The Meaning of Tribal Edge- part 1
Something had shifted as we slowly and silently approached the circle of people facing the soft, warm glow of light emanating from our central fire into the crisp darkness of the fall evening. We paused instinctively as if honoring an invisible threshold, a boundary that marked the transition from one world to another.
“What did you notice?” I said quietly to my silent companion.
“We are at the edge of something,” he said, looking back into the darkness from which we had come, then glancing meaningfully back at the cozy group around the fire.
“The edge of what?” I whispered to acknowledge his instincts.
“The edge of the tribe.” He said thoughtfully as a shift of the insight rippled through his body.
The Central Fire
Origins of a name
When I was 26 years old, I was visiting a friend on the Big Island of Hawaii. During the trip, we spent some time camping, surfing, and climbing trees in a sacred area on the island called Waipio Valley, or the “valley of the kings”. Our time there became somewhat of a quest and I spent much of my time searching my heart for clarity about my purpose in life.
I had been inspired almost ten years earlier with a vision of a training center which I simply had called “the quest”, and much of my time, energy, and interests had already begun to shape my life around this idea. During this phase as I adventured, traveled, trained, and studied, I was following a call and gathering clues. I was tracking my vision, longing to know its identity and wanting to have a name for it after nearly a decade of searching.
One afternoon, after a great session of wandering and tree-to-tree travel down the huge valley wall, I was relaxing in the jungle near the beach when I began to feel a knowing, a deep sense of something important trying to come through. I grabbed my journal and as I wrote and sketched the message began to form, finally after some time, with a resounding rightness I wrote the words “Tribal Edge” and had a great sense of relief.
At that point, I had very little conscious understanding of what I had discovered, and how it would guide my journey. I now know the power of following my heart and unpacking the gift of this vision and allowing it to take form and guide my life. In this post, I would like to share some of the meanings I have discovered, and perhaps the best place to start is by defining some terms (see my future post “The Meaning of Tribal Edge- part 2” to discover what the triangle & circle symbolism means to me).
What is a Tribe?
The terms tribe, tribal, and tribalism are becoming widely used and increasingly controversial and misunderstood. Let's look at some definitions.
From Google:
a social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, with a common culture and dialect, typically having a recognized leader.
From dictionary.com:
any aggregate of people united by ties of descent from a common ancestor, a community of customs and traditions, adherence to the same leaders, etc.
a local division of an aboriginal people.
a division of some other people or nation.
a company, group, or number of people.
a group or class of people with strong common traits, values, or interests.
Tribe vs. Tribalism
So a working definition of a tribe is the collective, emergent qualities of a group of people who are connected by some common bond. A phenomenon that likely originated with family groups and clans of common ancestry who relied upon one another for survival and safety, but now may also refer more casually to any group with a common bond, whether it be shared space, values, purpose, etc. A tribe is a primal category defining some natural order of people which according to the controversial notion of Dunbar’s number, is around 150 people, representing the number of meaningful relationships people can maintain at one time. Family groups, clans, and societies cluster into tribes as an important natural group size for human beings- like horses, wolves, orcas, and other social creatures who follow their unique code of interdependence.
With an increasing awareness of tribalism, the value of tribe as a useful category has been threatened. Although the concept of the tribe as an anthropological classification remains empirically useful, the general use of the word tribe in mainstream cultural slang is questionable and has been reduced to cultural appropriation, social conformity, group think, or even worse, mob mentality and other cultish derivatives. Naturally, mainstream attention highlights the negative potential of tribalism suggesting we discard it as a savage and dangerous artifact that we have outgrown.
Rescuing Tribalism
Here we must be careful about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Tribalism refers to the natural tendency to form social bonds between people who have something in common and is an evolutionary survival capacity that we will not grow out of any time soon. It is heavily rewarded in our nervous system by a potent cocktail of neuro chemistry that is responsible for the experience of group flow, networked cognition, dialogos, emergence, synergy, and other life-supporting and community-sustaining attributes that have defined the survival and thrival of our species.
