The value of Belonging
What You Gain When You Awaken to Connection
The world we live in today is one of constant acceleration — economic, technological, geopolitical.
But in the rush to keep up, we’ve lost something fundamental: our ability to interbe.
Interbeing is a concept that the late Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh articulated to describe the deep interdependence of all things. It is not just an idea but a lived experience, an embodied understanding that we are woven into a wholeness system — one in which humans, nature, and technology are not separate but co-evolving in a dynamic dance.
Once you grasp interbeing, you realize that reality is not built on separation but on relationship. We are not isolated individuals trying to dominate nature, outcompete one another, or outrun technology. We are part of a larger flow, a dance of interdependence. And if we resist this truth, we don’t just cut ourselves off from connection — we also cut ourselves off from wisdom, from healing, from the very forces that make life meaningful.
A Dance of Three Forces
Think of this dance as a three-beat rhythm: human evolution and consciousness, the Technium (as futurist Kevin Kelly calls the self-evolving sphere of technology), and the natural world.
These forces are not static; they are always changing, always influencing one another. Sometimes the dance is harmonious, like when Indigenous knowledge informs regenerative agriculture, or when AI helps us understand complex ecosystems. Other times, it’s destructive — think deforestation, climate collapse, or social media’s assault on mental health.
At its core, interbeing is about recognizing these entangled relationships and choosing to participate wisely in the dance. The alternative is what we have now: fragmentation, alienation, and a world in which people feel more disconnected than ever — despite being more digitally connected than at any point in history.
The Cost of Living in Separation
The modern world has been built on a story of separation. We’ve built entire political and economic systems on the illusion that humans are separate from nature, that technology is neutral, that competition is the natural order of things. And yet, deep down, we feel the fragility of this construction.
You see it in the fear people have of truly connecting. Of being vulnerable. Of engaging with difference. Of allowing themselves to be changed by the experience of another person, another culture, another way of knowing. We have walled ourselves off from each other, and from the natural world, believing these walls to be protection. But they are not protection; they are prisons of our own making.
Of course, reality has a way of breaking these illusions. A sudden loss, an illness, an unexpected crisis — these are shortcuts to learning what interbeing really means. In those moments, we see clearly that we are not islands. That our well-being is bound up with the well-being of others. That the suffering of one is ultimately the suffering of all.
The Practice of Interbecoming
Thich Nhat Hanh and his community at Plum Village developed mindfulness practices precisely to help people awaken to interbeing — not as an abstract theory but as an embodied way of life. Meditation, deep listening, mindful breathing — these are technologies of awareness, designed not to withdraw us from the world but to deepen our participation in it.
And when you practice interbeing, something profound happens: you begin to interbecome. You don’t just see the interconnectedness of all things — you become part of that flow.
While Interbecoming, You move beyond the rigid categories of self and other, human and nature, individual and collective. You stop trying to control life and start learning how to dance with it.
At this level of understanding, even the concept of “growth” changes. Growth is not about accumulation. It is not about extraction. It is about relationship. It is about participating in regenerative flows — flows that support not just human flourishing but the flourishing of the whole system.
The Future of Belonging
If we are to navigate the crises of our time — climate collapse, social polarization, technological disruption — we must rediscover what it means to belong. Not in the narrow sense of tribalism, nationalism, or ideological purity, but in the deepest sense of interbeing.
Because in the end, what we gain from interbeing is not just knowledge or wisdom. It is healing. Healing of our fractured relationships, our broken communities, our sense of separation from the living world.
And once we begin to heal, we can begin to imagine new possibilities — not just for ourselves, but for the world we are co-creating, together.
