Who Am I Not to Be a Voice?
What if our experiences were never ours alone?
NOTE: Originally written June 29, 2024
This was one of those pieces I didn't really plan. I sat down without knowing exactly what I was going to say and let the words come.
This is intimidating, much like when I pull cards for a Tarot reading. I have no idea what will come through, but eventually something always does.
Who am I to be a voice? But also, who am I not to be a voice?
I have journeyed through too much to simply keep it all to myself. My children have journeyed through so much, too. Over time, I have come to believe that our experiences are not only for our own healing. What we live changes us, and in changing us, it changes what we bring into the world around us.
Maybe that is one way healing moves through the collective—not because any one of us is responsible for healing the world, but because no life exists entirely unto itself. Every life touches another life. Every awareness changes the way we interact with what is around us. We see this throughout nature in symbiotic relationships, where seemingly separate lives affect and sustain one another.
I have come to see human experience in much the same way. No experience seems completely isolated. What happens within one life can create awareness, consciousness, compassion, or change that moves beyond that individual life and becomes part of something larger.
“As above, so below.”
I keep seeing the same patterns echoed at different scales: the macro reflected in the micro, the inner world reflected in the outer, and the same ancient stories appearing again and again through art, religion, mythology, nature, and human relationships.
To me, they often seem to tell some version of the same story: separation leading us back toward unity.
I think of Source* as unity experiencing itself through countless individual perspectives. Through separation, there is contrast. Through contrast, there is experience. And through experience, perhaps Source comes to know itself in increasingly intricate ways.
Even an infant begins with this process. We enter a physical body and slowly become accustomed to the physical and temporal world. We learn object permanence. We begin to recognize ourselves as separate beings. We develop preferences, identities, attachments, fears, desires, and ways of understanding the world around us.
Then life becomes increasingly complicated.
We encounter the parts of ourselves we resist. We meet our shadow. We rebel against it, deny it, project it, wrestle with it, and sometimes eventually learn to accept and love parts of ourselves we once believed were unacceptable.
Somewhere within that process, I have begun to experience another possibility: that the people around me are not entirely separate from me either. They can reflect aspects of myself—who I once was, who I might have been, what I fear, what I love, what I reject, or what I have not yet understood.
I have come to see many of these human experiences as part of a journey back toward remembering that we are Source, with no true separation.
That does not mean every experience feels good. Of course we prefer some experiences over others. Pain hurts. Grief hurts. Fear, anger, loss, betrayal, and loneliness are very different experiences from joy, love, peace, connection, and wonder.
I no longer feel the same need, though, to immediately divide every experience into good or bad, right or wrong, dark or light. Sometimes an experience is simply an experience, and I may not understand its place in my life while I am living through it.
The idea of non-duality has become meaningful to me because it invites me to stop fighting the existence of half of the human emotional spectrum. Perhaps balance does not come from experiencing only the emotions I prefer. Perhaps it comes from becoming spacious enough to allow the full range of being human without believing every difficult emotion means something has gone terribly wrong.
I often hear older people say they would not change their lives because everything they lived made them who they are. I understand that more now.
That certainly does not mean I want to repeat the same painful obstacles over and over again. I don’t. But when a familiar kind of obstacle appears in a different form, I am beginning to notice whether I can experience it differently.
Can I become the observer rather than automatically becoming the reactor?
That is a lesson I am still learning to appreciate.
Each time I meet something familiar with a little more awareness, the experience becomes different. Another layer appears. Another piece of understanding gets added. Another thread is woven into the strange, intricate, beautiful tapestry of a life.
These are broad ideas that have gradually emerged through my own adventure in this thing we call human existence. I have countless examples from ordinary life, and perhaps those stories will come when they are meant to.
For now, I am going to trust the process. I will write what comes and stop when I feel myself trying to force the words through sheer cerebral effort.
And for those who find something familiar in what comes through me, I hope the telling of my very human lessons offers a little hope, recognition, or catharsis—and perhaps reminds you that none of us is experiencing this strange life entirely alone.
*By Source, I mean whatever name you use for the greater whole—God, the Universe, the Force, higher consciousness, or something else entirely.