Spirituality, Therapy, and the Good Life

“We are social beings who grow in relation to others; we are defined through our relationships with them. Our ancestors lived their lives in the bosom of a supportive tribe. Every need was met within the context of that tribe. The tribe was community. When we moved out of tribes and into extended families, and then into nuclear families, we gained greater freedom and mobility, but something was lost: a fundamental sense of security based on the experience of belonging. We must seek to rediscover and recover community in our lives.”

Wayne Teasdale, A Monk in the World.

In a TED talk Rachel Botsman, author of, “What’s Mine is Yours” encourages us to become collaborative consumers. From my perspective, Botsman makes tremendous sense not only from an environmental and economic standpoint, but from a psychological, emotional, and moral stand point as well.

…Both in her book and in her TED talk Botsman asserts that we were born to share and live cooperatively, pointing out that we did just that for thousands of years until a massive cultural shift occurred that led us to compete with one another for the most, the biggest, and the best. In moving from an ethos of cooperation to one of competition, both people and the planet have paid an incalculable price.

Botsman urges us to return to a culture of ‘we’ vs. a culture of ‘me’ and celebrates a peer to peer sharing revolution that is growing across the world at extraordinary rates, spurred by the following: (1) a renewed recognition of the importance of community, (2) the growth of peer to peer social networks made possible by real time technology, (3) growing environmental issues that are very rapidly moving from concerns to crisis, and (4) the global recession.

In her thought provoking and hopeful talk she concludes, “I believe we’re actually in a period where we’re waking up from this humongous hangover of emptiness and waste, and we’re taking a leap to create a more sustainable system built to serve our innate needs for community and individual identity. I believe it will be referred to as a revolution, so to speak — when society, faced with great challenges, made a seismic shift from individual getting and spending towards a rediscovery of collective good.”

After listening to her talk I was inspired to do some research of my own and have located the following 16 resources that I would encourage you to explore. They may change your life, and if they continue to grow and to flourish, they will change our world.

http://www.swap.com/userhome/
http://www.freecycle.org/
http://www.carsharing.net/
http://www.ecomodo.com/
http://swishing.com/
http://www.timebanks.org/
http://lourish.com/
http://www.skillshare.com/learn
http://www.couchsurfing.org/
http://www.crashpadder.com/
http://www.airbnb.com/
http://www.lendingclub.com/home.action
http://1bog.org/
http://www.timebanks.org/
http://localcircles.org/
http://onthecommons.org/make-shift-finding-job-crafting-livelihood