When we come together in community, one that supports us in our wellness and in our wounding, we begin to question the narratives that have us feel less-than or in competition with each other. We become dangerous to the stories that have been handed to us by a culture that thrives on our disenchantment and cynicism. We begin to see that the world does, in fact, have a place for us – that we belong.

In industrialized cultures, we are often taught to focus on what our community is doing for us. What are we getting out of it?

And yet, perhaps paradoxically to some, we find our way into our belonging and embeddedness, the rich vein of our rightness-of-being, when we ask: What are we wanting, willing, and able to do for the others all around us? We find our belonging when we imagine we matter. We are defined as much – if not more – by the role we play in the ecosystems of which we are a part than we are by the things we get from those ecosystems.

In the last two decades, I have come to understand that fundamental social change seeds and roots within the intimate and often uncharted terrain of our emotional and physical bodies. Terrain that has been devalued, colonized, and commercialized by the dominant culture just as it is often ignored by activists themselves.

Life is an ingenious inventor. And, after about 4.54 billion years of trial and error, upgrades and product recalls, the system we humans have been endowed with is a brilliant organic web of optimal functioning….that is, if we follow the simplest of operating instructions; if we learn and follow the practices of fundamental wellness.

‘Body image’ – as it exists in Western Industrial Culture – is not an innate human concern. It is one that is implanted in us. One culturally produced image at a time, we are taught and told what a body of merit and value looks, sounds and behaves like. We are even told what a body of value and merit prioritizes…