She tried to let it go, not wanting to create a conflict and upset the “good stretch” they were in. She was worried about how her husband would react to her insecurity. But after a few days, her hurt feelings were still weighing on her mind and heart. Worse, they were turning into resentment—a narrative about her husband that started with “How could he? How dare he?” She knew she had to say something when she found herself obsessively ruminating and snapping at him over small things.

A few days later, she decided to “risk it” and be honest. Over a nice dinner, Jill shared her feelings, saying that while she trusted that he wouldn’t cheat, nonetheless his being holed up with this other woman all evening in the corner of the room made her feel afraid and hurt. Most of all, it triggered her fear of abandonment and inadequacy, her sense of being “not pretty enough, not young enough, not cool enough, not anything enough.” Jill’s own father had left the family when she was young, something her husband was aware of and of which she reminded him. She spoke openly about how his choice to spend the evening enjoying this other woman triggered her deepest insecurity.

Sadly, her husband’s reaction wasn’t the warm reassurance she had hoped for and needed. Rather than saying the loving words she craved—that he cherished her and would never leave her—he angrily questioned her use of the terms “holed up,” “in the corner of the room,” and “enjoying this other woman.” He rejected her description of his actions and accused her of calling him unfaithful and assuming the worst about him. When she defended herself, he told her that she was “nuts.” He said she was overly sensitive and had to get her jealousy under control. Moreover, he said that he was sick and tired of being monitored.

The conversation (which was never really a conversation) ended with his saying, “Nothing I do is ever enough for you,” and the couple retreated to their separate rooms.

Some version of this scenario plays itself out in every relationship I’ve ever seen or experienced: One partner shares his or her experience, longing to feel less alone in his or her pain, to be reassured and comforted, and to move the relationship into something more real and connected. But the result is a further wounding experience. He or she ends up feeling misunderstood, and more alone. The other partner’s anger and criticism then obstruct and add to the original pain.

These kinds of tragic “misses” happen in every relationship. We open a conversation with the desire to feel understood and known. But before we know what’s happened, we’re in a huge fight, tangled up in a lifetime of suffering. Instead of feeling more connected, and we feel profoundly cut off. Instead of feeling understood, we feel rejected. We started out feeling hurt and ended up accused of doing the hurting. We are miles from the empathic embrace we were craving.

Emotional safety is a universal human longing. We yearn for someone with whom we can be completely open; we want to express our real thoughts and feelings without being criticized or blamed. Deep down, we ache to be known.

As a therapist, I hear this same longing from people of every age group, race, gender, and socioeconomic background. The longing is to not have to twist our truth into a pretzel so as to make it palatable, to not have to silence our experience to maintain the relationship and the other person’s ego. We long to be heard without judgment. And yet, even as we are denied this kind of openness, we also have difficulty offering it to our partner.

The Persian poet Rumi wrote, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing, and right-doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.” That’s it, exactly. And yet, despite our longing and effort, again and again we find ourselves in the loneliest of places, feeling unloved and unknown. Worse, we feel unknowable. We question whether there is anywhere we can be received wholly, without judgment, and without having to fight vigilantly to get there. What we know is that we’re failing to gain entry into that union we crave, where egos fall away and the love is big enough to hold all our separate stories.article continues after advertisement

We long for the kind of love that can include everything. And yet, we get caught again and again in our humanness. We want unconditional love, but seem relentlessly stuck in the conditional.

A part of this pain is simply failing to accept the basic reality of being a human being. As human beings, we are condemned to live in separate bodies and separate minds, which makes for different thoughts, feelings, and experiences. We live in different realities, with different relative truths. We expect something different, especially in our closest relationships. We expect our partners to have an expansive understanding and acceptance of us, and then we experience great suffering when that expectation isn’t fulfilled.

When we are truly open, we are often denied the understanding we need. Our truth ends up bumping into our partner’s ego, their protective armor. Our experience signals a threat to our partner. They, too, feel misunderstood, expecting us to also have an expansive understanding and acceptance. The result is that our experience sounds like an accusation because it doesn’t reflect what they expect us to already have understood. And so they respond with anger and defensiveness. We end up in a life-or-death battle with our partner’s “me,” their wounds and storylines. Simultaneously, we’re trapped inside the claustrophobic separateness of our own little “me.” 

