Renew Your Connection, a Message from Consciousness.

Modern life accelerated the trend toward isolation even before the pandemic, and now the symptoms of loneliness, weakened relationships, depression, and anxiety have only deepened. One reads that a young generation knows only about digital online connections, impersonal transactions in place of actual human relationships.

Humans are social creatures and struggle to adapt to isolation. People need to connect at every level for their own well-being. Consider the various support systems that are open to us, from church, family, community, and all kinds of support groups online. Most people don’t realize it, but a person’s chances of surviving a heart attack are directly correlated with how many kinds of support they have. Someone who has little or no support is much more likely to not survive than someone who has a great deal of support.

Homo sapiens arose somewhere in Africa around 200,000 years ago. By 30,000 years ago sophisticated cave painting emerged. Seven thousand years ago animals were domesticated and the land was farmed. During all that time, Homo sapiens lived as part of the web of life.

But if you look deeper, it takes a connection with yourself before the true meaning of connection emerges.  How connected are you? Everyone needs to ask themselves that question. Nature itself is a web of connections. Trees in the forest communicate with each other chemically, and beneath the soil, the forest has its own nervous system. The web of life exists totally because of connections. In a tree, a mushroom, a deer, or in you, no cell is an island.

From a scientific perspective, the web of life is inescapable. We are fooling ourselves by being blind to this fact because you and I are intimately connected to the planet. With every breath, you inhale atoms of oxygen once breathed by Buddha, Jesus, and Confucius, and those atoms were probably in China, Italy, or the Arctic yesterday.

The most life-supporting connection you can make occurs in consciousness—it is known in India as Ahimsa, or reverence for life. That is also your deepest connection to yourself if you choose to embrace it. What is reverence for life? It isn’t a religious concept but a state of awareness. In this state of awareness the following things come naturally:

You are friendly to everyone and an enemy of no one.

You trust other people.

You respect all ways of life.

You feel the beauty and wonder of Nature.

You do nothing to spoil Mother Nature.

You make choices that benefit the whole of life.

Is reverence for life inspiring? Yes, but at this moment it is also a survival mechanism for a planet in peril. I am not saying this with blame in mind, and I know that all of us are numb to bad news about climate change. I am pointing out the solution, which isn’t radical or even new. The solution is reverence for life, starting modestly with each person.

Many people are running scared from Nature right now, living in fear of climate catastrophe and scarred by the experience of a global pandemic. Fear doesn’t bring solutions. It mostly leads to depression, inertia, denial, and numbness. Reverence for life, on the other hand, gives you the power of being a healer rather than a victim.

But what would you actually do? The doing must begin inside yourself, moving from a state of disconnect to a state of connection. Every aspect of life would shift in the following ways:

• You decide to live in the here and now, ignoring the voice in your head that repeats a litany of old fears, wounds, setbacks, and disappointments.
• You banish worry as pointless and unnecessary.
• You act generously instead of selfishly.
• You stop relying on someone else’s approval.
• You stop fearing someone else’s disapproval.
• You claim responsibility for your own emotions and reactions.
• You renounce blame.
• You let your creative impulses emerge.
• You respond from your heart.
• You look for beauty, love, and joy while you stop looking for flaws, problems, and worst-case scenarios.
• You practice appreciation, attention, and acceptance.
• You embrace your inner sense of self.
• You create your own bliss.
• You offer sympathy to those who need it.
• You are of service wherever you can be.
• You stop resisting and start joining the flow.

You don’t need to memorize this list. I want to inspire you with one thing, the realization that there is another way to be happy. It’s the connected way, which almost everyone has forgotten. When you are connected, which happens on the inside, you no longer run scared from Nature, nor look on other people with suspicion, and remain frantic about how to grab what you need in order to survive.

Those are the worst symptoms of being disconnected.  Once you realize the interconnectedness of everything, you find that life supports you. Consciousness supports you because the web of life is the web of awareness. A deep, abiding consciousness embraces all of creation. On your path, you will get glimpses of this, and you have to choose to adopt a vision based on reverence for this miraculous wholeness that is the womb of creation. As Einstein remarked, either everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle. The best way to be happy, the way that heals all wounds, is to know that everything is a miracle.

DEEPAK CHOPRA MD, FACP, FRCP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation.  Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego, and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution for the last thirty years. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Digital Dharma: How to Use AI to Raise Your Spiritual Intelligence and Personal Well-Being. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”  www.deepakchopra.com