We Are One

A Six-Year-Old's Revelation and Why It Still Matters By Dominique Debroux

Chris and I recently sat down with Kristen Shelt for a conversation about Coherence, Intention, and the Field Mechanics of living. You’ll be able to hear the full podcast soon, and I urge you to. It reminded me of a realization that I have been carrying since I was six years old. A knowing that I unfortunately forget when the world gets wonky, and it has been really wonky lately.

Let me take you back to Torino, Italy, in the late fall. I was six. It was a rainy night, the streets wet and glowing under all those amber street lights that Torino does so well. I had just been asked to leave catechism class.

I had been a questioning child from the beginning, which was not always welcome in the Roman Catholic tradition I was raised in. That particular evening, the lesson was that babies born out of wedlock, from adulterous relationships, carry the mark of original sin and are condemned to hell regardless of how they live their lives. I could not make that logic work. It felt wrong in my body before it felt wrong in my mind. My questions became more insistent, and eventually the nun asked me to leave.

To be clear: that dogma had already been officially stepped away from by the Catholic Church, particularly following the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the year I was born. It had been six years. That particular nun was carrying old doctrine. My mother understood this and was not upset when she picked me up. Her take was simply: one old nun, the rest still works. That was not enough for me. Because it was not just that one teaching. There had been others that had not sat right. And so that night something shifted definitively in me, and I did not know what I believed anymore.

The car ride home was quiet. I was thinking hard and trying not to cry. To calm myself I started watching the street lights through the rain-streaked window, squinting my eyes the way children do, the way we all have done at some point: you squint at a light and it blooms into a star, rays reaching out in all directions. If you squint further on a rainy night the rays begin to show texture, movement, particles traveling out from the center and then curving back in.

And then I heard something. Not out loud. Inside.

That is Spirit.

The center of the light is Spirit, or God, or The Source, or The Knowledge. Whatever name different people and different traditions have used across time. We are those particles. We travel out from the center, gather experience, learn, love, fail, grow, and eventually carry all of that intelligence back. The point is not the journey of any single particle. The point is that we are all part of the same whole. All connected. All connected to the same central knowledge.

A six-year-old in a car in Torino, looking at a street light in the rain, understood this without any framework to put it in. And it has been the spiritual foundation under everything I have done since.

This brings me directly to the work we are doing here. Lifting the voices of wise women. Bringing new science to the conversation about menopause and female leadership. Fighting to get our film, Wise Women: Humanity’s Untold Origins, seen by the people who need to see it.

There are days when that work feels enormous and the resistance feels heavier. As Chris wrote in Forward Is How We Win, the chaos of the current system is by design. The flood of spectacle and outrage keeps us reactive, keeps our attention fixed on the wreckage instead of on what we are building. It is a genuine strategy of exhaustion and it works if we let it.

But here is what the six-year-old in me has always known, and what Kristen’s conversation brought roaring back: if we are all connected, then the work begins inside. The field I broadcast matters. The coherence or incoherence of my own inner life is not a private matter; it is my contribution to the shared field. If I want wise women to lead, I have to start by trusting my own voice. If I want a world where women are seen as essential, I have to stop making myself smaller in my own mind first. If I want the future to be different, I have to live it now in the only place I actually have access to: myself.

This is not the same as saying that injustice is a mindset problem. It is not. The resistance our film is meeting is real. The systems designed to keep certain stories peripheral are real. But if I carry fear as my baseline frequency, if I shrink from conflict to keep the peace, if I hold back what I see because I am worried about how it lands, I am not fighting that system. I am feeding it. My hot flashes taught me this. Almost every time one started, I was suppressing something I needed to say. The body knows. The field knows.

So here is what I want to leave you with, which is also what I am leaving myself with.

We are not separate from each other and we are not separate from whatever you want to call the source of all of this. The science of coherence and field mechanics is catching up to what mystics, indigenous wisdom keepers, and one bewildered six-year-old in a rainy Torino street already knew. We are particles of the same light. What I do with mine matters to yours.

That means the most radical thing I can do for the future we want: the one where wisdom leads, where women are not peripheral but central, where the voices that have been quieted are finally heard, is to become as coherent as possible within myself. To clear the fear. To say the true thing. To live inside the intention of that world rather than just hoping for it from the outside.

Because the center is always there, steady and luminous. All we have to do is stop squinting at the damage and turn toward the light.

Forward.

The podcast conversation with Kristen Shelt will be available soon. Watch this space. Our documentary Wise Women: Humanity’s Untold Origins is available to rent at bingeable.net/WiseWomen.