I found another Domanic Video from 7 years ago – Only 3 min!
Before Disaster, Belonging
When we turn toward feelings like despair, hopelessness, or even apathy, we often expect only emptiness. But if we follow those feelings all the way down, something surprising happens—we uncover a well of energy. At first, there may be no clear ideas of what to do. That’s okay. What matters is staying with the energy itself.
When we listen deeply, that energy draws us into engagement. And with each small step, our strength grows. In connection with others, ideas begin to emerge—ideas no one of us could have imagined alone. Together, we discover a new way of living.
Disaster has a way of revealing this truth instantly. Fires, floods, blackouts—they show us how deeply our lives are woven together. But do we really need to wait for crisis to wake up to community? What if we chose to get wise beforehand, and discovered the joy of belonging now?
The invitation is simple: follow what’s alive in you, even the hopelessness. Beneath it lies the energy we need—not only to act, but to create the kind of community that sustains us, not because we must, but because we choose to
From the Video –
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From Despair to Collective Energy
As you follow each feeling and follow it down within you whether it’s depression with its hopelessness when you tell yourself there’s nothing you can do I think you will find a great deal of energy within yourself you still might have no ideas of what you could do.
Finding Energy, Engagement and Community
But if that seems to be less important to me initially than actually accessing the energy then if you keep listening to that energy in my experience it will lead you to engagement there might be quite a long period of sitting quietly with yourself there might be a process of getting some kind of resources that you need in order to be able to get yourself back to a position of some kind of basic wholeness.
But as soon as you have the idea of engaging and you engage then you have a new source of energy then you get even stronger you engage with more people you have more energy and you get even stronger and then the really exciting ideas emerge which aren’t the ideas that we have on our own but the ideas that we dream up together with other people that create processes which don’t belong to anybody and then we really start discovering our our community heritage and a completely different way of living emerges now you can wait until there’s a flood or black out some kind of disaster in your neighborhood fires earthquakes. Because they’ll do it for you too that’s like instant community. You will immediately discover that your life is totally interwoven with the lives of other people.
Do you think maybe we could get wise before those things happen? I think maybe we could and we might enjoy our experience of community that much more. I remember hearing about my grandmother talking about the experience of the Second World War and being really impacted by how she glowed when she was talking about these terrible things that people went through.
So follow the despair. Follow the hopelessness. Follow the apathy. Follow whatever it is that’s alive in you right at this moment and I think you’ll find that at the end of it there’s a huge amount of energy. You might also on the way bump into a lot of ideas that you’ve inherited telling you that you can’t do this and you can’t do that. In my case it’s too dangerous to act or you’re only one person. What can you possibly do with , 40 words of Portuguese, no money , no cultural understanding of the complexity of the situation that you’re in. I listen to those voices – they’re often very wise. But there’s a difference between recognizing the wisdom of that advice whether it comes from somewhere inside or from other people, and actually deciding that that is going to impede me from acting.
Resources:
🌱 Presentation Version (spoken flow)- GDoc