Everything is connected

We just forget to notice it. When we think of someone we care about, we feel it inside us, through love. This is just one example of how as human beings we’re connected to everything. We all have the capacity to sense it, it just hasn’t been nurtured or prioritized in our culture and society.

Many spiritual traditions talk about it. Physics continues to explore interconnections between the smallest pieces of matter. Some of the most complex mathematical equations and scientific experiments demonstrate it. Disconnection causes dysfunction but connection heals. 

Nature demonstrates this interconnectedness all of the time. The extensive root system of trees and the mycelium of fungal organisms that help them communicate with one another. Birds fly and migrate as a unit. The light of the sun touches a plant and participates in photosynthesis, a chemical process that allows a plant to convert light into energy that it uses to live and grow.

Water is one of my favorite examples of interconnectedness. Water falls as rain, soaks into the earth, evaporates into the air, and returns to the rivers and the oceans. Plants participate in this incredible physiological process called transpiration where they absorb water through its roots, transport it throughout the trunk and branches and evaporate it into the atmosphere as water vapor, primarily through tiny pores in the leaves called stomata.

We humans are not that different from plants in the way weather moves through us. Humans are approximately 70% water. We have feet and legs that offer a strong foundational connection to the earth, our head and arms, the branches of the tree that receive the light of consciousness and share it with others, and a central trunk that connects them. In my masterclass, there are guided experiences where one can experience this interconnectedness from within their own human tree of life and the water that is always in us and around us.

If you haven't noticed yet, I love making connections and helping people to understand and experience this interconnectedness. As an osteopathic physician I work every day with this interconnectedness. My patients often remind me that they know that “the kneebone is connected to the anklebone” - and there is so much more than this. Osteopaths sense and balance the relationship between muscles and bones, our diaphragms that pump and move our blood and lymphatic fluids, the extensive fascia enveloping all of our organs and muscles, the connection between our brain and cerebral spinal fluid, the biodynamic fluid fields, the intricate balance of our nervous system, and how these all work together from head to toe, within the wholeness of our mind, body, and spirit. 

Our body physiology demonstrates this interconnectedness with the air that we breathe in every moment using it in internal metabolic processes including cellular respiration that converts oxygen into energy that our body uses to keep us alive. And this respiratory breathing is happening on many levels in many parts of our body. We’re actually being breathed in every moment.

On smaller levels, we’re made of cells, DNA, atoms, particles, quarks, and a new one I just learned about called “gluons” that functions like glue to hold stuff together. In physics, quantum entanglement happens when two particles link together in a certain way no matter how far apart they are in space. In fact, the “observer effect” means that observation inevitably influences the system being observed. It's deep and complex stuff, and science has yet so much to discover about all of these connections, but you don’t need to be a nuclear physicist to experience this interconnectedness. 

Even Einstein said it: “A person experiences life as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. Our task must be to free ourselves from this self-imposed prison, and through compassion, to find the reality of Oneness.”

You don’t have to go live in a monastery or become a priest or find a guru to experience oneness. People go away for a spiritual retreat or spend time meditating. These things can help but what is the most beautiful thing to me, is that we can do it in any moment and it can help so many things. We’re all wired to be connected to everything. Our nervous system has an extensive network that helps us to sense and feel this interconnectedness. There are fancy words for how we sense and feel through perception, and our inner connectedness, called interoception.

And most of the time the thing that keeps us from the connection is our thoughts. We know that everything is connected but we don’t live as if we are. So much of the time we forget to experience what we know and believe to be true. We love being in nature because it feels good. People go places and even spend money to experience “forest bathing”. It reminds us of our connectedness to the natural world and its beauty. But whether we’re inside or outside, we’re always connecting with it. What if we did remember and feel that beautiful peace of the Nature that is constantly supporting us, mind, body, and spirit.

There is a spiritual teaching about a fish in the ocean being thirsty. This teaching refers to our own spiritual unawareness. Just as a fish is completely surrounded by and using the water in the ocean for internal processes but still searches for water. It seems impossible. However humans endlessly seek peace, God, fulfillment, and meaning externally, completely unaware that the divine is very likely already within them.

It’s amazing to me what happens when we humans remember our own interconnectedness. Just this week a patient put it beautifully when I taught her how to do it by putting her attention in the lower part of her body. When she did it, she stopped talking so fast, she became still, and her muscles softened into my hands. She said, "Do you mean we just need to consider our feet?”. I laughed because she put it so simply and beautifully. A few minutes later as she continued to practice feeling the connection she asked, “when we use our mind to feel our feet does the energy pass through all of the parts of us?”. The simple answer was yes! The definition of energy is a whole other topic but I think you get the idea. She had made the connection in a simple and profound way. 

What’s really important and beautiful is that we as human beings have the capacity to consciously live and breathe within our interconnectedness, and it helps so many things. I’ve seen it lower heart rate, stop pain, eliminate panic attacks, heal trauma, and so many other things. A simple connection makes all the work someone is doing really work. 

The best thing I’ve learned after all of the work I’ve done in myself and with patients is the magic that happens when we bring it into our daily life. Even when we’re in the midst of a challenge, and especially then, it's remembering that conscious connection to the goodness that’s in and around us that makes the difference. We feel better, we’re more patient, more healthy, and more kind. When we remember, we recognize it. We can simply allow ourselves to drop in and sense and feel it. When we do this, we feel Peace. We feel Whole. We are One.