What Is Humanity?
- Jun 23
- 6 min read
Humanity is not a category we belong to. It is the thread that runs beneath every story, every wound, every difference we think separates us from one another. It is the shared essence we carry, the same breath, the same longing to be seen, to be safe, to be loved. And it is also our capacity to feel. To be moved. To hold someone's hand and feel their pain become, for a moment, our own.
This is humanity: connection and feeling, woven together.
"If we want to find the way back to ourselves and one another, we need language and the grounded confidence to both tell our stories and to be stewards of the stories that we hear." — Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart
And it runs deeper than that. We are not separate beings reaching toward oneness as some far-off destination. We are already one. We do not create connection from nothing, we remember it. And we remember it every time we choose to turn toward one another instead of away.
"If you see oneness as an experience to be attained or that may one day happen to you, then you are caught within that straight line between two points." — Richard Rudd, The Gene Keys
But remembering asks something of you. It requires an open heart. A humbling. A surrender of who you think you are, and all you believe to be fact. Only then can you truly see, understand, hear, and feel another person. And at the same time, do the same for yourself.
Weaving the Fabric, Within and Without
We create our experiences. We weave the connections in our lives, thread by thread, choice by choice. And what you weave inside yourself becomes what you offer the world.
This is the part we forget. We think humanity is something that happens out there, in our actions, our activism, our advocacy. But humanity begins inside your body, inside your nervous system, inside the quiet, hidden places where your feelings live.
Your feelings are not interruptions to manage. They are teachers. Grief teaches you what you loved. Fear teaches you where you still feel unsafe. Anger teaches you where a boundary was crossed, yours or someone else's, sometimes generations ago. When you silence your feelings, you silence the teacher. When you listen to them, really listen, they show you exactly where the old stories live in you, and exactly what's asking to be healed.
This is the internal work. And it is not separate from the external world. It is the loom the external world is woven on.
When enough of us do this work, when enough hearts open and surrender and remember, our individual threads start to connect. Your healing touches mine. My remembering touches yours. And slowly, thread by thread, we weave one fabric. Not many humanities. One.
Healing Your Stories
You carry stories that are not fully yours. Beliefs handed down through generations, fears absorbed before you had words for them, wounds that belonged to your mother and father and the ones who came before them. These stories live in your body. They run quietly beneath your choices, your reactions, your blind spots, often without you ever knowing they're there.
This is not pathology. It is inheritance. And inheritance can be healed.
Energy medicine offers you a way back into these stories, not to relive them, but to witness them, to feel what was never allowed to be felt, and to release what no longer needs to be carried forward. This is how you change the pattern instead of repeating it. This is how your grief becomes wisdom instead of a wound passed down again. This is how your fear becomes discernment instead of a wall you build between yourself and someone else.
Healing your stories is not a solitary act. When you heal what lives in you, you change what you offer the collective fabric. You stop unconsciously perpetuating the very mistruths and hatred you say you stand against. You become capable of the open heart that remembering requires.
The Courage to Remember: Tova's Story
On June fourteenth, I sat in the Rotunda at Union Terminal in Cincinnati, that vast, breathtaking space where history breathes through the walls, where art and time hold each other. This is where refugees and Holocaust survivors once passed through, seeking safety and new life. And on that evening, it held the Upstander Awards, hosted by the Nancy and David Wolf Holocaust and Humanity Center, a ceremony honoring people whose courage and character strengthen our community.
Seven upstanders were honored that night, each answering the call to courage in their present-day work. But as the evening unfolded, we went deeper. She took the stage, Tova Friedman, one of the youngest known survivors of Auschwitz. She entered at five years old and walked out at six. For decades afterward, she was silenced. When she came to America as a child, people did not want to listen. It wasn't until the 1980s that the world finally began to ask her questions. And now, that is all she does. She travels. She speaks. Alongside her grandson, Aron Goodman, she shares her story with the world through TovaTok, asking the same question, again and again: is there anyone who will listen?
We listened. We held our breath as she carried us back in time to the most precious and most traumatic years of her life. Her mother's words echoed through the room: Remember. Don't forget us.
After the ceremony, I sat with her. I held her hand and looked deeply into her eyes. I thanked her for her courage, for spending her life force carrying these stories forward. She looked at me, passion rising in her voice, and said: I don't have a choice. If I don't tell these stories, who will? It must be me. For my story, and for the millions of Jews who never had the opportunity to tell theirs.
Afterward, I felt a flash of disappointment that I hadn't captured a photo with her. But that wasn't what the moment was about. It was about presence. It was about feeling the full weight she carries, and holding honor and gratitude for her, for what she endured, and for how brave, kind, and loving she is to keep sharing her stories with the world. That feeling stays with me, even without a photo to look back on.
In that moment, I understood something deeper. Tova's refusal to let the world forget is not only about remembering what happened to her, to the Jewish people, to everyone who was persecuted. It is an invitation to all of us. To turn inward and ask: what are we carrying that we have forgotten? What subconscious beliefs, what ancestral traumas, live inside us, perpetuating mistruths and hatred we no longer even see, unintentionally repeating history again and again?
Tova's life is proof that one woman's open heart, one woman's willingness to surrender silence and speak her truth, can move an entire room to remember its shared humanity. This is what it looks like when someone has done the inner work to carry a wound forward as medicine instead of poison.
You can follow Tova Friedman and her grandson Aron Goodman at @tovafriedman on TikTok and @tovatiktok on Instagram. Her memoir, "The Daughter of Auschwitz: My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope," co-written with Malcolm Brabant, is available wherever books are sold.
Weaving One Fabric
Tova's story is not separate from yours. It is a thread in the same fabric. Every story of survival, every story of silence broken, every act of courage to be seen and to speak, adds to a pattern far larger than any one of us.
This is the invitation. Not to wait for a ceremony, a survivor's testimony, or a moment of crisis to remember our shared humanity. But to do the quiet, unglamorous work of turning inward, again and again. To let your feelings teach you. To witness the stories living in your body that are not fully yours. To surrender what you think you know, and open your heart wide enough to see, hear, and feel another person, and yourself.
Being an upstander was never meant to be rare. It was never meant to be a badge we wear or a moment we rise to only when called upon. It is who we already are, beneath the noise, beneath the fear, beneath the self-protection that unhealed wounds create. When we do the work to heal what lives in us, upstanding stops being something we do. It becomes something we simply are, woven into the fabric of our humanity.
We create our experiences. We weave the connections of our lives. And when enough of us turn inward to heal, thread by thread, we weave ourselves back into the one fabric we never actually left.
This is how we honor every story that came before ours. We remember. We heal. And we become, once again, one.
Step Forward with an Open Heart
If you feel called to go deeper, join my next free Healing Circle. It’s a space for healing, connection, and expansion—because you don’t have to navigate this alone.
💛 You are here for a reason. The world needs your light, your truth, and your gifts—now more than ever.
Are you ready to Rise?
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