Oneness should be an Olympic sport.
And we should all be going for gold.
I have high standards.
Yes I want to be happy. Yes I want financial freedom. Yes I want to be healthy and feel energized. Yes I want authentic relationships.
Ultimately I want oneness. It feels like the most elusive goal of all.
I don’t have any super wealthy friends. But I have exposure to the wealthy. I see affluence all around us in horse country where we live.
Money can be earned and grown.
We have our share of emotional drama in our family. And we also know how to wring the fun out of an adventure. My family was laughing at me this weekend when I was so excited to see this massive tadpole at the nature center we went to. It was literally the size of a full grown frog but it had a complete tadpole tail and it was bolting around the surface of the water. Fascinating little creature.
We can always make room for more happiness.
I’ve worked with a spiritual teacher who has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. And when she gazes into your eyes it feels like she’s reaching down into your soul and calling you out to shine. I’m pretty sure she knows oneness.
I’ve read and studied the contemporary greats. Eckhart Tolle is a favorite. And Jesus mastered the secret of oneness no doubt.
We can’t get to Oneness with our mind.
Eckhart’s teachings focus on clearing the mind as a doorway to being in the present moment. I can clear my mind. I can blank out without even trying.
Clearing the mind is a significant piece of the puzzle. We can’t think our way into oneness. We’re a pretty intelligent crowd here. I wish we could mentally figure it out. We would all be living in bliss by now.
We have it all backward. We want to use our mind to figure out the stuff that makes life worth living. We know how to use our mind. It should be doable to figure out this oneness thing. Right?
Instead we need to find the door to this oneness world. Then the flow from this place will light up our minds so we’re actually using the 90% of our brain that science tells us we aren’t even accessing. It will be all that intuition and wisdom and telepathy and powers to heal the environment and who knows what else.
We can’t get to Oneness with our senses.
Hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, smelling. Our remarkable tools for knowing this physical world.
When we’re lacking one of them we feel lost. We get left out of conversations. Or the pleasure of food. Or the awe of the Grand Canyon.
Years ago I went to a home and garden expo. One of the exhibits was a display of all white flowering plants. The person at the booth told me that white flowers are always the best smelling. I’ve tested it over the years. They seem to be right.
If we could get to oneness through smell, I’d take the white flower path.
Oneness is a shift in focus.
Do you remember the 1990s art that looked like an abstract of different colored dots? If you figured out how to focus your eyes you could see an actual image of something.
I never could see those things.
As a kid I mastered a lot of the kid skills. Bicycle. Swimming. Yoyo. Whistle. Blow bubbles with Hubba Bubba Bubblegum. Shuffling cards. I can also curl my tongue. I understand that’s genetic. And I can overextend my elbow joint. That’s from a broken arm, being kid crazy in a tree fort.
I can’t juggle. Yet. And I could never see those freakin images in the dots.
Shifting into Oneness feels like figuring out how to adjust your focus to a different world. The world that is right here with us. We’re in it. We just haven’t figured out how to access it.
The good things in life take work
There’s a story about a woman who got divorced. She had a stack of boxes sitting in her garage for 10 years that had stuff from her former marriage. Old pictures. Souvenirs from trips she and her ex had taken together. She couldn’t bring herself to open those boxes and be flooded with all the memories and emotions.
Finally one day she woke up and felt a weight off her shoulders. She knew she was ready to go through the boxes. So she did and it took her 2 hours to throw away, keep a few, and give the rest of the treasures to the local thrift store.
It took her 10 years and 2 hours to heal her wounds from her relationship. The 10 years was the work of peeling off the layers.
Reaching oneness is like that. For most people, it doesn’t seem to come in a burst of lightning out of nowhere. It’s a skill we practice. An unpeeling. Trial and error. 20 years and 1 meditation later it comes pouring in.
Oneness training
Olympic athletes are otherworldly. They eat, drink, and breathe their sport. They train. And train. And train. For years.
What if we were to approach oneness like an Olympic sport? Hyper focus on it. Or maybe it’s more a hyper unfocus on the tools we use to get around this physical world. Quiet our minds. Take our focus off all the physical senses. And try to squink through our soul in just the right way.
We went on a trip for spring break. 16 hours driving in the car. I drive while my husband entertains the kids with ukulele tunes and car bingo. I like driving. And I’m glad when all the driving is over.
This time was different. I was doing a practice of clearing my mind and placing a hard, intense focus away from any of my physical senses. And I held it. It was a game. Holding the focus. A training. Training to unfocus.
And I’m finding I’m getting (a little) better at pulling myself into this unfocus when all the daily emotional trials hit me, instead of getting sucked in and trying to fix it or fight against it.
Anyone can reach Oneness. Maintaining Oneness is the trick.
Seinfeld is so brilliant. I love the episode where he and Elaine are at the car rental place and the clerk is telling him that the car he had reserved has been given to someone else. So he’s giving the clerk a hard time. Something like, “Anyone can take a reservation. It’s holding it that’s the hard part.”
We’ve all had moments of being in a kind of peace, harmony, stillness, clarity that are fulfilling. And we have dreams of life being end to end filled up with moments like these.
I’m waiting for the one final meditation that will push me over the edge into oneness.
After that, we’ll worry about “holding it.”
Going for Gold
I’m not a great athlete. I am pretty fit for a mid centurion. I do love to hike and swim. I was on swim team for about a year as a kid.
I haven’t reached the financial freedom I will someday. I’m still working on this one. I know this one will feed my happiness to a degree.
I don’t have a busload of friends I hang out with, but the ones I do have windows of connection with are real.
The medal I’m going all in for is oneness. The daily training tips from Divine at the moment seem pretty simple.
Emotionally and mentally retreat from the trialing event.
Unfocus from the physical world tools - the mind and senses.
Hold that unthought.
Repeat.
We all know this stuff is simple but not easy. Either oneness will “spontaneously” happen or the next step to get there will show up.
Big Tolle fan as well! His book The Power of Now was transformational for me!