Rebuilding the village was never going to be easy
Rebuilding the village was never going to be easy
Discomfort and disagreement, also known as "storming," are part of the process.
And make no mistake, cohering
is the hardest task history ever wrote,
but tomorrow is not written by our odds of hardship,
but by the audacity of our hope
— Amanda Gorman
For the past few weeks, we have been moving our belongings into a caretaker’s cottage by the Massachusetts coast, where we’ll spend the year. We’re also moving through the honeymoon phase here — oh gosh, my old friends from college, this beautiful water, the penguins at the aquarium, it’s just like I remembered! — into what my Outward Bound friends would call the “storming” phase of community-building.
These friends are referring to Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development, a theoretical framework authored by psychologist Bruce Tuckman in the ‘60s. This framework lays out four stages of building community — forming, storming, norming, and performing. While forming is self-explanatory, many people don’t know to expect storming — the part of new beginnings during which we’re longing for what we’ve left behind, cranky from expending lots of time and energy trying to resource ourselves in a new place, and sometimes cynical or checked-out instead of fully engaged when it comes to doing the work to ensure all needs can be met respectfully.
In this case, moving is eliciting most of these feelings, but I’ve also found them to be relevant to many other folks charged with creating a new community from scratch (start-up founders, educators, caregivers starting or blending their families). Recently, I have also found these stages to be relevant to our national politics here in the U.S.. where we’re witnessing a rapid re-organizing of platforms and coalitions, and the reactivity that comes with that.
Bringing mindfulness to this kind of reactivity recently has helped me to navigate this season with a bit more equanimity than I might have during previous transitions (like that time I took up chain-smoking again after vowing to quit). So I thought I’d share more about this below. May it be of benefit to anyone looking for a few new ways to navigate, or at least to think about, the storms that lay ahead.
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Thanks so much for reading! 🙏
Forming
We typically come together to form a new group in order to achieve a shared purpose. This might be jamming together into one big house for a family vacation, gathering for a wedding, or founding a new nonprofit.
The extroverted, novelty-seeking, and connection-oriented parts of us may love this stage of things. However, there are often other parts of us that may be skeptical or even fearful about joining a new community, especially those of us who have been rejected or harmed by prior communities, or even our own families. Those of us who are highly sensitive can also feel activated when noticing and absorbing the anxieties of others.
This is true for me in this moment. Each day, I encounter new members of my community: teachers, neighbors, plants and animals. There’s a feeling of wonder and fear that arises in each one that makes it easy to pay attention to the present moment. And, it has felt important to me to create space for a consistent meditation practice, so that I can tend not only to what is happening outside of me, but all that is happening inside of me.
Storming
During the aformentioned “storming” part of community-building, the work for each person is to figure out not only how to connect safely with others, but how to get our individual needs met. There is often some conflict during this stage, as the ways in which we’ve learned to meet our needs compete and clash.
In my work as an educator, I see this all the time. In the forming days of September, kids are remembering what they loved and missed about school — their friends, their teachers. A few days or weeks later, however, the storm has arrived, as they remember all of the things they decidedly did not miss — the cafeteria food, that kid that always calls them names. As the temperatures outside cool, it may seem to some teachers that it is increasingly feeling very hot inside the classroom.
Experiencing some tension during the community-building process is not necessarily an indication that there is a problem with the vision, the plan, or the people, per se. It is simply an indication that as long as there are unmet needs in a community, there will be conflict.
In my meditation practice now, I’m noticing “storming energy” arising in moments when I’m missing supports I enjoyed in the past and no longer have, like my irreplaceable writing group. I’m noticing anger, frustration and confusion arising when I’m missing some important object that brings me comfort. In these moments, it has felt both very difficult and very important for me to sit down wherever I am, follow my breath, and by so doing, remind myself that even amidst this mess, it’s still safe to be here. As Kate Bowler quips, real life can never be good vibes only — it’s all vibes only around here.
