We Are All Connected

One of the most important things I wrote in Heaven Time had very little to do with dying. It had to do with how we live.

I wrote that book after my near death experience because I was trying to understand what had happened to me and what I had come back knowing. Some things were easy to describe. Many were not. But one understanding kept returning.

We are connected.

In 2012, I wrote in Heaven Time, “Through our Divine Source, I am connected to you, sharing Oneness with you. I am your equal, no better, no worse. Therefore, in a sense, I am also your sister.”

I was not trying to create a business philosophy when I wrote those words. I certainly was not imagining what my work would look like more than a decade later. I was trying to put language around something I had experienced and could not ignore.

At the time, I understood ONENESS largely through what had happened during my near death experience. I had experienced connection without the usual boundaries of distance, language or even a physical body. When I returned, I tried to understand that experience from inside an ordinary human life. That turned out to be the harder part.

Over the years, connection stopped being something I understood only through death. Life taught me what it looks like here.

Lorri’s books, Heaven Time and The In-Between, are the sources of the quoted passages in this article.

What Life Taught Me After Heaven Time

The In-Between is a book I could not have written in 2012 because I had not lived enough of the years that came next.

There was grief, relationship loss, betrayal, business, friendship, rebuilding and long stretches when I did not know what the next version of my life would look like. There were people who disappointed me deeply and people who stayed. There were times when I wanted solitude and times when another person’s presence made an enormous difference.

By the time I wrote The In-Between, ONENESS was no longer an idea I understood only from my near death experience. It had been tested by life.

In that book, while writing about the women who shaped me, I wrote, “I did not become the woman I am today on my own.”

That sentence is simple, but it is one of the truest things I have written. Independence has always been part of who I am. I know how to work, solve problems, make decisions and carry responsibility. I also know now that self-reliance can make it easy to overlook the people who helped us become who we are.

Walking together on an ordinary path. Photo by Dilara Albamya on Pexels.

Some people teach us by loving us well. Others teach us by showing us what we will no longer accept. A friend may help us hear ourselves again. A mentor may save us years of unnecessary mistakes. A stranger can say one thing at exactly the right time and change the direction of a day, a decision or even a life.

Connection does not remove personal responsibility. Years earlier, in Heaven Time, I wrote, “As your mentor, your equal, your sister, and friend, I will help you, but I can’t do it for you.”

I still believe that. Nobody else can make our decisions, grieve our losses, repair our relationships, rebuild our confidence or decide who we want to become. There are parts of life we have to walk ourselves.

Doing your own work, however, is not the same as doing everything alone.

There is research behind something many of us know from experience: it makes a difference to have somebody we can turn to. In a large review published in 2025, researchers brought together findings from 60 earlier research reviews on social support. One distinction stood out. Knowing we have people we can count on was more closely linked with how well people were doing than simply keeping track of the help they had received.

I can understand why that matters. A person does not have to fix our problem to make a difference. Sometimes knowing we can call, ask a question or speak honestly is a form of support in itself. The study cannot tell us whom to trust or what to do in a difficult relationship. Those decisions are still ours.

Connection Does Not Mean Agreement

My understanding of ONENESS has also become more practical. In The In-Between, I wrote, “When you choose love, you step into Oneness — the truth that we are all connected.”

I went on to explain that people may call the Source of that connection God, Universe, Creator, Spirit or Divine Power. The label does not matter to me.

I do not need another person to believe everything I believe in order to care about them, learn from them or have a meaningful conversation with them. In fact, I do not want to surround myself only with people who think exactly as I do. There is very little growth in that.

People bring their whole lives with them. Their knowledge, mistakes, professions, humour, grief, families, cultures, beliefs and questions all affect what they see and what they can contribute.

Connection also does not mean that every relationship should be kept. Life has taught me that boundaries and connection can exist at the same time. We can recognize another person’s humanity without giving them unlimited access to our life. We can care about someone and still acknowledge that a relationship is harmful. We can disagree without deciding that the other person has no value.

ONENESS, as I understand it today, is not sameness. It is the recognition that our differences do not erase our basic connection to one another.

We often talk about loneliness as though it means being by ourselves. But those are not the same thing. The World Health Organization reported in 2025 that about one in six people worldwide had experienced loneliness, drawing on information collected between 2014 and 2023. That number is worth thinking about. You can be surrounded by people and still feel that nobody really knows you. And you can enjoy being alone without feeling lonely.

The importance of our relationships shows up in other research too. In a review of 148 studies involving more than 300,000 people, people with stronger social relationships were more likely to be alive at the end of the periods researchers followed them. That does not mean a friendship guarantees a longer life, or that anyone should stay in a damaging relationship for the sake of their health.

None of these studies proves what I experienced or what I believe about ONENESS. That is not what they were studying. But they give us another reason to take our everyday connections seriously. Being in someone’s life and truly being there for them are not always the same thing.