It’s important to realize that all people suffer to some degree in this inevitable form of isolation; it’s a core aspect of the human experience and a consequence of the terrible inadequacy of words and gestures to convey who we truly are, even to those to whom we are closest.

When we share our experience, we are sending an invitation to our partner to meet us beyond the words, in that expansive field of truth. It’s an attempt to bridge the divide between two people. Our truth is a path out of the isolation we all face as separate human beings. We offer our truth to our partner in search of love.

This attempt is profound. Furthermore, the awareness of what’s really being attempted changes the experience itself. At the same time, there are certain things we can do, and ways we can communicate, that will improve our chances of receiving the kind of acceptance and love we crave.

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And yet, despite glimmers of hope and movement in the direction of happiness, Alan continues to repeat certain comments to Viv. Specifically, “This marriage is a failure,” “I’ve totally failed at marriage,” or “I haven’t even been able to succeed at anything, including marriage.”

When Alan first started uttering these statements, Viv’s reaction was to become defensive and angry. She felt hurt and back-handedly insulted; his words felt like aggressions against her and the marriage. Her reaction would then be to defend the marriage or blame her husband for destroying it and them. Alan would then react and accuse Viv of being the one who was impossible to have a relationship with. One hundred percent of the time, when Viv engaged with defensiveness and aggression, the interaction went south and created more pain and disconnection within the couple.

After years spent defending herself and the marriage, blaming Alan for ruining things, and trying unsuccessfully to get him to see the marriage in a different way, Viv adopted a new strategy. She began pretending as if she didn’t notice her husband’s comments; she behaved as if he hadn’t said it, hadn’t hurt her. It was an attempt to stave off her shame at being wounded and show him (falsely) that his efforts to cause her harm were useless. Unfortunately, this strategy didn’t work either, because, underneath the nonchalance, she felt enraged and deeply hurt. Pretending in this way made her feel like she was tucking away and even betraying her true self, and this caused deep resentment and confusion in Viv.

Most recently, Viv’s and my work together has been focused on letting go of (or loosening) the controller in her—the part of her that feels it has to change or manage her husband’s behavior. When Viv is able to allow her husband to be the way he is, to let go of the idea that it’s her responsibility or duty to change him, she feels liberated and, unexpectedly, not resentful. She’s realized that there are a lot of things about her husband’s behavior that she doesn’t like, and that’s OK. When she’s not failing at getting him to be the way she wants him to be, and he’s not failing her by not being how she wants him to be, she can actually relax. She can hear his comments and not have to do anything with or about them. Viv has been learning to watch what happens when she lets everything be just exactly as it is, which may be the most important lesson we ever learn. The wise spiritual teacher, Adyashanti, calls this the practice of true meditation, a form of meditation that can happen everywhere not just on the cushion.

When Viv lets go of the controller and allows her husband to be as he is and also her experience of him to be how it is, she feels more separate from him, but also more aware of who he and she actually are, and paradoxically more in relationship with him, rather than the idea of the man she wants him to be. This doesn’t mean that she stops telling him when he says things that hurt her, but she no longer sees him as a piece of clay she has to mold. Alan transformed from being an object in her psyche, one that possessed the potential to make her happy, and became a separate human being with pleasing and not-pleasing parts.

There was a surrender that occurred within Viv; her 25-year effort to make Alan different (so that she could be happy) had given up. As a result, she was left with reality. Reality had always been there, but she had been in a battle with it, rejecting it and living in a state of chronic dissatisfaction and frustration.

The process of letting go is vastly liberating, but it also includes grief. When we surrender the controller, we surrender the hope that we will get to have the partner we wish we could have, that we will get to have the happiness we imagined our partner could bring us. We may discover a totally different kind of happiness, but our idea of how it was going to happen and who our partner was going to become must die.

When we stop betting our happiness on our partner changing, we discover a different kind of partnership, a bond without shackles, a union that’s both separate and together. When we step out of the role of manager, we start to see who our partner actually is rather than who they’re not, and hopefully, we can do all this with a bit of compassion.

