The modern American way of thinking about wellness is as an individual responsibility.

Seek therapy, sleep more, eat better, etc.

There is tremendous value in focusing on efforts within each person’s control in the present. I witness incredible healing and growth in this context in the therapeutic space I hold every day. An enthusiastic yes to going all in on the many parts we own fully. How we each show up matters.

But health actually stems from three sources: individual choices, genetic inheritance, and social context.

Genetic inheritance is more substantial than most are comfortable acknowledging. My children each entered this world with a way of being/brain wiring/given spirit that my parenting nor their free will get the credit or blame for sculpting. I walk through the world in the same small body of my mother and grandmother, regardless of what I eat or how much I move. Accepting the limitations of our control in this sphere is a powerful peace bringer that frees us to work with our nature as opposed to against it.

But the source I’m here to highlight today is environmental. A black person existing within enslavement might have had the DNA for optimism and a drive for engaging positive behaviors but being enslaved was obviously the most significant contributor to their daily mood. Our wellbeing exists within a social context that cannot be ignored. It is the atmosphere we (often invisibly) breathe with every breath. We have been trained to keep our view so tightly zoomed in on individualism that we are missing the forest for the trees.

Health is inextricably social in nature. Humans evolved to thrive in community, where individual well-being is collectively supported, in a reciprocal ecology of nourishing interconnection. We are participants in an ecosystem.

You are likely here as a result of your peaceful parenting work within the family system. I’m now inviting us to see how our values in this sphere are reflected one layer out to community. Parent is to child as government is to citizens. (And if the thought of your government treating you the way you treat your child is uncomfortable, then that is an invitation to reevaluate how you treat your child.) Let’s look through the lens of our gentle parenting principles as we consider this social context of community care.

“What if I told you that your ideas about politics are actually just your ideas about childhood extrapolated.” 
-Dr. John Rollo

So, what cultivates wellness in this domain? What social supports foster individual and community thriving? How are individual actualization and community actualization mutual? Thankfully, we have ample data and models to draw from for inspiration (nods appreciatively toward our Nordic neighbors and indigenous ancestors).

While the wholeness of the work of enhancing community care is unlikely to fall fully within the sphere of control of any one individual, we hold a responsibility to stretch all the way to the edges of that sphere and engage any good that is within our reach. Let’s all open our minds, soften our hearts, and take action toward greater evolutionary alignment.

Healthcare

Everyone needs full access to health care to be well.

Personally, my mother died well before her time when the for-profit insurance company denied the scan needed to diagnose the cancerous tumor in her femur before it spread. Her death was completely preventable. If only she had access to the medical care she so clearly and desperately needed, she would be here right now, laughing with my children and hugging me in the way that only a mother can. But she’s needlessly and pointlessly gone. And the ripple of that traumatic pain and loss will continue to negatively impact the health and wellbeing of everyone touched by her presence. Her community continues to grieve the loss of all she lovingly contributed.

Financially, we would pay less for community health care than we pay for participation in the capitalist health care system that is killing us.

Caring for each other on the most basic level includes coming to each others’ aid when we’re in pain and need help. If a person fell while walking beside me, I would pull out my first aid supplies and clean and bandage the wound for them. I wouldn’t stand there and watch them bleed to death because they didn’t have the bandage I had (and wasn’t using). We should be extending that same level of decency on a societal scale.

As a psychotherapist, I experience this issue from both sides (both as a patient and a provider), and the current system does not work to benefit anyone except the insurance executives—not patients, not providers, and certainly not society.

Food

There is enough food to feed everyone on the planet. Unequal distribution and access results in starvation.

Regulation to maintain a minimum standard of health for the food that is produced would be an example of prioritizing community care over corporate profit. Regulation for distribution instead of destruction of unsold food would be another easy example. Government food security programs that provide necessary nourishment are an easy yes.

Starving children are a symptom of a sick society. A universally nourished population is a healthy one on so many more metrics than nutrition.

The other night I arrived at choir rehearsal scarfing down a burrito. I was full after eating half my meal. A friend arrived late on a break from work starving and so gratefully accepted my offer to have all that remained of my dinner. Again, let’s extend the empathy we offer on an interpersonal level to a community level.

Education

We all benefit from living in an educated society.

Therefore, quality education, designed to honor the true needs of individuals and communities, should be freely accessible to all.

Our current public education system is not at all designed around how children learn. It is not an environment that supports a developing human’s wellbeing or thriving. It does not even well prepare children for the modern world in which we currently live (it was designed to cultivate obedient factory workers for the Industrial Revolution).

I’ve written an entire book on this subject (Sage Homeschooling), so I’ll keep it brief here in summarizing that I advocate for a library model of education in which attendance is not compulsory but resources, mentors, and spaces are abundant. Natural and self directed learning can be stoked like the innate fire it is with opportunities for meaningful experiences, connections, participation, and contribution. Forcing children to sit still and quiet in a cinderblock room with fluorescent lights filling out worksheets deadens the mind and atrophies the soul while children spark to life with insatiable curiosity listening to stories read aloud around a fire in a sanctuary of trees. They can be quizzed on a textbook definition of hydroelectricity that is immediately forgotten with no meaningful context to hold onto it or they can care for the engineering and ecosystem at a dam while supporting the people and places directly impacted by it.

Education can be inclusive of diversity, progressing equality and enhancing empathy. We can both nurture and value individual strengths (while supporting and accommodating challenges) for the collective benefit of all. We can select for critical thinking and peaceful resolution. We can emphasize how to learn more than what to learn, preparing them for a future none of us have yet met. The foundation of a holistic education is wellbeing.

