Finding Oneness: A Journey Beyond the Separate Self
I never intended to end up here.
Five years ago, I clutched my phone in a hospital parking lot, having just received news that would shatter the carefully constructed identity I'd spent decades building. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely text my sister. Everything was falling apart, and with it, my sense of who I was supposed to be.
Maybe you know that feeling. That moment when life pulls the rug out from under you, and suddenly, the story you've been telling yourself doesn't make sense anymore. For me, it was a health crisis. For you, it might be a relationship ending, a career setback, or just that quiet Sunday afternoon when you looked around at your "perfect" life and thought, "Is this it?"
God, I hated those moments. Until I realized they were doorways.
That parking lot moment became my reluctant entry into seeking something beyond the separate self I'd always identified with. The path to oneness wasn't one I chose – it chose me when everything else fell away.
What Nobody Tells You About Falling Apart
When my carefully constructed life began crumbling, well-meaning friends offered the usual advice:
"Stay positive!" "This too shall pass!" "Everything happens for a reason!"
I smiled and nodded silently, thinking they had no clue what I was going through.
What I didn't realize then was that my identity had been built entirely on quicksand:
My job title (which disappeared during company restructuring) My physical strength (compromised by unexpected illness) My role as the "one who has it all together" (laughable, as I didn't) My financial security (rapidly dwindling with medical bills)
The panic attacks started shortly after. 3 AM became my witching hour, when I'd wake up with my heart racing, convinced I was dying. My doctor called it an "acute stress response." I called it my life imploding.
What no one tells you about these breaking points is that they're breaking OPEN points. The cracks in your life aren't a punishment – they're where the light finally gets in.
The Awakening Nobody Warns You About
I'd love to tell you I had some profound spiritual epiphany that transformed everything overnight. That would make a great story, wouldn't it?
The truth was messier. My awakening came when I grudgingly attended a weekend retreat my sister had gifted me ("for stress relief," she said, though we both knew it was because she was worried I was having a breakdown).
I went expecting some woo-woo nonsense. Instead, I met Lisa, a retired corporate lawyer with a razor-sharp mind who had gone through her identity collapse ten years earlier. There were no crystals, no chanting—just straight talk about how our identification with the separate self creates unnecessary suffering.
"The mind creates a story about who you are," she told me over lukewarm coffee, "and then you spend your life defending a fiction."
I almost walked out. Instead, I cried in front of a room full of strangers.
That weekend didn't fix anything. But it planted a seed that would slowly, painfully, gloriously change everything.
The Illusion That Kept Me Stuck
Looking back, I can see how I'd been living from a place of profound disconnection:
I treated my body like a machine that should function perfectly on demand. I saw other people as either allies or obstacles to my goals. I approached nature as scenery rather than something I was intrinsically part of. I believed my thoughts were absolute truth rather than conditioned patterns.
This separation wasn't just philosophical – it was physically exhausting. The energy required to maintain all those boundaries left me perpetually drained. No wonder I was always chasing the next achievement, relationship, or purchase, hoping it would finally make me feel whole.
My wake-up call came during a simple meditation practice Lisa suggested. "Just notice what's here," she said, "without needing to change anything."
Simple. It was the hardest thing I'd ever done.
When I finally stopped running and looked, I discovered something both terrifying and liberating: the separate self I'd fiercely protected didn't exist.
Beyond My Mind's BS
Let's be honest – when everything you've identified with starts dissolving, it's scary as hell. There were days I was convinced I was losing my mind rather than finding my true nature.
The practices weren't complicated: basic meditation, mindful walks without my phone, actually listening when people spoke instead of planning my response, and noticing the constant commentary in my head without automatically believing it.
But simple doesn't mean easy. My mind fought back with everything it had:
"This is stupid." "You're wasting time." "You need to be DOING something." "Everyone will think you've gone crazy."
The breakthrough came on a random Tuesday afternoon while waiting for a delayed flight. Staring out the terminal window, something shifted. Suddenly, there was just the experience itself – the plane on the tarmac, the announcements overhead, the feeling of breath – without the usual sense of being a separate person to whom all this was happening.
It lasted maybe 30 seconds. But at that moment, I recognized something that had always been true: I wasn't separated from any of it.
The relief was indescribable.
