We Are All One?

"We are all one" is a spiritual and religious concept I've heard many times from many different sources. It can be an attractive idea to some and to others it sounds like meaningless woo woo. Regardless of which camp you sit in, the concept is something people say and spend hours meditating on because it isn't always obvious in our day to day lives. It's a nice idea, but where's the proof?

First, 'oneness' is about more than just people. It points to a lack of separation in all things. And the ways this can be conceptualized is endless. Our cells aren't separate from our bodies, people aren't separate from animals, animals aren't separate from the planet, the planet isn't separate from the stars, and so on and so forth.

What I'm interested in are the ways we can see lack of separation in front of our eyes. If we are one when we look at the entirety of the universe then we should see it when we zoom into its parts. For this post, the aspect of 'we are one' that I want to highlight how connected we are as people.

In my experience, doing Family Constellations and ancestral work is the most tangible way I've ever witnessed the concept of "we are all one." When people support others in these workshops, part of what happens is that they stand and represent fathers, mothers, children or siblings for other people in the group. Fellow group members stand up and become the map of a person's family tree. Although these participants are strangers to each other, a remarkable sense of familiarity always appears. Despite the fact that they're standing in for people of a different family that they've never met, they suddenly find themselves working with a family dynamic that's all too familiar for them personally. It's a connection that's deeper than simply relating to the narrative of what's going on. You can feel this connection in your bones.

So when I examine "we are one," one way I conceptualize it is to say "we are all one family." Not only do I see this in how interconnected relative strangers can be in family healing workshops. But it's a fact we've been taught since we were young. If we go back far enough in history, we all go back to the same mother in Africa. So we are all one... one family.

This is why I feel group ancestral and family healing is so powerful. It may look like we spend an hour working with one person's family, take a break, and then an hour on another person's family. But even in a group of strangers, we're still working on different branches of one family tree.