Getting Metaphysical for a Moment

We humans are much more similar than we are different. We have the same fundamental needs of LOVE in this life. I hope you're sitting down, because we're about to go in.

Welcome to Grounded💡- a place for my letters written from a deeper place, metaphysical if you will;

What you can expect from Grounded:

• Learnings through a lens of faith, philosophy, love, and belonging.

• Ideas on life, health, humanity, spiritual experiences, prayer, and more.

• Insights into other cultural & religious context to help us grow together and expand our horizons.

Stay beautiful.

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It's been a minute since I spoke from the heart and soul.

Something came knockin’ on my door unexpectedly, but the way I make resolve within my spirit is to take many long walks, to be in prayer, and to write.

These are sounding boards for my sanity.

If your spirit is calling or your soul is longing for something more meaningful, read below. If your heart is seeking satisfaction and your mind is itching for something of intrigue within an intellectual context, read below.

If you’re only here for the bright and shiny things of life, ignore this message. If you prefer to only get your feet wet and stay in shallow waters, then STOP NOW.

I’m calling us deeper here and we’re about to go on a journey together.

I’m writing from a different vein, tapping into a a different reservoir of my soul than I have for quite some time. This may feel heavy.

Are we ready?

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When we speak about ADHD, Autism, and neurodivergence more broadly we can so quickly take on a dismissive tone about the lived experience with ADHD.

As with any label, diagnosis, or self-perceived limitation in life, the voice of victimhood has no place in glorifying the journey. Victimhood has no place in authentic grace or growth.

You’ve likely seen and heard someone speaking with this closed-mindset, dismissive tone as they personify the victim mentality as part of their lived experience on this planet. It is no fun to listen to.

But we celebrate when we hear people of similar origin speak with courage and freedom, liberty to imagine and enjoy the unknowns of their futures. Striving without paralyzing perfectionism while striving with strength of faith amid all the unknowns we must recognize.

It’s all about how we perceive and experience the journey. Some people choose to be stuck in the muck and allow the lies of victimhood to hold them back. Others choose to listen to the higher calling, the greater truth, being that of a conqueror… not letting their circumstance hold them back from achieving greatness.

For example, one of the most sought out public speakers today is one that speaks to crowds of thousands at a time. She speaks to motivate and inspire. She tells stories of rags to riches, stories of recovery, stories of overcoming challenges. We love the story of the underdog, but we will quickly roll our eyes when someone starts to play the victim.

There is one public speaker in particular, a man who has no arms and no legs – yes you read that correctly – he has no arms and no legs. He speaks with passion, with courage, to tell stories of hope, growth, to push others to break through their mental and emotional blocks that they believe they are chained by.

His name is Nicholas James Vujicic, or simply “Nick.” He has an amazing story if you look into it. I encourage you to do so at some later time.

In years past, certain people were looked down upon for having a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome or more of an eccentric lifestyle from those Franklins, Teslas, Eddisons, Einsteins, Mozarts, Bachs, Beethovens, and others… yet they were of the greatest thinkers, inventors, and leaders of their time.

As a man, I and most men have a bias to learn from and know more about men in history than I do women in history. Whatever your situation may be, I encourage you to find the stories and characters that inspire you, that align with your interests and expand your mental frameworks as well. Please do share any additional examples for inspiring people in the comments below.

Today, we thankfully have people like Elon Musk who commands a global stage and doesn’t shy away from their Asperger's, going so far as to say while speaking on stage at a globally televised event that he on some level really cares about truth at a deeper level, “truth matters to me a lot, really. Pathologically, it matters to me.”

It is this exact obsession that can be seen as something beautiful and a powerful driver for good in the world when taken under the script of a conqueror. But if Musk had taken on the tone as victim for his story with Asperger’s, the world we live within today would look fundamentally different altogether.

We need neurodivergence. We need truth. We need those who are obsessive, eccentric, motivated by intrigue and curiosity. We need seekers. We need curious cats and dedicated dogs willing to dive in deep to the nature of our shared experience and use their superpowers for good.

We need more heroes. We need more heroines.

We need more victors. We need less victims.

We need more stories of recovery to be celebrated by more people. We need to be factual about the hardships we face in life but even more so we must celebrate and spotlight the stories of actual people making a difference in the world around us. At the end of the day, we are each not all that different than one another.

At the end of the day, we humans have only but a few needs at the core of our hearts.

We seek to be loved. We seek to have someone or something to love.

“Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature. Each of us, then, is a ‘matching half’ of a human whole…and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him.” – Plato, The Symposium

It is within our genuine human nature to be born with and live through a great wound within our heart, a deep longing and feeling of lack. This lack is attempted to be filled with all sorts of artifacts and idols.

We run from the pain of this wound.

We fix our eyes on the brightest distraction that can keep us from facing the torturous longing that resides within this great wound.

Many philosophers, behavioral psychologists, theologians, and other deep thinkers agree that love is the closest thing we possess to healing this deep void within our hearts that so often echoes home inside our bones and dampens our soul and spirit.

