We some­times get so caught up in our small selves that we fail to rec­og­nize how tru­ly immea­sur­able we are.

Rid­ing the ham­ster-wheel, going over and replay­ing every­thing we did, didn’t do, failed or suc­ceed­ed at, can be exhaust­ing. We tuck­er our­selves out with over­think­ing and overex­er­tion and have to rest. Then we get up and do it all over again. Why? Because our ego is extreme­ly occu­pied with telling us it needs our atten­tion and to busy our­selves in its service.

Yet, ego is a bar­ri­er to our true con­nect­ed uni­ver­sal self. We get occa­sion­al glimpses of this self when we dis­tance our­selves from our egos. Some for­tu­nate indi­vid­u­als have even devot­ed their entire focus to this one self that is greater than any indi­vid­ual can be. One can find great peace in prac­tic­ing a life that hon­ors such a res­o­nant con­nec­tion between one­self and the uni­verse beyond.

Con­nec­tion to a spir­i­tu­al self, and con­nec­tion to our envi­ron­ment, can be one and the same. As Bud­dhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says, “The solu­tion is to learn how to touch eter­ni­ty in the present moment. We have been talk­ing about the envi­ron­ment as if it is some­thing dif­fer­ent from us, but we are the envi­ron­ment.” Indeed, by deal­ing with the most extreme moments of life: birth, death, love, tragedy, we can bet­ter come to under­stand that we are all one in being part of a con­tin­u­ous­ly-evolv­ing cycle.

We all deserve space to access the insights and enlight­en­ment found by chan­nel­ing the con­nec­tion between one’s own exis­tence and the exis­tence of everything.