This process, while painful in many ways, is a spiritual evolution. It involves shedding a central part of ourselves, a primary component and motivation in how we relate. Our relationship, with a loosened controller, is fundamentally different; our purpose is no longer fixing the project that is our partner. Without a controller, it’s a relationship without the hope of having exactly what we want, but with a new and undiscovered hope of meeting what we actually have, who our partner is, and who we are in this relationship as it is.

In letting go of the controller, we give ourselves the freedom to focus on our own behavior, our own happiness. We have permission to not have to be in charge of everyone else’s behavior. The more we practice this, the more we get the hang of letting others be who they are and moving on. In so doing, we also give ourselves the possibility of loving our partner now, not if and when we turn them into who we want them to be.

And remarkably, when we change our responses to our partner’s behavior, our partner’s behavior also changes. It has to, as we’re feeding it different food. One thing’s for sure: If we keep doing what we’ve always done, we’ll keep getting what we’ve always gotten. When we change, the people around us change, either through their own behavior or simply through how we see them.

Most recently, yet another shift has occurred; Viv has found a new clarity, a new wisdom that’s not about Alan or the marriage. Viv has discovered an authentic desire to move away from negativity and what hurts and move towards love and kindness, towards friends and family who have a positive experience of their relationship with her—who do not view their relationship with her as a failure. This desire in Viv stems from self-love, from letting things be as they are, and it allows her to disengage from her husband’s comments, to leave them alone in the interest of her own well-being. While she still finds Alan’s words hurtful in these situations, Viv has developed wisdom that, in the moment, tells her to let go and act in service of her greater happiness. Or, as the wonderful Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron puts it, to not bite the hook that’s dangling. When not responding is not just another response tactic, but rather a true act of self-love, we’ve discovered a most powerful tool.

Evolution and happiness in our self and our relationship is not about figuring out how to better control our partner, learning to not care, or swallowing behavior that’s hurtful. It is, however, about learning to allow everything to be as it is, letting go of control and responsibility for our partner’s behavior, and practicing self-love. Ultimately, it’s about learning to take what we want and leave the rest behind, moving away from what hurts and moving towards kindness.

A caveat: In the case of abuse of any kind, emotional or physical, we do not allow anything to be as it is. When abuse is present, we remove ourselves from the situation. When abuse is happening, we do not surrender control or wait for our partner’s behavior to change, we take ourselves out of harm’s way. This article is not applicable in cases of abuse.

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The average person checks their smartphone 190 times per day.  At this time in history, we are bingeing on technology as if we were at a cruise ship buffet, using it to maintain a constant state of distraction and entertainment, and ultimately, to escape the present moment, and ourselves. We continue using, and even increase our use, despite being aware of the negative consequences that it causes. Our more evolved self wants to cut down but we won’t, can’t, don’t. The only difference between technology addiction and other addictions is that we have all drunk the Kool-Aid; we’re all in on this one.  It used to be that an addiction caused us to be excluded from society, but technology addiction makes us an insider, part of the club.  In truth, technology is not doing this to us.  Rather, it is simply making it easier and more acceptable for us to act out the most primitive aspects of who we already are.  Technology is the perfect partner and tool for our reptilian self. (The reptilian self is our inner five-year-old, that part of us that wants what it wants and wants it now, regardless of whether it’s good for us—and yes you have one!)

Thus far we have been building bad habits and allowing ourselves to fall into a kind of entertained sleep, letting technology decide how it will use us rather than the other way around. But the great news is that each of us can start building a healthy relationship with technology right now, by simply making different choices, little ones, like not playing games on our phone when riding the bus, not putting our device on the table when we’re with a friend, not checking our phone when we wake up in the night, not posting every thought that appears in our mind, not taking selfies each time we have the impulse to do so… little things that radically change the way we live, and feel.

Technology is not going to start make mindful choices on our behalf. It is us, the humans using technology, who must make mindful choices for ourselves, take ownership of our behavior, if we want to regain control and bring our lives back into sync with what really matters to us. Change happens one individual, one moment, one choice at a time. Why not start now?

