By all accounts, we human beings are living in a time of great upheaval. 

Every day, we are flooded with news of disaster, heartbreak and imminent planetary doom; every day, to survive this barrage, we are turning on our autopilot and turning off our hearts. Every day we cocoon within the echo chambers of our identities, the light of the outside world dimmed and wings of our curiosity folded. 

Every day, we have conversations with loved ones that fail to express and nurture that love; we walk past strangers without seeing them, talk to acquaintances without hearing them. 

Every day we carry unfelt and unshared fears, grief, shame and rage. Putting one collective foot in front of the other, with our gaze to the ground or our head in the clouds, every day, we are missing what is right in front of us. 

And yet the darkness of our existence is also paradoxically bright—as so many of the great leaders of our age are attesting. As human rights lawyer Valarie Kaur questions, is this the darkness of the tomb, or could it be the darkness of the womb? 

In a similar vein, Krista Tippett (author, podcast host and journalist) describes this as our species moment: where, in its rarity and preciousness, we are remembering “that civilization is built on bodies breathing in proximity to other bodies” and “we are experiencing that the way we’ve done much… could be done radically differently.” 

You may have also heard the great Buddhist scholar and environmental activist Joanna Macy refer to our time as “The Great Turning”—with this “turn,” among other things, representing a revolution in our collective consciousness: cognitively, spiritually, relationally. 

Perhaps most poignant is Rabbi Ariel Burger’s analogy: that our world right now is like a baby with a fever. It is burning up, crying out, vulnerable—and yet filled with aliveness and potential. 

And in order to care for this baby, we must gather our most open-hearted, tender expressions of love, alongside the purposefulness and ferocity that are truly needed to change an urgent situation. The changes we need to make in our situation can feel overwhelming—but just like with the baby, they must be both curative and preventative. 

We want to bring the fever down, but we also want to make sure the baby does not continue to get sick: that it can thrive and grow and flourish. In other words, we are in need of medicine, and we are also in need of vitamins.

In response to all these challenges, our unique role at AR-GO is sharing the medicine of human connection.

Why is connection medicine? Because disconnection lies at the root of nearly all our world’s suffering. We cannot inflict pain on one another, on our planet, or on ourselves, unless we are operating from a state of separation. 

It is only when we are willing to see the essence we share with all other beings, and to recognize our shared needs, that we will truly be able to address our most pressing human and environmental conflicts. That’s because, in the words of cosmologist and activist George F.R. Ellis, the truest form of security is to have no enemies—and enemies are only made when we see another being as fundamentally different from ourselves. 

But as Brené Brown reminds us: “In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen. Really seen.”

And yet, our culture tends to make Othering our default. 

We are, for one thing, not encouraged to see beyond a person’s immediate presentation. Many of us may have lifelong friends who have never seen us cry, who we would not feel comfortable admitting to about something they did that hurt us, or with whom sharing eye contact for more than a moment would seem taboo. Yet when we hold others at an arm’s length in this way (or, hold ourselves at an arm’s length from them), it only makes sense that we would fail to glimpse those deepest and most personal fears, desires, hopes and questions, that are, paradoxically, also the most universal and therefore connected to our own. 

At the same time, most of us are starved for the kind of connection that goes beyond friendliness or pleasantries: connection that embraces all of who we are, as whole human beings. Yet while we long to be seen, we often go through life feeling immense shame about those parts of ourselves that don’t fit with the expectations of our society or community—and then we feel shame about our shame, believing we need to hide it. This has, in part, led to a whole category of people that some researchers have termed “The Desolate”: the toxic combination of both social isolation and loneliness that is now being experienced by 1 in 3 Canadians.(1)

All of these unexpressed and unheld experiences become a kind of poison that eats away at us internally—and from this state of disconnection from ourselves, we are also more likely to be disconnected from others. When we become entrenched in these patterns as individuals, our curiosity becomes hardened. And when our curiosity becomes hardened collectively (as a nation, culture, or global society), our ability to imagine and to Love better worlds into being is greatly diminished.

Of course, this hardening has many different elements. Right now, we are living in a society where the record of an experience is arguably more important than the event: where “the medium is the message” has taken on a whole new meaning. One study found that in Canada, we exist through the filters of our screens for an average of 11 hours a day—and this is a number arrived at before the pandemic.(2) 

In this social media dominated world, it is not only our innermost insecurities that we must contend with. Rather, it is as if we are living under a magnifying glass that exacerbates all of the feelings of shame and fear that already exist within us. We are in a constant state of comparison, manufacturing our own presentation in a way that we hope will hide what we don’t want others to see. And in all of these efforts to quell our insecurities, we are also constantly consuming—either in the quest to “better” ourselves, or to numb ourselves to the pain of our inevitable imperfection. In such an environment, we become Other even to ourselves. 

Yet life in an online, metaphysical universe is not only internally isolating; it is also impairing our ability to be present and compassionate with everything around us. As studies have indicated, having empathy for other people requires attention: and this is a limited resource that is becoming increasingly divided.(3) Innately, we know our minds are biased to favour the past and future, and this present-moment avoidance is only made worse by our immersion in the shadowlands of social media. 

As philosopher and poet John O’Donohue admonishes, our very sense of vision is being damaged by such a reality, in which we are always looking out at that which cannot look back. We are seeing how the power of our eyes can backfire: where the holiness of a gaze becomes the intrusiveness of a stare, making the outside Other. This is the realm of, at best, judgment or indifference; at worst, violence and dehumanization. In this light, it is no wonder that we are becoming increasingly polarized: to the point that 1 in 4 of us in Canada now say we ‘hate’ people who vote differently than us.(4)

As a collective body, all of this is a disruption to our vital act of breathing.

Just as our lungs need full inhalations and exhalations, we human beings need a proper balance in the way that we process all of our world’s and body’s information. Yet in the ubiquitousness of consumerism—and the ever-increasing mass and speed of information—we are caught in a state of never fully exhaling. We are constantly bombarded with energy, but have lost the tools necessary to digest and release it. In our largely neck-up existence, most of us have become numb to our bodies’ sensations. Most of us stuff away our more challenging emotions, and distort our thoughts and opinions to match what we think is acceptable to those who are closest to us. We impede the free flow of energy through our system, lacking any output to balance all the inputs we are receiving. For millions of us, this can become severe enough to lead to major depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. In Canada, we are losing 17 people a day to opioid overdoses; 11 of us to suicide.(5,6) Yet no matter the severity of our condition, all of us share the foundations of this state: We are almost never truly at rest.

And just like the breath, without a full exhale, we can’t take in a full breath either. And so our aliveness is blocked, leaving us in a state of perpetual desensitization. According to Anne Wilson Schaef (author of When Society Becomes an Addict), this is exactly the point—because “the best adjusted person in our society is the person who is not dead or alive, just numb.” If we are dead, we are useless, but if we’re fully alive, we won’t cooperate. “Thus,” she writes, “it is in the interests of our society to promote those things that take the edge off, keep us busy with our fixes, and keep us slightly numbed out and zombie-like.” And indeed, we are numbing: with 8 million Canadians in the throes of some sort of addiction.(7)

Of course, social media in and of itself is not the problem. But its dangers are especially powerful when combined with our anxieties around the dire state of our planet. From constant images of war to the looming threats of climate change, all of us are being made to confront our mortality. And awareness of this reality that we are, in fact, going to die, causes us to latch onto whatever elicits the illusion of being able to escape it.(8) These are the things that make us feel a sense of belonging to something bigger to ourselves: including our most cherished beliefs and values, as well as our social groups, communities or nation. And so we use these things as armour, and wage war against any outsiders—subconsciously believing this to be some sort of protection. 

This process is also what underpins the creation of social media “echo chambers,” governed by invisible algorithms, which make it ever-easier for us to distrust and vilify one another. Such siloing not only prevents our ability to connect, but also the flow and integrity of information—and ultimately, truth itself. 

Luckily, the benefit of being in a crisis is that we are forced to wake up.

Indeed, “there is something dying in our society,” says Zen priest and activist angel Kyodo Williams. “And that is the willingness to be in denial.”

In Canada for example, growing numbers of us are losing faith in our system: over a quarter of our population claim to have ‘no trust at all’ in those who are leading us.(9) We know that our systems are broken: that they depend on strong connections, and that we can’t function if we continue to operate as parts in isolation. As it has been said, “If you want a system to be healthier, connect it to more parts of itself.” And that’s why at AR-GO, connection—to self, to others, and to our planet—is the lifeblood of our mission. 

We believe human connection has three vital ingredients: 

Vulnerability is the essential risk we must take to expose something of ourselves or our world that was previously hidden. It is the willingness to start noticing the stories and identities we carry, and to acknowledge our ultimate unknowing of what we once held as truths. 

Empathy is the act of welcoming and honouring whatever is arising in this process. We give this first as a gift to ourselves, and then we can extend it as a gift toward others. 

And curiosity fuels and enlivens the journey, always available to restore us when we grow tired from our efforts. In the words of Jostein Gaarder, “An answer is always part of the road that is behind you; only questions point to the future.” And so the more we can transform our answers into questions, the more space we open up for the forward momentum of a new, more human, more deeply connected system. 

Perhaps most fundamentally, it is only with these three vital ingredients that we can begin truly letting go of what doesn’t serve us. When we allow ourselves to face the essential vulnerability of our human state; to deeply empathize with the inevitable pain and suffering that this entails in each of our lives; and to become curious—even playful—about all that we have been missing in our fear, shame, and numbness: we can finally begin to release the flawed notion that any identity, group or ideology will protect us. 

After all… Is the best self-protection hiding who you are, or being who you are?(10)

We believe it is up to each of us to make this choice.

With our hands and our hearts freed from armour, the space we create for new possibility is limitless.

-by Shaina List