It is a universal human desire. To be connected. To belong. To know we belong here and re part of something greater than just our own selves an our own day to day, menial tasks. 

I struggled to feel connected for decades. Truly, Even as a child,, I cried myself to sleep every night, and was deeply, painfully alone. This was not because I was actually alone. I had parents who wanted me and siblings I adored. But they did not have much in the way of tools for holding space or connecting on an emotional level. For the parents I grew up with, connection looked more like an unhealthy co-dependence than a steady relationship with something greater. The loneliness came with me into my adolescence and early adulthood. It left me grasping, desperate for connection to another, for someone else to fill the gaping whole I felt in my heart. But of course, no one else could ever fill that space, because the very feeling of loneliness was a plea from my inner Self to embrace being alone with myself. The request “to be alone with myself in a loving and non-non-judgmental way,” seems to simple, so obvious, when put in this small sentence, yet it took me decades to ever hear the request, never mind fulfill it. 

As with any hero’s journey, the search for Self took me far and wide. It took me to the mystical birth city of Kabbalah, it took me to study many forms of healing arts with many great teachers, it took me to the peaks of tall mountains, led me to grow my own food and even make meat and clothing from road kill. It led me to primitive camping and cooking over the fire in 1 degree weather in Montana. The search took me to tropical beaches, to sacred temples, through emotionally abusive relationships, to hours of meditation, wood chopping and water carrying during a winter hermitage in a shack in the forest where the only amenities were a spring, a hole in the ground, and a wood stove. Eventually, the search spit me out in the northern forest, finally alone in the winter woods, snow slowly drifting through the canopy, and I, utterly lost, not just as a metaphor, but quite literally lost in an expanse of forest that stretched from Canada to Mexico. I was lost.

In hindsight, a few years later, it was in this moment of being truly alone and contemplating the possibility of never again seeing another human face, that I reconnected to my Self. That day, I did make it out of the forest, but the loneliness who has been my stolid companion for so many years, stayed behind.

Of course, integration was a process, and I believe that as long as we still breathe, we have yet more to learn. Still, there is a new, or perhaps re-newed relationship with Self that exists within me.

We’ve all had our own version of our ‘hero’s journey,” and weather you are in a place of feeling deeply connected or incredibly disconnected, or whether you’re somewhere in between, ebbing and flowing as the river does, you know, deeply and completely, somewhere within you, that unknowable thing which is the Self. I invite you to sit still for just a few moments and ask yourself, where do you feel it in your body? What does it feel like? What is the quality of the sensation? For me, and for many, it is felt as an expansiveness in the front and center of the chest. Sometimes, when in a meditative state, I will guide either myself of a client to get in touch with this feeling. Then, when the sensation is strong, we set a ‘key,’ by tapping the front of the chest three times with the intention that this action will now be the key to remind and open up that connection when it seems lost. 

When I feel anxious or sad, I remember that it is only a feeling, and it will pass. I pause. I allow it. I feel it. I tap my chest gently, and say to myself, “Sheefra, we are in this together. I am here with you, and we will get through this together. I will not abandon you.”