As seen on Fox news: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2016/11/06/are-addicted-to-your-cellphone-tips-for-breaking-habit.html

Nancy Colier

www.nancycolier.com

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Most of us, when listening, are doing one of two things and sometimes both.  First, we are scanning for danger: is there something that our partner is expressing that conflicts with what we experience or believe. If so, then we think that our own experience or belief is threatened, as is the relationship itself.  We are taught that our partner’s truth must align with our own—or else someone’s truth and thus someone must be wrong.

We listen with the word “but” (not “and”) as our guide. If our partner shares an experience or thought that is different from our own, we connect the two experiences with the word “but” which implies that the experience on one side or the other is invalid, rejected, and… (Read more https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/inviting-monkey-tea/201610/the-key-intimacy-is-radical-listening-0)

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My path to becoming an enabler started out as most do, as someone trying to help, and thinking that I could. A dear friend who is also a relative came to me in trouble, having lost her job, about to lose her health insurance and unable to pay rent. An intelligent, honest and kind woman, she was not afraid of hard work and had always demonstrated a strong moral character. She desperately wanted to work and was trying diligently to find employment. When she first asked me for financial help, a short- term loan, it was a no-brainer. She’d never had trouble paying her bills, and there was no reason to think that she wouldn’t get herself out of this recent financial pickle. And so, without much thought, I wrote her a check…

Eight years later, she was still in that pickle only that pickle had morphed itself into a malignant sub-machine gun. For eight years she came to me for money on an increasingly frequent basis, with increasingly dire potential consequences, and with an increasing sense of entitlement. For the most part she paid me back although sometimes not for a long time, and sometimes after I had already loaned her more on top of what she already owed me.

Complicating the matter, she wasn’t just a relative and friend, she was also deeply involved in my children’s lives; she loved my children…and was also someone I loved, and still love. I didn’t want her to suffer as she was suffering or be tormented by the relentless fear and desperation she felt.

Also, I was in a position where I had a good job and some money in the bank; she had neither. I could help, which in my mind meant that I should help. She was in pain and also family after all.

Year after year she continued to ask me for money. But no matter how much I “helped,” her financial situation got worse. She was also growing more despondent and angry, more aggressive in her behavior towards me. She spent money that she didn’t have, assuming that I would cover her. Despite many frank and difficult conversations, nothing changed. Finally, despite great ambivalence, I told her that I could not continue to play this role in her life. I didn’t want us to resent each other. Difficult as it was, I laid down an official “no more” declaration.

Although I sounded clear outwardly, inside I was anything but. I felt terrible about the decision to stop “helping,” selfish, un-loving, and incapable of deep compassion. In light of my longtime Buddhist practice, I felt like a spiritual fraud.

She was on her knees, begging literally, and also threatening terrible things, if I didn’t rescue her. She looked like an animal with its leg in a trap, helpless and terrified, and enraged—at me. Looking at her face, white with terror, furious with desperation and humiliation, still I held my ground. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done, but some part of me knew I had to do it.

The result was that she acted out her threats and I believe, punished me for attempting to stop the cycle. She stopped taking care of her life, on every front, and ended up homeless (except if I would have her) and ill, without health care, and without any community. I spoke with relatives and former friends, but no one was willing/able to help her.

As I experienced it, she was now my third child, my charge. In truth, I still loved her, and wanted her to find her way back to independence, to enjoy her life. Nonetheless, I also knew that I had been bullied into saving her, despite my decision to stop, but it would not happen again.

Two years later, back on her feet at least minimally, having never paid me back the large amount of money she now owed me, she asked again. “Just to cover her for a short time” was how she put it, as if it were a small and casual affair, with no history. The tone of the request was perhaps even more shocking than the request itself. But this time when I said “no” I was certain I would not waver. What followed however, I could never have imagined.

This friend and relative, whom I thought I had been (lovingly) taking care of for years, ferociously attacked me verbally and emotionally. She abused me with her words and anger, accused me of wanting to destroy her, of being a terrible and sadistic person, the antithesis of family. And, she blamed me, fiercely, for the impending consequences she would suffer as a result of my not fixing her life. As she saw it, I was not only to blame for what would happen to her but actually intended for her destruction. I had abandoned her, and my abandonment was the cause of the horrible pain she was enduring. Finally, she assured me that I would go down with her when she fell, that she would make sure of it.