As children metamorphose through adolescence and young adulthood, they naturally become more deeply connected to their unique calling for contribution, specializing with their focus, time, and efforts. This is where higher education can help align individual gifts with community needs. If we want healthfully productive members of a cooperative society, then higher education (college and trade schools) must be free and accessible to all.

Anyone with the capacity and passion for becoming a lawyer, should be able to. An electrician? Yes please. Water engineer? I am, in fact, a big fan of clean water coming into my home. I am in desperate need of care from a gynecological surgeon but the wait is almost a year long. If there is a child within a marginalized community with an affinity for surgery and an admiration for uteruses, please let’s clear her path! A community of skilled practitioners, professionals, tradespeople, and craftspeople support a comprehensively well cared for society.

In the same way providing universal health care would cost individuals less than they are currently paying in the for-profit insurance system, providing universal higher education would cost individuals less than they are currently paying in the crushing student loan racket. And again, we all benefit from living with neighbors who are healthy and educated.

My husband and I graduated from graduate schools with six figures of student loan debt that was both required for our career paths and debilitating to survive under. As parents now with college-aged children, we feel overwhelmingly grateful for our state’s Running Start program, which provides two years of community college (completed during junior and senior year of high school) tuition free. Though our eldest is now about to begin law school knowing that it is a perfect intersection of her personal strengths, passions, and abilities and a specific, clear, and pressing need within our society but terrified of how she will navigate the unavoidable realities of the immense debt this path will require.

Work

Under a government whose mission is community care (Should that not be the mission of every government?), people are prioritized over profit. A wellness economy includes both financial sustainability and abundance, but profits are not the defining metric of success. Money is valued as a means of servicing human and environmental sustainability and health and wellness abundance.

Regulation of the workplace is how we have held boundaries around harm. Children no longer work in coal mines because we made child labor laws. Under a capitalist economy, profits are often at direct odds with individual and community safety, health, and wellbeing. Capitalism loves the free labor of slavery, so we had to outlaw it.

At this point, we need more—more protections for workers, less for corporations.

We need a universal minimum wage that is an actual living wage, so that a full-time working citizen can support themselves without the need for government assistance. We are subsidizing corporate profits when we fill in that gap. To be clear, I am not suggesting we should not feed people who are hungry, but that we acknowledge the financial sleight of hand that is maintaining the dysfunctional status quo—we are paying for that corporate greed.

We need better job security so citizens don’t live each day in fear of losing their income at a moment’s notice. We need better work-life balance on the institutional level. We need income equality—equal pay for equal work. We need safety requirements that are inclusive of women’s bodies (like requiring the auto industry to develop, test, and install seat belts that protect our half of the population). There are myriad specific recommendations I would endorse but the bottom line is that we need to lean in to corporate and workplace boundaries in the form of laws and regulations that protect people and the planet from harm.

Justice

If a child inflicts harm, we know that the best thing we can do as a parent is to hold a boundary for safety while teaching that child how to more effectively address the true need beneath the behavior, followed by meaningful repair and supported practice.

Now let’s extrapolate that to society.

If a citizen inflicts harm, the community benefits most from supporting that individual with a path to belonging. A boundary for safety is sometimes necessary, but that boundary creates a safe space for the real work of restorative justice to take place.

As with all of these facets of community care, we would spend less money on a justice system that actually addressed the causes of crime than our current punitive model—a for-profit prison industrial complex that supports itself by fostering recidivism (the capitalist system benefits from repeat customers).

If your adult child was struggling with addiction, would you choose for them to be locked in a cage for drug possession or offered drug treatment? Which approach would be better for your child? For your family? For the community in which this person is an integral member? They could spend a period of time healing, learning, and repairing, coming out the other side with a clear path for belonging and service.

Environmental Sustainability

In what should be the most obvious statement of fact, if our planet dies, so do we. If we poison our environment, we poison ourselves. We must live harmoniously in balance with the non-human world that sustains us.

Again we bump up against a challenge where the forces of capitalism are at direct odds with the well-being of humanity. If it’s cheaper to make home construction materials with asbestos, the companies will continue to do so until the government steps in and tells them that they can’t (awareness of harm > public concern > lawsuits > new regulations through the EPA—no more cancer-causing asbestos in our homes). We need laws in place to counteract the forces of profit when harm is taking place, including harm to the environment that we all need to survive and thrive.

Environmentalism is especially challenging in that we are led to believe that far more falls into that sphere of individual control than actually does. Individuals choosing to buy organic at the grocery store cannot counteract toxic agricultural industrial practices. Individuals choosing to buy an electric vehicle cannot counteract toxic auto industrial practices. The scale differential is such that change has to come from the top down. The glass spray bottle I fill with vinegar water to clean surfaces in my home instead of buying cleaning chemicals in plastic bottles is not going to save our planet. Regulation that we demand from our government whose role is to care for our collective best interest, can.

For all intents and purposes, I have won capitalism. While my direct income is meager (thanks to choosing a majority-female career rooted in grossly undervalued emotional labor), more wealth moves through my hands than the majority of women around the world (which is likely also true for you, even based solely on the accident of your location of birth). My critique of capitalism comes from a place of privilege. The system is rigged to benefit the very few at the top.

Pulling on your bootstraps (exclusively focusing your efforts on the individual realm) will not change that—a conscious, unified commitment to shifting our model of wealth from profit to well-being would. And individual well-being is inextricably connected to and dependent upon community well-being.

If our bellies are full but our brothers and sisters are starving, we are not well. When we can all gather together around an abundant table, we thrive.