Belonging

The first book I wrote is titled Belonging to Life and as I write these words the title still touches me deeply. I used the word belonging because everything I explored in the book was how I discovered, for the first time in my life, that I actually belonged!

Belonging is an essential ingredient for healthy life. Research now shows that belonging can be as important as food and water to a human being.  Children thrive when they feel they belong. Elderly people live longer when they have a group they meet with regularly. In other words, we flourish when we have someplace where we connect, somewhere we are seen and heard, whether it is our partner, our co-worker or our book club.

The longing to belong is so strong that it can motivate young people to become a part of a gang or a white supremacist organization. When no belonging is available it brings forth mass shootings such as Columbine, Stoneman Douglas and the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook elementary.

In my childhood I didn’t belong. I didn’t belong to my extremely dysfunctional and disconnected family and I also didn’t belong at school for how I dealt with all the craziness in my home was to withdraw.  So, riding the bus, or lunch time, or even walking down the halls was torture. Before I began the journey back to belonging to myself and to life, my dreams were mainly about being on the outside looking in. In other words, being all alone.

Most especially I didn’t belong to myself. I had lost myself very early in my life. That is why it made so much sense to endlessly stuff myself with food and, when I went away to college, to add alcohol to the mix and when I left college to get lost in drugs. I used to look back at my teens and 20s with great disgust about all the unskillful things I did. But now I see it all through the lens of my heart. I was just lost, doing the best that I could while completely disconnected from myself and from life. In other words, belonging nowhere.

Now I belong to myself and because of that I belong to life. Tears arise as I write this. The experience of belonging is one of the most nourishing things you can know, and I will go as far to as to say that it’s even better than chocolate! (Anybody who knows me, knows that’s quite a statement!)

It took me a while to walk through the labyrinth of fear, self-hate and despair, which made me feel like I didn’t belong. But slowly, just as light gradually appears in the morning, I saw through all the heart killing misperceptions I took on in my childhood. As I began to be able to breathe open breaths again and dissolve the armoring around my heart, I finally recognized that I was okay exactly as I was and thus, I was loveable. In other words, I not only belonged to myself, but I belonged to my life. Tears come again as I write these words. It was like I lived in a parched and desolate desert of non-belonging and now I live in the oasis of my heart where I truly belong.

I am just one human being who has walked this journey back into belonging and because you are reading these words, the truth that you belong is calling to you too for we all deserve to belong. One of the most powerful ways to discover that you belong is to see that your journey is unique.  Life has given you the gift of life because it needed to express itself as you – exactly as you are – and you are one of a kind!

You may think that you aren’t doing life ‘right’ and you are less than other people, but all your experiences make up the totality of you!  Because you are different than anybody else, you experience life through a unique lens and thus have something to offer from your incomparable experience of life. In other words, you are needed, and you belong!

In rediscovering belonging, you can also look for ways you are similar with others instead of focusing on ways you are different. There is so much more you have in common with your fellow human beings than not. We have all been wounded by life; we all have a story that we are not enough: we all want to be seen and accepted as we are, and we all yearn to come home to our hearts.

Another shift of perception that helps you to move into belonging is to understand that everybody deals with the feeling of not belonging……everybody……even people who look like they belong such as CEO’s or the president of your school class or your so-called successful sibling or the much-touted athlete.  We all carry great vulnerability and we all long to belong. And having been able to see into the minds and hearts of countless people for the last 30+ years, I can say that absolutely everybody is a work in process. There is no such thing as a totally together human being!

Cultivate the courage to accept yourself as you are. Be willing to live life from the truth that you are a unique and necessary part of life. And open your heart to the truth that everybody carries a broken heart and searches for belonging. If you can’t do this for yourself, do it for all the children that are coming after us. They need examples of people who, against all the odds, belong to themselves and thus belong to life.

I leave you with the intention that I wrote at the very beginning of Belonging to Life:

To belong to Life, to belong to your own life, to trust the activity of Love.

To belong to Life, to belong to your own life, to know the activity of Love.

To belong to Life, to belong to your own life, to become the activity of Love.

If this calls to you, we invite you to become a part of Mary’s interactive online course, What’s in Your Way is the Way beginning on September 25th. The price is marked down $100 until Sept. 16th. For more information about the course, Click Here