Experiencing Interdependence

Hello Beautiful Humans,

This week I'm continuing my series on interdependence. As we look inwards and see ourselves more clearly, the more we see how connected we are to everything else.

To intellectually understand this is important, and if we are to live into it, I believe we need to verify our interdependence through our direct experience. This week I explored a few ways to realize interdependence, and below you can find our artifact of the week.

Interdependence means no thing exists by itself; any one thing depends on other things, which in turn depends on other things, creating and endless web of interconnection. This interdependent through-line between all beings may be hard to experience, yet I believe it's critical we realize and act from our interdependence more deeply.

While interdependence makes sense conceptually, it's easy to feel like a separate independent self in our day to day moments. UCLA Psychiatry Professor Dr. Dan Siegel offers a new word to bring our interdependence into our sense of self.

"I'm a me and a we at the same time. I'm a mwe... if we live into this, we realize helping another is helping myself, helping the planet is helping myself." - Dr. Dan Siegel

Below are a few ways to realize our interdependence and feel our "mwe" in the day to day:

Togetherness

We come together in team meetings, on the sports fields and dancefloors, family events and community gatherings. When we're gathered, a cohesive aspect can be directly felt. We can actually sense togetherness, perhaps as collective effervescence, a term coined by sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe the sense of energy and harmony people feel when they come together in a group around a shared purpose. Next time you're in a group, notice your experience and see what this group's togetherness feels like.

Ancestors

Each of us are part of a line of ancestors, and our uniqueness depends on our inherited DNA. By building a family tree or talking to relatives about their lives we can recognize how we are a continuation of our lineage.

To feel this more directly, consider how your birthday is both uniquely yours and as Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, can also be celebrated as a “continuation day”.

"The day you call your birthday is really a day to remember your continuation… if we look at a child, it’s easy to see the child’s mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, in her. The way she looks, the way she acts, the things she says. She is a continuation. Her parents and ancestors are inside her... our mothers and fathers are fully present in every cell of our bodies. We carry them into the future.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

Life

How can we feel connected to something larger than us? To life itself? This existential connection with life is important for me, and I'd wager, most humans. As someone who grew up atheist it's still hard for me to reliably feel connection to life. Yet one way I can feel a connection is recognizing separate self is an illusion and how I'm interdependent on all of life for my being.

I'll sample again from Thich Nah Han who's No Death, No Fear covers how there's always a continuation, even across birth and death, similar to how a cloud transforms into rain.

"This body is just a manifestation, like a cloud. When a cloud is no longer a cloud, it is not lost. It has not become nothing; it has transformed; it has become rain. Therefore we should not identify our self with our body. This body is not me. I am not caught in this body. I am life without limit."

Finding ways to tap into our existential connection to life can serve as the ground of our being and the source of deep belonging.

Knowledge

The next time you're reading something interesting, or someone shares something insightful, consider how their thoughts have become your thoughts. After some new information hits your psyche, notice how it connects to the prior knowledge - how it might challenge or confirm what you already know. Any thought you think depends on everyone who's shaped your world of knowledge.

Material

Take a moment to look around you. The clothing you wear, products you use, food you eat, oxygen you need, everything material you depend upon has come from some complex and unknowable sequence of events to arrive in your life. Taking a brief moment to recognize the many hands, minds, plants, animals and raw materials can help you sense into the interdependence we live.

You could try this at a meal, moving into a version of grace where you recognize the complex chain of events that allowed your food to be here - sun, soil, plants, animals, those that tended the land, transportation, grocers, and your self all make this sustenance possible.

Artifact of the Week

To learn more about me + we = "mwe", check out this 90 second clip with Dr. Dan Siegel where he gives an overview of the concept of mwe.

How might you feel your mwe?

Much love,

David, human @ Museum of Self