| In an interesting validation of Snyder’s insight about fear, Frederickson has discovered that eye contact is crucial to creating safety for connection:
‘It is the key that unlocks the wisdom of your intuitions. Without eye contact, it is much easier to experience misunderstandings, crushed hearts, and exploitation as you over- or under-interpret the friendliness of other people’s smiles. You can also miss countless opportunities for life-giving connection.
‘Eye contact helps you better detect the sincere affiliative gestures within a sea of merely polite or decidedly manipulative smiles that bid for your attention. Love, then, is not blind’.
This helped me understand why social media doesn’t really satisfy the hunger for connection that I feel in myself, and that I witness at gatherings here at North Farm: we humans seem to be wired for actual presence … for being together and creating a kind of resonance that feeds itself, in a virtuous cycle of growing good feeling.
Frederickson calls this ‘positivity resonance’, which she describes like this:
‘Within those moments of interpersonal connection that are characterised by this amplifying symphony – of shared positive emotions, bio-behavioural synchrony, and mutual care – life-giving positivity resonates between and among people’.
‘Bio-behavioural synchrony’ … a great description of a great feeling, which Frederickson helped me see is, by its very nature, always fleeting. She calls it a ‘micro-moment of connection’. Once it passes, as it must, there’s another factor that can kick in as the resonance between us builds: a desire to invest in the relationship still further, which in turn generates more of the good feeling, and so on, and on:
‘At the heart of love is a feeling – a feeling with both physical as well as mental components. Physically, your whole body feels relaxed, with a warmth and openness in your chest, as if your heart were stretching open to let in or embrace another being.
‘This is the feeling that makes you want to move in closer, to listen and observe more carefully. Mentally, you yearn for good fortune for others. You wish them well with great sincerity. You also wish to show how much you care, to enact tenderness and concern’.
Here, for me, is the vital clue to why gatherings are somehow so soothing in troubled times: loving connection (with others, with nature, with inner self – and preferably all three!) serves as an antidote to the alienation and anxiety so many of us feel in modern life.
Here at North Farm, Gai and I set out ten years ago to offer a gathering place – a safe and sacred space where people could connect deeply … really connect, in ways that both of us had found invaluable at various times in our lives, and that we knew were rare.
Over the past few years we’ve been blessed to witness first-hand the way that people somehow ‘come to life’ when they make space and time in their busy lives for getting together with kindred spirits in a peaceful place. We’ve noticed that by about the third day of a retreat, even the most burned-out city-dweller starts to shed their armour and open up to their surroundings, to notice nature and to feel its healing magic. |
