The Political is Personal: Our Individual and Collective Journey from Disconnection to Reconnection

We are living in a time of profound and accelerating change and challenges — a convergence of ecological destabilization, social division, political breakdown, and technological disruption. These crises are not separate; they are deeply interwoven and amplify one another in ways that threaten all humanity and the life of our planet. More and more we are experiencing these larger social forces impacting us personally.

At the root of these challenges there is a crisis of disconnection — from ourselves, from one another, from the natural world, and from the living systems and greater mysteries of which we are a part. The accelerating pace of division and upheaval is not just a political or ecological problem — it is a relational and spiritual one.

This disconnection has unfolded over millennia, across many generations, and each of us carries this legacy within us. Since the beginnings of large-scale agriculture and the rise of social hierarchies and empires, human societies have gradually shifted away from deep relationship with the land, one another, and the mystical, toward systems of control, extraction, and consumption. Over centuries, this has contributed to cycles of conquest and exploitation — patterns that continue today in modern forms, such as the global economic system, and also in the internal belief systems that shape our individual experience and behavior.

While these systems have brought many advancements, they have also carried many devastating consequences. The result is deep trauma, fragmentation, imbalance, and disharmony in our inner and outer worlds.

But this is not the whole story.

Since early in our human ancestry until today, there have been traditions — especially among Indigenous peoples and wisdom lineages — that have preserved a different way of being: one rooted in relationship, reciprocity, and reverence for the living world. These ways of knowing remind us that wholeness and healing is possible — that we can remember ourselves as part of a larger whole, and that true strength and power arise not from domination, but from connection, humility, and care. As has been carried in these ancient traditions until today, we can hold spaces to come together across differences to feel, to listen, to speak truthfully, and to do the sacred work of repair. It is the faith that humanity’s way forward is through deep relationship with ourselves and the world — across political, cultural, and historical divides — towards reconnection and a new future.