So many things have happened in the past weeks which helped awaken a memory of something ancient inside of me, sparking a desire of bringing it to life. The feeling isn’t entirely new to me, I have felt it a couple of times in my life. But now, apparently, it is time to start working with it. It is this deep memory of what we call „community“, but often can’t quite put our finger on what it really means or how we can make it real.

I have been to a magical retreat led by five absolutely fantastic facilitators from Germany (Antonia Stessl and Rotger Heilmeier) and the USA (Emily Blefeld, Dan Cohen and Lisa Murphy)with an international group of healers, constellators and explorers of consciousness. What happened there is difficult to put into words, but my heart is still full of it, and I am sure it will linger for a while. Here, three generations from grandparents- to baby-age came together to each peacefully weave their thread into the large tapestry of collective consciousness. And here it was irrespective of background or affiliation: the feeling of belonging and community. When the baby sat on the lap of one of the more senior participants, everyone else gathered somewhere around them, while both parents gave their impulses into the group, with every age group and nationality peacefully singing and drumming together, it was present and tangible like a being of its own claiming its place within the room: the invisible network made from warmth and light connecting us all with each other, a consciousness of community, unity consciousness. And I asked myself why we can’t always feel this: even if we are around people, this feeling isn’t always there.

Fast forward to two weeks later: Princess Kate of the British Royal Family publicly announces her cancer diagnosis in an incredibly strong, prepared but emotional video message, thus putting an end to an endless litany of increasingly wild speculation about her condition. I was very touched by this as well as by some of the public apologies of the ones who had previously fuelled the flames of speculation or had dumped their malice on it. There it is again: the invisible bond of community that we could theoretically establish or rather feel having with every single person, because it corresponds to a deeper reality.

And yet we can’t always feel it, it just gets activated as soon as we open our hearts. And it became crystalclear to me once again that we need to work on being open, on opening our heart, and on keeping it open – despite all the chilliness and darkness out there which is of course there and likely will remain – to be able to feel our bond with the community around us, and truly with all life, regardless of whether we regard them as close family or friends or not.

What stands in the way of community...

Of course, many extreme, emotional, moving, difficult, transformative and healing moments occurred during the time of the retreat, which almost forced our hearts to open. But they also clearly demonstrated to me what prevents our hearts from staying open – more clearly than ever. Two of the facilitators – Emily and Dan – as well as a few of the participants with their Jewish background came to the German place of the retreat with its own eventful history from the times of WW2. As constellators and healers who are used to work with the systemic intergenerational entanglements which hold old victim-perpetrator dynamics active within collective consciousness, the significance of this was clear to the facilitators as well as all participants right from the beginning. And among many other things, the work that was done during the retreat opened up a unique opportunity to all of us to bring healing to these old entanglements, which prevent us from opening our hearts or feeling true community.

I myself suddenly found myself confronted with the intergenerational, individual and collective German shame through my own entanglement with my grandfather who fought as a German soldier at the Russian front during WW2 – up to the point at which Emily with her Jewish background stood in front of me during a process with her powerful words: „If you are not reclaiming your power now, then we both can’t be free.“ Never before have I been able to so clearly feel what it means if we stay entangled in the old victim-perpetrator dynamic: when you are looking at someone through the lens of shame and guilt, both can’t meet at eye level. Even more: the heart closes down and true connection cannot arise. And without connection there will be no community. If we stay in old victim-perpetrator consciousness – no matter which side – we all can’t be free and neither of us can truly meet the other as a human with an open heart.

But it is not only the victim-perpetrator dynamic which makes our heart close down, all dynamics do which make us feel superior or inferior. With the special composition of facilitators and participants from the USA and Europe who all in some way or another have gone on their journey to expand their consciousness and follow the way of the heart, a safe container for true community emerged. But how can this be achieved if the safe container isn’t there? If people around us are not interested in communion, or haven’t found the way of the heart yet? Do we then return to our ways of protecting ourselves, of closing down our hearts? Do we feel the need to fight back, do we let ourselves be distracted or instigated by all the news of doom and gloom, or do we turn away, having “our own thoughts of the matter”? Through this experience I came to realize once again how much effort we need to bring to the table if we want true community, a community which does not exclude anybody. For example, every time we turn away in disgust because someone’s view differs from our own, we secretly feel superior and shut ourselves off from communion, shut our heart down. Every time we believe that we are right and the other is wrong and we therefore feel superior. And by guarantee, we all had these moments. Every time we hold the moral cudgel, every time we believe ourselves to be „on the right side of history“, but also every time we feel inferior or worthless, when we think we have nothing to contribute or that we are of no value: it is also in these moments that the heart closes down. And most of us had them, too. Community? Impossible.

Yesterday, again, I sat with a baby on my lap (not my own) together with two wonderful people (who do not belong to my physical family or close friend circle) and there again it was, this feeling of community, this invisible bond. Even if unity consciousness is a spiritual concept not everyone can believe in or feel into – I truly believe that most people have this deep longing for connection because deep down somewhere they remember this elementary and simple foundational principle that we are all connected. And then the cynical ego has this habit of chiming in, rolling its eyes at us, saying: Yes yes, the naivety of the hippies. Has nothing to do with reality. Thank you, dear ego. We know you like to protect us from too much sentimentality or disappointment. But with the killer argument of the Ego (mostly: This could hurt!, This won’t work! or This could turnto shit!) we stifle all movement towards community consciousness. And if the things our Ego likes to tell us were the ultimate truth – my experience at the retreat, global proclamations of compassion for a royal most of us will have never met, and truly every movement of the heart towards someone we „do not even know“, would never be possible. And arent’t these things the ones that make us human?