The gut, flora, and community

📸 by Marco Savastano on Unsplash

You might need to bear with me a bit here. I've got a point that's relevant, I promise.

The other night, someone in one of the groups I facilitate mentioned that a few months ago their digestion was off. It was creating a series of issues for them, making life not as comfortable as they might like. We didn't go into the details, so we're all spared that.

As they were sharing, they said, "It turned out there was an imbalance in the flora in my gut. My doctor helped me make a few tweaks, and I was able to get back into balance. Since then, I've been good."

And this is where it hit me.

See, when you google "gut flora," you learn that it's "...the slang term given to both good and bad bacteria that live inside your digestive tract." In other words, it's the little beings that live in your gut, helping you to digest your food and expel waste.

Another way to say this: we aren't alone in our work to feed and care for ourselves. We have other organisms living within us that help. And when they aren't doing well (in other words, when they're out of balance), neither are we.

We don't do this digesting thing alone.

And what is digesting? It's taking in the nutrients from the foods we consume, and expelling what we don't need; what doesn't serve us. What's toxic to us.

I mean, it's not that we don't all know this.

So, what exactly was it that hit me? It was this: just as we don't digest (read: process) our food alone, we can't really process (ahem: digest) our emotional material alone. We need to be in community / relationship with others to support that work.

For this analogy to work, let's look at emotional material as being the intake of experiences that we are having in the world. We have an experience, and we react to that experience. Often this isn't even noticed, as the impact on us is minor (in the analogy perhaps we can think of things like drinking water, or eating greens that are very easily digested).

When we have an experience that's trickier—be it at home or at work—and our 'flora is out of balance', meaning, we don't really have the community we need to fully process it, or our relationships aren’t really that solid, we can't really digest it. We can't extract from the experience the part that feeds us, that makes us healthier, that makes us even more alive. And we can't dispose of the part that we don't need (at best) or that's perhaps toxic (at worst).

What is it like to intentionally build the kinds of relationships that allow us to support one another in processes like this?

Well, sometimes we choose to be in an intentional space for this work (this can be in therapy, it can be in a men's group, or group for folks of other identities and genders, etc.), but being human, we encounter our emotional selves pretty much everywhere. That includes the workplace.

Now, you may be thinking, "well, the workplace is about work. We should deal with our emotions elsewhere." It's a common sentiment, but I'd point out, as mentioned above, that as humans, we encounter this part of ourselves everywhere. We just can't make that separation in a way that is truly healthy.

As individuals, we can choose to do this in our lives by building community around us. By making friends who are willing to hold us in this way. By joining groups.

And as leaders in organizations, we can build this aspect of our humanity into the culture. We can normalize our humanity and our need for one another. We can put into place practices that allow us, together, to process and digest what we are experiencing.

The reality (as so beautifully expressed in the ways that our 'guts' work) is that we can't do this stuff alone. We need to be in relationship to do it.

As the pandemic drags on, and things feel more and more challenging almost by the day, I can think of fewer things that feel quite as important.

Perhaps, together, we can find our way back into balance.