What do we owe each other?
Living in harmony with 30 other people for 3 weeks
I was a mean girl for the first 18 years of my life.
Throughout my time in school, I found myself in the group of “popular girls”. We were the ones to wear makeup first, have boyfriends who were older than us, dance, and usually do well academically. When I got to high school, I was known for “getting into Twitter beef” with other girls (and sometimes guys), saying the nastiest, rudest things on the public sphere tearing people down. The likes and Retweets that resulted from my words were pure gold to me.
One time the words were so nasty that the next day my victim was seen in the administrative office with her mother. They were getting transfer papers for her to leave the high school we went to.
I learned how to live with others by stating what I wanted and not stopping until I got it. That was my harmony.
Things started to change though, when I moved away from my hometown to go to university and began to really think about how I was showing up in the world. I was living with people who were too smart for me to bully into getting my way, although I did find myself in that pattern ever now and then.
In lay man’s terms, I realized I was kind of a piece of shit. But at least, I knew how to behave myself and make the “right people” like me.
Due to COVID, my remote work situation for years on end, and enjoying smaller groups typically, I stopped finding myself in prolonged situations where I had to cohabitate with more than 1 person at a time.
So here I am, on the side of a mountain in Guatemala, with 30 of my fellow yoga students, facilitators, and support staff. There are two flushing toilets for everyone, the rest are private or composting. And we cannot pee in composting toilets.
Luckily for me, the routine strenuous daily routine that begins with a silent yoga and meditation practice for 2 hours, class time, specific meal times, and 12 hours of additional silence, gave me some solace.
Unluckily for me, I hate sharing bathrooms (but I love composting toilets), I’m a Type 3 Enneagram (which means I need to understand the social ranking of every group I’m in), and I have extreme anxiety about how people will perceive me.
On our first day together, we devised a set of group ethics. We were asked “What do I need for this space to feel safe? What can I provide to make this space a safe one?”. Warmth, inclusion, curiosity, love, attentiveness, trust, were among the ethics we’d all promise to provide during our 22 days together. The most prominent of all: non-judgement.
What do we owe each other?
I won’t admit that I know everything about life. That would be not enlightened of me at all. But what I can share that I’ll try my absolute best to live by when I leave this mountain is reserving my judgement. I’m pretty sure that this is the key to harmonious living. I’m pretty sure it’s the key to happiness. I’ve learned that it’s one of the many keys on the road to enlightenment.
But, when we practice non-judgement, a whole new world opens right in front of our eyes. The feelings, emotions, and bodily reactions we have to situations that we try to rationalize and talk ourselves out of are welcomed with open arms. We process them and love them as much as we love the positive reactions, instead of holding onto them for years, or perhaps, even dying with them.
The stories of others we tell disappear. We free ourselves from being victims of the narratives we create for others. We see the human in front of us, instead of all of the things that they are and are not.
This is not to say there will be no judgements at all. Of course, this is our evolutionary way of surviving. Ranking good or bad, edible or not, dangerous or safe. But we’ve taken judgement too far, losing touch with what our gut says, beating our brains down until we don’t know anymore.
I’d even go as far as to say that we don’t even owe it to each other to be good to one another. We don’t have to be a good samaritan, saving everyone in our paths. I reckon we could reserve judgement, observe judgement, and life would start to turn in on itself.
This is how I’ve managed in cohabitation here. I don’t get offended when I see that the toilet seat was left up, I just do my business and make the bathroom nicer than when I left it. I let the stories and behaviors of others present themselves to me, instead of making my own narrative. Life has been better and brighter as a result.