Happy and Healthy in Community
Which Community?
In our circles, we talk a lot about community and building community. Sometimes we get confused about whether people are talking about the church community, the community where we live or the local community that is our suburb.
Community Corona-ed
Although we have Zoom, We Chat, Facetime and other avenues for virtual community, the global pandemic in 2020 has curtailed our gatherings, our congregating, our drinks at the cafe and hospitality in our homes. It will be interesting in the review after Covid-19 to consider how much our sense of community has been diminished.
Benefits of Community
Dacher Keltner, in his Preface to Casper Ter Kuile’s book, The Power of Ritual, writes:
As a professor of psychology, I teach the science of happiness at University of California, Berkeley, and beyond to hundreds of thousands of people in online courses, digital content, and my podcast, The Science of Happiness. Over the twenty years of this engagement, I have been asked one key question:
How might I find deeper happiness?
The science points to an answer in the abstract:
Find more community. Deepen your connections with others. Be with others in meaningful ways. Find rituals to organise your life. It will boost your happiness, give you greater joy, and even add ten years to your life expectancy, science suggests.
Keltner continues:
Deep connections and the sense of community reduce levels of stress-related cortisol; they activate reward and safety circuits in the brain; they activate a region of the nervous system called the vagus nerve, which slows down our cardiovascular system and opens us up to others; and they lead to the release of oxytocin, a neurochemical that promotes cooperation, trust, and generosity.
Community from the Abstract to the Concrete
It's one thing to know, in the abstract, our need for community, it’s another thing to practically choose the people with whom we will connect and commit to building with them a deep and supportive group.
Geoff Pound
geoffpound@gmail.com
Image: Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash