The Herd
Harnessing the Energies of a Small Group to Heal Ourselves and the World
Today, I’d like to share a story about elephants.
In the wild, when female elephants give birth or are injured all of the other females in the herd circle around her in a tight formation so that the vulnerable sister can’t be seen. They present an impenetrable 30-tonne wall of female aggression to bravely face and challenge any predators that may have caught the scent of blood and vulnerability.
Sisters, mothers, aunts, cousins, friends from other herds, and grand matriarchs join together as one. As they close in ranks to watch guard, they even kick up dust to help mask her scent and to protect the baby’s new skin from the hot African sun.
After the birth or when the injured sister recomposes herself and is able to continue on as she rises up again from her time spent in the middle, the other female elephants trumpet the most piercingly joyful call announcing something new being born.
A new calf or a healing is cause for celebration in the herd.
I felt so moved by this story. First, I think because it seems like these big wrinkly grey beauties are not much different than we are. We also celebrate the birth of our young together, trumpet the occasion with cute birth announcements, and showering each other with gifts.
Similarly, we also gather around to help each other when one of us has fallen or is grieving.
And finally, does anyone else find it ironic that in a world where feminine beauty is defined by shrinking our waist sizes or taking up less space, having no wrinkles, or filling our wrinkles with injectables, these majestic creatures just take up space unapologetically as if to show us in an exaggerated way, that none of that really matters, all that really matters is standing up for our sisters and loving one another.
Goosebumps.
It was magic to see them wandering in the wild when I was in Africa.
Also like us, they are complex creatures. Both gentle and fierce, majestic, and vulnerable. They live in large extended communities and are compassionate, but they also shouldn’t be messed with. They are organized and intelligent beings with their own language and they care for one another.
Like us, they also seem to be vulnerable to outside forces. Even though they have been walking the earth for more than 6 million years, in the last generation their population has decreased by 60% due to poaching, our encroachment on their native land, and climate change. Sadly 55 of them are still killed each day on average by poachers with dollar signs in their eyes.
It’s complicated for area residents. When elephants walk as a group they flatten forests and knock down farmers’ fences. One time we got stuck and had to get out of our vehicle to push it out of the soft sand and we were charged by an angry elephant who wanted us to move on. Many of them are shot simply for looking for food or when their families accidentally wander onto private property. When provoked, they can easily pick up a large human with their trunks and toss them into the air to crush bones or “break them”.
It has had me thinking about our own female communities and how we show up to support one another. Some of us need help and when we are lost, we may even behave in outwardly destructive ways that threaten our communities or other people’s lives. We fall prey to addiction and depression or become overwhelmed with anxiety from the effects of trauma and isolation.
I think deep down for most of my life, I’ve dreamed of starting a small women’s group in my community to emulate this dependable, unconditional, and fierce kind of love.
To bring together an incredible group of women to connect with in a circle. Both in-person and possibly online for people in remote areas if there is a demand to see what is possible for all of us.
This special get-together would come at no cost, and everyone would be welcome. It would be funded by voluntary donations or like any church or 12-step meeting not to profit, but to simply help pay the costs incurred by the group or to charity.
As happy as I am that so many of us can work from home online and make a decent living as coaches or with online courses (including myself), this has caused a very noticeable and disturbing elemental shift in our local communities and something new…
The commoditization of our female friendships.
Things are beginning to feel a bit off.
It’s not just our friendships, it’s the way we’re acting in general as consumers.
Is it just me, or do you sometimes feel like you have an algorithmic target on your back and you’re being marketed and sold everywhere you go online?
Frankly, it’s exhausting.
It has not always been this way. Capitalism in the 20th century molded the ordinary person into a consumer. Consumption is now frequently seen as our principal role in the world. it drives most of our daily unconscious behaviors.
We have, of course, always "consumed" the necessities of life – food, shelter, clothing – and have always had to work to get them or have others work for them, but there was little economic motive for increased consumption before the 20th Century.
Quite the reverse: frugality and thrift were more appropriate to situations where survival rations were not guaranteed.
