Finding Community

I unfortunately had to miss the evening meditation tonight due to some errands I had to run and school work that was pressing. I have found that my heart feels so heavy when I cannot be with the group, and such a feeling makes me realize how important it has been to have an accepting group of people in one's life as a spiritual life support.
  I have rarely talked about community in my blog, perhaps because my concern has been developing self-compassion and self-awareness to function well in communities. But I do believe that when there is a community that is supportive of you, and you are given the opportunity to be a contributor to that community in turn, your mental and spiritual health is nurtured. I also believe that possibilities open up only when people can open their hearts to communities of some sort or another.
   When I talk about community, however, I don't mean that one needs to force themselves to be extroverted or the same as everyone else. This form of community is actually just an extended peer pressure. I am more interested in community that shares a common spiritual vision and acts on that vision, particularly through shared texts, meditations and reflections. There really needs to be a psychic space there for people to bring their whole personality, being and mind into the moment of coming together, rather than bringing out fragments here and there. In this way, communities that allow people to bring themselves to the present are most inspiring and nurturing to me.
  It's also important that communities operate from an attitude that everyone has something to contribute to the whole.  A community that only values a few people's talents does very little to expand outward and embrace others at their own stages in life. Even when people's spirits are broken in some way, those broken shards are beautiful crystals: they are gifts waiting to grace others' life with the wisdom that can come from enduring hardships.
   These are a few isolated thoughts on community which I would like to expand on in future entries.