Nourishing Connections

An Excerpt from Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's Summer 2022 Retreat at Serenity Ridge

A study from Harvard shows that one of the primary factors affecting our longevity is our social connection. Now, if that's the case, that you can live healthier and longer by connecting with others, then you might live an even healthier life if you learn how to connect with yourself. That's certainly true, but it's harder. We know how to connect with each other better than we know how to connect to ourselves. In all of the things that we are trying to do here on retreat, it all comes down to trying to connect. You see, fundamentally, ignorance begins when it does not know itself. And once ignorance begins, then disconnection begins. That disconnection is the root of all of the events, the stories. So you can see how connection is very important.

Therefore, I really feel that it is important to explore where it is that we find connection. Because at the end of the day, it's about nourishment, right? Food is nourishing and we feel that. But are there other means to nourish yourself besides food? What I've come to realize is that I can be nourished simply through encouraging myself to be happy or joyful, and allowing the joy in myself and feeling the nourishment from my joy and my feeling grateful for life. When I feel gratitude strongly enough, then I feel nourished and I feel it healing my body. I know, too, that connecting with people will nourish me. And the nourishment comes when in any encounter I can be a little bit aware that I am simply trying to connect right here and now with this or that person.

Many in the Western world are driven by a focus on what needs to be accomplished. This focus on outcomes is very strong and carefully calculated, and leaves little room for focus on connections. But if people would only begin to realize that there is so much more that we can gain by connecting with each other. If that awareness is there, then it wouldn't matter what we are talking about, right? Just like when you are talking with a beautiful child. If you love children, then you will have such a great time talking. But are you trying to make a deal with the child? No. Are you trying to earn something from the child? No. Expecting something? No. You are just being and doing in order to stay connected; that's where the nourishment is.

That is true in any relationship. It comes down to this deep sense of connection. However, connection is very limited for us. Many people don't know what their connection is. They can have so much abundance in their life, but no connection. It can be because they've lost a connection that their pain identity has designated as the single most important connection that they had. Losing that one connection, they then lose all of their other connections, because they've lost their ability to connect at all. That's what happens in many people's lives. In this way one loses the vitality that comes not from food, but from other important sources such as connecting with nature and with people.

So you see, connections are important, and we limit ourselves in the way we connect. You can connect to anything, to everything! You can connect with food, but you can also connect without having food. Whatever you have that makes you feel, Oh I'm so happy I have this, means that you are making a connection with that situation. Can you also make the same connection without that situation? Yes, it's possible, but not everybody can.

So a simple question in life is, how many connections do you have? You see, having a family does not mean that you are connected with the family. Having a house does not mean that you connect with that place. So where do we find our connections? You have so many things where you could have a connection, and yet you've lost the connection.

What might help to reconnect with our body and self is to nurture all of our connections with the outer world. Enjoy them! A sip of water! A sip of coffee! A glass of wine. A little sweet. It's the simple connections that I'm talking about.

Particularly in this culture, there are a lot of lost connections. For instance, the drive-thrus at fast food restaurants. They are like gas stations for human beings. Drive through, fill up and go to work. But what you fill up with is worse than gasoline. [laughter] That is the culture. It doesn't mean that every time there is a meal, we need to share and sit together, but doing so sometimes would be good. In India every meal is eaten together, and after a meal sitting together at the fire, chatting and telling stories is a way of connecting with each other. We don't do that so much in this culture.

So the important question is: how many places can you connect where you are not presently connecting? It is true that most times in our life, in the strong cases, what we lose becomes the door to finding ourselves. Big losses become the doorway to self-discovery, self-growth, self-strengthening. That's very true! Many times for those people who have wanted to find themselves, they did not find themselves through what they gained, but through what they lost. For so many lucky people, so many strong and mature people, this is what they experienced. Buddha did not achieve enlightenment in the middle of a dance, in a club on a Friday night. Buddha achieved enlightenment through suffering, because Buddha found the best relationship to the suffering. And suffering is true. It really does wake us up. It really opens the door and really makes you grow.

In an individual sense, the strongest most important place of disconnection happens with our suffering, with our pain. Oh, I don't want pain. I don't want suffering. I don't want this feeling, this thought. I don't want this experience. I don't want this situation. I don't want the discomfort. But you are disconnecting with what is actually inviting you to connect! That's because you think, Here I cannot connect. And what I really wanted to connect to, I lost: the dream job, the dream house, the dream partner.

