Conscious Choice: Be Well! Take a Community Pill

September 2003 | Body & Mind Health

Be Well! Take a Community Pill

by Julia Mossbridge

In the early 1900s, Wendell Barry commented, "Community is the smallest unit of health." This wisdom has been upheld by study after study showing that people live longer, have fewer illnesses, and recover more quickly if they are engaged in an active community of loving people. That is, as Sharon Salzberg aptly puts it in her book, A Heart as Wide as the World, "The mysterious root of healing is connection."

Although I was aware of this evidence, I did not consider community as a healing modality until a few weeks ago when my son got a bad cold the morning of our family reunion. Looking at his drippy nose and hearing his hoarse cough, I was sure my husband and I were destined to catch the same thing, as we so often do. Then 30 relatives descended on our house and I forgot about the cold entirely, busying myself with pancakes and bagels. Every so often, I would see Joseph talking and playing with an aunt or a grandpa. But it wasn’t until that evening that I realized his cold had been stalled and several days later, I noticed that my husband and I never caught it from him.

This community-as-preventative-medicine experience (albeit anecdotal) started me reflecting on the different kinds of communities to which I belong. I pondered these groups of people in my life and their potential health-giving qualities. At first I labeled them "good for me" and "not-so-good for me." But I realized that it was more useful to divide different groups of people into three kinds of communities.

Some communities may feel uncomfortable at times, but these are still valuable. In fact, the more I took inventory, the more I realized that, at one time or another, every group I’ve been involved with has taken on the identity of all three of the communities I describe below.

Resonance Communities

People who think like me, have similar morals and beliefs, and share my vision for the future of this planet are in, what I call, my resonance community. I also go to these people when I want to feel safe and warm — they are the comfort food in the community buffet.

The strange thing about resonance communities is they almost always don’t stay fully resonant; there is something about agreement that gives rise to disagreement. Talking with a few friends who live in the Grayslake, Illinois ecological development Prairie Crossing (www.prairiecrossing.com) recently confirmed this for me. According to these homeowners, even though everyone who lives there was drawn to the community principles, including the importance of the environment, a commitment to diversity, and an orientation toward lifelong learning, large arguments have begun about how to best incorporate each principle. Prairie Crossing has evolved from the resonance community that I suspect the originators intended, to a thriving, changing, growing, real-life organism. At its best, the development has become what I call a learning community.

Learning Communities

A learning community takes for granted the wisdom that growth and change arise from diversity — of culture, belief, thought, and action; that the individuality of others has something to teach each of us. I belong to a small (four to six members) learning community called an Unfolding Circle (www.unfolding.org/circleinfo.htm) — each month we meet to support one another in our spiritual growth, and each month I find myself learning about a new perspective shared by one of the members.

Learning communities can be especially powerful in cultures that do not emphasize individuality. For instance, Marianne Knuth, the founder of the very successful learning community Kufunda Village (www.kufunda.org) in Zimbabwe, relays a story of seeing a young man in the extremely group-oriented Zimbabwean community actually laugh out loud, then cry, when he was told that his gifts could make a one-of-a-kind contribution to the world.

Goal Communities

Once we each learn to recognize and respect one another’s contributions, the work of world healing begins with, what I describe as a goal community. Goal communities are groups of individuals with different beliefs and gifts who, despite and because of these different beliefs and gifts, manage to work together toward the same goal.

I’ve experienced a beautiful example of a goal community as one of a group of scientists who are determined to make life-affirming changes in the way science is done (see www.humansinscience.org). We each come to this community from different backgrounds, but we are determined to use those backgrounds and our individual talents to transform academic science, even in small ways.

The interesting thing about goal communities is that, predictably enough I suppose, when they work well, they begin to feel like resonance communities. This has happened to our little group of scientists; each of us feels at home and safe — that is until we remember our differences and the evolution of community begins again....

Julia Mossbridge, a Chicago-based writer, is also a mother, cognitive neuroscientist, and author of Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul’s Work (New World Library www.unfolding.org).

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: