How to cultivate belonging?

There is a particular kind of loneliness that does not come from being alone. It comes from being together — in a relationship, a family, a community — yet never being fully met. A loneliness that hides inside performances of closeness: the text sent to seem loving, the agreement offered to avoid friction, the tears swallowed because this is not the right moment, and the right moment never comes.

This is the loneliness that a hyper-individualistic, consumerist and modern society specializes in producing — and then refuses to name.

In my work on Reindigenizing and the polycrisis, I have argued that a genuine sense of belonging is not a personal luxury. It is a political and ecological necessity. People who feel lonely cannot build courageous movements for climate action and social justice. Isolated nervous systems cannot sustain the long work of justice. And a civilization that has severed itself from kinship — with neighbors, with land, with ancestors — will continue to generate the crises it cannot solve. The question I want to sit with in this short piece is more intimate: for a human living inside this hyper-individualistic culture, what does the practice of healthy belonging actually look like?

Two Potential Traps: Anxious Enmeshment and Avoidant Isolation

Western psychology has given us a useful vocabulary for the pathologies at each extreme. On one side: enmeshment, co-dependence, anxious merging — relationships organized around the unspoken contract “I will manage my reactions so that you like me and allow me to be in your life”. Developmental psychologist Allan Schore and attachment researcher John Bowlby both document how early experiences of relational insecurity can train a nervous system to use appeasement as its primary survival strategy. On the other side sits the Western ideal of radical self-sufficiency — the individual who needs no one, processes privately, presents only curated strength.

Somatic practitioners and thinkers across the world, including Resmaa Menakem in My Grandmother's Hands, insist that neither of these is simply a personal wound. When a body has learned across generations — through slavery, caste, colonial subjugation — that safety depends on the approval of the dominant group, fawning becomes a culturally transmitted survival pattern, encoded somatically through what Menakem calls "dirty pain": unprocessed trauma passed from body to body across time. Belonging purchased through self-erasure is not only psychologically hollow; it is a colonial residue living in the nervous system. The trap of enmeshment is not just developmental — it is political.

The trap of hyper-individualism is equally structured. People in many Western cities now routinely cancel plans when tired or sad, hide tears from friends, and experience their own vulnerability as a burden. Black feminist writer bell hooks, in All About Love, named this dynamic decades ago: a culture organized around domination cannot teach love, because love requires mutuality, and domination requires hierarchy. Adrienne maree brown adds in Emergent Strategy that genuine interdependence — where no single being carries the full weight alone — is not merely a relational ideal but an adaptive strategy drawn from the logic of living systems.

The Middle Path Is Not a Compromise

Interdependence is not the midpoint between codependence and isolation. It is a qualitatively different state — one that many non-Western philosophical traditions have named with precision that Western psychology is only beginning to approach.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu drew on the Nguni Bantu concept of Ubuntu — umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, "a person is a person through other persons" — to describe this state. Ubuntu, as Tutu and philosopher Mogobe Ramose elaborated, is not a merging of selves. It is a relational ontology: the self exists through relationship, not prior to it and not dissolved within it. This is philosophically distinct from both Western individualism and from enmeshment. The self does not disappear in community; it becomes more fully itself.

Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh arrived at a structurally identical insight from a different tradition. In The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching, he writes that to look deeply at a flower is to see the cloud, the rain, the soil, the gardener — everything that is not-flower is also flower. Applied to human relationship: to look deeply at another person is to see yourself; to look deeply at yourself is to see them. This is not merger. It is the recognition that the boundary between self and other is permeable and co-constructed. Indian physicist and activist Vandana Shiva, writing from the tradition of vasudhaiva kutumbakam ("the world is one family"), draws on this same cosmological framework to critique how capitalist individualism severs the web of mutual dependence that both ecosystems and communities require to survive.

Relational theorists Jean Baker Miller and Judith Jordan at the Stone Center added a clinical perspective: a growth-fostering connection is one in which both people are more themselves, not less, after the interaction. Not flattened into sameness. Not performing strength. More alive, more capable of their own work. This is interdependence: neither self dissolves, and both deepen.

Do We Need to Swing Through the Poles?

Here I want to make a suggestion that is perhaps uncomfortable and may even be controversial: the path to healthy belonging, for many people shaped by particular cultural histories, may require a deliberate movement through one of the extremes before it can find the center.

A person formed by Western hyper-individualism or an avoidant attachment style may need to practice radical messiness — showing up to a friend's home without warning or appointment, allowing tears in public, asking for help before exhausting every private resource. What feels like dangerous vulnerability or even codependence to that nervous system may simply be the normal porousness of a human animal in community. Resmaa Menakem's somatic work suggests that the body that has learned to armor itself needs titrated doses of relational contact to discover that being held is survivable.

