The Human Dance

We come together and then we pull apart. Connect and disconnect. Unite and separate.
It's the dance of Togetherness and Separateness.

At the recent Enlightenment Intensive I worked with my question, What Is Another? Even though I was on staff rather than attending as a participant I still went pretty deep into my contemplation--after all, there I was in the midst of it focusing on all these Others, it was rather perfect.

I started getting the sense of a strong, warm hand resting reassuringly on my right shoulder, sending me the message that it's OK, it's all OK. This separateness that I have been experiencing all of my life, this aloneness that catapults me into a deep and desperate yearning for connection with Another is simply OK. It's natural, it's the way things work here in the physical world.

I've identified with being wrong my whole life and I've suffered with an incredible sense of abandonment. My mother was pregnant with me when she and my father divorced, returning home soon after I was born to live with her parents. I never met my father until I was seventeen years old. I thought about him all the time, wondering of his greatness. He was my father after all. I yearned for his love and missed him terribly. As far back as I can remember, I was convinced that I had done something wrong, and thought of myself as a bad seed of sorts. I had it figured that something inside of me just wasn't right. This assessment of self latched on to my psyche as a spurious, absolute knowing, a sad misunderstanding masquerading as the absolute truth: Adrienne = Broken. Why else would a father leave behind his little daughter? Something was obviously innately wrong with me if I was unworthy of even my father's love. I didn't see myself as broken because he left me. He left me because I was broken.

We all make up stories of the world and of ourselves. This was my story and it greatly influenced my way of being in the world, my way of perceiving what others were offering me. I blamed myself for my sense of separation from others. It was a self-loathing of sorts. I thought of separateness as wrong, and that it was my fault, stemming from the fact that I wasn't good enough for others to want to connect with me. I saw myself as flawed, as if there was a basic defect in my overall design. I was a glitch in the matrix.

It's not that I've lived my life unable to connect with others. Although I never had an over abundance of friends when I was young and often felt misfitted in the social scene of grade school and junior high, once I hit high school it was easier for me fit in and I found a mock sense of self in my looks, budding sexuality, and identifying with one popular cause or another. As an adult I've made deep connections. I have a sense of belonging. I've established long-term friendships and commitment in intimate relationships. But this nagging sense of disconnect has plagued me most of my life. It has crept up and surprised me at the least expected and inopportune times, causing me a good deal of suffering. I've found myself overcome with such an unbearable sense of separation and abandonment that I've cried out in grief. And yet I've also been blessed with piercingly deep connections with Truth, Love, and Another. These experiences, contrasted with those of separation have thrown me into desperate yearnings to feel oneness again, to find my way home, merge with the beloved and be filled.

At the intensive, that warm hand was reassuring me that separation is OK. I was tasting this subtle sweetness of separation. I realized that the less I resisted the separation, allowing it to be without judging it as wrong, the sweeter it was. Also, the more I allowed myself to experience the separation, the easier it was to move deeper into, and trust the connection when it was available.
I've always had the idea that connection with others is the natural state of being. That's become a given for me as I've directly experienced the truth of this ultimate connection. But here I am in the physical world, choosing to experience all things physical and this is a world of dualism-- connection and separation are both natural states in this neck of the woods. I came here to experience separation too. To separate myself from others and live autonomously.

I find the physical universe such a merciful and accommodating place, along with all its harsh survival of the fittest modalities and karmic kick backs. It really wouldn't be easy, or fun for that matter, going at it all alone with these bodies and minds and egos that create an incredible sense of a separate individuality. But Others are always close at hand. We are born into families with parents and siblings who immediately bond with us and then we have extended family and friends and neighbors and communities to connect with and form a sense of belonging. From this starting point we immerse ourselves into the human experience.

It's a dance, a beautiful incredible dance of coming together and pulling apart. A push me pull you drama full of tears and sadness, joy and laughter. It's the human equivalent of the rasa lila, Krsna's divine dance with the gopis, who are engaging in what is considered by some as the highest form of love, the emotion/devotion of separation from the beloved. It was the same with Caitanya, an incarnation of Krsna, who took birth as a devotee of himself and spent his life overcome with ecstasy, inundated and blissed out by both love and the grief of separation from his beloved self.

If I had wanted to only experience connection with others, why would I have come into this physical world to begin with? I'm supposing that what I am is a non-physical being, come from a state of union and truth to experience all of this here. Why? Certainly not only to resist and suffer and strive to return from whence I came, mid-adventure because I'm distraught with separation anxiety? That doesn't make sense to me. I'm here to play as a blended being, both physical and non-physical, to experience this human condition in its totality. To both connect with others and to experience separateness also. That's the rub. I need to stop resisting the separation, to acknowledge its existence when it arrives. To welcome it as a friend and stop judging it as wrong. To stop judging myself as wrong because I experience it.

I've been playing around with this separation more, getting more familiar with it. When I sense it's arrival I'm just noticing it with an--"Ah, you are here. I feel you." I'm breathing into it and allowing it to be with me without the screen of my old stories of what it is and means. I'm no longer interested in blaming myself or Another because of the separateness between us. I know it's OK, I know it's a a part of our human condition and that it's temporary, just like all things in this physical world.

So again, I'm learning to accept more of what is--wanting what is--loving what is. When I return to my non-physical existence I will be done with the illusion of separation but for now, it's a significant step in the dance of my life. I've been practicing diligently and I'm becoming a better dancer, learning the steps, tripping less over my own and my partners' feet. I'm finding that the graceful steps of separation are part of what makes the human dance so lovely.