Why We Need Each Other Now More Than Ever

Key Insights Learned From the June 10th Speakeasy

By Jocelyn Macdougall

On June 10, a small group of us gathered with our beloved friend and mentor, Tara Nicholle, for a conversation about change. In this incredible moment, as we slowly and tentatively reopen our lives, our homes, and the world after almost a year and a half of quarantine, lockdown, fear, isolation and pandemic, we are all facing the reality of change. Many of us have undergone significant change during the last 18 months — in some cases (like my own), because pandemic life forced us to reconsider what we needed for emotional survival. 

During this great moment of change, we were gifted with the incredible presence and wisdom that Tara Nicholle has to share, fundamentally calling us to remember that tumultuous times are sacred and cosmic calls to be in conversation with Spirit. She reminded us that a crisis is always an opportunity to make the change that our inner being always knew needed to happen. 

"A crisis is always an opportunity to make the change that our inner being always knew needed to happen."

Through inviting us to consider using the lens of Apocalypse, meaning the end of the world as we knew it, we considered what wonderful things are trying to come through me during the discomfort of change and crisis. If we use crisis as a turning point in which we disrupt our personal mythology, or treasured AND self-limiting programming, what might we discover about living in alignment with our sacred contract?

With deep love, Tara invited us to recognize imperfection as our default. In fact, if we feel uncomfortable, if we feel the “struggle switch” turn on, if we begin to feel confused or distracted, that’s how we know we’re on the right track! 

Our speakeasy conversation was an incredibly intimate, sacred experience. Tara’s wisdom kicked us off, followed by some deep internal reflection. Through that reflection, our beautiful attendees had such incredible insights as:

• I worry whether I actually matter? Has all my work even made an impact? But then I wondered, does the bee even understand how much it really matters as it goes about its day to day?
• I always feel like I’m some kind of shapeshifter, like I have fit into other people’s puzzles, doing or being what other people need me to do or be. But I’m left feeling sad, and so exhausted. It’s not my fucking puzzle!
• I realize that I always feel like I have to make the next thing I do bigger or better than the last thing. Instead, I want to cultivate slow business, built on relationships, trust, and knowing.

"Does the bee even understand how much it really matters?"

We dropped into an embodied exploration of the feelings of hope, relief, excitement, exhaustion, promise, and feeling off the hook. Understanding where these live, and how they feel in the body enables us to recognize them the next time they show up.

We shared revelations about work, vision, family, aging, creation, rest, success, and most of all imperfection. 

At the end of our speakeasy, it became abundantly clear that we need one another to do the healing work that is required concurrently with change. As we uproot and unearth practices that have been protecting us but also limiting us, we need in parallel to heal the parts of us that we have been protecting, and we need to do that in community. 

"We need one another to do the healing work that is required concurrently with change."

By looking deep into the mirror that is one another, by learning from one another’s journeys, the reflection becomes the teacher and the connection becomes the medicine we need to keep stumbling forward in our imperfect dance toward justice, wellness and change.