Conversely, a person formed within tightly enmeshed family systems — as many Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American and African family cultures can produce — may need to practice the initially strange work of differentiation: having a preference that differs from the family's, disappointing someone without collapsing in shame, discovering where one person ends and another begins. Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi, writing from within a culture of profound communal solidarity, spent decades insisting that authentic belonging cannot rest on women's suppression of their own uniqueness — that community purchased through self-erasure is not community at all. Her work, like that of Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi, points toward a vision of communal life that holds both rootedness and individual dignity without sacrificing either. The goal is not a Western self that does not need others. It is a self rooted enough to be genuinely present to others without dissolving.

In my grief and rage ceremonies, I have watched something like this emerge when people are given permission to be fully human — to weep, to rage, to be witnessed without being fixed. One participant described being able to "drop walls around the heart... I could be my goddamn authentic self." That is not codependence. That is the full-spectrum contact that Ubuntu and Interbeing are pointing toward.

The Deeper Problem: We Are Trying to Do in Pairs What Requires a Village

Western psychology still, by and large, thinks love flows between two people. The therapy office is built for a dyad. This is not wrong. It is profoundly insufficient.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, describes how plants in a forest do not simply exchange resources with one neighbor — they participate in a web of reciprocal giving that has no single center. The mycorrhizal network does not flatten the trees into sameness; it connects them while preserving their distinct being. This is the model of belonging that both Indigenous science and African relational philosophy have long practiced: love as a quality of embeddedness in kinship networks — human and more-than-human, living and ancestral, visible and invisible.

John Mohawk, the Seneca scholar whose work grounds my Reindigenizing framework, understood this structurally: re-indigenizing peoples to the planet means recovering kinship as an organizing principle, not merely as sentiment. When the entire web of belonging collapses down to one or two people — the romantic partner, the nuclear family — no single relationship can bear the weight of a human life. The loneliness people experience when that relationship fails is not only grief for a person. It is the anguish of a species that has been cut from the web it was designed to inhabit.

The practical implication is uncomfortable: individual relationship work, however deep, is not sufficient. We need to rebuild the structures that hold many-to-many belonging — the intentional communities, the sanghas, the grief circles, the mutual aid networks — in which no single thread bears the full load. This is part of what I mean when I say the love-justice work cannot be separated from the structural work. As adrienne maree brown puts it: we must practice "the thing we're moving toward" inside the movement itself. Belonging is not only the destination; it must be the method.

A Practice, Not a Destination

My own experiences convey to me that healthy belonging is not a state we ever arrive at. It is a practice with identifiable features: the willingness to be seen when we are unpolished; the capacity to witness another's pain without rushing to fix it; the ability to disagree without severing; the commitment to what I have come to call “accountability-as-repair”— transformation and composting of negative patterns — rather than “accountability-as-control”, which reproduces hierarchy even in the name of justice. Fania Davis, who brought restorative justice practice into Oakland's schools, has documented what this looks like institutionally: when the circle replaces the verdict, relationships that were ruptured become the very site of healing.

The Lila Watson line often cited in my nonviolence work says it best: "If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."

That is the grammar of interdependence. Not I will save you. Not you must save me. Our liberation is bound up together. Distinct humans, distinct nervous systems, fully themselves — and also inseparable. From each other and the larger web of life.

Ubuntu. Interbeing. Vasudhaiva kutumbakam. Different words. The same ancient knowing.

References

African philosophy and scholarship:

  • Tutu, D. (1999). No Future Without Forgiveness. Doubleday. | penguinrandomhouse.com

  • Ramose, M.B. (1999). African Philosophy Through Ubuntu. Mond Books. | iep.utm.edu/hunhu-ubuntu

  • El Saadawi, N. (1980). The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World. Zed Books. | zedbooks.net

  • Mernissi, F. (1975). Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society. Schenkman. | ucpress.edu

South Asian and Indian scholarship:

  • Shiva, V. (2005). Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. South End Press. | vandanashiva.com

East and Southeast Asian contemplative scholarship:

  • Thich Nhat Hanh. (1998). The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching. Broadway Books. | plumvillage.org

  • Thich Nhat Hanh. (1987). Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism. Parallax Press. | parallax.org

Black feminist and womanist scholarship (US):

Indigenous science and kinship:

  • Kimmerer, R.W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions. | milkweed.org

  • Mohawk, J. in Nelson, M.K. (Ed.) (2008). Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future. Bear & Company. | beyondword.com

Somatic and decolonial frameworks:

  • Menakem, R. (2017). My Grandmother's Hands. Central Recovery Press. | resmaa.com

Restorative justice:

Attachment and relational neuroscience:

  • Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1. Basic Books.

  • Schore, A. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. Norton.

Relational-cultural theory:

Kritee (Kanko)