Freedom Requires Accompaniment

The unnested are unfree.

Human freedom begins accompanied. We are held, known, loved, by our companions, especially in early life when our trajectories for health and wellbeing are initiated. Companionship opens us to trusting the unfolding of our uniqueness. It is welcome. We spend our lives living in an ocean of connection, flitting and floating like a fish in a sea of relations.

We are enlivened by the relationships all around us. They introduce us to the wellness pathway that is our heritage. We are fully alive to the moment, spontaneously responding to the world. We are confident in our capacities to meet whatever comes. We know that the universe holds us, nurtures us, that our needs will be met because we experienced this so deeply in the early years when our worldview was shaped. Our eyes, signals to our wellbeing, remain bright.

But the unaccompanied life leads to the opposite, to nihilism. We are not welcomed to a living world that encourages our vitality. Instead, we are discouraged, deadened, by the community, by those charged with nurturing us. We are ignored, suppressed, muted, isolated. We learn the rules to stay alive, barely, miserably (or we give up on life). We feel that we are on our own, separate, isolated, living against a sea of woes, with desperation bubbling just beneath the surface. We find some script that works to give us the crumbs of safe attention we so deeply desire. But we are easily triggered into panic, rage, or a deep freeze.

The very short film, Breaking the Cycle, contrasts these alternative pathways. The dominant culture pushes communities out of accompaniment, away from nurturing, into mutual misery, into superficial lifeways, and into pretense. Social media has become the world of spectacle—looking impressive, successful, good. But the reality off stage is decrepit, decaying life energy. There is no mastery of living well, just broken fingernails hanging on.

Less and less livingness around us becomes normalized, making AI look alive and real. At least it responds, unlike the community in our early lives.

Some unnested people learn to act ragefully to get at least some needs met or take revenge on the deep feelings of injustice felt as a baby. They redirect their distress outwardly, blaming others for their fright, displaying anger instead of grief over the love and support that was missing, perhaps unable to articulate that preverbal fear.

The undercared for, the unnested, are unfree. They are governed by their lack, reacting impulsively, irrationally, grasping for control in the midst of their psychic dysregulation. Impulsivity is an illusion of free will. But they are unfree. Their will is taken over by their reactivity to threat. They become upset when others don’t follow ‘the script,’ their source of shallow stability. They cannot tune into the newness before them. They cannot delight in the beauty of dynamic Nature. They are imprisoned by the rules of their script. Guided by fear, they struggle to avoid feeling the existential terror that got planted in their baby brain.

Nestedness fosters freedom. In an accompanied life, we learn and become ourselves in the loving embrace of others. We live freely, fluidly, following our co-constructed cooperative inclinations. We recognize our feelings and welcome them, letting them emerge and fade, centered in the wholeness of being. We live a collaborative life, knowing how to get along flexibly with others, human and non-human. We are partners to Life, knowing how to enhance it and how to let it go when the time comes.

We become respected ancestors.

It all starts with nestedness!