It was nearly impossible to process—violent rage and hatred from a person that I believed I had been “helping” for nearly a decade, someone that I loved and that I believed loved me!

She continued to bully me emotionally for months, to make me know and feel her suffering. She made life extraordinarily stressful not just for me, but also for my children. Her fury was terrifying and seemingly bottomless. Occasionally, between rages, she would approach me with kindness, express deep gratitude for all that I had done for her, and acknowledge my generosity. Still, no matter her approach, wrath and hatred or gratitude and responsibility, I painstakingly continued to say “no.”

I had become an enabler. Realizing this truth was like waking up from a terrible dream. With my role named, I was suddenly able to change. What was it that allowed me to know myself as an enabler, finally, after years of co-creating this disastrous situation—all with the best of intentions?

Copyright 2015 Nancy Colier

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Unfortunately for both of us, my friend had taken pieces of reality and, as the human mind is inclined and skilled at doing, woven those independent truths into a larger story, filling in the gaps and constructing a cohesive narrative, which could have made sense but was in fact not true. My friend was suffering intensely with his false beliefs about me, and the proceeding story, namely, what those beliefs meant for our friendship. At the same time, I was suffering at the hands of his mind, being punished for a crime that I had not committed, and a belief about my nature, which was radically out of alignment with my actual behavior. And yet, no matter what I offered, my friend chose to stick to his false assumptions and write the final act of our friendship. I realized, after great strife, that he was more committed to holding onto his pain-inducing and friendship-annihilating story than to opening to the truth, and possibly, the feelings that the actual truth might bring. I came to understand that the truth, what had actually happened, was irrelevant at this moment. His fictional reality was real in his mind and body. Real, but not true.

With so much at stake, fighting naturally erupted. He fought fiercely for me to concede to his mind’s version of reality, and I fought equally fiercely for him to know the actual reality, and with that, to stop punishing me for a fictional crime, and erasing the truth of our deep friendship.
While fighting for the truth did little to shift my relationship with my friend, it was profound in how it transformed my relationship with myself.

When we fight, our tendency is to want to correct the other person’s version of truth, essentially, to get them to agree with our version. We explain our truth over and over again, in newfangled words and styles, desperately trying to create some consistency between what we believe to be truth and what the other believes. The internal dissonance can feel unbearable when our version of truth is in contradiction to another’s with whom we are involved emotionally, particularly when the truth in question implies something about our character or who we think we are.

When all attempts at truth-correction with my friend had failed, I had nowhere to go, no way to be heard or known correctly. The desperate efforts that had been focused outward, on getting him to change his beliefs, to see the truth about me, had not given me what I needed. It was then that I woke up: I remembered to turn my attention inward, and bring myself the loving attention, listening presence and understanding that I had been so desperately trying to get from my friend. I realized that I could not stake my own okayness and wellbeing on his changing his beliefs. Not only was that not going to happen, but it put me in a perilous and helpless position. I needed to be able to get okay with just my own acknowledgment of my truth and goodness. I made the choice to stop chasing what I needed and open to how painful it was to be misunderstood and misperceived, and possibly to also lose the friendship for reasons that were false. I gave myself the right to know what was true, even if it would never be known by another. I honored my integrity and strength in having made the choices I had actually made. I gave myself precisely what I needed to receive from the outside world.

It’s normal to want those we care about to share our version of truth. And yet, our tendency is to need external acknowledgment and validation in order to make true what we already know ourselves. The time comes however, when we need to start taking care of our own knowing, to provide acknowledgment and kindness to our own truth. When I turned inward and honored the sadness and loss in being misperceived, the truth of what I know actually happened, and the integrity of my choices, I felt known, loved and comforted. The attunement that I desperately sought from my friend, I received from my own loving presence. While I will always wish for my friend to know the truth, and me correctly, I am nonetheless able to bring myself the love and understanding, the wellbeing that I thought only he could provide.