How many resources do we have that we can connect to? It is a very simple thing. First of all, connect with all the people that you are kind of connected with, or that you're supposed to be connected with, like your family, right? If you've decided to live with someone, then that is a commitment to connect. Of course, there will be ups and downs in the relationship, but that is the work that you need to do for connection. And you will connect. You will find the beauty, the love, the connection, the support. You can find that in a life partner. You also find it in friends. Sometimes it is not easy to find friends, right? But it is important to find friends and to feel friendship, where you can relax and be yourself, share freely what you feel, and enjoy what this other person has to share and all that you have in common.

Finding friends is important. It doesn't matter how many people there are in one's life, finding a friend is important. There is so much loneliness and isolation in areas that are crowded with people. There may be a thousand people living in one building, and there can still be so much loneliness within the individual apartments. People value privacy, but we fail to see its relation to loneliness.

Here at the retreat we are creating the space for everyone to come together and begin to make connections and become closer to others, making your experience here more memorable. This is a place where you can feel connections more. We are not on retreat to focus simply on accomplishing things. We are also finding connection with ourselves through connecting with each other, and through becoming connected with the different goddesses and channels and chakras inside ourselves, all to learn and connect.

Don't think that you've lost connection simply because you have lost one or two connections in your life. You have so much opportunity to connect in life. And it doesn't necessarily even have to be with people. You can connect with nature. You can connect with silence. For example, every single meditation that we do is ultimately trying to connect, trying to calm down your body, trying to be in the stillness of the absence of actions, trying to connect with inner stillness. But most of the time for us, we find connection with others not so much through the stillness, but in doing things together. Let's do a project together, walk together, eat together, drink together. Whatever it might be, we know how to connect with each other by doing things.

But how about just saying, Let's get together, and let's do nothing. We'll just decide spontaneously once we meet, and go wherever we choose to go. Or maybe we'll not go anywhere, and I just come say hello and sit on your couch, and we spend the whole day there connecting with each other. You see, it doesn't matter what you do or don't do when you are connecting. However, connecting to others through not doing is generally far harder than connecting with them through doing things. But through all that we try to do in our daily lives, when it comes down to it, it's just simply trying to connect.

This is an important journey we are on, one where we go to the source and come to recognize and see that the negative conditions and situations that we face in our life arise largely as consequences of more subtle underlying negative emotions. In this way you come to see that your pain identity is the source of those emotions. No matter how sick you get or how much of an emotional crisis you have, if you never get to look at the source of it, then every pain is wasted and every conflict is wasted, because it did not bring about any extra awareness. You see, if every conflict or challenge leads to your going more toward the source, then every challenge is causing you to expand. As a result you actually come to want challenges so that you can expand. People who want challenges know that after the challenge comes expansion. They make something out of the challenge and expand themselves. Everyone loves to expand their sense of self and their creativity. But those who hate challenge have seen that after being challenged they get stuck.

So for every situation in which you feel that you have lost something, it's always good to think about what you have gained from it. For me sometimes it is amazing and eye opening. Just normal situations in life, when it feels like it has taken away something from my life, then I would say, Ah! I see that I am trying to disconnect here. Then I can come to see what that situation has actually given me in life; it gives me this mood of connecting. When I open my eyes in that way, and ask the right question, then I get countless amazing answers in life with that event; what it brought me in my life that I would otherwise never have seen due to not being open enough or clear enough or having power enough to connect with it. But now I feel that I can connect with what it brought to me. Then I can embrace that fully. And I feel so much more richness, wealth, completeness with what I have received from this one situation that I had originally labeled as a loss of something, of one thing.

The power to connect, the ability to connect, is so limited for most of us. Look at your life right now, all of the things that maybe you're worried about such as your health, your energy, or that you're draining yourself and other people. All those issues might have to do with just a few things, or even sometimes just one thing: that you are losing something and you don't have any relationship to that situation other than thinking that you are losing something. You cannot see how freeing it might also be, what a gift it is, and what you're getting out of it. You're not able to see it with different eyes. The result is you're not connecting; instead, you are losing connection. Sure, you may definitely have lost something due to that situation, but you are unable to see every other door that it opens up in your life. And in most cases there are more doors opening due to those situations than those doors that you feel have closed. The essential truth is that all of the doors are open all of the time, but you're simply not seeing that. And the strong push that you get from strong experiences gives you a greater opportunity to open your eyes! Even then, though, you are often not able to open them.

We are simply talking about one thing here, connection. We limit where we connect. That's my point. You don't need much to connect. If you are in the mood to connect, then you can absolutely connect even with disconnection. If your mood is one of disconnecting, though, then you can disconnect all of the connections that you have. You know that very well, right? So, again, an important question is, where do we connect? Connection is a source of healing, connection is a practice of longevity, it's a source of power for charging our battery. Connection is a source of vitality, of creativity, of fun, of everything! Even enlightenment, if you are interested in that, because enlightenment requires connection too.