Attempts to promote or “market” new fashions, harness what historians and economists have called the "propulsive power of envy” to boost sales began the slow unleashing of our acquisitive instincts and put our distance between us as individuals.
Separating us further and further.
“People recognize themselves in their commodities.”
Herbert Marcuse~ Philosopher
It’s no wonder many of us feel so overwhelmed, tired, and lost.
In a system of never-ending growth, we can’t just wake up one day and feel content with life or like we have all we need.
We will never feel comfortable in our bodies to take up space or thicken our skin with satisfaction like elephants have embraced their divinity and how they were made. We’re so busy scrolling and consuming it’s rare for us to ever be bored, or to sit still and quiet our minds or go inside ourselves in meditation, contemplation, or prayer, and to trust and listen to our own higher selves for guidance.
After struggling through some personal challenges including divorce, financial difficulties, and overcoming breast cancer, one amazing woman and reader here in ‘the Field’ reached out because she was unable to find any help or afford a therapist in her local community and it struck me that we need to course correct in our communities to prevent our further separation and alienation.
Our egos may get ruffled by this, but if we go to groups to be sold something by the host, or with the expectation to network or sell something or benefit from others we’re not truly aligned with the energy of love and service.
Again, please don’t misunderstand me, there is a time and place for amazing retreats and making money, but what we call the “service” industry is a bit of a misnomer. What we are doing is making a living. Energetically we are primarily using our gifts to fulfill our interests or gain from them so this kind of work falls into a negative or service-to-self-polarity.
No payment, no service.
If I don’t pay your monthly fee, I can’t be a member of your special online group or community.
It’s not the same as a gift. One thing that gifts do is that they create ties among people – which is different from a financial transaction. If I buy something from you, I give you the money and you give me the thing, and we have no more relationship after that. I don’t owe you anything, you don’t owe me anything.
The transaction is finished.
But if you give me something, that’s different because now I feel gratitude.
What IS gratitude?
Gratitude is the recognition that you’ve received, and the desire to give in turn builds up in you silently and energetically. And that’s why we are driven to give. Because everything we’ve received is a gift.
Our life is a gift. Having air to breathe – we didn’t earn that.
We didn’t earn being born.
Everything that we have is a gift.
Therefore our natural state, our default state is gratitude.
Our default state is a desire to give, a desire to be generous. And you can feel that desire coming up, but then there’s something that stops you from being as generous as you could be.
Fear. Money. Security. Time.
The feeling that there is not enough.
Often we’re not even consciously aware of what is happening behind the scenes because it’s in the cultural air we breathe.
Here is THE ONE thing that has taken me most of my 5 decades of life to even recognize from my own patterns of behavior and the KEY to our freedom:
If it’s unconscious knowledge, we will rebel unconsciously – by cultivating habits of procrastination and laziness, by becoming depressed, by getting addicted to something. This is a mutiny of the soul that says, “I’m not going to participate in this. I would rather stay in bed than live the wrong life.”
And then we’re told, “Well, there’s a problem with you. If you are depressed, if you have a migraine and can’t get out of bed, if you procrastinate, if you can’t motivate yourself to be a success, to do the things that you need to do, to develop good work habits – there’s a problem with you.”
But maybe the problem isn’t with you, maybe you’re healthy.
Maybe we don’t have to fight ourselves to be virtuous and to be productive.
Please don’t misunderstand, I support many online programs, memberships, and other coaches and I LOVE those services and adore the online communities that I’m in. I may even set up an online membership site of my own someday to better serve and support my sisters AND make a decent living doing it, and I will of course feel like I’m serving others with my offerings, and to some extent I will, but I’ll be also serving myself and this is not that.
Because the energy and intention behind the actions are subtle but VERY different.
Maybe the oldest eyebrow-raising example of this is the oldest profession in the world. Do you think that if you pay someone, it’s the same as if they are intimate with you for free?
We’d like to believe so, but of course it’s not.
It’s transactional.
In our local communities, we have organized sports leagues and private memberships with huge initiation fees to belong to different clubs to ski, golf, and even social memberships. We seem to no longer have drop-in shiny or baseball at the local park, we have to pay to play.
Again, those services have their place by filling a need, but herein lies the problem.
With churches closing and funding being cut on “free” government programs, we have lost our ability to truly serve one another authentically. Church buildings are being converted into homes. Where we live churches are turning into beautiful ski chalets like this one that recently sold for millions.
The community halls where we used to dance, Legions, Rotary groups, and all our free children’s services have traditionally been the places where we’ve congregated with our neighbors to celebrate and care for one another for “free”, babysitting each other’s kids or for a voluntary tithe are slowly but surely disappearing with paid services.
The good news is that there IS something small for as little 1 hour a week that we can ALL do.
We can step OUT of one another’s sales cycle and find or form some authentic human bonds and connections with each other in our communities.
But the new problem is that deep down we don’t care about meeting our neighbors anymore. It’s why people don’t show up to our drop-ins or open houses the way they used to, or even want to leave home and go out at night because they don’t have to. What’s the point? We have everything we need at home, right? We can be at home in our pajamas with our phones in our laps and watch our favorite TV show.
How is that even a problem?
There is a hidden price that we’re all paying and it’s a significant one…
We are feeling more alienated from one another. Lonely. Depressed. Anxious and sadly, more suicidal.
We are simply not having our basic human needs met.
Addiction rates are higher than ever. Sitting at home consuming television, gaming, gambling, consuming social media, and porn are all transactional in nature.
Our deep human need for authentic connection and giving is going unfulfilled.
I know firsthand that it IS possible to connect with others on Zoom and have authentic human interaction online as well, it’s just that we’re not really doing that. Maybe we did during COVID-19, but now we’re mostly paying to consume other people’s content. Netflix, Nintendo, Facebook, IG, X, LinkedIn, porn hub, and Amazon prime. The numbers don’t lie.
Around 284 million people aged 15-64 used drugs worldwide in 2020, a 26 percent increase over the previous decade. Our young people are using more drugs, with use levels today in many countries higher than with the previous generation.
What is going on?
“The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is human connection.”
Johann Hari
I’m haunted by an online talk given by Gabor Maté who may have been quoting Johann Hari when he said: “The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety, it’s love and connection”.
I’d love to help bring some free groups to my local town and help build an online community to help anyone who needs a compassionate and understanding ear or a friend for no charge.
I have two ideas I’m going to try this year and honestly, I think I’ve been slow-moving on them because a part of me knows that most of us would much rather STAY home in our pajamas and go to bed early.
Maybe you’re thinking, Nona nice idea but even if I wanted that why would I do this for free? What’s in it for me? Things like this are a lot of work.
Maybe, maybe not. I think it’s why book clubs have grown in popularity because as most of us who have been a part of one know, it’s more about friendship, wine, and personal shares than the books. The books and the lubricant can help to break the ice when we’re feeling socially uncomfortable and vulnerable.
This concept strips away the props and everyone stays conscious and sober and just shows up as they are.
It’s time for us to rise up off of our couches to quite literally save humanity.
There are already a couple of wonderful women’s and great men’s groups in our local community, but most if not all are paid groups for people who can afford them. The groups I’ve encountered cost about $2,000 for a 2-hour weekly meeting in person or online and some additional support or topic coverage in the form of courses or creative workshops and people love them. They include a 2-hour meeting and of course a list of benefits from learning and the power of being in a group.
Instead, this would be an offering accessible to everyone.
Here are two of my ideas, I’d love to hear yours:
The first is a group called “She Recovers”. It is based on a larger recovery movement through:
The Canadian women who started this organization are phenomenal.
It’s a 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity that I’ve been slowly working with on some trauma-informed recovery coaching and yoga certifications to offer their services in my community in 2024 ideally in yoga spaces.
