The Laughing Heart, May 17, 2026

The Laughing Heart with Errol Strider Connectedness, Meeting, and the Courage to Move Beyond Separation Opening Reflections on How We Really Are In this episode of The Laughing Heart, Errol Strider opens with a gentle reflection on the everyday question, “How are you doing?” He admits that people often ask the question casually, while he does not always answer with complete honesty. From there, he introduces the episode’s central theme: connectedness. Errol describes it as one of the most critical calls in human experience, a call to move away from the many ways people separate themselves and toward a deeper, more essential joining that could help improve the human condition. Connectedness as a Radical Human Need Errol then shares a piece called “Connectedness,” which he originally wrote in 1981 for the Association for Humanistic Psychology and has revised over the years. The piece explores how human beings stand before one another as individuals shaped by their bodies, histories, experiences, fears, dreams, wants, and defenses. It asks whether people can move beyond isolation, comparison, longing, and self-protection into a place of authentic contact. The writing suggests that people deeply want love and union, yet often fear that if love truly finds them, they may disappear inside it. The Search for a Place to Join The heart of “Connectedness” asks where human beings can genuinely meet one another without violence, compromise, or false performance. Errol’s piece explores whether connection comes through honesty, vulnerability, confession, touch, shared pain, grief, longing, terror, or the willingness to drop the protective shells that keep people apart. The poem calls for a kind of courageous nakedness, not merely physical but emotional and spiritual, where people can reveal their confusion, innocence, fear, resentment, and longing in order to rediscover the humanness they share and the divineness they hope to become. Individuality Inside Oneness After the piece, Errol unpacks its meaning by reflecting on the relationship between individuality and unity. He explains that each person is distinctive, yet also part of a larger undivided reality. To illustrate this, he recalls living in Marin County, California, where individual towns each had their own personality, even though from above they appeared as one continuous community. For Errol, this becomes a metaphor for the human condition: people are unique, but their deepest suffering comes from believing they are fundamentally separate from one another. He describes surrender not as giving up, but as letting go of false ideas of separation. The Meeting and the Fear of Dropping Barriers Errol then performs a more comic dialogue called “The Meeting,” inspired by Martin Buber’s idea that “all real living is meeting.” The sketch features two characters discussing misery, aliveness, barriers, fear, body sharing, loneliness, and the risk of truly seeing and being seen. Through humor, the dialogue shows how people build invisible walls, compare themselves, shame or blame others, and cling to separateness in order to feel safe. Eventually, the characters begin to look at one another directly, admit fear, exchange names, and experience the first awkward but real moment of meeting. Repentance as Turning Toward Union In the closing reflection, Errol says the episode’s pieces reveal the essential challenge of the human condition: people become absorbed in daily problems and desires while overlooking the deeper call to move beyond the illusion of separateness. He uses the religious idea of repentance as “going the other way,” meaning turning away from separation and toward union. He encourages listeners to notice when they compare themselves, act from guilt, live by “shoulds,” or make themselves better or worse than others. He closes with a love poem that says he cannot live outside of love, because only in love does he truly know himself, and he invites listeners to continue the journey through The Laughing Heart website, email, Substack, and YouTube presence.