Find Your Tribe

Q: Is socializing necessary for wholeness?

A: Until you attain enlightenment and a state of Self-sufficiency and Oneness, your emotional body requires and is satisfied by talking heart-to-heart with and touching others with hugs and kisses. The arms, hands, and mouth are organs of giving. We are nourished and satisfied through giving. Even after enlightenment, we continue to give because we love others as ourselves (see Find Your Calcutta Where You Are).

Be selective in choosing whom to give your time, energy, attention, words, and touch to. If they are negative, this negativity will rub off on you. Socialize with like-minded and like-hearted people (see What Bird Are You). You may think you can live by yourself or just with a spouse or partner and not require socializing to feel whole. But humans were created to live in tribes. So, find your tribe, your kin in spirit, and share your love and wisdom. Each person’s purpose is fulfilled in socializing through work and/or play. We are all in a dramatic production or comedy with various roles to play. A one-person soliloquy is not as interesting as a multiactor play.

The current social distancing restrictions due to the pandemic are teaching everyone, even introverts, the importance of socializing. Sometimes, you don’t appreciate the value of something until it is taken away from you. Along with the importance of socializing, people are realizing the importance of freedom and the necessity of thinking of others in the exercise of their freedoms and rights. If, in the process of exercising our rights, there is the possibility of harming others, then we should refrain. Love is the only rule to follow in socializing and enjoying our freedoms. It unites people in communities (coming into unities) and guarantees freedoms to and freedoms from. Saint Augustine wrote, “Love and do what you will.” He wasn’t advocating becoming libertines but saying that when you truly love, all your actions, everything you desire, will be in harmony with the whole, for you will be one. The selfishness of the libertine leads to separation from others and slavery to addictions. It starves the emotional body, for the emotional body can only be nourished by loving others unconditionally.