Being Social Can Add Years To Your Life
Lynn Mctaggart, of the Intention Experiment fame, was coming home from the L.A. premier of the Living Matrix movie, which is a great flick, when she stumbled upon an article in Scientific American that answered a question that had burn burning up her consciousness.
The question she asked herself, “What is the X-factor of the group.”
This question came after doing a group healing on a gentleman with prostate cancer.
She came across the article called ‘The Social Cure’ which she says, “concerned the work of a number of social scientists at the UK’s Exeter University. Although it had always been assumed that membership in a large number of groups was detrimental to health, particularly because it overcomplicates our lives, the evidence shows just the reverse.
The more groups one belonged to, the healthier one was – particularly if one had strong relationships within them. The scientists concluded: “Group life and a sense of social identity have a profound influence on our general health and well-being.”
This was even the case in prisons or with members of ethnic minorities who were the victims of racism. So long as they could connect with other beleaguered members of their minority, they remained robustly immune to the effects of prejudice.
“As a rough rule of thumb,” wrote Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam in his book Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster, 2002), “if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half.”
Connectivity, oneness, global consciousness, social media, social groups, all of these things are revealing to ourselves the inherent need we have to be a living global family. That tribal aspect of ourselves is getting harder and harder to ignore. We are social creatures that crave connection.
Why fight it any longer? Get out there and join something, start something, build something, connect with something. In turn you’ll connect to others and in truth to yourself.
In Oneness.
Ian
Copyright © – Permission is granted to copy and redistribute this article on the condition that the content remains complete, full credit is given to the author(s), the links are active with no sneaky “no follow” in the code and that it is distributed freely. Source: Ian Paul Marshall