profoundly human longing? We make light of it when we don’t have it in our lives, we cheapen it when we fulfill the superficial impulses but don’t hold a standard of genuine connection, care, and love for ourselves and anyone we are fortunate enough to share our bodies and our time with.
I’m reminded of a moment in the documentary Surfwise which Seth asked me to watch early on in our relationship, as it’s very important to him. In it, Juliette Paskowitz teaches her eight sons that “if a woman is generous enough to share her body with you, always be sure to thank her” (paraphrased from memory). How strange is it that this is a radical idea? To be sure to say thank you to someone we share a sexual connection with, no matter how brief or how long.
Rather than meeting as living beings, we are taught to consume each other, to conquer or be conquered. We see this in media, in relationships shaped by domination rather than devotion, in the silent ache of unmet needs twisted into shame.
Yet when we see these distortions clearly, we are invited to remember:
Our longing for intimacy is not wrong.
Our desire for touch, tenderness, merging, is a deep call from the living world within us, seeking union with the life around us.
We can reclaim eros not as performance, but as presence.
We can listen to the intelligence of our own bodies, honor our boundaries and our yearnings, and remember that pleasure, connection, and life itself are sacred.
So I welcome you to ask yourself:
What assumptions do I have about sex? Where did they come from?
How has my natural longing for intimacy been shaped or distorted by extraction culture?
Where have I been taught to shame or commodify my own body, my own desire?
What might it feel like, in my body, to experience intimacy without agenda?
Where in my life am I invited to experience connection as an act of reverence and belonging?
How could I rewild my relationship to eros, so that it becomes a living current of vitality, creativity, and trust?
And finally, last year I also created this podcast episode on sex inspired by a life-changing encounter with mating slugs that Seth and I had in the garden:
Reweaving the Web of Belonging
Sex, God, money. Each of these currents touches a real, holy longing within us.
Each has been twisted by extraction culture into systems of disconnection and control that live within our own bodies as conditioning that we are often unconscious of.
But each of them are pathways toward our remembrance of our undeniable, always present truth of belonging to the web of life.
Recognizing the ways we have been shaped and manipulated is not an act of despair, it is an act of liberation. It allows us to stop outsourcing our belonging, and to begin practicing it here, now, in the living world.
Belonging cannot be bought. It cannot be denied. It cannot be diminished.
It can only be remembered.
It can only be practiced.
It can only be lived, in the messy, magnificent web of life that holds us even now. And when we live from that place, we create the life affirming futures that all of life deserves. The futures that are possible through the many metacrises we face. Futures of wellbeing and connection and care for all.
The living world has not forgotten us.
It waits for our remembrance, reconnection, and regeneration, like soil waits for the rain.
If these words resonated with you, you may find profound growth and support in our summer journey, Sex, G⟡d, & Money.
This course is designed to gently unravel old stories, deepen somatic awareness, and empower you to choose how you relate to these sacred currents for the rest of your life.
Through embodied practices, relational wisdom, and a spacious, living curriculum, we are gathering those called to weave more care, presence, and liberation into their lives—and by extension, into the world we are dreaming into being.
If you feel called to join us, you can learn more here and as always, feel welcome to reach out with any questions. We would be honored to walk with you.
A resonant piece. Thank you for sharing how you make sense of belonging via the interconnected aspects of human experience. To survive, we require air, shelter, water, and food (in this order of priority). Remove or restrict any and our bodily existence can cease in anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks. These are the elements of physical survival. Yet, as you describe, we are also wired for belonging and connection. We are a social species after all. Mess with the elements of healthful belonging, and our existence also can become threatened. And that connection can lead to a deeper quest for meaning… purpose. “Who am I? Why am I here? What genuinely matters for this day?” You’ve given a new (at least for me!) perspective on how to think about these human needs and their healthy functioning. Thanks.
Thanks for giving me some food for thought this morning and for the journal prompts! I’m using some of them for my reflections 💚