What can we offer each other in this weird world?

13 September 2024 | Timothea Goddard

The power of “R U OK (ANY) Day

"Safety is not the absence of threat. Safety is the presence of connection."
Gabor Mate

I love the premise of “R U OK?” (ANY) Day which happened this week.
It rests with the idea that a connecting conversation can change a life. And that we have the power to make a difference to others, in our ordinary interactions during the day.

A sense of another mind recognising us giving and giving us the experience of being seen and cared about, is fundamental to human physical and mental health, let alone flourishing. Infants and children need this. Teenagers need it. Adults need it.

Loneliness is pervasive in our late-capitalist society. And loneliness is quite agonising for most mammalian creatures like us. Offering our presence and our recognition to another may not seem like much. But presence in our interactions, however simple and mundane, makes for a sense of belonging. We each have a choice to extend this in small moments in a day.

What might it involve?

1. It does involve a kind of wise effort.
2. It involves awareness.
3. It involves being present and not caught in the dream of our own pre-occupations.
4. It involves interrupting rushing.
5. It involves stepping out of treating each other as means-to-an-end, and seeing each other as a person with joys and challenges.

Mindfulness, compassion and community-making

At first, when I started teaching mindfulness in 2004, I was captivated by the “mechanisms” of mindfulness and the physical and mental health outcomes it offered.

But for a long time, what I have realised that one of the major “mechanisms” is the providing of a space of connection. We get to have real conversations in these reflective spaces. And amazingly this practice of “real conversation” seems to generate intimacy and care – not only inside ourselves, but between others. It seems that meditation practice gives us a sense of intimacy and connection with our own inner life. Then we have a meeting of minds and hearts, when we share out stories and experience with others.

How can we have a sense of safety or wellness when we are living in a disconnection with others? At its core, caring for one another is essential to our ability to co-exist. On a broader level, a sense of connection—whether with ourselves, others, animals, nature, or our spiritual beliefs—gives life its vitality and meaning.

The future

With our new iteration of Openground, this new Centre for Mindfulness and Compassion, we are doing the ground work to generate an organisation that that not only offers courses, but can be a space and place of community building. A place where our voices can be heard and care extended to each other in ways that can contribute to us all having more of sense of connection – as we continue to meet the weird world we find ourselves in!

Timothea (Tim) Goddard is the founding director of Openground – an Australia-wide network of clinicians and teachers offering MBSR and related mindfulness programs, workshops and retreats, and of the Mindfulness Training Institute – Australia and New Zealand – a not-for-profit which offers teacher training and Vipassana retreats.