Why don’t we ask for what we want? What keeps us from laying our needs out for all to see? It’s easier to pretend we’re okay than to be authentically real, especially when that means looking like the loser we’re trying so hard not to be. Does hiding who we are serve us in some perverted way? Would it shake our personally well-honed, yet painful identities to open up to accepting love, to admit the possibility that we are fully capable of love and that others ache to love us too?

We fear that if we do, love won’t come.

It can’t not, but we don’t experience that when we don’t grant its possibility. We miss priceless ripe rejuvenating nurturing human love and the golden chance to discover that we are the Beloved, the source and fountain of all love — to know it absolutely, utterly without one single doubt, in every precious cell. No more faking it, no more seeking it, no more hiding from it at all.

99% — perhaps more — of our stories trend negatively — how we will be found out, how we will lose something or not get what we want, how something bad will happen — in our stories it’s rarely good — how our world will fall apart if we take the risk. Is it any wonder that we can’t even see all the love that’s right here waiting for us?

Because of this measureless mental masturbation, we are afraid to ask, to try, to experiment, to fail, to be a fool for love, to let the entire world know we are alive and have needs, that we care about another, that we aren’t tough and hardened, that we are not impenetrable, that we are pitifully vulnerable. Rather than taking the risk of drowning in the shame of rejection, we add another chapter to the dramedy of our unworthiness, our aloneness.

We humans are a silly species. We hide around the corner, just out of sight, waiting for the object of our affections to notice us and give us a hug. We wonder why no one loves us or wants us around when we put ourselves on lockdown, concealed within the safety of our heads. We live waiting to die, waiting for death to take us one unmet need at a time.

Shall we call a moratorium on such nonsense. It’s the everyday, automatic, can’t avoid it, fear-based human programming, but it doesn’t have to be ours once we recognize it for what it is.

Humans are wired for connection. We need each other. With the exception of intentional solitude, when we go solo, we tend to go rogue. Our hearts feel the sting of not being included, of being on the outside looking in, whether it is self-imposed or not. Eventually self-imposition is so hard to break free of that something breaks within.

We carry the wounds, the damage of our lives with us everywhere we go. Some of us are consciously meeting those wounds, doing the deep shadow work, many are not, but even those of us doing the work at a conscious level, still need each other. It is in another’s eyes that our own path is reflected back to us. It is through another’s heart that we see what is hidden from us. It is in the communion of souls that we are set free.

No one wakes up alone. There is no one; there is US, the unity self. Like it or not, live it or not, we are in this together.