The reason your boundaries keep breaking isn’t because people don’t respect you, it’s because you’re out of alignment with yourself.
When you’re disconnected inside, you spend all your energy defending instead of becoming.
•••
Most of us think boundaries are walls. They’re not. They’re reflections of our internal congruence.
As Viktor Frankl taught in Man’s Search for Meaning, freedom lives in the space between stimulus and response, and that space only exists when you’re aligned.
This talk exposes how misalignment drains your nervous system and steals your presence.
•••
YOU’LL LEARN
• Why alignment, not stillness, is the real goal of meditation.
• How digesting your past unlocks full presence in your body.
• The difference between slowness and stillness, and why one creates awareness.
• How suppressed anger blocks boundaries and turns inward as self-sabotage.
• The dynamic way life keeps pulling you off-center, and how to bounce back faster.
• How congruence (thoughts + words + actions) speaks safety into every relationship.

🧘‍♀️Learn more about Soma+IQ
↪https://www.somaiqtraining.com

You can’t help anyone until you regulate yourself.
Most practitioners burn out trying to fix others, but the nervous system doesn’t lie. 

The truth? Transformation happens through you, not because of you.
•••
When your presence is grounded, it gives others permission to integrate their own. This episode exposes the myth of "helping" and reframes healing as co-regulation, embodiment, and self-discovery.

You’ll learn:

• Why regulation precedes transformation and how clients mirror your state.
• The hidden trap of the "fix-it" mentality that drains practitioners.
• How to become a healing presence without performing or pretending to be whole.
• The difference between containment and suppression when emotions surge.
• How to communicate truth without projection or people pleasing.
• Why anxiety is unexpressed truth and how to listen before burnout hits.

•••

Soma+IQ founder Steven Jaggers and Adam Carbary break down what it really means to live in alignment, not as a goal but as an embodied process. 

They dismantle the myth that clarity comes from logic or strategy, revealing how the body itself is your most reliable compass.

You’ll Learn
• Why pain and resistance are your body’s feedback, not punishment.
• How to tell if life is redirecting you or if you’re just avoiding growth.
• The real difference between "out of alignment" and "in transition."
• How to protect your energy when you’re reinventing your purpose.
• Why your mess always becomes your message if you let it.
• How to train your inner awareness like a muscle through breathwork.

•••

→ Listen, breathe, and reconnect with your internal GPT, the one source AI can’t imitate.

🧘‍♀️Learn more about Soma+IQ
↪️https://www.somaiqtraining.com

What if your anxiety isn’t the problem, but your resistance to it is? 

That tightening in your chest, that racing thought spiral, it’s not a malfunction. It’s your truth, trying to break through the noise.

Most people fight their anxiety. But what if it’s actually your most intelligent signal, the body’s way of saying something in your life is out of alignment? 

In this episode, you’ll learn how to decode that message, release trapped energy, and transform anxiety into clarity and flow.

•••

You’ll learn in this episode: 

• Why anxiety is just truth bubbling up, not something to suppress
• How resisting emotion drains your energy and leads to burnout 
• The biological reason anxiety turns into depression (“deep rest”) 
• How to read your body’s language before it forces a breakdown 
• The difference between familiar pain and real healing 
• How to turn internal pressure into creative or emotional power

••• 

👉 Share this with someone who you think will find value. It might shift everything.

You think the problem is your partner. But the truth is, the relationship is the mirror forcing you to face the unfinished parts of yourself. 

We have been sold the lie that love completes us. In reality, that belief is what traps us in resentment, cycles of chaos, and self-betrayal. 

As Terry Real says, your partner is the one who sticks the burning spear in your eye because that is where the work is. 

••• 

You will learn in this episode: 

• Why conflict is not about fighting, it is your nervous system begging for connection
• How to spot when you are flooded and why arguing in that state never works
• The fix it trap, how trying to save your partner destroys the relationship
• Why peace can feel like boredom if your nervous system is addicted to chaos
• The difference between love and obligation, and why obligation kills desire
• How to risk the relationship by telling the truth and why that is the only way love survives 
  
  

••• 
👉 Share this with someone stuck in the should I stay or go loop. It might shift everything. 

It’s not because you’re broken. It’s because your biology and nervous system are wired to repeat unfinished stories. Freud called it repetition compulsion. Peter Levine called it reenactment. Either way: you don’t escape the loop until you complete it.

•••

In this episode you’ll learn:

• Why your body is a “balancing machine” always chasing homeostasis.
• How unprocessed emotions hijack your clarity and decision-making.
• The hidden role of shame as the lock that traps old patterns.
• Why familiar pain feels safer than unknown freedom.
• How anger can be a boundary signal, not a flaw.
• What it means to become the “transitional character”.
  
  •••
  👉 If this hit you, drop a comment with the pattern you’re noticing most in your life. 

A recent discussion on the Soma+IQ podcast, hosted by Adam Carbary with founder Steven Jaggers, surfaces a central idea: healing is less about self-improvement and more about repairing the bonds that tether us to our bodies, our communities, and one another.

Consider the cultural backdrop. Many of us cannot name our neighbors. Our social interactions unfold more on screens than across kitchen tables. The daily exchange of hugs and eye contact, basic nutrients for the nervous system, has been replaced with likes, comments, and fleeting digital affirmations. It is no wonder the body reacts with symptoms we label as illness.

