On Friday, I was lucky enough to be in the virtual room with Peter Block, who was celebrating the release of his new book, Confronting Our Freedom: Leading a Culture of Chosen Accountability and Belonging. I was struck, to use Peter’s word, by the palpable love in the room, and the presence of so many people who have known Peter for many years, have worked with him, and been impacted by his practice and ideas.
As has been the case when I’ve shared a room with Peter in the past, I found myself wanting to write down everything he said, even though I own his books, where these thoughts re-emerge again and again. And still, every time I encounter them, there’s a gong that goes off in my body.
Belonging and freedom and accountability are the same.
People mistake freedom and autonomy; freedom comes from connection.
Liberation is the absence of oppression, but it’s not freedom.
Freedom is the antidote to a leadership mindset. The task of leader is to get people to connect with each other.Leaders are not there to fill the expectations of ‘subordinates,’ they are there to partner.
Peter Block
Belonging = freedom = accountability.
YES!
What an amazing distillation of everything I’ve been thinking about lately. How can I live into my full power, be fully in love, be fully in responsibility, be fully free, be intimately interconnected with everything and everyone, be in connection, be able and willing to hold my boundaries with total compassion and humility? How can everything I build and do and contribute come from a place without fear? (Though Peter talked a lot about the anxiety of accountability – perhaps as I read the new book I’ll understand this more).
Belonging means letting go of so much, as does freedom, as does real responsibility. I belong when I belong to myself, which requires a container that is expansive and also an embrace. I can not belong if I’m only about myself, though. Such a paradox and that’s what real community is about, feeling into the mutual possibilities, taking on the ways I am part of the problem I want to see change, and coming with curiosity to hearing how you and others want a future to look. Coming with the kind of real wonder that is a result of love and letting go of the aspects of identity that depend on othering – othering myself and othering others.
I think this makes sense but I am still working towards this. I still find myself with a sense of frustration that there’s oppression around us, that there are so few BIPOC or disabled or non-binary or trans people or even women in some of the spaces I’m in, despite those spaces often being oriented around collective practices, community, and particularly creating spaces or technologies around bringing people together. I spend time in other spaces where there’s more melanin and queerness and look forward to finding ways to develop more and more overlap.
True community are spaces in which we feel that we are accepted in the wholeness of who we are. And that doesn’t mean that every part of who we are is expressed in every given moment, that’s not possible. But that the body, the collective of people that we are in relationship with, there is no request to leave a part of ourselves behind in order to be accepted in this group of people.
Rev. angel Kyodo williams
To have spaces like this, I think, requires us to not feel like the only, but is “the only” just a story we have of ourselves where we don’t belong to our selves? This stuff is complex, and in the end, I can only work on letting go, freeing the part of me that will love fully and not supposing the rest of me, the layers of protection, the shell, the veil, the disguise, is needed for its protection. That part is the strong part, the badass part, the part that can’t be abandoned because it’s where belonging is freedom and where freedom is owning my experience.