You Are Not Alone

Another major shift of perception comes from understanding that one of the feelings that human beings are the most afraid of is the feeling of being separate and alone. Not only in the middle of the night when despair threatens to overtake us but also woven throughout our days is this blind belief that we are a separate human being who is not connected to the whole. This causes us to compete and compare, which fuels our struggling minds and closes our beautiful hearts.

The feeling of being separate and alone is as far from the truth as you can possibly get. As the renowned scientist David Bohm once said, “The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.”

If you quiet down and look carefully, you will see that absolutely everything is interconnected and interdependent. In other words, we are all one and you’re not alone. Cultivating this shift of perception will transform your life in ways you cannot even imagine. Let’s explore some very basic things that will help you see that you are intimately connected to the whole of life.

The next time you eat a bite of food, realize it took the entire universe to make this food available to you. It took the love affair between the Sun and the Earth, which not only gave life to the plant kingdom but also created the wonderful gift of rain; it took the people who planted the plants, the people who created the irrigation systems, the people who harvested the plants, the people who drove the trucks to the packaging stations, the people who created tires to allow the trucks to move down the road, the people who unpack the food and put it on the grocery store shelves. And this is just scratching the surface of all that is necessary to bring you the food that you need to survive. For a moment I ask you to bow in gratitude for all the efforts of the Sun, the Earth and countless people that keep you alive!

But that’s just one way to recognize you are not alone and everything is interconnected and interdependent. All animals (including humans), plants, and other organisms such as fungi and algae share a common ancestor. In other words, we are all kin! Or as a teacher once told me, “We are all hairy bags of seawater who have learned how to think!” If that’s too hard to imagine, contemplate the truth that no matter what shape, gender, or color of skin we all come from the same gene pool. In other words, there is only one of us here!

Another way to recognize that you are not alone is to see that your pain is not just your pain. It is THE  pain of humanity. If you stub your toe, there are thousands upon thousands of other people right at that moment who have stubbed their toe too. If you are going into triple bypass surgery, there are countless others all around this planet who are experiencing that surgery at the same time. If you’ve lost a loved one there are untold numbers of people right at that moment who have lost their loved one too.

When I was spending a lot of time in hospitals with my children, and my mind was unsettled and reactive, I would ground my attention into my breath and then recognize and feel all the other people in that hospital who were dealing with an illness challenging enough to be hospitalized. I could also feel all the loved ones who were going through the pain of watching a loved one suffer. That immediately calmed me down because I knew I was not alone in this terribly painful time.

The last experience that will help you unhook from the kind of mind that thinks it is separate and alone, is to come to the moon with me and see before you our beautiful home we call Earth. See what so many astronauts saw – that there are no lines parceling the Earth into various countries, which then fight over their borders and their ideologies. As Edgar Mitchell said about his shift in consciousness when he saw the Earth from the moon, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

All these ways of loosening your separate mind’s grip on reality will eventually allow you to recognize that there is a loving presence with you every step of the way. You are not alone!!! You may not have been able to experience it because your mind is so noisy. But even then, it never goes away. To rediscover that you are loved and supported at all times is one of the greatest gifts that come to us as we awaken.

I invite you to take this blog to heart and cultivate moments where you realize you are part of something much bigger than you, rather than being a separate and isolated part. You are interconnected and interdependent with absolutely everything. Allow this to open your heart enough so that your actions come from this knowing of connection rather than the heartache of separation.