“Your vibe attracts your tribe.”

What is my vibe, I wonder? How do others experience me? What moves us each to approach one another?

It’s been six months since I wrote about feeling liberated to be more authentically and fully expressive of my thoughts and observations. I feel freed to take up more space, be all me, all in, whatever I’m doing. As a result, my encounters and interactions with many people, patients especially, are that much deeper and more meaningful. In this time, I also seem to have attracted and strengthened connections with a number of like-minded and like-hearted folks. It feels joyfully cosmic.

I met the team at Ethos Training Systems three years ago, and stayed on their periphery. I officially joined the community this April, moved by some immutable force, and made fast friends with the coaches. I also feel right at home among my gym classmates. I rejoined Instagram a few weeks ago in order to see the workout videos, and found Coach Jacob’s page. To see posts of a thoughtful, generous, humble, and loving young man, or if you just want some uplift one day, hop on over and read his reflections, watch his videos. I learn so much from Jacob, in more domains than fitness. It reinforces for me the value of making friends with people much younger than myself. The generation ‘gap’ invites attention and exploration, an ebullient mutual bridging. I am convinced we each have something important to offer the other.

Last month I reconnected with Steve, one of my favorite people in high school. Looking back, he was one of the first people with whom I could do joyfully deep philosophical banter, and also talk science. He went to college on a physics scholarship, and now flourishes as a tenured philosophy and religion professor. We met for lunch after over 30 years, and it was as if no time had passed. We humans are who we are from a very young age, and we also continually change and evolve throughout our lives. It’s such a lovely paradox, and I’m finding folks left and right who embrace it like I do–the connections reminding me of formative atomic collisions.

Colleague introduced me to Hilary, an energetic and effusive somatic psychotherapist. It took us a while to connect in person, yet we both persisted in the effort. I felt pulled–called to gather with her. We both feel first hand as well as vicariously, the immense pressure and burnout borne by our fellow healthcare workers. We understand intuitively that COVID was just an oceanic tremor; the myriad recurring tsunami waves of consequences are yet to hit, and we brace for it, personally and professionally. Meanwhile, we both ascribe to Isaac Asimov’s words: “I continue to try and I continue, indefatiguably, to reach out. There’s no way I can single-handedly save the world or, perhaps, even make a perceptible difference–but how ashamed I would be to let a day pass without making one more effort. …I have to make my life worthwhile to myself, if to no one else and writing these essays is one of the chief ways I can accomplish this task.” Like me, Hilary sees and feels her potential in multiple domains at once, gets excited about them all, and must self-regulate. She chooses to embark now on a writing journey. I think I was placed on her path to walk in solidarity with her, while we share, support, and learn from each other. We agree to buy Colleague a drink for bringing us together, right here and right now, just when we both needed.

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” Simon Sinek says. It’s about resonance. My Why grows ever clearer, and I manifest it with increasing power and momentum (and hopefully without too much ego). I am definitely attracting my tribe, finding people with whom my Why vibrates strongly. I compare myself to a magnet more often every month–one with rising energy. The tribe grows, maybe approaching critical mass for effecting positive change through relational leadership. But even if not, the coalescence feels profoundly meaningful.

Useful Repulsion

If I am a magnet, then there are elements (people) I will repel, and/or will repel me. I can name, with some regret, friends who have exited my life. Sometimes my bids for initial connection with people I admire get rejected, which doesn’t feel good. Why don’t they like me? Others approach me, and I feel neither spark nor interest, so I politely keep my distance, eventually falling out of orbit. It’s limbic, visceral, irrational, and organic. I have learned to take it all in stride. Not all friendships, relationships, and connections are meant to be, or to last forever. Neither, though, are separations. You just never know. So I resolve to stay open to shifts in whatever polarities are at play, for repulsion now to become attraction later, and vice versa. Anything is possibile.

I have a few longstanding relationships, however, which I will not exit and that yet feel consistently repulsive in one way or another–dissonant, counter, antithetical. How do I reconcile this? What is the cosmic purpose here? I have decided to see it as a form and source of movement, as with Maglev trains or levitating globes. My counterparts and I, like these magnetic objects, are held in sustained proximity by both attractive and repulsive forces of the relationships themselves, based on the positions and polar orientations of our respective magnets. As a result, I am impelled forward, I like to think in personal growth. Or I’m held in place, suspended in stability within which I may spin and bounce–there is security here, even if movement is restricted in some dimensions. Anyway, it’s a fun and encouraging way to think of myself–as a magnet that naturally both atrracts and repels, creating both potential and kinetic energy.

As I continue to step into and stand straight and strong in my core values and life purpose, I understand and accept that my relationships will self-organize accordingly. As I attract some, I will necessarily repel others. Sometimes the latter is painful. Still, the rewards of magnetizing myself this way far outweigh the costs.