Feel at Home by Knowing You Belong
What will your presence create today?
It’s easy to feel alone a lot of the time, especially when you’re struggling. Stress, anxiety, trauma, or difficult relationships feel as if they are uniquely your own. Being with other people might even underscore the feeling of aloneness.
A big part of that sense of isolation is believing that you are here and the world is out there. Your default experience is one of fundamental separateness from everything that is not you. In one sense this perspective is right—for example, you and a tree don’t occupy the same physical space at the same time (which is a very good thing), and only you have have access to your inner world.
But on another level, you’re intimately connected to everything around you. You can stand only because the floor or the ground supports you. When you breathe air into your lungs, it becomes part of you, right down to your cells. When you walk, the atmosphere parts all around you to make space so you can move through it.
Nothing that you do can happen in isolation. Every action is a relationship.
And it’s more than that. The “blue sky” is blue only because you see it that way. Wavelengths of light in and of themselves have no color. The characteristic blueness that you know so well exists when you and the sky interact through your visual system. You offer the sky its color.
In the same way, when you see trees, your phone or computer, a window, or anything else, you and those objects are co-creating their appearance. There is no image of a tree without your witnessing it. Trees don’t have eyes to see themselves or fingers to feel their own bark. Those sensory experiences enter the world through you. A tree is more fully a tree when you are present.
When you see things this way, it’s really hard to feel like a stranger in the world. You and everything you witness are collaborating to make each other who you are. The matter all around you is not indifferent to your presence and regard. Everything seems to take joy in being known by you—in being brought into fuller existence through you.
You might even realize that everything around you is for you. Who else would it be for? You are the only one who is having this exact relationship with the world. No one else is seeing what you are seeing right now, from your particular vantage point in space and time.
This level of awareness can’t be forced, and you don’t have to find it alone! The world that you are a part of will help you see beyond separation. You simply open to it, making space for a wider perspective:
Perhaps you’re not a solitary island. The distance that your mind imagined between you and everything around you begins to dissolve. You are home, and all of creation is thrilled that you’re here.
You belong. This is your world. Enjoy being part of it.
A 30-Day Stress Reduction Plan
If you’re a Think Act Be supporter, be sure to get your 30-day plan for managing daily stress. It’s included in your membership!
Here is Day 2 (since I’m posting this on the 2nd of the month). It’s a quick reminder that you don’t have to be at the mercy of unhelpful thoughts that make your stress worse:
Free Deconstructing Anxiety webinar on Friday!
My friend and fellow psychologist Dr. Todd Pressman is offering a free webinar this Friday, April 5, 2024 at 11:00 AM EDT. Todd will be presenting his signature Deconstructing Anxiety approach. I’ve heard so many good things about Todd’s work, which echo my own impressions. Here’s the link.
With love and gratitude,