The near enemy of connection is control.
In Buddhist philosophy, a near enemy is a quality that imitates a virtue but ultimately distorts it. Far enemies are easy to recognize—cruelty stands in opposition to compassion, despair to joy.
Near enemies, however, are subtle. They can feel almost identical to the real thing, which makes them harder to detect.
Comfort is the near enemy of safety, pity of compassion and peace of liberation.
Control can sometimes wear the mask of care. It feels like closeness, like attention, like love. Yet at its core, it is a refusal to surrender to what is. It is an attempt to use someone else to soothe our own fears.
While true connection arises from love, control is born of fear.
Liberation Practice Field teaches the somatic & relational tools that help us move beyond punishment and practice accountability, boundaries, conflict and repair in the relationships and movements we already have. Doors are open until OCTOBER 11th !!!
The near enemy of connection is control.
Connection says, “I will stay present with you, even without knowing how this will end.”
Control whispers, “I will only feel safe if I can manage the outcome.”
Because our need for connection never disappears, its near enemy slips in unnoticed. It keeps us alive, but never nourished. A ghost that keeps us company in our loneliness.
Control takes the lead when intimacy feels too raw, shielding us from exposure before we can be hurt. Connection, meanwhile, waits—unguarded, tender, defenseless.
True connection asks us to stay—not necessarily with the other person, but with reality itself. It invites us to meet what is without armor, without bending it to fit our fears.
The reason why we confuse connection with control is simple: it is the basis on which our societies have been created. It is the water we drink and the air we breathe. We live under constant control and surveillance, exploitation and policing. This system is called ableist, racist, classist patriarchy.
Somatics teaches us that we have 3 inherent need: safety, dignity, belonging.
Without those, it is trauma.
Liberation Practice Field is the course where your politics get to live in your body and your relationships instead of your mind and your phone. Inside LPF, we French press the whole theory to actual relationships with ourselves other and the land. Doors are open until OCTOBER 11th !
Needless to say, all of us are survivors.
But if we have to give the state its flowers, it is extraordinarily skilled at offering us the near enemies of what we actually need—just enough resemblance to keep us running, complying and making money for it.
Instead of safety, it offers us security: surveillance, policing and the promise of protection if we remain compliant. It also offers comfort to those who can afford it, while keeping everyone else trapped in survival.
Instead of dignity, it offers us status and respectability. We are told that if we perform goodness correctly, become productive enough and remain legible to power, we may earn the right to be treated as human.
Instead of belonging, it offers us assimilation. We can fit in, as long as we abandon the parts of ourselves that disturb the order of things.
These substitutes keep us chasing privately what can only be created relationally. Safety, dignity, belonging can not be granted by domination. They emerge through the way we practice responsibility and care with one another.
Stay ungovernable,
Care