I’ve personally met some of my best life support friends through this organization- four in particular about 6 years ago when as relative strangers we all shared a hotel room in New York City for a conference to save money and we still all keep in touch almost every week (and often daily!) and we try to get together at least once a year. In fact, two women from our group are in Boston dropping off one of their sons to his first year of college and just spending two incredible days together.
I’d love to help others have that too.
This particular group is for any female or non-binary individual seeking recovery from mental health issues, trauma, disordered eating, substance use, and related life challenges. Their tagline is: “Because we are all recovering from something—no one should have to recover alone”.
The second group is called “THE HERD” and is loosely based on the story I shared today (flyer with details attached to the end of this post)
Starting with a monthly meeting, and possibly with a future online version, and an additional monthly walk or hike as a group, whatever the group decides together at our first meeting, but after a decade of being in the center of the circle, now that I’m able to stand on my own two feet, I’d like to return the favor and hold formation for others that could use some sisters to lean on.
I joked with another friend who is also a reader here who sent me a 9-minute amazing, thoughtful voice memo this week sharing about her recent interview and search for employment, and how she felt…at the end, she said, “Wow, thank you, I needed that…you don’t even need to respond!”. ha. SO GOOD!! That’s essentially what this is. She had a chance to find words to express what she was going through and the emotions were released perfectly. Sometimes we don’t even know why we’re sad because we are keeping it together and putting on a brave face.
I was driving home from a wedding last night listening to Gabby Bernstein’s new book “Happy Days” and it struck me how sometimes women in leadership who seem to have it all together and present as healed or whole can keep showing up and looking good for others, but deep down be unhappy inside - call it trauma or whatever you want but even famous spiritual teachers need help.
We all need a chance to be “heard” (pun intended) to sort things out for ourselves by working through or sharing what we’re feeling and thinking to intuit what is best for us. The next steps present themselves when we share and surrender our struggles to a higher power of our own understanding.
When I prayed for a helper and sidekick to do this with me, she came quickly. My friend Emily Knight, whom I met at a co-working space and we are officially starting a group next month for other females in our community at no cost. She’s organized, dependable, and a perfect accomplice so we can lean on one another when someone is traveling or unable to make it we will have one another’s backs.
Because we both missed old-fashioned free human connection.
Here are a few things we’ve written about our intentions for the creation of this group:
We wanted to create this special group because as amazing and helpful paid group experiences can be, we saw a gap in the South Georgian Bay community for a free, safe space for connection and support from the Herd.
Being together in person to support one another simply because we're human and it's how we thrive in communities.
Our promise to you is that this group will always be free, that you will never be sold to, & that this space will be co-created with every individual who attends.
I know we’ll eventually find the most incredible, loving, generous, and kind women from our community to hold space for each other if we just keep showing up.
Is this you? If so, we hope you’ll join us.
We’ll share ideas, grieve together when we’ve experienced a loss, and inspire and encourage one another. We’ll celebrate when we transform, write a book, launch a program, or just get through the day without a drink.
We can help those who are vulnerable, but we also don’t need to have hit rock bottom to go to a group.
We can simply do it for everyone and anyone who would like to have authentic friendships.
I dream of co-creating a simple format with our group that can easily be replicated and shared with others including anyone reading here today to start one in their own communities and all around the world to create a vast contagion of change.
I’ve been contemplating groups, elephants, and communities for months now.
The power of an 8-person group is, according to research scientist Lynne McTaggart, our solution. Lynne reveals her remarkable findings from decades of researching and experimenting with small and large groups about how group intention can heal our lives – and change the world for the better:
When individuals in a group focus their intention together on a single target, a powerful collective dynamic emerges that can heal longstanding conditions, mend fractured relationships, lower violence and even rekindle life purpose.
But the greatest untold truth of all is that group intention has a mirror effect, not only affecting the recipient but also reflecting back on the senders.
Life isn’t working the way it once did — and we all know it.
The old way of doing things is no longer serving us.
Most of us don’t know what to do, but we CAN realize the incredible power that you — and each of us —already hold to make the necessary changes in ourselves and the world.
