As we go about our day we are either attending to actuality or attending to a narrative.
Take a look. Every now and then (now and now) just stop and check to see what is being attended to.
Nine times out of ten it'll be a narrative, a conversation in the head, a memory or plan*. This is the source of our sense of contraction.
Narrative creates a knot of separation where there is none. In present actuality there is no separation - there is simply this seamless happening of existence.
It's only when we envisage entities out of their context of actuality - when we freeze frame and analyse them - that the concept of separation/independence arises. But that's not how life presents itself - life is this ongoing flow of datum, this unfolding event.
In the absence of our freeze-framing, abstracting and conceptualising, energy flows as this ever-fresh unfolding. With this comes a sense of underlying ease, the ease of simply being.
* Obviously narratives have a place in our lives - but we can come to see that they are mostly unnecessary.