You Belong: A Call for Connection

Belonging is an expression of life.

Belonging is revealed through awareness. When we cultivate the capacity to know what is happening in any moment (minus our opinion of it), then we can connect to belonging.

At the heart of not belonging is what I refer to as “the delusion of separation”—the belief that you are separate from other people, from other beings, and from nature itself. And it is a delusion. You are not separate. You never were. You never will be.

Belonging flourishes within this paradox: everything is connected, yet everything is experienced as separate.

How do you acknowledge differences and inequities yet also hold a firm conviction that fundamentally we are all irrevocably interconnected and belong to each other?

Community offers the promise of belonging and calls for us to acknowledge our interdependence. To belong is to act as an investor, owner, and creator of this place. To be welcome, even if we are strangers. As if we came to the right place and are affirmed for that choice.

We may think we learn to belong. In fact, we unlearn not belonging.

We feel we don’t belong because society categorizes and ranks everything, leaving us unable to bridge the hierarchical chasms between ourselves and all we deem “not us.” We become trapped in thoughts about ourselves, missing the vital experience of being that is always present.