We are living in an abnormal environment, and our stress is a normal response.

Jaggers and Carbary propose a reordering of priorities. Instead of chasing “trauma release” or the endless project of self-fixing, the work should begin with connection. When individuals link head, heart, and gut into a coherent whole, the system organizes itself. Pain diminishes. Relationships deepen. Communities strengthen. Healing, in this framework, is not the prize at the finish line; it is the natural consequence of being genuinely connected.

The nervous system operates like the mycelial networks that allow forests to communicate. Breath becomes the mediator of that network. By drawing attention back from the whir of thoughts into the chest and diaphragm, people restore the physiological conditions for curiosity and presence. This matters because curiosity, as the hosts argue, is the gateway to connection. It is impossible to remain both tightly contracted in stress and open to wonder at the same time.

If children embody relentless curiosity, adults often surrender it in the name of stability. Work, bills, and societal expectations calcify into boxes: the settled career, the settled relationship, the settled beliefs. But settlement comes at a cost. It forecloses growth, silences imagination, and diminishes the ability to truly know oneself, let alone another person.

The alternative is harder but richer: to keep asking questions, to let people and beliefs remain verbs instead of nouns, and to bear the discomfort of revising one’s worldview.

Loneliness, too, is reframed not as pathology but as signal. It is supposed to hurt; the pain is evolutionary design, compelling us back into relationship. Yet not all relationships resolve loneliness. Without connection to the self, even a crowded room can feel empty. The first step, then, is inward, integrating one’s own history, weaving one’s own story into coherence, before extending outward.

Ultimately, the conversation circles back to beauty, defined not as an object but as the recognition of relationships between things: tree to soil, breath to body, neighbor to neighbor. Beauty lies in the web, not the individual strand.

The editorial lesson is stark but hopeful. Healing is not the goal; connection is. Our health, mental, physical, and civic, depends less on innovation than on remembering what we have forgotten: that we are social creatures wired for reciprocity, presence, and touch. If modern life feels unlivable, it is because it asks us to live against our own nature.

The way forward begins simply: a deeper breath, an honest conversation, a hand extended not through a screen but across a table.

You can have the job, the house, the relationship—the markers of success—and still feel like something vital is missing. The mirror smiles back, the world applauds your progress, yet inside the quiet question lingers: Why don’t I feel like myself?

This episode dives into that contradiction. How we inherit scripts of “shoulds” from childhood. How people-pleasing and performance drain the nervous system. How a curated life can still feel hollow. And how conflict, authenticity, and even loneliness can become guides back to who you really are.

We’ll explore:

• The Nervous System’s Truth: Why your body often knows before your mind does when something is off.
• The Cost of People-Pleasing: How avoiding conflict erodes relationships instead of preserving them.
• The Hardest Question: Why most of us can answer what we “should” do but freeze when asked what we want.
• Loneliness as Compass: How disconnection isn’t punishment but a signal pulling you back toward authenticity.
• The Magnetism of Realness: Why dropping the mask draws people closer than any strategy ever could.

This isn’t about blowing up your life overnight. It’s about simple, subversive steps—writing down your “shoulds,” speaking your needs, letting yourself want again. Small acts of rebellion against performance. Small steps back toward yourself.

Because the truth is: connection without authenticity is just theater. But when you meet life as you are—aligned, regulated, unapologetically you—connection deepens, energy returns, and life finally feels like yours.

"Selfishness" for many of us, is a word that was first used as a weapon. Maybe a parent called you selfish because you didn’t do what they wanted. Maybe a partner or a friend said it when you finally started setting boundaries. But here’s the truth: selfishness is not greed. 

Nature itself is selfish. A tree doesn’t apologize for pulling water and nutrients for itself. It grows taller, stronger, and in the process, it provides oxygen for everyone else. The sun doesn’t shine for you or me, it radiates simply because that’s what it does. Every cell in your body takes energy for itself first so it can support the whole. That’s not greed. That’s the natural order of life.

In my own journey of healing, I had to pull all my energy back inward and ask myself the questions I had been avoiding: 

Who am I? 

What do I stand for? 

What do I actually want?

That wasn’t easy. For years, I had been living according to societal expectations, family programming, and the endless voice of “you should.” But living in obligation creates resentment. It drains your nervous system. And it keeps you disconnected from the one person you need to be connected to most: yourself.

The most important skill you can build today, in relationships, in business, and in your own happiness, is learning to know what you truly want. Not what others want for you. Not what you think will make you more lovable or acceptable. But the real voice inside of you that says: this is what I desire, this is what I need.

That voice might get you called selfish. But it’s also the only way to live with clarity, peace, and congruence. When I ignore it, I burn out. When I listen to it, I thrive.

Here’s the paradox: when you honor your own wants and needs, you actually show up more fully for others. Just like the tree, just like the sun, just like the flower, your selfishness becomes nourishment for everyone around you.

So if you’ve been called selfish for setting boundaries or for finally admitting what you really want, I want you to hear me clearly: you’re on the right path. It might feel uncomfortable at first. It might upset some people. But the only way to build honest relationships and an authentic life is to stop living from obligation and start living from your truth.

Because at the end of the day, nobody else is responsible for your needs and your wants. That’s your responsibility. When you own that, you unlock the power to create a life that’s true, connected, and alive.

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 y