Something is taking shape within Deep Living Lab.
We call it The Chrysalis—a collective exploration of what is emerging from within us and what is asking for our attention from the external world at this moment in time. As it unfolds, I find myself returning again and again to a simple yet profound question:
What connects us within the larger field of life?
The Four Sacred Portals are a living framework for this inquiry. They help us ask unexpected questions, meet difficult realities with greater honesty, question what we think we know, and share our vulnerabilities and unfolding possibilities.
This month we have been exploring the foundational Sacred Holding Portal. At its heart is a question that feels especially relevant right now:
How do we remain in direct contact with ourselves—how do we come home to our deeper nature—amid the distractions, uncertainty, and fury of the world?
For me, this exploration continues to be humbling, informative, and subtly liberating.
A couple of years ago, I shared a video called Cells. Planets. Cells. Planets. Same Thing, inspired by a choral piece by composer Erica Lloyd. The title points to a simple scientific truth: we are made of stardust. The carbon, calcium, oxygen, magnesium, and other elements that form our bodies were forged in stars over billions of years through supernova explosions and other cosmic processes.
I never tire of contemplating this.
There is something deeply comforting for me about remembering that the same elemental forces that shaped galaxies also flow through our bodies and the earth. We are not separate from the cosmos.
More recently, Susan Raffo’s beautiful book Liberated to the Bones—recommended as part of our Chrysalis exploration—invited me into another kind of remembering, one that is beyond concepts.
This is a remembering through my bones.
In silent meditation, I find myself sensing into my skeletal structure—the shape of my bones, their strength, their fragility, their hereness. During intentional walks, I bring awareness to this elemental foundation that carries me through the world.
Sometimes these moments feel like encounters with an ancient knowing that lives beneath language. I sense that I am getting to know myself at a deeper level.
I don’t fully understand it, and perhaps I don’t need to.
What I do know is that this exploration deepens my experience of Sacred Holding. It strengthens a felt sense of being held from within. It reminds me that I am held by the land beneath my feet, which is also infused with these same elements. And it speaks directly to one of the primary qualities of Sacred Holding:
Belonging.
How would it be possible not to belong here at this moment?
If one of life’s most intricate expressions—a skeletal structure, in whatever form it appears throughout the living world—is shared across countless species, perhaps belonging is already woven into the fabric of existence.
I’ve come to see that belonging is not something we need to strive for, but a deep remembering.
Our culture often teaches us to seek belonging externally—to find it through approval, achievement, status, community, or affiliation. While these forms of connection matter, they rarely satisfy for long when they become our primary source of belonging.
When we doubt our place in the world, perhaps we are being invited to look more deeply at our ideas about belonging.
Yes, there are places where we are not welcomed.
Yes, there are moments when we feel unseen or excluded.
And yet, beneath those experiences, there remains a deeper question:
What happens when we belong to ourselves first?
What shifts when we begin there?
I don’t ask this as a conclusion, but as an ongoing exploration.
What might we each discover as we walk, breathe, and reconnect with our first? What becomes possible when we remember that we are not separate from life, but expressions of it?