It’s easy to get caught up in our life’s story. We often lose touch with our surroundings when we get bogged down by heavy emotions and a storm of thoughts that completely dominate our attention. Sometimes, when we live mostly in our head, we feel incredibly disconnected and isolated from everyone and everything.
So why do we feel this way? What causes this disconnect? Why does it happen and what can we do to experience deeper connection. In today’s episode, I explore these questions, and most importantly, what we can all do to experience the oneness of the universe and how we can feel connection and community instead of isolation and separateness.
***If you prefer reading to listening, here’s the transcript of this podcast***
The question is, why do I feel disconnected from everything?
The reason for this feeling, which many people experience, is because although we are always seeing something and always listening, if a plate of dishes falls behind you, it will startle you and you’ll turn around, even though you weren’t listening for that, you weren’t anticipating it.
This is because we are always receiving sensory input into our brain; we are constantly feeling a billion sensations through our nerve endings, ready to tell us if something’s too hot or too cold, and we are always seeing some kind of light or color input through our eyes.
We’re always hearing all of these sounds even when we are not aware of them. That is really where the disconnection takes place. It’s the lack of awareness. It’s because we fixate on very specific, very narrow points of focus.
Most often, these focal points that we fixate on are thoughts and stories in our own mind, which carry us away from the present moment. We go on this mental and emotional journey where the outside world disappears.
Even if something is happening right in front of us and someone can be talking right to us, we will not notice what is happening around us. This mental chatter is something that most of us live with, probably about 99% of our lives.
Only when something truly remarkable happens do we break that thought cycle and become actually aware of what is going on around us. We may see a beautiful sunset, and for a brief moment, we are mesmerized and in a trance, which is our normal state of being when we are fully present. It is this healing sense of awe and wonder because we become one with the universe around us.
As we take in through our sight and our other senses, whatever is happening, which is always coming in, which is always merging with us, which is always a sharing of photons, a sharing of sound vibrations.
But we are too often distracted by our thoughts to notice them. It’s easier when we are with other people to notice this shifting of our awareness from someone else and the words they’re saying to the thoughts in our head.
When we are really actively listening, when we are just hanging on every word, hearing every sound in the space between the sounds and taking in visually, the person and their visual cues. A real merging takes place where a part of them comes into you, and they have a space within that allows them to be.
This is to say not when we are thinking of how we’ll respond or thinking of how their position on a certain topic lines up with our position. We are not critically examining every word they say. We are not constantly reaffirming our own egoic position.
By ego, I mean the thinking mind that all the thoughts come from in our mind are this egoic entity, which believes that it is a separate self and tries to convince us that it is who we are, that it is unique, and that it is separate from the surrounding environment. That it needs to constantly acquire more resources in order to survive. It needs to defend against any and all threats, whether real or imagined.
It’s easy to see why we have this ego, this thinking mind. It is an incredible survival mechanism for finding food and shelter, safety, and avoiding and preventing danger. The problem, however, is when these egos go into overdrive and start running unconsciously, when there is no danger. When it becomes hyper-vigilant in a constant, subtle state of stress, and is always paranoid or anticipating danger. Because we have experienced some kind of trauma in our history, or because we watch too much news, it impacts us on a subconscious level.
There are numerous reasons why these egos in our brain can become active 24/7, typically stemming from not feeling totally safe and secure. Some of these reasons include the media, which thrives on drama, action, excitement, and adrenaline-pumping scenarios, conditioning our egoic mind to always anticipate danger. Constant exposure to podcasts, song lyrics, hip hop, or audiobooks can also contribute to perpetuating the constant voice in our heads, as we absorb a steady stream of dialogue.
This constant mental chatter distances us from understanding, being comfortable with, and even capable of rest. If the ego cannot rest and we cannot become one with the universe around us, our senses are extensions of our sense of being.
Thus, we can observe stars billions of light-years away. They can literally shoot off photons in every direction, which then reach our eyeballs and are processed by our brain to interpret that data. We are literally merging with that star; our consciousness, through our senses, is blending with our surroundings. This is where that sense of oneness and connection comes from—being fully present and recognizing that we are simultaneously witnessing and projecting the universe.
Our brains process that information and project it onto our conscious awareness, to consciousness itself, which witnesses everything we see and experience. We perceive and experience everything within the mind alone; photons become filtered into images, sound frequencies and vibrations become translated into all the noises we perceive, and places of high energy can become translated into heat and warmth.
Low-energy places, with little particle movement, are interpreted by our bodies as cold. So when we perceive through this usual state of consciousness and we constantly strengthen our ego by avoiding the present moment and by getting lost in stories within our minds, we are simply believing a story about reality instead of experiencing reality.
Everything we experience gets filtered through this ego. Instead of truly appreciating a tree, we collapse the magnificent, beautiful form of life into a four-letter word, “tree.” This is where the disconnect really takes place and holds. Language is an incredibly powerful tool for communication, but we have mistaken language for reality. Language is only ever going to be a signpost, a pointer towards reality.
