Community

by Gabriela Luft

What is essential in community for me? There is much movement and action in and around community in Germany. We have big and small, young and old communities here. One of the biggest and oldest communities in our country numbers around 200 people and has existed for 30 years. They already have a young adult generation who grew up together in that community, and who offer a summer camp for youngsters for the first time this year.We also have two people here who coach communities, help people who are looking for one, and who have created a big network with yearly community meetings.

All these communities are different. Many are oriented towards spirituality, while others mainly focus on ecology, and others again on free love.

For seven years I did my primal therapy in a primal community. This community no longer exists, and since then I have not succeeded in building up a similar one. But still it is my wish to live again in such a community, where the main focus is to feel one’s feelings.

What is the attractive thing about community life? We are social creatures. And the more we regain our capacity to feel our feelings, the more we seek one another. The more we wake up to our hearts, the more we look for the common. To live in communities is an ancient, human tradition. Ethnic people live in clans. They raise their children together, do their daily things together and make themselves comfortable together. They live a simple but socially rich life. Humans have also always lived in spiritual communities, and lived there a simple life, gathered around a teacher, a n d strengthened one another on their spiritual way.

Community strengthens, teaches and protects the individual, and community protects the earth from exploitation and abuse. Children need the community to become healthy, social adults.

We need one another to help us, to serve us, to be happy together, and to share the earth and life. And the more we lay down neurosis—which aims at the power of authority and being right, making us socially poor—the more we long for community.

To live in community makes us aware that we are a human community on earth, and what we have forgotten and repressed. This lecture is perhaps the most important one that we still have to learn—to learn how to let live, to share and to take care.

This article appeared in the Summer 2005 IPA Newsletter.