We come from oneness and we return to oneness. Our time in between is defined by separation. For highly sensitive people, this separation is our kryptonite – the thing that makes us feel most vulnerable in the world – and we often become aware of it very early on. We realize that we’re not one with our parents. We experience rejection from peers. We learn that death exists.
Without the proper community rituals that could hold a young person through this unbearably painful and scary awareness, we’re left to cling to false footholds to gain some sense of control in the sea of uncertainty. This is often when shame and intrusive thoughts arrive.
Maybe if I make all the right decisions, I can prevent bad things from happening.
Maybe if I’m perfect, I can prevent being exiled from the tribe (which is the ultimate separation).
Shame offers the illusion of control: if the problem is me, I can make myself as pure as possible so that I’m never shunned by those I love.
Separated at Birth
Let’s start at the beginning as we chart the series of separations that define our lives.
We begin in the womb, in a symbiotic state of perfect union. Rocked in warm waters, nourished without effort, we spend 9 months ensconced in the deepest oneness we’ll know during our time on earth.
And then… we’re born: expelled from the womb in our first experience of exile. No wonder babies often meet the world with a protest of rage.
The separations continue, often immediately after birth. I’ve been told that after I was born, I was taken into the nursery, as was the custom in 1971, and the nurses brought me to my mother when it was time to feed. The story goes that I was in such a deep “sleep” that my mother couldn’t wake me up and by the time the nurses came to take me back to the nursery, I hadn’t eaten.
If the story is true, I can only imagine the depth of my despair upon leaving the perfect, warm, symbiotic oneness of the womb and being placed in a bassinet in a room full of crying babies. I assume that I was not only asleep but dissociated, and that’s why my mother couldn’t wake me.
Stepping Stones of Separation
From birth, the separations continue. For many of my clients, their earliest memory is being left to cry on the first day of school. I also share this memory: watching my mother walk away from me, her body receding down the long hallway, while I sobbed and clung to my childhood blanket who accompanied me everywhere.
Then sleepovers at friends’ houses. Sleepaway camp. And even going to college.
Victoria and I discussed many of these early separations in our Gathering Gold episode on separation anxiety, which you can find here.
The anguish of separation often continues into adulthood. For my younger clients, it can show up when they’re graduating from college and establishing a life on their own. It’s then that the shattering grief that childhood is over and siblings have splintered into their various lives across the country or world hits hard.
The grief can be profoundly destabilizing, breaking our hearts open until we feel undone by what seems to be an unbearable separation from our original family.
As we embark on a healing path, many find yet another layer of separation as they discover that most people are not on a healing path. There’s a loneliness that often ensues as you realize that you’re different from many people around you who are content to live according to mainstream values: focusing on accolades and externals to the exclusion of the inner world. Even something like deciding to reduce alcohol consumption separates you from the collective, and can contribute to a feeling of separateness.
The key, here, is to find a community of people with shared values, but that’s not always easy. This is one of the primary reasons why I write this blog and why I was excited to start the Community Garden. There are few things more normalizing than realizing you’re not the only one.
The Wound is Where the Light Enters
And yet, what we learn over time is that our kryptonite is also our medicine. As Rumi famously said, “The wound is place where the light enters you.” It’s our acute awareness of separation that can propel us to discover our pathways of connection and belonging, which ultimately become our greatest sources of joy.
From separation comes connection.
From loneliness comes union.
It’s then, when the old ways of trying to manage the grief about the fundamental separation of being human stop working, that we discover a place that we can never be separated from. We learn that there is a way in which we are so deeply connected to one another that no matter how it seems, we are one family.
There is also an invisible, spiritual realm from which we came and into which we will return. I say that as if it’s a fact, which, of course it is not. But even if we don’t believe there is a realm beyond this one, what we know is that we all came from the oneness of a womb, and we will all return to the womb of the Earth.
During our time in between birth and death, we seek out those places of belonging: the friends who are family and family who are true friends; work that gives us a sense of purpose as we serve our community in the ways we are called to serve; opening the channels to the creative realm or something we can’t quite explain; being in nature, who always folds us in her web of belonging.
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