Your Beautiful Need ~ redesigning human culture

The world population of our planet is over 7.5 billion now, and rising; and there have never been so many lonely and isolated people living on our planet. It’s like that painful feeling of being alone in a crowd-a very big crowd.

I witnessed a powerful dialogue recently, that changed something deep inside me. The conversation happened between a teacher of mine, Thomas Huebl, and one of his students, a woman who had recently suffered a great loss. She told him that she was still struggling with the weight of her grief. Thomas encouraged her to reach out for support, which was not easy for her to do. He demonstrated the language and the energy we need to express in such a moment, instead of continuing to try so hard to manage it all on our own. The words he offered to her were very simple: “I need your support. I can’t hold this alone—it’s too much for me.”

Later on I sat with this brilliant and powerful woman, and we practiced saying these words to each other, allowing ourselves to really embody the energy behind them. I felt like I was praying, or reciting a sacred text: “I need your support. I can’t hold this alone—it’s too much for me.” Each time I was able to speak these words from deep inside me, I felt something melting, a whole inner structure being reorganized. I felt myself becoming tender, transparent and much more human.

This makes me wonder, for the thousandth time, why it is so hard for most of us to ask for help. Not just a little bit hard—we are talking about a serious difficulty, an ongoing human dilemma. It’s a very odd program that we have running, the “I’m better if I can do it myself” software. It does feel like this message is almost encoded in our genetic wiring. Thank God we know now that not only our brains but our genes are also mutable-they can morph and transform, just like everything else. How fortunate!

What do we get by trying to be so strong and independent? Would it be easier to reach out if we remember that when we refuse to ask for help, we deprive our fellow humans of the fundamental experience of generosity, of belonging, of contributing something to life?

We all need to feel we have something to give. Even one small moment of generosity can change a life. If everyone is staggering around trying to hold it together, determined to tough it out, to be the warrior, none of us win. Why did we come here, if not to hold, nourish, inspire and love each other? But we don’t behave like that. We often behave as if we all came here to learn how to get along by ourselves, with a minimum amount of help from anyone else. We behave as if the word ‘need’ is a dirty word, as if we are going to get in trouble somehow, for using the ‘n’ word.

I’d like to change this program, if I could. I want to to redesign our genetic code, make the ‘n’ word part of our everyday vocabulary. I’d like us to put the word ‘beautiful’ before the word ‘need’, every time we use it. This is something else I learned from Thomas Huebl, to love and respect my needs by calling them beautiful. Try this yourself and see how it feels when you describe your needs as beautiful. This is not a small thing, it’s an enormous shift.

This is the world I want to live in. I long for this, and I’m not a wizard, or a queen, or a mistress of the universe. I can’t just wave a magic wand and soften the frozen energy in our bodies that says, “I must be strong. I must handle this by myself. I must not show anyone what I want or need.”

What I can do is keep practicing myself: to keep softening, keep asking for help, keep using the beautiful ‘n’ word, keep allowing myself to be more and more human and vulnerable. When I think I don’t need anyone, the space inside my heart gets pretty hard and cold. I might not even notice this, if I am used to living this way. It’s a beautiful turning, it’s the movement of grace, to let myself enter another landscape. I’d love it if we could live here together, in this landscape of openness and real humility. We could come down, bit by bit, to this new ground, where it’s warm and moist and fertile. Where we can start growing a garden together, a new human culture, if we are ready.

If we could approach one another
soft-voiced, light, easy
still connected to
the small flowing child-self within

We would be like those gentle visitors
we imagine
from some evolved other world.
We could create that world here.

-Nina Mermey Klippe

Check out the world population clock here: World Population Clock

with love,
Shayla