As Margaret Mead famously observed, virtually every major historical movement has started with a small group of committed citizens resolving to do things differently.
Our disconnection from one another, the planet, and the very source of our being is the elementary root cause of our suffering.
We long to feel energized and fulfilled and that is exactly what happens when we stop focusing on trying so hard to have our own needs met and on ourselves all day long.
This is not just a nice idea, it’s scientifically proven that connection, altruism, and helping others positively impact our coherence as communities in order for us to heal.
This same exact behavior is observed in great Apes, dogs, and even some birds like ravens. They recognize when a herd mate is upset and offer gentle caresses, and sympathy and are fully present to hold space for them to heal themselves.
There is so much for us to learn from these elephants and other animal species.
Elephants are showing us how to “allomother” one another. They help raise one another’s babies when one of the mothers is grieving or in need. They aid the weaker animals when they are vulnerable. When an elephant dies they walk great distances to grieve. They touch and bless the deceased softly and gently by running their trunks ritualistically along their dead bodies. They ALL care for their elderly and sick.
When we are a part of and cared for by a loving group an amazing, strange, and mystical thing happens.
When those of us who temporarily have more, help those who temporarily have less, the MOMENT we take the focus off ourselves and intend for someone else OUR life heals too.
This is something I have learned studying A Course In Miracles. It has been taught spiritually for thousands of years, but the scientific explanation pointing to this today is pretty simple. Our vagus nerve is the longest nerve in our body involved with all of our major organs and it’s centrally involved with our nervous system. When we share an intention in a group we affect one another’s vagus nerves.
We move into heart coherence. Our systems, heart, and brain waves begin to slow down and match up wave by wave in undulating patterns. You can see the difference in our waveform patterns in the diagram below:
What does all of this even mean?
We not only move away from our fight-or-flight sympathetic nervous system where we are self-obsessed and can’t find our way out, but we all also move into our parasympathetic, and together in a group where two or more are joined, and for Lynne, the number is 8, our healing power is unlimited.
Lynne’s investigative journalism and scientific studies over several decades have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that when we hold the same thought at the same time from anywhere we can heal. Since the beginning of time and all around the world, it has happened over and over again.
"The need to move beyond the boundaries of ourselves as individuals and to bond with a group is so primordial and necessary to a human being that it remains the key determinant of whether we remain healthy or get ill, even whether we live or die. It is more vital to us than any diet or exercise program; it protects us against the worst toxins and the greatest adversity. The Bond we make with a group is the most fundamental need we have because it generates our most authentic state of being."
- Lynne McTaggart, The Bond
Her team has witnessed and documented spontaneous healing from just about every illness known to human beings. Psychological trauma, PTSD, inoperable stage 4 cancers, and chronic pain. Lynne herself has personally witnessed 2 people who were paralyzed from the neck down stand up out of their wheelchairs, the reversal of lifelong “incurable” blindness, loss of hearing, and even chronic arthritis.
How is this possible?
None of it makes any medical sense.
None of this can be rationally explained or fully understood.
I’m not sure it can even be religiously explained, although the bible has parable after parable describing miracles. Luke 8:43-48: “Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years; and though she had spent all she had on physicians, no one could cure her. She came up behind Jesus and touched the fringe of his clothes, and immediately her hemorrhage stopped.” Her faith and knowing joined with his.
It appears that it’s our clear intention PLUS our elevated emotion (love/faith) that when shared with another believer is our superhuman power.
It’s also not a meditative state, rather it’s the same state that Sufi masters get into with their chanting, or Buddhist monks in ecstatic prayer, or Christian mystics in deep contemplative prayer. They are one with the Tao, Source, or God. It’s not just love but a very specific way that we can access this higher field of energy with coherent hearts in small groups.
I don’t completely understand it myself, nor can I explain it very well, but I have experienced it.
I understand that what happens in the brain is not that we reach an alpha state, but we turn OFF or significantly reduce our identity with the part of our brain in our frontal lobe that identifies as separate. The place where worry, doubt, and negativity are experienced.
