On Separation and Belonging
We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
It is the eve of my 65th birthday and my dinner date just cancelled as I was heading out the door to meet her for dinner. Feeling alone and abandoned – not an unfamiliar feeling – but, surprising, as I am so often surrounded with people and projects and thinking how I need more alone time... but 65, how the hell did I get so old? Gone is the sense of being immortal that I had in my teens and twenties. Gone is the passionate exuberance of my 30s and 40s. In the past 15 years I’ve grown to love my life and feel blessed to be doing exactly what I most love – dancing, djing, writing, learning and contributing in ways I feel make a difference through my radio show Conversations and moving meditation classes. I am clear that my purpose in life is to learn to love and serve. In spite of all that I know, I find myself subject to feelings of aloneness, separateness, a sense of not belonging...
Webster defines belonging as “acceptance as a natural member or part of...” Do I feel accepted as a natural member of anything? I am part of the dance tribe, but I am also the leader of the 5 Rhythms community here, which is a role that seems to set me apart in terms of responsibility, commitment and position. I’m part of the KVMR broadcaster body, and yet each of us is highly individual and many of us only know each other by the sound of our voice. I’m not even a baby boomer – wedged in between the beatniks and boomers – again there’s a sense of separateness that pervades my consciousness. When the Dali Lama first came to the US he had a hard time understanding how people could feel so separate and alone. He had no experience of this in his own culture. In this country 1 in 4 people feel that they don’t have a single person they could call in emergency or need! How have we gotten to this place?
You cannot belong to anyone else, until you belong to yourself.
– Pearl Bailey
It takes enormous energy to repress the unwanted parts of our selves, the parts we want to hide, that we cloak in shame and embarrassment. All of this, however, is part of our authentic self, shapes our actions, and creates the stories of who we believe ourselves to be. We want to be happy, successful, and cheerful, but that’s only part of who we are. We belong to it all: our pain, our joy, our suffering, our fear and our love. Can we embrace it all — the good, the bad, and the ugly? Can we be with what arises within us?
Much of my work has been to try and heal the sense of separation that exists in the world and myself. But, I am beginning to realize that I am trying to change something that exists only in the mind and actually perpetuates the myth of “me” and my separation. Why would I try to change something that didn’t exist? It all looks very real — religious, economic, race, power, gender and all the different ways we define ourselves — all seem like very real forms of separation. But, do they exist outside of my own hyperactive monkey mind or are they simply phantoms, dreams, stories we have built through time and experience – an identity or ego character that mistakenly sets me apart from the whole of life?
Better to join in with humanity than to set ourselves apart.
– Pema Chodron
Science and physics have shown without a doubt that everything is alive and connected to everything else. Separation is an illusion! Everything we do and say, everything we are is part of the web of life and shapes the world around us, which in turns shapes us. No matter how much we physically, mentally or emotionally isolate ourselves, we are still inter-dependent and connected to the whole of life. So why do we continue to operate as though our words, actions and even our thoughts are somehow disconnected from each other, our communities, and the world?
Sociologists believe that ancient Greeks viewed themselves as vessels. They believed that thoughts occurred to them by a god or goddess giving an order or direction, rather than something originating from within themselves. Apollo was encouraging them to be brave. Athena was stirring thoughts of love. What if we looked at our thoughts as belonging to the whole of life? Where would we focus our attention? Would we still act as though our thoughts somehow dictated our reality and sense of separation? Or would we begin to inquire into the nature of reality itself?
Energy moves in Waves. Waves move in patterns. Patterns move in rhythms. Human beings are just that, energy, waves, patterns, and rhythms -- Nothing more, nothing less — A dance.
– Gabrielle Roth
One of the greatest rewards of meditation and prayer is the sense of belonging that comes to us. Moving meditation and the Five Rhythms has taught me to recognize myself as energy in motion. Perhaps if we began to see ourselves as Gabrielle Roth says, energy, waves, patterns, and rhythms, we would have a direct experience of our connection to the whole of life. We would see that we are not the penultimate manifestation of evolution, but simply an integral part of the evolutionary unfolding of a timeless process, bound to the earth and all life in a cosmic dance. Perhaps then we would experience what Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, called the “radical unity of all”, pointing to “the spirit of non-separateness” as the One truth.
Maybe this sense of separateness is the very path to finding pure love, because it is in separateness that love is defined. In love we unite with someone or something considered outside of ourselves and discover the path to true unity. Is this a trick of conscious evolution, to create separateness in order to become love and merge with the sacredness of all life? In this kind of love, wouldn’t fear and desire disappear, or at least not be something personal? So I celebrate my separateness, my loneliness and my thoughts of not belonging as a path to real oneness, which is the calling of our time, if life on our lovely Earth is to survive… We aren’t abandoned, we just forgot who we really are!
In love and belonging,
michael
PS. Thank you all for your emails, letters and cards. My birthday climaxed with a moveable feast and hugathon on the streets of Nevada City the next day at the Hot Summer Nights Celebration...
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
– Walt Whitman
