Connection & Perception

We call it all sorts of things – feeling a connection, a spark, falling in love, belonging, feeling oneness. You meet someone and feel like you have known them forever. You might walk in nature and experience yourself one with all of life. Or maybe in your place of worship you feel the love of God fill you. It could be dancing at a concert with strangers and becoming one collective dance as you fall in love with everyone. Maybe you’ve made love and have felt the boundaries between you and your lover melting away….no longer being able to tell where you stop and your lover starts. Meditating, or on a sacred journey perhaps you’ve had the experience of ecstatic Connection, becoming pure awareness, pure consciousness…all sense of a separate self dropping away.

Each of these are experiences of nonordinary Connection. Why do these moments happen? What do they have in common?

What is the difference?

ORDINARY CONNECTION

As a fundamental desire, we want to be liked, and loved. We want to belong. It’s simple. And yet so hard! Why?

With big desire, can come big tangles! However, I’ve found that ordinary connection has two big themes.

First, we often think of connection and love as things that are created or something special that we have to find. We have to “make a connection,” “fit in,” and “get someone to like us” in order to be or feel connected. This perspective means that we are separate by default until we do something. It also makes us dependent on other people for Connection.

And what happens if you can’t make it happen? What if love is elusive?

We often become either innies or outies. As an innie –  you start to believe something must be wrong with you. If only you were thinner, smarter, more confident then people would like you. Or as an outie – we decide it is about the other person. They are assholes. We get a bad feeling about someone and avoid them. We fall out of love because the magic is gone and the same person is now driving us crazy. Or perhaps we decide, the person that we don’t connect with is simply not one of us.

They become the other, which brings us to the second common way we define connection.

Sameness.

As humans, we like to find people just like us. It makes sense. We seek out likeminded people—our tribe. We feel safer. Your tribe gets you. We feel connected when we find common ground. Through sameness, we sort ourselves by color, by belief, religion or political party. With the rise of social media and the internet, it has become easy to sort ourselves. Our tribes are becoming more and more narrow and fragmented. When we define connection as sameness, difference becomes threatening and the pressure to conform is real. It can even become dangerous. In order to feel the safety of sameness, we have to define difference as the enemy, often literally.

Look, we have to be honest. There is some comfort in this approach to connection. It is just easier when we are with people that are the same as we are. If everyone thought just like you, had the same preferences, and same ideas of how to act….it would be easier…sort of. We have some fantasy that if everyone was just like us, then all the problems of the world would disappear!

However, we also limit growth, and learning when we hold tightly to people just like us. And, come on, after a while sameness gets boring! And even more true, who actually wants to be like everyone else?  After a bunch of conformity, we want to rebel!

Even oneness, can be easily confused as sameness. We are all one. The confusing part is even we are all one…does that mean we are the same? It is easy to then take that feeling of oneness and decided everyone is like us!  This works in theory, until we start cursing the driver in front of us.

With either of these versions there is another problem. Both of these definitions mean that we are in some way dependent on the other person or our environment to give us the feeling of being connected. Connection becomes tangled in all sorts of external factors which we think we can control. But guess what? We can’t. We can’t make someone like us or love us. Fitting in, doesn’t mean we are safe or even that we are actually feeling connection. And even if we do fit in or get someone to love us – what version of ourselves have we shown them in order for them to like us? Will the person leave us if we do something they don’t like? If we change, will they still want to be with us? If I disagree with my community will I be rejected?

The shittiest part? We are desperate to be loved just for being ourselves and at the same time, being ourselves is often the thing we are most afraid of revealing.  How can we really be ourselves and still be loved?

Ordinary connection is crazy-making.  Its tribal politics making. It’s loneliness epidemic-making. It is war-making. It is lone gunman making.

So all we need is love right?

In a world filled with hate, it is clear we need more love and connection. Great. Now what? How do we do that? What does that actually mean? Can you love on demand? If you love your enemy, what are you doing?

THE BIG SHIFT

NonOrdinary Connection is knowing that you are connected. Period.

In fact, there is no such thing as not connected. There is nothing you can do to become not connected.

When you feel disconnected it is simply because you are no longer able to perceive what is already there.

And when you feel deeply connected, you feel love. Love is a byproduct of Connection.  When we deeply connect with someone, we can’t help but feel love.

Think about that. What would the world be like if everyone could feel they were already to connected to everyone else?

There is good news and bad news about this shift. The good news is that when you feel disconnected, it is 100% within your control to feel connection again. It is also 100% within your control to feel connection with anyone and everyone. The bad news? It is 100% in your control whether you feel connection with someone or not. That means no more blaming the other person or the circumstances or your past experiences for not wanting or not being able to connect with someone.

There are important caveats to this shift:

Experiencing connection does not automatically mean anything. We often stop ourselves from feeling connection because we will then feel obligated, or responsible. Being NonOrdinary means, you can feel deep love and connection for someone and be also very clear that you don’t want them in your life. You can feel connection and not be responsible for the other persons experience (in fact this is super important). You can fall in love with someone and not want to be sexual or even date them. You can feel Connection and also be clear that the other person’s behavior is not acceptable. Feeling Connection is just one facet of being in conscious relationship with another person.

Also, the other person does not have to feel connection at the same time. Connection is completely about your experience.

And at the same time….

When both people are able to feel the truth of deep connection that is always there between us, something magical happens….it becomes exponential and we are able to experience even more pleasure and possibility with another person. But remember, when two people feel connection – it doesn’t automatically mean something (see above). Both people are at choice (Expression) about what form (Purpose) their connection may or may not take.

Connection is also not just about people. Nonordinary connection also expands our senses, gives us access to deeply feeling nature, the planet and realms beyond the physical.