The Common Thread

The common thread is that we’re all human. The common thread is that within our humanness is the center of our being. The common thread is that in the center of our being, we’re connected to all of creation. It's a beautiful thing to realize. And it’s even better when we can learn to feel it, to experience it within our own center, and to feel within ourselves our own common thread in the center of our being. 

It's a simple thing, really, but we humans are masters at complicating things. There is a river flowing through us that connects us to all of creation. It's the common thread and it's something that we can learn to experience, and it can be fairly easy when we learn to keep it simple.

I’m a lumper rather than a splitter. I love that everything is connected. If we aren’t careful, our thoughts can make us feel disconnected and separate from ourselves and all of creation.

But our bodies are wise. 

The common thread in our bodies is the interwoven interconnectedness of the tapestry of our human beingness. Everything in our body is connected. We’ve all heard, “The knee bone is connected to the thigh bone.” But it is so true. In medical school, we learn the anatomy, the physiology, the biochemistry, the microbiology, and how they relate to one another and to our health. Our bodies are working together in a beautiful interconnectedness. It’s happening all the time. A simple way to think of it is through our nervous system. It's what makes us think. It's what helps us to feel. It’s what determines when we heal. It’s how we feel love. It’s how we’re awestruck by a beautiful sunset. It's a common thread within each and all of us.

Our nervous system is wired for interconnectedness and its ability to help our body receive and send signals and self regulate. A lot of people are talking about the vagus nerve lately, the polyvagal system, and looking for the perfect gizmo or hack to “activate the vagus nerve.” Unfortunately, when we’re disconnected from our wholeness, we make it harder for our nervous system to do its thing. No gizmo or quick technique is going to do for us what our intricate, sensitive body has the capacity to do for itself with a bit of help and a bit of awareness of our own center. 

We can get disconnected from our inner common thread when we think too much, try too hard, or pay too much attention to things outside ourselves. When we spend too much time paying attention to the outside or looking for someone or something outside of us to fix us, we forget to connect to our own inner common thread.

Our common thread is our ability to feel peace, to self-regulate, to heal, to be still and know. It's the inner wisdom that is flowing through us all the time. The more we can be centered and tune into that common thread within ourselves, the better we feel, heal, and grow.

I talk a lot about nature’s perfect design. Nature’s perfect design is within all of us, and it's our common thread. If the design wasn’t perfect and interconnected, we just wouldn’t be here. It's our perfect design that keeps us healthy, alive, learning, and growing.

Our common thread is the interconnectedness of our mind, body, and spirit. It’s in our center and gives us that feeling of centeredness when we allow ourselves to feel and sense our own interconnectedness.

Let’s take a moment and go inside and consider what’s happening within our bodies. Our cells and immune system are constantly reading the signals and interacting to keep everything in a state of homeostasis, a state of balance. Homeostasis happens through feedback cycles of interconnectedness. It's a form of self-regulation. For example, if our heart rate gets too high, our autonomic nervous system kicks in and does its job of activating the parasympathetic nervous system to down-regulate the sympathetic nervous system. The heart rate then slows down. This kind of thing is happening all the time in all kinds of places on all kinds of levels within our human body. 

Problems happen when we get out of balance and become disconnected. A common pattern that I see is that we humans have been trained to pay a lot of attention to stuff outside of ourselves. These things can be a partner, a boss, a parent, the news, social media, a video game or show, or focusing too much on a problem. These outside things can actually pull our attention and awareness outside of ourselves so much that we dissociate from the wholeness and interconnectedness of our bodies. These outside influences can be quite strong because as humans have “evolved,” we’ve neglected the importance of learning to make the most of our human superpowers, our inner common thread. When we get out of balance by thinking too much or paying too much attention to the stuff on the outside, we get more disconnected, and things start to feel crappy. 

What I’ve discovered in working with so many of my patients is that so many of us have learned to pay too much attention to the outside, which causes things to get out of balance and makes us feel lousy. Just a few examples of these things that I’ve seen include anxiety, pain, stress, high blood pressure, depression, weight gain, and fatigue. It may sound like a wide range of things. It is. 

When we lose our own center by paying attention to the outside and not living in and sensing our own ability to self-regulate on the inside, we often experience a lot of suffering and frustration. We do things for the wrong reasons, feel out of control, or feel like something is missing. What’s missing is our own common thread. The common thread is that we all have the ability to self-regulate, to calm our own nervous system, to center within ourselves, to feel more balanced. Most of us were never taught how to do it or, how important it is, or how helpful it can be to use the common thread of interconnectedness within ourselves.  

When I teach someone to drop into their own center, things often shift immediately. They feel more calm, their breathing slows, they become more still. The common thread is that this is something that anyone can learn to do, and it’s pretty simple. The common thread is that it can help so many things. The common thread is that it's part of our own interconnectedness. Nature’s perfect design within each of us connects us to all of creation and gives our own inner capacity to calm our own nervous system, heal ourselves, listen to our inner wisdom, and know ourselves better. 

Like I said, I’m a lumper. I love the interconnectedness of everything. But the thing that I’m most excited about and grateful for these days is my discovery that when I teach someone to drop in and access their own inner common thread, and when they start to use it in their daily life, amazing things happen. They heal stuff that they’ve been working on for years. It makes all of the work that they’ve done really work. Everything comes together because they’re getting themselves together. It's the common thread within all of us and it can help with so many things because it's our own connection to our own empowerment. 

Learning to become centered within ourselves, in even the simplest way, connects our mind, body, and spirit, calms our nervous system, allows us to listen to those gut feelings. We can heal our own trauma because we have more control over how we feel. We can improve our health on many levels because we’re making it easier for our nervous system to do the work of homeostasis. Things become balanced because we’re more balanced within ourselves. 

This is the common thread. It's a simple step that we can take, in more and more moments, to activate a process that allows our perfect human design to do its thing more and more of the time. The common thread is that the common thread works for so many things and can help so many people. The common thread is that no one taught us about the common thread. The common thread is that people want a quick, easy fix. The common thread is that there is no quick fix because we are mind, body, and spirit and need to be centered for our nervous system to be balanced, for us to know ourselves better, to realize our full potential. The common thread is that it's simple and even easy. The common thread is that the flip side of the problem is the solution because when we learn to center inside, everything starts to get better.

But the common thread is that many of us are so disconnected we never knew or were taught how important and simple it can be to make our own connection. Humanity has forgotten its own humanness. It's so easy to forget the common thread because we’ve been trained to pay attention to all of the other stuff rather than our own center, where we can be centered and balanced and empowered in so many ways and on so many levels.

The common thread is that the common thread within ourselves connects us to our own inner health, light, and peace. It's an act of self-love that allows us to take better care of ourselves so that we can be better human beings. The more we can relate to the common thread within ourselves, the more connected we are to our own wholeness and all of creation. The more we can experience our inner common thread, the more patient, kind, healthy, wise, and empowered human beings we can be. Our common thread is our birthright; it's what connects us to our humanness and to all of humanity, the interweaving within our being in the beautiful tapestry of life.