Staying Connected in an Expanding Virtual World

What is Connection?

We all know what it feels like to be connected to another. It’s an invisible thread, not unlike the virtual world. Yet the sense of connection alive between people, with nature, the divine, our animal friends and our passions, is something so relevant that without it, there is no richness to living. In fact, a lack of connection has serious health consequences.

Increasingly, adults and children are plugging into a virtual world, which is predicted to grow its reaches into a virtual "reality" that can make us feel that it is actually real in a multidimensional way.

National Public Radio reported recently that a man spent 45 days engaged in a virtual game, only to stop for an hour per day to sleep, fueling himself with pizza deliveries. In the end, he gained close to 50 pounds and became emotionally incapable of human connection.

There is even a pathology now know as IAD, or Internet Addiction Disorder.

What are people seeking through overuse of the internet? Is it a misleading path to a sense of connection?

Connection is defined in the dictionary as relationship, or being joined to something or someone. True connection, though often ephemeral, is beyond any words in the English language. It can be transcendent, but is most certainly a glue that holds us together as human beings in all of our facets – physically, emotionally and spiritually.

Nourishing true connection for ourselves and our children is what keeps us healthy. Beyond limiting time on the internet, it is important to nourish our relationships, to nature, to one another, to our own bodies, and to the divine.

Intentional creativity teacher, Shiloh Sophia McCloud, speaks about an invisible red thread that weaves us in community to the tribe of people with whom we are meant to share our gifts. This is the thread of community that brings us together with a sense of purpose, a requirement for a healthy life by fulfilling what she calls our “sacred responsibility” as global citizens.

Important ways to nourish our connections include communication in many directions, both inner and outer. When we take time to feel our inherent connection to the divine and our earth mother, feeling ourselves magnetically connected both above and below, our flow naturally then invites healthy human interaction. Healthy human interactions can also stimulate this essential sense of wholeness in our “vertical connection,” the fundamental circuits joining us from above and below, earth and sky.

Nourishing and maintaining connection in a busy world requires more than just human interaction, but time in nature and daily meditation that invites connection to the divine, to the Soul and stillness within.

Building a Soul Altar is wonderful foundation to affirm and cultivate connection to the divine and stay healthy as a spiritual being having a human experience. (Visit www.soulfulalignment.life for more about the Soul Altar).

Gathering in circles is another timeless tool that predictably restores our circuits back to home base, especially when calling in communion with our vertical connection.