I take a radical stance on facebook: I love it. I think it's world changing and a powerful force for courage, learning, remembering, and experiencing a level of support from community that many of us have never known in this life.
I know people like to call it a time-suck and an enabler of self-obsession, but I have found it to be incredibly supportive of my rather counter-cultural beliefs and my geographically dispersed but facebook-connected community. Back when I was spending more time in communities that didn't align with my deeper values, I found it annoying too. I don't particularly care who won what sporting event or what you had for dinner. But as talk of the weather has always been, even these mundane topics have their place as beautiful ways of connecting, which is what facebook is really all about.
And as I surround myself with more people that I find inspiring and supportive of my own unusual path, I find facebook to be a lot more useful, a lot more fulfilling, and a lot more fun. Increasingly, I participate in communities in my life - and thus on facebook - that share the value of practicing expressions of love, gratitude, honesty, vulnerability, mindfulness, and other deliciously refreshing alternatives and supplements to the usual American conversation topics of sports, politics, celebrity gossip, and weather.
These days, when I sign on, I'm bombarded not with sports and alcohol and fashion stories, but with Rumi quotes, inspiring stories, gratitudes and honest reflections on the challenges of living a life of integrity. It's like my own custom-made ever-evolving social bible, with pictures! It's a nice intro to manifestation really - get clear on your values, create community that aligns, friend them on facebook, and voila! custom-made spiritual support group. Be sure to include some marginal players to keep you honest, and I highly recommend creating tiers within your oversized morass of 'friends' so that you can choose who's posts you read and who reads yours.
This tiering system is also a really helpful way to create a sense of safety about going public with your inner truth -- you only have to come out of the honesty-junkie closet with those you trust to accept you at first, and you can slowly ease your way toward total disclosure with all your 500+ facebook 'friends'. I personally have a four tier system: "soul family" is my closest circle of friends whose posts I actually care to keep tabs on; "brave new world" is my broad and expanding group of friends with relatively shared values, and "borderlands" is the group that includes some possible recruits to the land of radical honesty and self-reflection. This last group pushes the edges of my own vulnerability when I choose to post to those who I fear might judge me for it, and yet also I dare to hope that these same posts might occasionally help someone out there feel safer being their own authentic self as well. Safety to just be honest is unfortunately rare in our culture.
And then there's the general "friends" group for my 900+ closest acquaintances. They get the more rare political commentary or general interest web-link. Someday, I do hope to be able to dissolve the list system and just bare all. But I'll practice my art and just admit straight up that I'm not there yet. This public blog in and of itself is my boldest move to date. And in the meantime, I find that facebook both reflects this duality and offers some amazing micro-communities and social support so that more and more of us can overcome the fears that keep us hiding.
So I'll close with a quote I saw on facebook just now from a fellow brave-new-worlder:
"A miracle is a shift in perception from fear to love." - Marianne Williamson
If facebook is a place to practice this shift in perception (and if you didn't catch it that's rather my point), then perhaps it's a place where miracles happen. Gotta love it.
I know people like to call it a time-suck and an enabler of self-obsession, but I have found it to be incredibly supportive of my rather counter-cultural beliefs and my geographically dispersed but facebook-connected community. Back when I was spending more time in communities that didn't align with my deeper values, I found it annoying too. I don't particularly care who won what sporting event or what you had for dinner. But as talk of the weather has always been, even these mundane topics have their place as beautiful ways of connecting, which is what facebook is really all about.
And as I surround myself with more people that I find inspiring and supportive of my own unusual path, I find facebook to be a lot more useful, a lot more fulfilling, and a lot more fun. Increasingly, I participate in communities in my life - and thus on facebook - that share the value of practicing expressions of love, gratitude, honesty, vulnerability, mindfulness, and other deliciously refreshing alternatives and supplements to the usual American conversation topics of sports, politics, celebrity gossip, and weather.
These days, when I sign on, I'm bombarded not with sports and alcohol and fashion stories, but with Rumi quotes, inspiring stories, gratitudes and honest reflections on the challenges of living a life of integrity. It's like my own custom-made ever-evolving social bible, with pictures! It's a nice intro to manifestation really - get clear on your values, create community that aligns, friend them on facebook, and voila! custom-made spiritual support group. Be sure to include some marginal players to keep you honest, and I highly recommend creating tiers within your oversized morass of 'friends' so that you can choose who's posts you read and who reads yours.
This tiering system is also a really helpful way to create a sense of safety about going public with your inner truth -- you only have to come out of the honesty-junkie closet with those you trust to accept you at first, and you can slowly ease your way toward total disclosure with all your 500+ facebook 'friends'. I personally have a four tier system: "soul family" is my closest circle of friends whose posts I actually care to keep tabs on; "brave new world" is my broad and expanding group of friends with relatively shared values, and "borderlands" is the group that includes some possible recruits to the land of radical honesty and self-reflection. This last group pushes the edges of my own vulnerability when I choose to post to those who I fear might judge me for it, and yet also I dare to hope that these same posts might occasionally help someone out there feel safer being their own authentic self as well. Safety to just be honest is unfortunately rare in our culture.
And then there's the general "friends" group for my 900+ closest acquaintances. They get the more rare political commentary or general interest web-link. Someday, I do hope to be able to dissolve the list system and just bare all. But I'll practice my art and just admit straight up that I'm not there yet. This public blog in and of itself is my boldest move to date. And in the meantime, I find that facebook both reflects this duality and offers some amazing micro-communities and social support so that more and more of us can overcome the fears that keep us hiding.
So I'll close with a quote I saw on facebook just now from a fellow brave-new-worlder:
"A miracle is a shift in perception from fear to love." - Marianne Williamson
If facebook is a place to practice this shift in perception (and if you didn't catch it that's rather my point), then perhaps it's a place where miracles happen. Gotta love it.