No moment can ever be adequately described through language; it can only be experienced. When we are constantly thinking, we are disconnecting ourselves from reality and truth, limiting our wisdom and understanding. When we feel most disconnected, it’s typically when we are most attached to the stories in our head—stories of loneliness, isolation, discontent, injustice, and unfairness. We completely turn our attention inward, and the outside world disappears.
How to Feel That Connection When You’re Disconnected From Everything
Often, this happens even to people who are very successful, with loving families. They simply have an ego that has gone to the extreme end of identifying with the story that nothing is going well, nothing is good enough, and that everything is out to get them.
We all know people who are deeply loved and have no apparent reason to be unhappy, yet they retreat to their bedrooms. Or they at least retreat within themselves. They are the ones cutting themselves off from the universe, not intentionally, not by choice, but because they have strengthened their ego over time, habituating incessant thinking to the point where overly analytical overthinking has become their standard mode of operation.
All of us, to some extent, live like this. We can all be sent down that thinking spiral, where we feel like our emotions, thoughts, and general feelings are out of our control, determined by the whims of others or wherever our own mind may lead us.
But no matter what happens, the present moment is always here for us. It is a vehicle out of that thinking spiral and into a place of peace, presence, and oneness.
In order to feel that oneness, to feel that connection, we just have to do three things.
Aloneness to Oneness | Award-Winning Spiritual Film on Oneness
Take the Journey Within
Step 1) Feeling Disconnected From Everything? Try Creating Some Space in Your Life
The first step is to create space in our lives, which in turn creates space in our minds. This involves spending a little bit of time every day, throughout the day, as much as possible, simply observing what is happening around us.
We put our phones down, turn off screens, and take a moment to feel our bodies because that’s present moment awareness. We can feel the chair beneath us, touch the armrest or the desk, and look with fresh eyes at whatever’s in front of us. We feel how it becomes a part of us as we take it in with our awareness.
And when thoughts come up, as they surely will, we witness those too. We observe everything that is happening without adding new stuff, without avoiding the here and now, without picking up the phone and checking social media, resisting the urge to fill that time with chores, tasks, or activities that the ego may conjure to strengthen itself. We simply allow for the moment in whatever form it takes, with no craving and no resistance.
This is peace and presence: when we allow everything in the universe to come and go within our field of consciousness, with no cleaning, no aversion. It’s about acceptance, embracing, and even loving every moment. This is how we love the universe in all its forms, and there is no greater sense of connection than love.
Step 2) Feeling Disconnected From Everything? Try Loving Your Ego Instead of Fighting It
The second thing we can do to feel connected, curb the ego, and create a sense of quiet and spaciousness within our minds and lives is not to fight or attempt to kill the ego, nor to be angry with it when it disrupts our peaceful moments. Instead, we should love the ego because it is a part of us and is here to help us, even if it inadvertently causes suffering.
We can love it for its protective nature because we cannot eradicate it; we can only accept it and work with it. Fighting it will only lead to more conflict and suffering. Instead, we can approach it with curiosity and accept all its manifestations—the good, the bad, the useful, and the annoying. By creating space for all of these thoughts, we make friends with the ego. A friend is much more likely to cooperate than an enemy.
When we get angry at our ego, it’s actually the ego itself that is angry at itself, disguising itself as another level of consciousness. But it is the thinking mind that operates as one of the survival tactics of the ego.
Our higher self is awareness, and it is consciousness itself that perceives all thoughts, which is our true essence. Where we direct our focus represents our highest intelligence and wisdom. Just as paying attention and spending time with a friend is an act of love, we can also dedicate time to observe our ego and cultivate a love that transcends thoughts. This practice can lead to a better-functioning, less neurotic ego.
Step 3) Feeling Disconnected From Everything? Expand Your Awareness
The third step we can take, now that we have created some space and room in our lives and have accepted and embraced the ego within us, is to expand our awareness beyond the five senses. We must go beyond these limited sensory organs in our bodies, beyond our own thoughts and feelings, and beyond the physical objects we perceive. We need to transcend all the thoughts and stories we tell ourselves.
By moving beyond the narratives we construct about the past or our current situations, we can achieve a deeper understanding. This understanding leads to a realization, an insight beyond words, where we grasp that everything is unfolding exactly as it should. We come to understand that the stories we tell ourselves, where we are at the center and everything is happening to us, stem from the ego-driven mind.
In reality, everything unfolds according to the laws of the universe and the actions and desires of the other 8 billion people on this planet. There is a beautiful flow, a sea of oneness, with waves sometimes rising and falling. This is all part of the perfect dance of the universe unfolding before our eyes. We no longer see things as existing permanently on their own.
Within the present moment, we perceive all past and future, all causes and effects that make up this moment. It’s too much information for the ego to handle at once. However, we can see this reality on many layers, many dimensions, understanding all the factors that contributed to making this moment exactly as it is.
The inescapable fact becomes clear: nothing is disconnected. Everything is connected. There is no separateness; only the illusion of separateness. Ultimately, there is only one.
When we think we are our thoughts, we let them dictate our emotions and we suffer. When we discover who we truly are, thoughts become simply the appearance of words in our mind arising within our field of conscious awareness, no different than if we heard it on the radio. Take the journey within, in the book, Finding Your True Self: A Love Story.
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