The Epidemic No One Talks About

Over the past decade, I’ve studied everything from bodywork and functional movement to coaching and trauma therapy. I’ve explored these fields to improve myself, help others perform better, and deepen my understanding of what it truly means to be human. Every path, every conversation, every moment of reflection has led me back to the same answer:

It’s all about connection.

When we peel back the layers on anxiety, depression, burnout, conflict, sickness, and even environmental destruction, we find the same root cause: disconnection.

In our modern world, disconnection has become the norm. We’re disconnected from our bodies, from our emotions, from our communities, from the environment and, most dangerously, from ourselves.

That disconnection shows up in every headline and every household. We isolate. We numb. We lose empathy. We become apathetic, the lowest vibration a human can live in.

When we stop caring, it becomes easy to poison the soil, dump waste into the ocean, or ignore suffering on the other side of the world. We forget that every action, every drop in the water, ripples back into our lives, and into the lives of our children’s children.

Trauma, at its core, is disconnection from the true self.

Something happened that was too much, too fast, too soon, or too overwhelming, and a part of us checked out. In shamanistic traditions, they call it soul fragmentation. In psychology, we might call it dissociation. Either way, a piece of us becomes frozen in the past, unable to fully participate in the present.

Those frozen parts shape our choices. If I was betrayed years ago and never healed, I might keep people at arm’s length today and that guardedness will shape my future relationships. The past leaks into the present, and without reconnection, it defines the future.

From a somatic perspective, healing is simply the byproduct of connection. When we integrate the body, mind, and emotions, when we move as whole beings rather than segmented parts, we return to our natural state of flow. The same is true for relationships, communities, and the planet itself: integration restores health.

One of the simplest, most powerful tools for reconnection is breathwork. Your breath is the switchboard for your nervous system, it can pull you out of stress and into calm, out of overwhelm and into presence. You can’t always change the world around you, but you can always change your state.

When I guide breathwork sessions, I’m not just teaching a breathing technique. I’m creating a space for deep connection, where someone feels seen, felt, and understood without judgment or the need to be “fixed.” Because healing doesn’t happen in isolation. Most wounds occur in relationship, and so they must be healed in relationship.

The Three B’s: Being, Belonging, Becoming

I often think of life through three interconnected states:

Being – The ability to simply exist without urgency or performance.

Belonging – Knowing you have a place, and that you matter to others.

Becoming – Growing and evolving, but not at the cost of being or belonging.

In our culture, we glorify becoming, chasing achievement, status, and transformation, while neglecting the foundation of being and belonging. That imbalance pulls us further from ourselves and each other.

As technology accelerates, we have to ask ourselves: what does it mean to be human now? If AI can think faster and store more information, what do we have that machines can’t replicate?

Connection.

Your ability to connect to yourself, to others, to your environment, that is your greatest currency. When you focus on deepening connection rather than “fixing” yourself, you stop living from a place of lack and start living from a place of wholeness.

At the end of my life, I won’t measure success by my accomplishments or possessions. I’ll measure it by the depth of my connections: with my family, my friends, my community, and myself.

So if you take anything from this, take this: every problem starts with disconnection. Every solution starts with connection.