Tribalism is the natural developmental stage that healthy humans encounter as they grow from the egocentric paradigm of “me”, to include the ethnocentric worldview of “us”. In that sense, tribalism is a significant leap in consciousness that transcends and includes the limited world of the self and extends to self and others. It is of course, like any paradigm, incomplete, and although useful, in the end, it only captures a slice of the greater story of the whole of humanity and of the complex interdependence of all life.
Where the tribal worldview runs amuck is when it identifies itself as the most important or only perspective through which to interpret the complex issues life presents, and does not acknowledge other necessary perspectives. The once useful boundary of “us" is hardened to create strong separations between “us and them”, especially in situations of scarcity or zero-sum (win or lose) games. Despite this tendency, there are endless examples of the amazing, life-supporting capacity of humans skillfully and consciously experiencing tribalism together, but like everything else, a tribe has the potential for both great and terrible things, depending upon the awareness, intention, and use of its power.
A Tribe can be a resilient grouping of humans that serves as a survival mechanism for solving problems efficiently, and as a defense mechanism when uncertainty and chaos challenge individual existence, and it is this natural, healthy expression of a tribe, and the edge it gives us, that we value at Tribal Edge.
Edges are natural
“I don’t understand” she said, “how do transitions give us handles and leverage to make change?”
I paused for a moment, then said “pick up the floor, the mat- pick it up!”
“What? What do you mean, I can’t” she said in disbelief, as she started to scan the floor as if for some secret answer, “ besides we are sitting on it anyway.”
“Sure you can, you could if you really wanted to. Do it, pick it up.” I said with confidence as if I had seen her do it a thousand times.
Questioning my sanity, she shook her head and started to move her open hands around the floor half trying as if to prove I was mad.
Then suddenly, as if they had a flash of insight, her fingers instinctively groped quickly towards the seam in the flooring where the heavy mats came together, and grabbing the edge of the mat it with her fingernails, she peeled it up off the floor and stopped, realizing with a smile that she could easily achieve the task by finding the edge.
What is an Edge?
We are all intuitively familiar with the concept of an edge, however, let’s look at some basic definitions.
From Google:
the outside limit of an object, area, or surface; a place or part farthest away from the center of something.
an area next to a steep drop.
the point or state immediately before something unpleasant or momentous occurs.
the sharpened side of the blade of a cutting implement or weapon.
the line along which two surfaces of a solid meet.
an intense, sharp, or striking quality.
a quality or factor that gives superiority over close rivals or competitors.
move gradually, carefully, or furtively in a particular direction.
So from this, we can gather that an edge is a transition, from one space to another or one object or even identity to another, the point at which two things meet or are separated. An edge is also naturally, the farthest point from the center of something, the outer limit, and boundary. Lastly, an edge is an advantage and can be a gradual advancing movement.
Edge or boundary?
Edges are real, at least real enough (if we don’t look too close i.e. subatomic) for us to have the experience of bumping into another edge or falling off an edge, but not everything that we think of as an edge has the same qualities. Many things which we perceive as edges such as boundaries, limits, constraints, and laws may be real in the sense of consequence, however, if we look again, it is possible to see from another perspective that many such things are only agreements or representations of some abstract concept. These types of edges are convenient distinctions that give us useful ways to make sense of our experience.
There is a simple exercise we do in our Body Lab classes called “touch a tree” where students slowly approach a tree and finally make contact with it. After what seems like forever, this mind-bending experience can lead to a redefining of when the tree was touched and where the “edge” of the tree even is- and if a tree even exists beyond our familiar labels. After all, a tree is a complex adaptive system, a streaming flow of nutrients like water, air, and minerals interacting with the soil, atmosphere, sun, other plants, and animals. Not to mention the light bouncing off the tree “touches” my eyes, the oxygen it is respiring touches my lungs, and my feet touch the mesh of roots below as I compact the soil with each step. Where does a tree stop and a forest begin? Where do nature stop and I begin?