It’s not us that really does anything, but it’s the ecstatic sense of feeling our oneness (with “God” or source) that is the secret sauce.
It’s also how prayer works. Our minds in consciousness are joined and unified as a group.
When I am in this unified and coherent state I can feel it. I experience goosebumps, chills, heat, and energy moving through me in particular from my crown chakra and tingling energy at the back of my head. It feels like an epiphanic oneness and I often feel tears and like there is something more true at play.
I suspect it’s what Maslow’s peak experience state was referring to.
This INNER shift is possible for all of us, we don’t need to be a saint, a sage, or anyone special just like the elephants, our BEING is enough.
It’s in our true nature to heal ourselves and one another when we focus our attention together in community.
In her book “The Bond”, Lynne addresses that this sense of communion or community is our birthright. We need it as much or more than food and water and it’s what is required for us to transform.
To make this practical I would like to help anyone interested in being a part of a small group to learn some basics on how to show up in service to one another simply with what we all have: our presence, love, acceptance, shared healing intentions, and nothing more.
To simply hold space, listen, and love.
A place where we come to take turns being “heard” and to be healed.
The premise is simple:
We take turns being in the middle when we need it.
We take turns being in formation when we don’t.
We refrain from offering tips or advice or any cross-talk or interrupt unless we’re being directly asked for feedback. We will share what’s in our hearts, but will always encourage them to go inside and do what feels right for them.
We send a collective loving intention with elevated emotion to the person in the middle based on what they have shared with us. They will stay open to allow the solutions to present themselves to them in the coming days, weeks, and months through coincidences and synchronistic encounters to help them move forward.
That is it.
Anyone can do this, no certifications are required.
Like elephants, we just keep showing up for others and move as a pack together in coherence to experience our lives both in our own bodies and as a herd.
It’s really simply about creating a safe space for us to take up space and be “heard”.
No matter how fragile you feel right now, you’re not alone.
Your story is not over, it has only JUST begun. The hardest times in my own life are like the richest fertilizer for what can come next when we allow, share, and heal.
We transcend it all. We don’t bypass and we don’t even need to dig it all up and relive it again and again. We shine a light on it and let it go and the problems fall away naturally when they stop being fed.
The success of an elephant herd rests on the strength of their relationships and the success of our global community also rests on the strength and the quality of our authentic relationships.
At least now we know there is something we CAN do. It’s taken a long time for me to finally do something, but that’s what today is about.
Imperfect action.
Grab a journal and write out a few different ideas for your own group based on your own interests. It could be ANYTHING, held anywhere.
One of my favorite circles of friends came when I first moved to my town and another woman and I started a spiritual group where we’d just get together at each other’s homes and speak about books, print off some of Byron Katie’s worksheets to do “the work” and sit in each other’s backyards with drinks and appetizers to help us share out loud and work through anything that came up that frustrated us or we struggled with, which is a tool I highly recommend. It fizzled out after a few years and now we get together once or twice a year I adore them all and they were the real inspiration behind wanting to offer this for others.
We can take a turn being weak and we can take a turn being strong.
Announcing this first group, the Herd, making it official and encouraging all of you to think about possibly starting your own “free” group in the future when the time feels right.
RISE SISTERS, RISE.
As Tish Melton’s beautiful song suggests “the best people ARE free”.
With love,
Rev Nona
ps. If you live in the Collingwood area and would like to join Emily and me for our first in-person gathering at the Foundry is on September 20th at 7 pm at the Foundry.
You can RSVP through our new website and the QR code on the flyer below:
Please subscribe for more news on our groups by clicking here: The Herd
If there is demand we could post some free resources and guides for you in the futre if you would like to start a group in your own local community. If you live far away but are interested in joining a monthly online version, please let me know by simply responding to this post or contacting us through the website and we’ll consider it for the fall.
I promise to keep you posted!!
ps. If you liked the elephant story, there is a wonderful National Geographic series you might enjoy: Elephants - National Geographic streaming on Disney Plus.