Where in your life are you standing right now, and with what mindset? When you’ve reached the end of a busy day, and you’re tucking yourself in for the night, what do you feel in your heart? Do you feel confident that your life has a direction, and that you are the one driving your life in that direction?
If you’re up against a particular challenge right now, do you have faith that you can overcome it and move on? Do you feel a sense of fulfillment—that you’ve got a firm grip on the steering wheel of your life and are living the values that are meaningful to you?
And more than anything,
do you feel that you’re deeply connected with yourself and that you truly love yourself?
Recently, I took a long look back at what I’ve been doing for the last four decades and at the problems people have repeatedly presented to me, such as stress-related illnesses, depression, anxiety, and relationship issues. The more I reflected upon these common worries, the more the underlying cause became clear to me: people’s connection with themselves has been cut.
It’s easy, and normal, to think that the causes of our problems are to be found outside ourselves, in other people or in the environment, but that’s definitely not it.
Dig deeper, and you’ll ultimately find that the primary cause of your problems lies not in your relationship with other people or in some imperfection in the environment, but rather in your connection with yourself.
Yes, the earth suffers from pollution, and the behaviors and words of others can be toxic, but the first order of business is your own inner world, not the world outside of you. In fact, you will never be able to adequately solve outside problems if the interior connection isn’t established first.
You experience physical ailments, from headaches and indigestion to much more serious diseases, because your connection with your body isn’t good. And if you’re troubled, unable to find direction in some areas of life, you’re not really connected with your true self.
We can see the problems that arise from disconnection in every aspect of our lives, from our individual selves to the ecosystems of the earth. There are more than two billion Facebook users worldwide with approximately 300 friends per user, but loneliness has surfaced as a greater public health risk than smoking. People may have a lot of social media friends, but they don’t have that many true friends to turn to in real life, to talk to and share their hearts with comfortably.
The greatest challenges faced by humankind today—such as climate change, gender inequality, the wealth gap, military conflicts, trade disputes, and religious conflicts—have at their roots
a deep-seated mindset that separates me from you and humans from nature. A solution that’s based on separation without consideration of mutual interests can never be a true or sustainable solution, and in the end such a “solution” disadvantages everyone.
Unless we heal the disconnection that is so widespread in our lives, the hole in our souls will keep getting bigger, the conflict between different social groups will grow increasingly serious, and the Earth’s environment will reach a state in which recovery is impossible.
Once you understand that disconnection is the underlying cause of your problems, then the solution also becomes clearer. All you have to do is mend your broken connections. Recover your connection with your body, your connection with your true self, and your connection with people and the world.
This article is excerpted from Ilchi Lee’s upcoming book
Connect: How to Find Clarity and Expand Your Consciousness with Pineal Gland Meditation. The book will be released July 15, 2019 and is now available for
pre-order online. Learn more at
ConnectByIlchi.com.