Where Do You Belong?

My whole life, I have sought spaces where I belong.

Without really understanding what that means…

I have been searching the web of my connections for the space where I can be myself. The space that helps me become myself.

Sitting down to journal about my biography with belonging, however, the first words to hit the page evoke a grim and grudging truth: “It’s hard to write about belonging when the first word that comes to mind is betrayal.”

I yearn to belong, and yet my track record is a long ways from lustrous. My handwriting—black ink on cream lined paper—marches on: “From moments when I realized that others didn’t want me to moments when I realized that I wasn’t being true to my authentic self.” Across the waxing and waning of the years, I have been betrayed by others; I have betrayed myself.

Months into a 15-month program to work through all 87 emotions and experiences in Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, I take a deep breath, place one hand on the Siamese occupying my armrest, and dive in—swimming past the scum of shame and oil of regret that prevent me from accessing the pure sweet wellspring of belonging.

The dots I connect when processing each emotion don’t follow a linearly consistent path. My access to each one varies. So instead of continuing along this path, I have to back off from the intensity of betrayal. Instead, I list places and people and times where I felt belonging. I tease out the similarities in their differences and the differences in their similarities.

• When I belong, my growth is heralded, my triumphs celebrated. I can shine without dimming my light.

• When I belong, I can also get raw, unfinished, show my messy in media res. Doesn’t matter what I look like.

My truths, my imperfections, my contradictions… they’re not just accepted, they’re welcomed.

In Brené’s own words, “True belonging is not passive. It’s not the belonging that comes from just joining a group. It's a practice that requires us to be vulnerable, get uncomfortable, and learn how to be with people without sacrificing who we are.”

These words stir my center.

Belonging is an active practice for me. It’s a symbiotic dance. A give and a take. I must constantly negotiate my own boundaries. Where do I allow myself to be shaped and changed by my relationships, and what is my essential core? Where do I give with joy? Where do I receive with joy?

Two truths hit me in succession with a 1–2 punch:

• To belong, I have to be willing to reach out first; and

• The person I need to reach out to first is… me.

Belonging is a safe place to land, and if I can’t feel safe with myself…

My journal lets these consequences hang in midair.

My selves are often in conflict with one another. One craves the relief of a to-do list demolition. Another? Connection. A third? Solitude and serendipity. How can all these desires dwell in the same time-bound body? Can they shift from tolerating to respecting to flat-out adoring each other for the balance and perspective they lend the whole?

This is vulnerable work.

At times, I feel I’ve pinned my amphibious, emotional body down for dissection. The solid feline rumbling from Mr. Bill Purray reminds me that the warmth of belonging is worth it. I crave the pull of other people. And I crave the experience of being my own magnetic attraction: two points on a compass that, together or apart, exert a balancing tension.

What does it feel like to belong and be longed for?

• When I belong, I can witness my broader context, react to it, flex with it… without losing my own sense of individuality or selves.

• When I belong, I communicate my wants and needs, and they do not place me in jeopardy. I speak my truth, even if it differentiates me, and I am welcomed for it. Even in similarity, there is difference; even in difference, there is similarity.

Dangermouse, my other cat, wraps her stripey grey tail protectively across my waist. She looks up at me, placid as a sphinx. Her one eye, knowing.

The Aymara word for past, nayra, literally means “eye,” “sight,” or “front,” while the word for future, q’ipa, translates to “behind” or “the back.” In the Andes, the past is in front because it is known and seen, while the future is behind because it is unknown and cannot be seen.

The Māori proverb Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua means “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past.” This perspective reflects a value system where ancestral knowledge guides the present and future.

Belonging lives in the present moment. Right here, in how my spine lengthens with an inhale, in how my shoulders soften with an exhale. I’m reminded how much I feel at home in myself on the mat. I practice union in yoga, my breath creating a balancing tension across my many selves. I gather together my many wants and needs, intentions and contradictions—all my many stories—into a single now. It comes as no surprise that my processing of all these 87 emotions and experiences involves breathing through them on my yoga mat.

Sketching labyrinths into my journal book is another processing method. They don’t stay confined to paper. The process of walking them with my whole body, not just my finger tracing the lines? This is useful AF. It’s integrating. I’ve begun building these labyrinths wherever I can—etched in sand on a beach, outlined across a field, staked in lights at burns.

Maybe you and I met along the beach one morning. You may have walked Spiral Beyond Shame at Alchemy in 2024 or Resign to Rise at Emergence in March 2025. This year, I’ve chosen to bring This Be-Longing to Alchemy, because of all the legendary burn experiences I’ve had. At a burn, this big, beautiful, experimental community mirrors my own becoming. They are spaces where I feel my light is not only accepted but longed for.

This is why I’ve been combing back through my raw processing, my messy in media res, to take the vulnerable and uncomfortable step of sharing these offerings with you.

I am retracing my own lines. Tidying up my own edges. Spending hours again on the mat, pondering: Who am I? Who is this person who feels? What does belonging feel like in my body? Where do I belong?

And so I lower myself into Sphinx, belly safe against the earth, heart open to whatever rises. Here, I am reminded that the first syllable of belonging is be. To belong is first to be. To be present. To be honest. To be still enough to hear the hum of my own heartbeat, the buzz of my own aliveness.

The second syllable is long. To be long is to stretch beyond my own edges. To investigate my boundaries from a patch of safe ground. To yearn. To crave connection. To extend myself into the future, into possibility, into another’s gaze.

Be. Long.

Together they form a practice: belonging.

At Alchemy, I will create this pattern from rope and solar LED strands. I will practice belonging with the group of humans who will help me build it and break it down. I will collect the stories of those who walk it. I will experience what it’s like to walk it alone, with beloveds, with strangers. I will dance it, skip through it, sob through it. On Sunday morning, I will offer a yin yoga flow centered on belonging.

At the end of this yin sequence, I will invite participants to sit across from one another and gaze softly into each other’s eyes—or into a mirror, if they seek an inner union. To witness and be witnessed. To belong, and to be longed for.

And then, in a farewell gesture, the labyrinth will be dismantled. We will turn up some music, laugh and cry, processing all of the ways we’ve belonged across the event. Practicing belonging.

You can practice belonging any time. I recorded my yin yoga practice as gift to my future selves and to you.

You can breathe and be and be long along with me—and with Mr. Bill Purray.

Wherever you take your next deep breath, I invite you to contemplate along with me:

Where do you belong?

This Be-Longing

Alchemy | October 16-20, 2025 | Near Atlanta, GA

A labyrinth of light, reflection, and connection, This Be-Longing invites participants to walk a shared path through a glowing geometry inspired by patterns found in Tunisia’s Great Mosque of Kairouan. Created from solar LED lights, This Be-Longing is a processional labyrinth, meaning that you enter in one place and exit somewhere else—the only way forward is through.

Two mirrored routes allow walkers to begin at the same time from different points, find each other, separate to explore their own journeys, and reunite at the luminous center—where a ring of mirrors reflects them back to each other. It is a place to witness and be witnessed, to belong and be longed for, to remember that we are each both path and companion.

Rooted in the emotional landscape of belonging—our oldest ache and deepest joy—this installation honors the soul symmetry between individuals and the sacred geometry of connection. Whether you walk hand in hand with a beloved, to seek union with yourself, or encounter a stranger, the pattern holds space for a shared truth: that to belong is not to fit, but to be found.

Step into the light. Trace the thread of us. Let the story of this moment become legendary.

This labyrinth pattern is one of 87 created by the artist Charms to process each of the emotions and experiences in Brené Brown’s book “Atlas of the Heart”.