Why My Work Has Taken So Many Forms

Over the years, I have written books, articles and E Readers. I have taught workshops, developed courses, created tools and apps, recorded interviews and spent countless hours talking with people about death, grief, intuition, relationships, business, change, energy, resilience and difficult decisions.

Those subjects may look unrelated from the outside. To me, they rarely are.

People usually start looking for answers because something has changed. A relationship no longer feels the same. Someone they love has died. Work that once made sense no longer fits. Their health has changed. Their confidence has been shaken. They have experienced something they cannot explain. They are questioning something they once believed, or they simply know that something in their life is no longer working.

The subject changes, but the underlying problem is often similar: life no longer makes sense in quite the way it used to.

I help people find clarity when life changes and the life they knew no longer fits. My near death experience is where that understanding began, not where my work ends.

That distinction matters to me because my near death experience will always be part of my story. It changed my understanding of death, identity, time, relationships and what I believed mattered. But the fifteen years that followed taught me something just as important: you do not have to die for your old life to stop fitting.

Grief can do that. Divorce can do it. Betrayal, illness, retirement, financial loss, career change, caregiving or simply reaching a point where you can no longer pretend something is working can do it too.

Heaven Time was written while I was trying to understand what had happened to me and what I believed it meant. The In-Between comes from living long enough afterward to see what those ideas looked like when real life tested them.

The first book began with death. The second is much more about living. My work today comes from both.

When people ask for clarity, they may not be looking for a perfect answer. They may need a place to start, or a way to see which part of a difficult decision they can actually do something about. Another person’s knowledge can help us see possibilities we had missed. It should not mean handing that person control of our lives.

Different People Need Different Doors

I have never believed that one answer, one format or one person can meet everybody where they are.

A book can give someone time to think privately. An article can make a complicated idea easier to understand. An E Reader can go deeper into one subject. An app can help someone notice a pattern or work through a question. An interview lets people hear the story in my own voice. A conversation can help when somebody is too close to a problem to see it clearly.

None of those things is automatically better than the others. They are different doors.

That is one reason I am bringing my work together in the Clarity Vault. It gives the books, articles, E Readers, apps, tools, recordings and other resources one place to live and gives people one place to find them.

But information and connection are not the same thing. The Vault can hold the work. It can organize it and make it easier to use. What it cannot do by itself is create the moment when one person recognizes something of themselves in another.

That happens between people.

Someone might come to the Vault for a book and leave with an idea that helps them make a decision. Someone else might read three articles and still need to talk it through with a person who understands what they are facing. The resources can be useful without replacing every kind of help. Finding the right information is valuable. Being heard is something different.

The Work Is Not Meant to Stop With Me

I can share what I have learned. I can tell the truth about my own experiences. I can create resources, ask questions, offer perspective and use the knowledge I have gained over decades of living and working.

I do not believe that means every useful answer has to come from me.

There will always be things I understand well. There will also be things another person knows far better because they have lived them, studied them or spent years doing work I have never done. That does not weaken what I bring. It makes the room more useful.

I have seen what happens when one person speaks honestly about something difficult and another person realizes they are not the only one. I have seen people share knowledge that took them years to acquire and save someone else months of confusion. I also know how much it can matter when somebody simply checks on you.

Help does not always arrive as a profound answer. Sometimes it is information. Sometimes it is perspective. Sometimes it is a name, a resource, a question or a conversation that helps something click into place.

That is why connection belongs in the work I am building. It is not because everyone should agree, become friends or tell each other how to live. Connection matters because useful knowledge, lived experience, compassion and perspective do not have to end with the person who has them. They can move from one person to another.

And help is not one-size-fits-all. The 2025 review of social-support research looked at people in different parts of life, including school, work and personal relationships. Its findings differed across situations, so it cannot tell us that one kind of help is right for everyone. That fits with why I make different resources and why I value what other people know. The person who needs information today may need encouragement tomorrow. Sometimes the best thing I can offer is to point them toward somebody who knows more about their particular situation than I do.

What I Keep Coming Back To

Near the end of the ONENESS chapter in The In-Between, I wrote, “You are not playing against anyone. You are playing with everyone. We are love. We are one.”

Those words mean more to me now because I understand how difficult they can be to live.

Life is not always kind. People hurt one another. Relationships end. Trust is broken. We disagree. We disappoint each other. Sometimes the healthiest decision is to walk away.

None of that has changed my belief that connection matters. If anything, it has made the belief more grounded.

I wrote Heaven Time because I was trying to understand what happened when I died. I wrote The In-Between because I had lived long enough afterward to understand that coming back was only the beginning.

The work I am building now comes from both. It is about helping people understand what has changed, find enough clarity to move again and remember that having to do your own work does not mean having to do all of it alone.

In Heaven Time, I wrote that “we are all connected and we know that we are connected … but we forget until reminded.”

I still believe that.

And if you ever wonder whether you matter, I will remind you: you matter to me, and you will never be invisible here.