In our search for an other who will hear and understand our truth with compassion, we consistently overlook our own company; we forget our own presence as a source of deep comfort and kindness, and blessedly, one that is always available to us. We need only the willingness and wisdom (and sometimes the reminder) to turn our attention inward, listen with kindness, and care about our own suffering. Particularly when we are in pain, searching desperately for comfort and relief from the outside world, we need to remember to flip the process. That is, to turn towards our own heart, listen to what it is carrying, and offer ourselves the compassion and loving presence that we are searching for outside. The experience of being deeply seen and cared about is ours to give—and receive—here now, when we decide to truly be with our own heart.

Copyright 2014 Nancy Colier

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Once we’ve been in a relationship for some time, most of us have written a plethora of stories about our partners: we have volumes of ideas about what they do that we don’t like, what their problems are, why they are the way they are, how and why they hurt us, and on it goes. Basically, we have figured out what’s wrong with them. Some of our story lines we share with our partners and some we don’t. We could fill volumes with the convictions we have compiled on our partners, most if not all of which we believe to be the truth. Our story lines have a lot to do with what increases our pain in relationships.

When difficulty arises with our partner, we might feel hurt, angry, frustrated or perhaps a cocktail of all three and more. We might feel intense pain for some time. But then, oddly, we do something which intensifies and extends that pain. You could say we throw gasoline on the fire of pain. The incident or fight is over, in real time, but not for us, not a chance. We’ve still got a long way to go with the story of it. The hurt might have passed, its shelf life in our body over, but we opt to spend days, weeks, sometimes even lifetimes rehashing it in our minds, crafting new stories filled with our partner’s crimes and our grievances, breathing new life into what is in fact ready to pass. If our pain were a child, we would be nursing it long into its adulthood.
The shelf life of most intense feelings is quite short. A strong feeling, which is not fed by our thoughts about it, can pass through us in a rather short time. It is our mind that, counter-intuitively, does not want us to let go of our pain. The mind desperately wants us to pay attention to our pain, and to how any new hurt fits into the larger script that we have written on our partner and the relationship. Perhaps it is the mind’s effort to figure out the pain, to make sense of what seems nonsensical, not understandable. Or maybe the mind believes that if we allow the pain to pass when it has come to its natural end, it is not enough somehow, that we haven’t done the pain justice if we do not extend it by way of our own continued attention. Perhaps the mind believes that we further punish our partner by holding onto and ruminating on the pain they have caused us. Or, maybe the mind wants us to keep chewing on the pain simply because the mind loves a problem; a problem for the mind is like an extravaganza with which to entertain itself. In truth, spending more time re-thinking and rehashing our pain does not serve our pain, or us.
When we start paying attention to our mind, we see that it is always beckoning us to reenter the story of our pain. Something amazing happens however when we make the choice to refrain from taking the mind’s bait, resist engaging with such thoughts. Our relationship gets a whole lot better, and feels, suddenly, like it’s happening in the present tense, like we’re meeting our partner freshly. I am absolutely not suggesting that we deny pain when it is felt intensely and directly, in the body, but rather that we choose not to extend, intensify and freeze it, keeping it alive in our mind when it (possibly) might not need to be there. Pain is a truth, but if we don’t feed it, it has a natural life span. It is we who (often) make pain immortal.

To this end, it is important that we notice when we are actually feeling okay, not in pain, not resentful, not hurt, and we still choose to jump on board a thought train to pain. It is important that we become conscious of this habit to get back in the saddle of hurt. It is an odd choice really, but one that we all make, until we don’t anymore, until we become aware that we are choosing it.

The next time you catch your mind inviting you to dive into the negative story line of your relationship and your partner, to again crack open the great tome on their failings, politely decline the mind’s invitation. Return to where you are and the breath about to happen. By simply decreasing the amount of time we spend telling ourself the story of what’s wrong, we can profoundly improve the experience we have in our relationships. The more we can refrain from stoking the fire of how we have been hurt, the more room there is to discover how we actually appreciate our partners, and to see them in the moments when all is well. The less we obscure our present moment with the history of our scars, the more possibility there is for new relationship skin to grow.

We need to pay attention to what is actually true for us; to meet ourself and our partner, as freshly as we can in each new moment. We need not go looking for past pain, need not dive into every pain story the mind presents. Simply by choosing to decline the invitation to engage with old pain, we end up feeling a whole lot lighter, happier, more present, and available to love.

