A Personal Connection

I’m in the hair salon and a little guy, maybe three, is with his mother and grandmother waiting for his haircut.

Through the glass window, he sees a car pull up at the curb. “Who that car belong to?”

His mom says she doesn’t know.

A big smile is on his face as he whirls around and points at another car: “That momma’s car!”

A few moments later, he picks something up in the salon and plays with it. Then he looks at me sitting across the room and grins a big grin.

I am struck by this little boy’s complete freedom to interact with everyone and everything in his environment. He feels like he belongs, and he isn’t afraid to make contact.

This little boy’s spontaneity flows out of a deep sense of connection to his world. There are moments, situations, when he may draw back a bit, perhaps act shyly. But his fundamental state of being is one of belonging, feeling at home.

Our society has been dubbed a high-tech, low-touch world. We grow up to feel increasingly separate from, even alienated from, the world around us. We go about our lives with a high degree of isolation, even when we are in close proximity to others. Connection isn’t one of the strengths of modern western culture.

When our sense of connection has been ripped apart––in divorce, loss of a loved one, loss of a job––or when we feel alienated, all alone—we long to connect. Being an individual is important to us, but we don’t want to be isolated.

I have been on an individual journey recently. It’s called The Presence Process. Devised by Michael Brown, it doesn’t lend itself to group work. It’s very much a personal process. It’s not something you talk about a lot with others. You do it alone in your room at home.

Although The Presence Process is a journey that can only be taken by each of us as individuals, as I take this journey I find myself able to connect in a deeper way than ever before. As I come in touch with the divine Presence that is the source of all life, I experience a profound underlying oneness to our existence. The Presence I experience at my own center is the same Presence that forms the core of everyone else.

Becoming aware of divine Presence in life creates community. For we realize that, beneath our apparent isolation, we are all part of a universal life. The more deeply this realization dawns on us, the more we desire to connect. The more we plunge into the depths of this Presence, the more capable are we of touching each other’s hearts.

A woman was telling me of how her ability to connect is developing—of how even the people in her life are different people these days. She just doesn’t care to spend her time among people with whom she can’t connect.

She shared that in her fifty years of marriage, not once did she have a conversation with her husband in which she experienced the depth of connection that is so essential to her today in her relationships.

“Fifty wasted years,” she said.

And then she corrected herself. “No, not wasted––they are what got me where I am today.” Today, she can connect soul to soul.

Everything that happens in our lives is part of a drama that is being played out to bring us in touch with Presence. The external world of each of our lives is meant to drive us to find the internal, where Presence resides.

And, paradoxically, as we connect with Presence, we desire to—and find we are able to—connect with each other. But until we take the personal journey of connecting with Presence within our own being, we will never truly connect with another.