You Belong Here

NOVEMBER 4, 2025

You Belong Here

Friends. You are welcome here and you belong here.

If you don’t always feel like you belong, yet a tiny part of you remains open to the idea that it may not be the whole truth – these words might change your life.

And although this is hardly the whole story for me, it’s as good a place as any to begin.

I remember distinctly the moment these words landed, unexpectedly, channeled by a wise and beautiful stranger who’d I’d later call one of my great teachers as I settled into her class. And I broke. I couldn’t have anticipated the degree to which I would be impacted by such simple language. But the potency of her words penetrated me, and my cracks began to show. The foundation I had built and lived upon had started to shift and as it did, I too, began to come apart.

A series of less than gentle awakenings delivered me to the truth of my reality: that the world in which I felt alone, unwelcome and an outsider to – had been in large part my own creation.

Early in my yoga training, I began to relive a somatic memory from a similar training experience almost ten years prior. As the feelings of aloneness, discomfort, differentness and outsiderness emerged, a new awareness suddenly dawned on me as I watched my mind draw connections between names, faces, environmental similarities, and tether them – to the past. Matching new faces with old names, burying new possibilities into old stories.

Like many of us conditioned by a culture that exalts appearance over substance and fitting in over belonging, it was from a young and tender age I had been misguided to conflate the two.

Fitting in provides a template, and our degree of compliance with that ideal becomes the yardstick by which we then measure our value; however, the parts that we neglect, reject or try to kill off in the process of “making the cut” never truly leave us. In fact the longer we turn away from them, the louder and more destructive they become. Belonging, on the other hand, requires no debt be paid for its namesake. It is by virtue of no extraneous measure or factor that belonging is granted; it simply is.

But although belonging is your birthright, it is you that must claim it. Because how do we belong anywhere, if not first to ourselves?

There is no doubt a very biological, physiological component to what makes us feel safe or unsafe in this world. The architecture of our neural wiring prioritizes physical survival. These systems have evolved into modernity with us; although we’re no longer chased by a tiger, more vague and complex forms of stress plague us, and our mental interpretations can easily mislead us, calcifying biases by targeting aspects of our external environments as the cause of our agitation, suffering, and even our joy.

As I began to polish the lens of my perceptions, it became strikingly clear to me that what I saw externally was a reflection of what was happening inside of me; that my work in the business of belonging was actually becoming an inside job.

Remaining in the shadows of outsiderness would have been easy; would have felt safer than it did then to slowly crawl out into the light. But something deeper and wiser had been awakened in me.
An ancient intelligence – the same that lives in you: a holy golden thread all at once delicate and unbreakable, imperceptibly radiant; weaving the greater vision, story and possibility of our lives.

It was here that I realized my power to choose. To choose myself or to remain an outsider to my own life. To say yes to life. To say to myself: I am here, I have the right to be here, I belong here. These awakenings tend to shake us unexpectedly. Attempting to dissolve a distorted perception of reality that lives in the body naturally produces its own flavors of cognitive dissonance. So, it takes courage, and patience, and trust – to be with the uncertainty; to remain afoot of the shifting foundation as our wobbles and shakes and tremors endlessly remind us of our vulnerability.

Often we forget that we have choice, autonomy, and a say in how we play this game of life. It can be our greatest difficulty to examine and subsequently challenge the ways in which we see things – particularly ourselves. The realization that I was choosing to be and remain an outsider to my own life, was immense. As such, it shifted my understanding of the world in a way that began to deliver me a future I could not at the time have imagined. A future, now a present – brimming with depth of connection that I realize had been my greatest unacknowledged and unexpressed yearning.

When we leave it up to the world to tell us who we are and where we belong, rest assured it will. It will also tell us who we aren’t and where we don’t belong. Listen to these voices long enough and we come to depend upon them entirely. We lose our center and our ability to orient ourselves in the world. But when we listen for that quiet song inside, we awaken, and our fingers and souls begin the dance of weaving and spinning…. And then… The golden thread starts to appear…

Often, we don’t feel like we belong because we are asking the world instead of ourselves for that validation. When we invite ourselves in; when we become insiders, witnesses to, and friendly towards ourselves and our experiences – the “outside” world starts to reveal, too, its secrets: That it’s not as “outside” of us as we may have once thought and that the conditions for our belonging are in fact seeded within us, perhaps only awaiting a little bit of sunshine and rain…

Friends. You are welcome here.
And you belong here.