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Eric Whitacre assembled a technological collage of sound and sight that is remarkable, but other than the fact that the project involves music and humans, it has almost nothing to do with the experience that takes place in an actual, real life choir. There is a magical and transcendent experience that happens when we come together as human beings to create music, side by side, heart to heart, an experience that Whitacre himself describes as the moment that changed his life, the first time he felt a part of something larger.

The magic and mystery of the experience is a result of living something together—co-creating and sharing an experience that unfolds before us, larger than us but containing us nonetheless.  When we come together as individuals in a creative process, we become a part of the whole, our separateness melting into the experience itself, into one another, as we become vehicles for the universe to express itself through our seemingly separate embodiments. When our body experiences this, we are fundamentally changed.

When we omit the together part of the experience—when the process no longer happens together, is no longer shared, we cut out the key ingredient in the experience, entirely change its nature—extract its very soul. As I witnessed Whitacre conducting alone in front of a black screen, in silence, watched the singers’ faces float by in individual boxes—a mosaic of separate lives pieced together in the ether, creating the illusion of togetherness, I was certain that I would rather live connection than know that I had lived it.  I wonder, is this what the future holds? It feels apocalyptic.

No matter how we try to recreate the experience of together in an end result, inserting it through a separated process, we simply cannot manufacture the experience of together.  If we want to experience the profundity that being and creating together can offer, we must actually be and create together.  Everything else is just an idea.

The virtual choir informs its participants that they have become part of something larger than themselves, that they were indeed connected.  But in the experience of living it, they were alone and disconnected.

The experience of the virtual choir, to use Whitacre’s own words, is an expression of  “Souls on their own desert islands sending electronic messages in bottles to each other.” I believe that Whitacre used this image to suggest a kind of optimism about humanity and our longing to connect. I did not find his analogy to be optimistic, nor do I see sending out electronic messages from my own desert island as an acceptable substitute for experiencing connection. To celebrate the virtual choir is to celebrate the end of the direct experience of connection, of living the actual experience we are talking about.  It is to say that going forward, we agree to be nourished by the concept of connection—to let technology live fully, while we humans stand by and hear about it, delighting in our ability to re-create something that looks like real connection—and now actually calling it real.

In one particularly chilling testimonial, a singer writes about how wonderful the virtual choir was because she got to “sing with her sister.”  A cultural amnesia is setting in, a forgetting of what direct experience actually is, what it feels like to have the experience itself.  In truth, this young woman did not sing with her sister.  She did not have the experience of singing together; her body’s cells do not contain the experience.  She sang alone, as did her sister. What she lived was something entirely different; she had the experience of knowing that recordings of her and her sister’s voices were brought together in a technological feat.  It looks and sounds like she and her sister were singing together and that simulation of reality, that notion of being together, is what she gets to take home as the experience itself.  In place of the direct experience, she gets to have an idea of the experience—and here’s the terrifying part: she believes that they are the same thing.

“People will go to any lengths necessary to find and connect with each other.  It doesn’t matter the technology,” says Whitacre.  Yes, people are desperate for connection, but it does matter the technology.  Technology is replacing the direct experience of connection with the concept and simulation of connection, and we humans are losing the capacity to tell the difference!

At one time, technology may have been intended to bring people together, to create actual connection, more time together, more personal experiences, a richer experience of life.  Regardless of its original intention, it seems that the system has flipped on itself.  People feel more disconnected, more like they are on their own desert islands, while technology gets to do all the connecting. We sit alone in our isolated pods, while the invisible wires and cables do the interacting—together.  I fear that we are losing sight of what actual connection feels like, believing that our computers’ connections are our own. The more we congratulate ourselves on our ability to simulate the experience of being human, the more, little by little, the direct experience of being human slips away.

After listening to the virtual choir, I am left with a haunting echo, and I cannot help wonder if the haunting comes not only from the poignance of the music, but also from the poignance of what’s being lost, from the experience of virtual connection itself—the sound of humans singing alone into empty rooms, like lost birds calling out for their mothers to find them, to save them from the loneliness, and bring them home.

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