Mutuality: Giving and Receiving Care + 10-Minute Meditation
A meditation on interdependence for isolated times.
Click above for this week’s guided meditation
Hey friends.
I recently made the above meditation for Dan Harris’s new app, on the theme of mutuality. It was inspired by a fine interview he did with the pathfinder, futurist, and community organizer Mia Birdsong.
As a co-parent to two lovely and sometimes challenging neuro-quirky young boys, my partner and I have often felt isolated trying to figure it all out on our own. Finding support through government programs in Canada is a highly byzantine process — good care exists, but you must navigate the system — and private care is expensive. It takes a ton of time just to figure out what kind of specialist you want to begin to look for, and the cumulative demands of it all means you’re barely spending time with your partner. It’s a strain on any relationship.
Like many others, I’ve often thought the real solution is community — the extended network — both for the consolidation of resources, and for the creative redistribution of mutual support and care. It takes a village kind of thing. Except, in our atomized nuclear family cityscapes, where everyone is scrambling just to get by, a village can be hard to find. It seems contingent on the lottery of family member and friend availability, and the kind of neighbourhood you’re lucky enough to find yourself in. We have not quite figured it out yet, but we are not giving up — feel free to share your favourite Utopian eco-village locations and / or neighbourhood strategies in the comments!
And so it was that I listened with great longing to Mia Birdsong as she described a simple, sensible system she and two other families worked out when their kids were young. Every other Saturday, one of the families would host all the kids, while the other two partners got a chance to rekindle their romance / humanity. She describes how this didn’t just help with much-needed alone-time for the couples; it also introduced each kid to a different style of parenting, different rules, different ways of being together as a family.
I feel like this is central to the mental health and resilience of any child. Different humans wake up different parts of us. At their best, they connect kids to an expanded range of internal resources and ways of being. So much of health is about having a broad base — not just of other people, but of other parts of ourselves, now alive to the world. Much less fragility from this place.
All of this connects to Birdsong’s main point about “mutuality.” If “reciprocity” is a kind of tit-for-tat, “you do this for me, I’ll do this for you” isometric calculation, by contrast, mutuality is where everyone in a group helps each other, each according to their different capabilities. We don’t expect this to look perfectly equal, because people have different situations, different challenges, and different gifts. But as a general principle, there’s a grounded recognition that, in Birdsong’s words, “our own wellbeing is dependent on the wellbeing of the people in our community.”
Interdependence by another name.
And that’s what today’s meditation is all about: it prepares the ground for each of us to participate in a rising tide of mutual care and concern, one that lifts all boats.
Much love,
Jeff
A few quick notes—
The Do Nothing Project (DNP) is now happening on Substack. The next one is this Sunday, January 18 at 8pm EDT. Link here.
New to Home Base? We have over 60 free guided meditations in our audio library, over 350 meditations on YouTube, and a growing number of community practice videos. All can be part of your daily meditation support.
Beneath the Waves: An Immersive Evening of Meditation
February 26, 2026
Vancouver Aquarium, Vancouver, British Columbia
Come meditate with the fishies!
Excited to do this one-of-a-kind fundraiser for Hollyhock, a registered charity, at the Vancouver Aquarium. Expect an evening of guided meditation in the spooky depths of the aquarium after dark, alongside psychedelic jellyfish, patrolling sharks, and curious otters. Proceeds go to support Hollyhock’s scholarship fund, and to increase accessibility to all programs. If you’re in the area, come on by!
Jeff, as a member of your virtual community, I'll share what I learned about mutuality, stress, relationships, and community when our first child was born with a totally f'd up heart.
(Anybody reading this who is expecting, please know what he had was an extremely rare condition, so please don't worry!)
The stressors on our relationship: Carson spent his first month of life in a neonatal intensive care unit, fighting for his life. At four months, he weighed seven pounds and had to undergo open-heart surgery. It was touch-and-go, but he made it.
At five months, he experienced sudden congestive heart failure, leading to an air ambulance and a second, emergency open-heart surgery. He weighed six pounds. Somehow, by the grace of God, he survived. Following that, he couldn't eat for two years, so we fed him through a tube in his stomach.
More sh** happened, but you get the point. The stress on our relationship was immense and continuous.
As a psychologist, I knew that we tend to naturally turn to our partner for understanding and support when we feel depleted. But we were mutually depleted. Neither of us had anything to give. It would have been easy for the relationship to go south from there by blaming the other for somehow "not doing it right."
The mutuality of our community helped save us. People all over the country, whom we did not know, were praying for us. We could feel their energy, much like you encouraged us to do in the meditation. My boss gave me the space to get my work done in odd hours. Our immediate community of friends and family offered to help where they could, and we let them.
And we gave each other space and grace wherever we could.
For example, we couldn't fix it for each other, but we could listen. We could share our mutual experiences, e.g., "What did you think when the doctor said this?" and "Did you notice what that funny lady said when she got off the elevator at the hospital?", etc.
It was like lived meditation. We stopped trying to control the uncontrollable. Instead, we learned to go with the flow, cried when we needed to, and laughed when we could.
By sharing our lived experience and allowing the mutuality of our extended community to support us, we survived.
Today, Carson is thirty-seven years old and on his second pacemaker. His life's journey has not been easy, to say the least.
But now he is married to a wonderful woman, and we look forward to welcoming their first child, and our first grandchild, into this world soon.
Life is tough. Life is grand.
And when things get overwhelming, I use a mantra my wife shared with me years ago:
Breathe in God. Breathe out love.
Thanks for listening.
One of the things that got me through parenting my neuroquirky kids (now 17 and 22!) and the systems surrounding that was your voice and meditations! It was a port in the storm some days! I ended up writing a kind of map for parents going through this very experience. It’s a practical sense of self journey that kept me sane called Wide Open Spaces: a wellbeing journal for parents of neurodiverse children. It mentions you! Let me know if you’d like a copy. This feels full circle on the receiving and giving front. Love this one too. Lou Fearn