Ever since I wrote and vulnerably shared my last blog, “What does it mean to feel like you belong?,” I’ve settled into my own belonging in a whole new way. I’ve had a healing! (I say with a playful smile on my face.) I can see now that there is a crucial point about belonging to understand:
Relative belonging vs. Absolute belonging.
The “relative” world is the 3D world of form which allows for duality, individuality, and separation. The relative is characterized by change, contrast, and impermanence. These aspects of the relative world are crucial for us to have our human experience.
Of course, living in the realm of duality means that we must experience light and dark— yin and yang— good and evil. While this can seem painful and maddening at times, the existence of the dark is what allows us to know ourselves as the light (for more on this, read The Little Soul and The Sun). We cannot eradicate the “dark” from life— and why would we want to? Our pain and heartbreak allow us to expand and grow in consciousness.
As humans in the relative world, however, we yearn to remember our true nature as oneness— as the absolute. Something in us knows that we came from wholeness. We have a cellular memory and a pining for the experience of “home.” We long to feel peace and love to such an extent that we can forever rest in the warmth of its embrace.
The surprising, miraculous truth is that the absolute is your nature. You are spirit. There’s nothing you need to do and no one you need to become. You can stop searching and instead inquire into what is already here.
Months ago when I felt that yearning for belonging, what I couldn’t see is that I was yearning for “absolute belonging.” I wanted to know that I was forever in the arms of love and connection. So, when I went searching for “absolute belonging” in the relative world, I only felt pain and disappointment. I considered whether I couldn’t find eternal belonging because of my own family trauma or because modern society has distanced itself from its tribal roots close to nature.
But guess what? I was wrong.
Ha! It’s funny now. I can definitely laugh about it. What is hilariously obvious to me now is that we cannot create the absolute belonging that we yearn to experience through an external process in the relative world. The relative world is characterized by impermanence! If we experience what it feels like to truly belong in the relative world through family or friends, the near guarantee is that we will also know what it feels like to lack that same belonging.
In practical language, this means that your life will always change! Sometimes you may feel really close to friends and community and be blessed with a deep sense of connection. Then, you may get a new job, move, divorce, or any number of experiences that will cause you to shift to feeling like you no longer belong.
This doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you. It’s how the 3D world was designed!
The opportunity is to come to know yourself as eternal, limitless consciousness. If you only think this in your mind, then “belonging” remains a concept that you are striving for. If you awaken to know your true nature through your body and presence, it is the coming home that you’ve yearned for since your first individuation from oneness.
Explore your own nature and discover that who you are resides in belonging. There’s no way to lose it or to find it. Your nature is belonging. When you awaken to know yourself as the eternal divine, you understand that you are all things and all things are you— without separation.
What a blessing. Finding belonging doesn’t happen by creating external circumstances that you must grasp and control in order to never again feel like you don’t belong.
Finding belonging is awakening to the truth of yourself as belonging. It is fulfilling your deepest yearning to know yourself. Then, from that place, you can feel free to do anything you like in the relative world! You can nurture relationships, spend lots of time with friends and family, play an active role in your community, and do anything else that gives you an enjoyable sense of relative belonging while you’re a human. Awesome! No problem.
First thing is first, however. Inquire and discover yourself as absolute belonging. Then, everything else is the play of the universe.