This first practice of true belonging is people are hard to hate close up; move in. When you are really struggling with someone, and it's someone you're supposed to hate because of ideology or belief, move in; get curious; get closer; ask questions; try to connect. Remind yourself of that spiritual belief of inextricable connection: How am I connected to you in a way that is bigger and more primal than our politics?

There is no courage without vulnerability. But we're all taught to be brave, and we're all warned growing up to not be vulnerable ... When you have bravery without vulnerability, that's when you get what we're looking at today: all bluster, all posturing, no real courage.

We've got to stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that we do not belong, because we will always find it.

Loneliness is being on the outside looking in. When I stand up alone in the wilderness and take a stand on something I believe in or stand up for something I don't think is right... I feel connected to every other person who's made that pilgrimage through the wilderness ... I don't feel lonely.

He or she who chooses comfort over courage and facilitating real conversations in towns and cities and synagogues and areas who need it, when you choose your own comfort over trying to bring people together and you're a leader... your days of relevance are numbered.

At the very heart of belonging is spirituality. Not religion, not dogma, but spirituality—and a very important specific tenet of spirituality, which, I believe, cuts across faith and denomination and belief system. And by spirituality, I mean the deeply held belief that we're inextricably connected to each other by something greater than us. And that thing that is greater than us is rooted in love and compassion.

Our deepest human need is to be seen by other people—to really be seen and known by someone else. And if we're so armored up, and we walk through the world with an armored front, we can't be seen.

The most tangible behaviors that I have found: stay curious, be kind, and as Harriet Lerner has taught me, listen with the exact same amount of passion that you want to be heard.

What if loneliness is driven, in part, by our lack of authenticity. I can go to a party, and I can be the belle of the ball, and come home completely disconnected, lonely, anxious, because never once during that experience was I myself; I was who I thought they wanted me to be.

If I raise my kids to have that wild heart— that can be grit and grace, tough and tender, excited and scared—they can hold the tension of those things, that's all I can ask.

That desperate need to belong is not a neurosis, or it's not an ego-driven thing; that need to belong and be a part of something greater than us is who we are in our DNA.

Everyone knows that experience of being surrounded by people and feeling completely alone ... You can be alone and with people because you're not connected to those people.

Because we've lost our capacity for pain and discomfort, we have transformed that pain into hatred and blame ... It's so much easier for people to cause pain than it is for them to feel their own pain.

I think one of the greatest casualties of trauma is the loss of the ability to be vulnerable ... When we define trauma as oppression, sexism, racism, I have no choice but to leave my house with my armor on and the 20 tons of that through my day.

If you look from the lens of neurobiology or even evolutionary biology, as a social species, to not be wanted and to not belong to the tribe or the clan or the group meant death.

True belonging is a type of belonging that never requires us to be inauthentic or change who we are but a type of belonging that demands who we are, that we be who we are, even when we jeopardize connection with other people.

The research participants who had the highest levels of true belonging sought out experiences of collective joy and collective pain.

I think my despair is people still opt for causing pain rather than feeling it.