Finding a Sense of Belonging

Finding a sense of belonging is usually framed as a search problem. Locate the right group, the right city, the right people, and the ache goes away.

Anthony Abbagnano, who founded Alchemy of Breath and has spent forty years working with this stuff, starts somewhere less comfortable. He takes the word apart.

Look at belonging and you will find be longing sitting inside it. To be in a state of longing.

His argument is that this is not a fault to be corrected. It is a condition to be noticed, and the noticing is the whole of the work.

The seventh note

He compares it to the seventh note of an octave. It is uncomfortable. It wants to resolve. Everything in you leans towards the resolution, and the leaning is not a flaw in the music, it is what makes the music work.

The trouble starts when the need runs faster than your ability to watch it. Then something takes the weight, and you do not get to choose what.

"If my need to belong is beyond my ability to witness it, I'll make myself belong to cults, belief systems, alcohol, trends, fashions, peer pressure. All signs of losing agency, losing traction. If we can stay in the need rather than rush to satisfy it, and become the detective of that experience, that's a little window into my work."

Read that list again, because it is deliberately unflattering. The mechanism that puts a person in a good community is the same mechanism that puts a person in a bad one. It is not a different impulse. It is the same impulse, moving at a different speed.

Which is also his quiet answer to anyone suspicious of a place like ASHA, and it is a fair suspicion to hold. A retreat centre in the hills with a shared language and a founder at the centre of it is exactly the shape of thing a person ought to look at twice.

His position is that the test is not whether you have found somewhere to belong.

It is whether you can still watch yourself needing to.

Why it cannot be done alone

The second half of this is shame, and it is where the case for community stops being pleasant and starts being structural.

Shame, in his framing, is a solitary condition by design. Admitting that you are less than you had hoped other people thought you were is not something anyone manages alone in a room, because the thing you are carrying is precisely the thing you have arranged your whole life around not saying out loud. The arrangement is the problem, and the arrangement is private.

It loosens when it is shared. Specifically, it loosens when it turns out that the room is full of people carrying the same weight in different packaging.

This is why he says that in his facilitator trainings he teaches less and less, and the group teaches itself. And it is why, when one person puts down the thing they most needed to hide, it immediately becomes cheaper for the next person to do the same. Not because anyone said anything encouraging. Because the cost visibly went down.

"The game is presence: coming to a point where I can sit in front of you naked and be okay, because that's how I was made. I don't mean stripping off in a sweat lodge. I mean psychically naked: honest and frank about what I fear and what I love, as you would be with your very best friend."

The judge you are not supposed to exile

There is a standard move in this kind of work, which is to treat the inner critic as an enemy and set about removing it. Anthony does not do that, and his reason is worth sitting with.

The judge, he says, is also the part of you that crosses the road at the right moment. It is the part that says no when something is off about a person, before you could explain why. It is involved in what draws you to people as well as what warns you away from them.

It is not a fault in the machinery. It is a faculty that has been left running unsupervised for thirty years and has got harsh with the job.

So his question is not how do I get rid of it. It is: what would it take to love it?

Be in relationship with it. Do not force it into exile. Include it, and you may well find it stops needing to shout.

That sits alongside something he says about feelings more generally, which is that they are not the enemy either, and that they have a shelf life. They pass through, like clouds. Most of the trouble comes from the energy spent stopping them moving, usually out of fear, shyness, embarrassment or self-judgement.

Shame and the inner critic are the same economy. Both grow in private. Both deflate in company.

The practice, which is almost embarrassingly simple

If there is one thing to take from all of this and actually use, it is this.

Anthony holds that without acknowledgement and celebration, none of this work gains any traction at all, because the default setting is self-judgement and we return to it within moments of looking away.

So when something has gone badly, or you are coming off a setback, there are two questions.

What can you acknowledge yourself for? Not grandly. Write them down.

And what would celebration look like for those things? Be realistic about it, do not be fake about it, and go through the exercise properly rather than nodding at it.

He is clear that this is not positive thinking. It is a way of showing the subconscious evidence that something has begun to change, which is the only currency the subconscious accepts.

Most of us are poor at this. We can list our failures from memory and have to go looking for our wins. The exercise is small and it is boring and it does more than almost anything else on this list.

Where this lands

Belonging, on this reading, is not a destination you arrive at and then stop. It is a longing you learn to carry with your eyes open, which turns out to be the only version that cannot be sold to you.

And it is easier to carry in company, which is the practical argument for doing any of this with other people in a room rather than alone with a book. Stillness helps too, and ASHA's piece on stillness and creativity in Tuscany covers that side of it.

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This is learned in a room with other people, over days rather than hours, and it is most of what a week at ASHA actually does. BreathCamps run through the season on the land in Tuscany, six nights with a group of strangers who tend not to be strangers by Wednesday. If you would rather come without a programme and simply live here for a while, Alchemy Residential Club is open all year.