The People Beside You

Standing in line for the washroom before driving home from the Omega Institute this past weekend, I found myself looking around at the people beside me with unexpected gratitude. Whatever had brought each of us there, we'd all chosen to spend a summer weekend in a place devoted to inner transformation.

The campus was bustling. Alongside the workshop I was attending were programs on mediumship, conscious dance, and other paths of self-discovery. The largest group, however, came for a bestselling self-help author. I'd been skeptical of her work over the years for promoting a model of hyper-individualized self-care that, to me, only entrenches our sense of separateness. As someone who has spent years helping people explore the nondual yogic vision of our interconnectedness, I felt my familiar judgments surface.

Part of that critique still feels important to me. But standing there, I realized I had a choice about where to place my attention. I could keep focusing on my judgments, or I could notice the hundreds of people who had come to spend a weekend becoming a little more conscious, a little more whole. As soon as I shifted my attention, something softened.

The evening before, I had dinner with a lovely woman from that workshop. A retired hairdresser, she'd started an online community to help other women find more joy in their lives. She had taken what had helped her and turned it into something that might help others. Again, I felt a wave of appreciation for her sincerity and how she was contributing to her community.

Those two moments—the washroom line and dinner with this woman—helped me realize that the real question isn’t whether we engage in inner work. It's what we understand that work to be for.

I believe humanity is being called toward a profound shift in consciousness: the recognition that we are not only individuals pursuing fulfillment, but participants in a living web of relationships. From this perspective, our healing matters not only because it makes our own lives better, but because it changes how we meet one another and the world.

This shift doesn't ask us to stop doing our own healing or relinquish discernment about what paths and practices truly serve us. It asks us to wake up from the illusion that our individual growth is solely a personal project.

In the tantric tradition, Iccha Shakti is the divine power of will—the creative impulse through which life expresses and renews itself. To me, it also points to the self-organizing intelligence of life that’s continually moving toward flourishing.

What struck me this weekend was this: Iccha Shakti can only find expression in the world through the people alive at this moment. It moves through ordinary human beings willing to open their hearts, question old patterns, and grow in awareness. Which is why that line for the washroom mattered. It wasn't only a queue of strangers—it was a gathering of ordinary people, each of us, knowingly or not, part of that same movement toward wholeness.

Joanna Macy calls this larger movement the Great Turning: millions of people, most of whom will never meet, each contributing in their own way to the emergence of a life-sustaining society.

As I looked around Omega that weekend, I realized it didn't matter whether everyone shared my philosophy or even my language for describing these ideas. What mattered was that we had all shown up. We had all, in our own imperfect ways, answered the invitation to become a little more conscious.

My judgments hadn't disappeared. They had simply become less interesting than my appreciation.

The next time you find yourself in a room full of people showing up for themselves—whether that's a yoga class, the gym, or a weekend workshop—notice the people standing beside you. Not what brought them there. Not what they believe. Just that they came.

See what shifts.

If the exploration of healing, interconnectedness, and our role in these changing times resonates with you, I invite you to join me for Nourish Your Inner Compass: Heart-centered Yoga and the Work That Reconnects. Together, we’ll explore practices that replenish us and restore our connection with ourselves and the world, and discover how our own healing can become a contribution to the healing of the whole. Learn more and sign up here.