Humans insist on looking for satisfaction in things that cannot provide real or lasting fulfillment. These false lures include material goods, also power, and fame, Aristotle explained. A life devoted to any of these goals becomes quite miserable and empty.

In the 17th century, French philosopher Blaise Pascal surmised of our experience that the wound of our nature is the existential condition, thanks to the utter uncertainty of our situation, which no science can answer or resolve, we perpetually teeter on the brink of anxiety – or despair.

Our human experience is one that has boggled minds for thousands of years. What’s your interpretation?

In his brief review of Sweet Sorrow: Love, Loss and Attachment in Human Life by Alan Eppel, Dr. Derek Puddester shares with us the following summary of the deeply contextualizing book on love and attachment published in 2009.

Society is obsessed with love, and we invest substantially in promoting healthy relationships in family and community. No surprise there, according to psychiatrist Dr. Alan B. Eppel, because the drive to attach is fundamental to human nature.

Personal health issues, such as low self-esteem, loneliness, and isolation, are tragically commonplace, as are community health issues, such as disengagement, poverty, and homelessness. The bottom line is that attachment is a substantial issue for all of us in health.

In Sweet Sorrow: Love, Loss and Attachment in Human Life, Eppel tries to clarify the complex topic of human relationships through theory, clinical case examples and references to art and music. He offers 11 core propositions to explain love and loss:

• The drive to attach is fundamental to human nature.

• Striving for attachment is the strongest motivator of behavior.

• Identity is formed from interpersonal interaction.

• Mood is the bedrock of identity and the sense of self.

• Psychiatric disorders reflect and affect the expression of love and loss.

• Disorders of sexual desire comprise the inability to maintain healthy attachments simultaneously with sexual intercourse.

• The intensity of loss and grief is directly proportional to the intensity of the attachment bond.

• The death instinct exerts itself when attachments are lost.

• Time is relative: Acceleration of time is associated with alienation; expansion of time is associated with authentic human experience.

• The need for meaning is fundamental to human nature.

• The drive to attach gives rise to the strongest sense of meaning in human interaction.

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In our lives as individuals, we can often overlook our role in the infinite – the infinite impact of our everyday interactions, the infinite interdependence that is our truest experience with one another in society, and the infinite love and relationship we may have with one another.

The murky waters of our relationships today seem infinitely more complicated than they were just 10 yrs. ago if you ask me – heck – even 5 years ago.

Nowadays, the feelings of my heart have allowed me to believe with my finite personal experience that confusion is more common that trust, faith, respect, and love genuine. It seems that we humans have suffered a great divide over the last several years – not one of specific racial tensions, global war, regional dialectic differences but rather one of a higher plane beyond our comprehension.

This severed tie we have suffered is one of the infinite spiritual attachments with which I believe we remained bonded to between us and the clouds decades ago but has grown tattered and broken for so many souls and spirits I see today.

People who had passion and fire now have slumbered speech and a depressed resting heart rate. Some whom I knew to be those to climb mountains are now residing and hiding in the valleys and under bridges – who have decided it easier to disengage and unplug from the machine rather than let it torment their minds and hearts anymore.

Such decrepit disruption I’ve seen in the invisible. Though too, I have seen a great awakening in the parallel. If my empathetic eyes see those broken and downcast, my own genuine heart longing for love, attachment and community has grown consciously aware of the awakening that’s occurring all around us as well.

This last week has been a humbling stumbling block that came across my path exceptionally unexpectedly, which should come as no surprise I suppose with the wild way in which this world works… but nonetheless, my heart has been challenged and so has my mind.

Through the conversational wading in water that has been some of the discussions of late, peeling back the layers of the perpetual onion of news, media, headlines, and heated debates online today I found the water in which we swam together began to grow darker and more contaminated.

I believe our creator has allowed us the discernment to judge good clean waters from those that are polluted with lies. I believe we are called to swim in fresh waters, celebrating and calling others to drink of and swim within good clean notorious and hydrating waters, rather than water that are “as clear as mud.”

I do not claim to know answers, but I do believe I can perceive clean waters in contrast of quicksand and mud.

I believe many people today are caught in the pit – the pit of lies and shame, the endless self-shaming and self-harming they’ve been instructed and artificially incentivized to prioritize in their hearts in exchange for the holiest of holy truths, that which is the absolute and unconditional love – to the infinites of time and space – that is perhaps the only conceived solution to help heal our broken hearts and the great wound that resides within.

We are each individuals, but we require each other at a much more profound level than what we give credence to within the everyday hustle, bustle, tussle culture.

Something deep inside my soul has always known this to be a piece of the puzzle of my personal lived experience, but it wasn’t until I was much older in years that I began reading texts and historical accounts that have explored these ideas for centuries.

At the end of the day, I think we humans end up converging on the same path one way or another. We are simple beings in reality: we seek to be loved, and we seek to love.

This is equally our calling, our command, and our genuine human need.

In presence of victims, we are called to love.

To fight the lies of victimhood, we care commanded to love.

Despite the destructive deception of individualism, our genuine human need is that of love.

May we be heroes in our story – not victims.

May we empower and inspire a generation of conquerors – not victims.

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A Prayer of Saint Francis.

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is error, truth;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.