The Edge of Distinction
So everything is connected but connected by edges. To keep things simple, we make necessary distinctions- “this is my body and that is a tree”, it is how we filter out the overwhelming web of connections and organize our internal reality to make sense of and interact with our outer reality. As Ken Wilber noted in his book No Boundaries (Shambhala, 1979), when you distinguish a “thing”, you simultaneously have distinguished everything else as “not thing” in the same moment. Boundaries arise when distinctions are made. This is natural and necessary, however, it is important to remember that they are inventions, and it seems that a lot of our suffering and conflict stems from believing that our distinctions, boundaries, or lines we draw in the sand are as real as the reality we project them upon; like property lines, dollar value, types of people and relationships. This awareness is a razor’s edge that can be hard to navigate without being cut deeply but is also a source of freedom and power.
“You think that because you understand “one” that you must therefore understand “two” because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand “and”.”
Tribal Edge
Tribal Edge begins to emerge when we bring the above concepts together.
To start with, Tribal Edge is a physical place we gather, simply called the land (also named Aporia), and is nestled between the Olympic mountains and the Salish Sea at the mouth of Sequim Bay at the edge of the First Nations S’Klallam (the Strong People) Tribal lands.
The Tribal Edge is a community and refers to the powerful quality that emerges when humans come together in meaningful ways. It is the benefit or advantage that we gain when we act together, different but united as we face challenges and solve problems together with a synergy that makes life and growth possible- thrival instead of survival. Tribal Edge is the community of people or “tribe” that have participated and contributed to each other’s lives over the years. It is in the stories, lessons, and skills that we have developed through shared experiences while supporting each other with respect and commitment on the journey of learning and growing together. It is building sustainable, resilient individuals, families, and communities who help each other thrive while respecting and caring for the planet as a whole.
In yet another sense, Tribal Edge also refers to the training methodology that we use in learning and growing together. In any system, existence is a balancing act of maintaining a stable center while meeting the needs of the ever-changing environment through adaptive growth and transformation at the system's edge. In training, it is essential to build a stable foundation of knowledge and skill while appropriately pushing your edges to stimulate growth. Sustainable growth and development occur incrementally at the speed of life and when we are learning real lessons in nature and in the presence of others we receive real feedback that gives us the guidance we need to grow. We are also able to learn from the challenges and insights of others which allows us to multiply the learning and edge forward together.
Finally, Tribal Edge is a metaphor that indicates the overarching focus of our training and philosophy. Within the primal arts, the special focus of Tribal Edge is the role and duty of the ordinary “Hero” or Protector- humans who are ready, willing, and able to take effective action in challenging situations. The root of the word protector is also found in servant, leader, and guide and means “to go before or between.” In this sense, the protector is willing and able to face the uncertainty of the darkness beyond the warm glow of the central fire and is called to walk the edge between the known world of the tribe that they love and the mysterious unknown.
There are many ways this simple name has taught me about my vision as I discover more about my path and where the journey leads. I never could have predicted the form it would take and the lessons I would learn when the name Tribal Edge first appeared in my awareness as a young man.
What does Tribal Edge mean to you?
We are now at the edge, witnessing the collapse of the old rigid models that got us here by playing the finite game of "winning", now struggling to stay relevant in a chaotic phase of changing history. It is difficult, messy, and risky to let go of what was while embracing what is emerging. In this time of transition, we need resilient groups, dynamic systems, and sustainable solutions that can address the complex problems we face.
Since 2002, Tribal Edge has been offering unique education and preparing for these personal, societal, cultural, and environmental shifts by providing "edge" experiences and working within the liminal space, or transition areas in between the steps and stages of the journey of human-nature transformation. We teach the practical yet subtle skills that allow you to find stability through adaptability, to keep going and growing as you follow your vision through the chaos of change.
Many people have shaped and been shaped by Tribal Edge over the years, and it is this tribe of people facing their edges and growing with each other that truly defines what Tribal Edge is. It is exciting for me to witness those interactions rippling out into the world. (Find out more about what others have to say about Tribal Edge here.)
If you have had an experience at Tribal Edge that you would like to share, please do so in the comments below, share this post on social media, or even better share your stories with others. If you are new to Tribal Edge, I look forward to sharing an experience with you soon and discovering what it means to you.
To be continued.
References:
Dictionary.com
Google dictionary
Gross, Jenny. 2021. New York Times. Can you have more than 150 friends?
Wilber, Ken. 1979. No Boundaries. Shambhala publications.