The Art of Reciprocity

It’s not balance or harmony, not quid pro quo.

It’s similar to give and take but so much more.

Reciprocity is full of heart and intentionality. And this intentionality, this heart-centered thoughtfulness takes time and space. One must choose to care about another, the other, and their entire multidimensional ecosystem of wellbeing. It is dynamic, alive, active, responsive. It is grace and innocence that returns to the adult being with practice and mindfulness.

When I think of reciprocity I think of sweet conversations between two people and each feel heard and cared for, questions are light and inquiring but not prying and self-serving. There is a generosity to the dialogue, a spirit of interest, of concern, a desire for supporting the well being of the other. In moments of reciprocity, the beings involved are “fed” by one another and end the interaction feeling lighter, fuller, nourished rather than depleted or exhausted.

There is a subtle consciousness about choosing to learn a thing, to feel and express interest in something another is saying versus pretending to listen, pretending to care. Maybe we deeply value the idea of caring about others, to be genuine, but how can our real world practice of interacting with others stay aligned with this value when we all have different styles of communicating, different interpretations of nonverbal body language and tone of voice?

This word, reciprocity, is a hot word among some of my friends right now. We are inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer, the author of Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss. She is an artist of words that touch the soul. A couple of years ago I found a video of Miss Robin speaking to an audience about reciprocity and her energy, her light in this video is captivating. Her stories and her truth speaks straight to the heart and empties it of heaviness.

We have “experts” about everything. How fantastic is that?! We learn from and rely on experts so that we don’t have to take deep dives into subjects that we don’t find interesting. And yet we can easily give our personal authority away to experts under the guise of giving ourselves time and energy to invest in ways that we tell ourselves are more meaningful. It is not just tempting to give our authority away, it is necessary. It is an act of trust. As children and students we must trust our parents and teachers.

This act of giving our authority away is an important, notable behavior that could use careful, collective inspection right about now. If we forget the sensation and experience of trust as the arbiter of authority — of giving it to another or retaining it for oneself on any subject, any knowledge we may have or desire — we may give it away too freely and harm ourselves in the process.

I worry that too few of us know about finances, about nutrition, and about the politics of economics and health. And it comes back to how we spend that time that we are not learning a thing because others know more.

My mother, God rest her soul, always gave her personal authority away to doctors. I know many who give their personal authority away to the Church. Some children never learn how to hold their personal authority in relation to their parents. I know I can do a better job helping my children appreciate their personal authority.

I explore personal authority here because without this skill actively functioning in our day to day relationships, we are handicapped in our ability to reciprocate, to hear one another, including non human species. We start by carefully listening to our body-minds and relearning to trust it fiercely. And we simply practice responding, as gently as possible, in new and different ways, every day.

In this story, Privilege is Being Heard, an alien from an advanced society encounters our entertainment-centric society and surveys people to learn how and why people have become enslaved by extractive capitalism. (Is there a strong enough synonym for enslaved so I don’t have to use that word to get my point across?) The choice to look at this phenomenon and the ability to let hard truths settle in, to let hard truths motivate behaviors and changes, is a choice of personal authority. Healthy personal authority will lead us to trust of ourselves, which will lead us to more easily trust others, which will lead to the undoing of the fear mongering spell we have been under, which will lead us to greater reciprocity.

I have come up with a couple of acronyms to describe the relationship we have with entertainment. We spend most of our time staring at screens, especially while we wait for the pandemic to end. I call the movie channels HAND-PRY (like “just try to pry this remote from my hand”) Hulu, AppleTV, Netflix, Disney, PrimeTV, Roku and YouTube. And I call the social media channels FITTS (like “trying to follow all these posts are giving me fits”).

What if we all took back that time and energy? Well for one, we’d eventually stop buzzing like an old clock radio. Our energetic body would eventually relax and return to a state of wellness — where the brain no longer spun in circles ruminating on things like a song we heard hours ago.

I’m trying to take back some of this time and energy. I’m also actively looking for the gifts in conversations; the gifts within hard conversations are actually the easier ones to identify. This week I had the good fortune of learning how my language was naive and was gently given feedback to help prevent future offenses. I also had a healing experience giving private feedback to someone who had shut me down in a committee zoom call which led to genuine relationship building.

The reciprocity of heart centered dialogue is a gift that keeps on giving.

Please forgive the use of “we” throughout…it’s my favored pronoun.