Communal Gifts

In many Indigenous traditions, one's engagement with one's story and its connection to a larger story is an imperative - a rite of passage that one must undergo in order to move beyond what can often be a petty personal perspective into one's deeper and truer purpose on this planet.  This process brings the individual into contact with his or her essence and deeper gifts as a human being. This rite of passage is often lost  or ignored in broader society, and narcissim is on the rise.  In fact, this narcissm has become so pronounced that it often veers into pathology.

The loss of rites of passage makes it difficult to make the transition from one stage of life to another.  How does one "find a place" for challenging experiences and feel an inner permission to let go, move forward, and integrate the teachings from one phase into the next with clarity?  Without these powerful rites of passage, we are left holding too much in a cracked vessel, and what we are holding is bound to spill out into our immediate realms - often unconsciously.

Living one's gifts is the best way to find peace within oneself. It is in community that one can come to know one's gifts, but when our communities and even our families are so fragmented, our gifts can lie dormant.  In a power-driven and celebrity-driven culture, scarcity infuses the notion of the gifted human being.  In indigenous teachings, each person is gifted.  The community is responsible for helping the other come to know their gifts by mirroring them and leading them out.  The underlying competition that is at the core of our psychic and social lives in modern culture does not consciously engage in the process of leading out communal gifts - it often forces people to invest in the notion of "the best" at the expense of all else.  In addition, our culture is so grounded in analysis and critique at the expense of a more heart-centred and soul-centred perspective that one can be constantly assessing rather than affirming others. Tremendous wealth and connection is lost through this imbalance.

Protesting that "when all are gifted, none are gifted" may seem like a reasonable stance.  Yet the recognition that all human gifts are unique and essential to the community as a whole makes that argument less compelling.  Instead, it might be more worthwhile to consider how one can better embody the classical African concept of ubuntu - I am because you are.  This succint yet profound kernal of wisdom is a generational undertaking in a world as pathologically competitive as ours.