Posted by reluctant on January 4, 2004, at 21:30:24
In reply to psychobabble mutual admiration club » Mrs C., posted by reluctant on January 4, 2004, at 21:06:14
I wanted to offer some words to everyone that were helpful for me. They come from Thomas Moore's Care Of The Soul - a book that I have mixed feelings about. Sometimes its messages are a theraputic jolt & very thought-provoking, other times I think the book glosses over serious pain with new-agey hoke - but this passage in particular gave me a lot of food for thought:
(hope it's ok to excerpt passages on this board)"Loneliness can be the result of an attitude that community is something into which one is received. Many people wait for members of a community to invite them in, and until that happens they are lonely. There may be something of the child here who expects to be taken care of by the family. But a community is not a family. It is a group of people held together by feelings of belonging, and those feelings are not a birthright. 'Belonging' is an active verb, something we do positively. . . . A person who is oppressed by loneliness can go out into the world and simply start belonging to it, not by joining organizations, but by living through feelings of relatedness - to other people, to nature, to society, to the world as a whole. Relatedness is a signal of soul. By allowing the sometimes vulnerable feelings of relatedness, soul pours into life and doesn't have to insist on itself symptomatically."
easier said than done, maybe, but it put the problem of being with others in a new light. and i thought it was apropo for this board.
-r.
poster:reluctant
thread:109458
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20031231/msgs/296518.html