Norming and Performing
If we attempt to avoid conflict by dismissing legitimate needs as “complaining,” “negativity,” “insubordination,” or “slowing us down,” then we risk imperiling the very good things we wish to build. So, if the community is a healthy one, it will anticipate and allow what John Lewis called “good trouble” to arise, like a predicted storm front coming through on the Doppler.
What I’ve learned as an educator is that my real power lies not in trying to direct the course of the storm, but in co-creating norms with the people I serve that lay out how the storming process can unfold, respectfully. With teens, this is essential, because they do not take kindly to feeling silenced. (Nor should they!) We talk at length about how our basic needs will be met together, and how conflict between needs will be resolved. We create clear systems, like circle talks, that allow for all people to feel heard. We create high expectations for compromise and collaboration among community members in service of our goals. And if we forget why all of this is important, we also agree to remind each other of the values and goals we still share, even despite our differences.
As people begin to see and to trust that their needs will be met, the temperature of the group begins to drop to a comfortable and sustainable level. This is norming. Then, the real work of creation can begin. When communities arrive at this stage, they are considered to be performing — flowing more or less smoothly from one moment to the next, with a clear understanding of how each person plays a role in the collective thriving.
During our moving process, it has been helpful to me to begin the day as a leader of my family by meditating on my own needs, and how they might get met. Then, I move off the cushion and try to share what I’ve discovered, and to elicit my family’s feelings as well. These meditation sessions and conversations are now informing the creation of new schedules at home that reflect how we’ll all get our needs met. To me, this is so much better than succumbing to the usual fall energy of allowing other people’s schedules to drive our lives, and to squeeze our needs to the margins.
I can’t afford to live in a world of uninterrogated positivity… I am not suggesting that a win is impossible or that we shouldn’t be hopeful. I am saying it’s important to prepare for the fight.— Austin Channing Brown
Healthy vs. unhealthy conflict
Greed, aggression and ignorance — what the Buddha called the Three Poisons — can easily derail this whole process and prolong the discomfort involved. When we see people grabbing more power than they need during the forming process, silencing other people’s voices through aggression in the storming process, or refusing to exercise the agency they possess to help the community reach the more sustainable norming and performing stages, we are no longer talking about “good trouble,” but unskillful human behavior. If a community seems like it is stuck in storming phase, these poisons are often the reason.
In these cases, acceptance might not be the right move. It may be more skillful to bring attention to these harmful stances in ourselves and others, if it’s safe to do so, and then actively work to shift things — in the direction of meeting more needs and cultivating more peace.
When I’m meditating, I’m typically beginning with myself, asking myself if I am bringing my own dose of poison to the proceedings. I consider whether I’m seeking more control than is realistic (greed), being crankier than I need to be with my loved ones (aggression) or neglecting to carry out necessary tasks because I’m too distracted (ignorance). I see these moments as small acts of resistance against the forces that want to see us all so stuck in striving, consuming and conflict that we cannot come together to imagine a better way forward.
Zooming out
America is unique in that it is not a nation of people who are united in their shared history, language or culture. We are united instead, at least theoretically, by our dedication to living in a participatory, multi-cultural democracy — to the idea that regardless of our differences, every person deserves to have a voice in creating what’s to come.
However, as Amanda Gorman memorably put it four years ago, this project is still unfinished. We have also destroyed much Indigenous wisdom on community-building along the way, which has made it even more difficult to reach a place of norming, of sustainably meeting everyone’s needs. Because we are ignorant of this history, and quite attached to greed, aggression and confusion in our culture, it often feels we are stuck in storming mode.
That said, there is so much that’s inspirational about our current storming season here, so many essential and valid perspectives arising from our community around how to better balance and meet all needs. I have been particularly enjoying the work of
, whose nuanced writing makes beautiful space for the both/and of the needs of the Black community and those of us who would like to see an end to the war in Gaza. I have also enjoyed being introduced to of the (via also-excellent newsletter, ), who outlines an expansive, clear, and aspirational vision for future consensus-based community structures here that I think would resonate with many readers here. These perspectives deserve a wider hearing on the national stage as well, and I hope they get it in the coming months.Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished.
Here in Massachusetts, I am trying to trust that we’ll get to the “norming” part of our family’s journey eventually —the part many of our loved ones have referred to when they ask, “Are you settling in yet?” I’m writing this from the sunny patio of a new-to-me coffeeshop, which delights me. My husband has three concerts with friends lined up this week, so there is new delight in his life too. My kid has already made a few friends in kindergarten, and hopefully, they’ll soon come over to play in a living room that hopefully no longer has boxes stacked to the ceiling.
That said, I know that the thriving of my family, and the thriving of our national community, isn’t going to come about as a result of my waiting passively for the arc of history to bend my way, as I ommm away on my meditation cushion. The point of meditation in this moment, for me, is to cultivate the discipline, inner calm and clarity I need to get off the cushion and show up as my best self, for all parts of this messy and imperfect process.
In the meantime, I’ve been working behind the scenes to arrange for some of my favorite community-tenders to share their own hard-won wisdom, here in this newsletter, about what makes for a steady, supportive sangha — and how to cultivate that kind of community in our own local spaces. I can’t wait to share these interviews with you. Be sure to subscribe now, if you haven’t already, to get them sent straight to your inbox.
Related reading
You can always return: On moving to Seoul, and leaning on old friends and new ones to help me break a bad habit that I couldn’t leave behind.
Mourning and re-making the real village: On learning from old-growth forests and Indigenous cultures about how to build community.
Receiving love from my Mother Trees: On how Millennials are redefining what it means to tend to those in need, particularly those living through “disenfranchised grief.”
Amanda Gorman’s latest poem and performance, “This Sacred Scene.” Incredible.
Other announcements
New interview: Last month, I had the opportunity to speak with Kiley Hanish, founder of RTZ Hope, about the role of community and peer-led circles in healing perinatal trauma and grief — for myself and for those I now serve as a facilitator. You can view the interview here (just skip over the first few minutes of technical difficulties, as we both attempted to figure out the new functionality of IG Live).
New circle: I will be joining my dear co-facilitator Emily Marlowe in hosting a new circle for loss parents in October of this year (Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month), so if that is of interest to you or a loved one, please click here. I’m also happy to answer any questions about this in the comments below, or you can email me privately by replying directly to this newsletter.
New sangha for subscribers and friends of this Substack: My friends and I are pulling together a group of caregivers interested in practicing, creating and connecting this fall over Zoom. We’re thinking of offering some guided meditation, brief teachings and writing prompts, and opportunities to share what’s coming up in your life as a caregiver, in a mics-on circle format. Are you interested in joining our small startup sangha? If so, please share your info here in this brief form. (All info will be kept confidential, and we won’t share your email address with anyone.) We’d love to hear from you!
Responding in solidarity to those without homes
I am also continuing to amplify the calls to action of Operation Olive Branch (OOB). The latter org, “steered by a diverse core council of global advocates including Palestinian and Jewish voices,” is supporting families in Gaza with this GoFundMe, and is also issuing a call for volunteers to amplify and support upcoming campaigns in Sudan and the Congo here. In collaboration with Pal Humanity, OOB is launching a Family Encampment this month, which will accommodate approximately 300 individuals (30 families), providing shelter, food, water, medical services, WiFi, electricity and other necessities. All paid proceeds from this post will be donated towards this GoFundMe.
I loved learning about these four stages - thank you! And yes to this…
“These meditation sessions and conversations are now informing the creation of new schedules at home that reflect how we’ll all get our needs met. To me, this is so much better than succumbing to the usual fall energy of allowing other people’s schedules to drive our lives, and to squeeze our needs to the margins.” Goals!