Awareness Needs a Body

Why 2026 is going to demand less scrolling, more feet-on-earth, and a deeper kind of responsibility

I do these interviews outside for a reason.

Because what I’m pointing to is simple: we can’t keep living as if higher awareness is something we understand in our head. That era is ending. The pace of reality is accelerating, people are evolving faster, information is multiplying, and the mind can’t keep up with it all.

Your body can.

Your body is the tie-in. It’s where reality lands. It’s where intuition becomes usable. It’s where all the “spiritual” ideas either become real, or stay entertainment.

And that’s what I see 2026 calling for. Less abstraction. More embodiment. Feeling it in your bones. Feeling it in your feet. Listening to your body again, and trusting it.

Acceleration is exposing everyone’s weak spots

When everything speeds up, it doesn’t just create opportunity. It exposes misalignment.

People are moving at different rates, externally and internally. That’s where we’re going to see more emotional outbursts, irritability, anxiety, and that “I feel ungrounded but I can’t explain why” experience.

A lot of people won’t know why they’re fatigued, why they’re reactive, why their system feels bogged down.

But I see it as feedback.

It’s feedback that we aren’t trusting the body. We aren’t trusting the heart. We’re not aligned with ourselves. And the wild part is, when you actually get aligned, a lot of that dissolves. It stops being a “thing.” It becomes obvious.

What’s also true is that it’s never been easier to lose that alignment. Not because you’re broken, but because there’s endless stimulation, and it’s designed to pull you out of your body.

What happens if you stay disconnected?

Fragmentation.

That’s the word I keep coming back to.

When someone isn’t connected to their body and the earth, their system becomes split. Their bio-energetic field isn’t aligned with their body, their body isn’t aligned with their mind, their mind isn’t aligned with their heart, their heart isn’t aligned with their gut.

That fragmentation can show up as numbness, overreaction, powerlessness, depression, disorientation.

I’m not trying to be dramatic when I say this, but embodiment is survival now. It’s going to take embodiment to move through the times we’re in without collapsing.

The “habit” is actually doing less

When people ask what habits they should take up in 2026, my answer is usually the opposite of what they want to hear.

It’s not about taking up more.

It’s about doing less.

The practice is: can you be present with less stimulation?

Can you walk without your phone? Can you stop grabbing your screen the second you have a red light, a pause, a moment of discomfort, a moment of boredom?

Do you reach for your device to feed the stimulation, or can you listen to your breath, listen to the earth, listen to the pulse of yourself?

Because this is the doorway.

It’s through your body that you can actually listen to the larger organism moving through all of us, whether you call it the universe, God, intelligence, field, spirit. Whatever language you use.

But you don’t hear it clearly when you’re urgent and twitchy and constantly reaching.

Why embodiment is harder than spiritual information

I hear this a lot, “There’s so much spiritual information out there, but not enough embodiment.”

I agree. And I also think there’s a reason.

The platforms are engineered for attachment.

Before phones it was TV. Now it’s everything in your pocket. These companies have teams of psychologists analyzing how long they can keep your attention, how to keep you scrolling, how to hook you through novelty, outrage, cuteness, shock, inspiration, even “high vibe” content.

You can be watching a reel that looks spiritual and still be pulled further out of your body.

Because the point isn’t your enlightenment.

The point is your attachment.

So the line is learning how to use the device appropriately, where it’s actually feeding you, versus crossing that line where you’re just getting sucked into the black screen.

Embodiment might look boring, and that’s the medicine

Embodiment in 2026 might look boring compared to the speed of everything else.

It’s like a correction. Like a market correction, but for your nervous system.

It’s regulating. Returning. Being present. Letting go of that constant “should” energy.

I should be more successful. I should be working more. I shouldn’t take so long in the shower.

That inner nagging voice is a big part of what keeps people disembodied. They’re not actually living, they’re measuring themselves.

There’s an older way of being human that we need to recover. Curiosity. Contemplation. Stopping. Noticing. Smelling the roses, like our grandmas have always said. Even 80 years ago, they were noticing the speed-up.

The people embodying the light are going to be the ones who know how to slow down.

Nervous system regulation is not optional

This is foundational.

There’s nothing without your nervous system.

And your nervous system isn’t just “inside.” It’s your whole interface. Your skin, your eyes, your hair, all of it, made of the same base-level cells as your brain and nerves. It’s the boundary of your physical self, and then beyond that you have what science calls the bio-energetic field, what many people call the aura.

When your nervous system isn’t regulated, your field collapses. That’s what depression feels like. Pressed down, pressed in.

But when you’re coherent and aligned, you’re influencing reality instead of being crushed by it.

That’s expression.

Express means to push up or out.

Your voice, your movement, your dance, your stories, your life. You become an expression of self.

My favorite ways to “push up and out”

Simple.

Get outside as often as possible.

Especially if you’re on screens. Screen light is broken light. It’s fast-food light. It gets the job done, but it’s not harmonious to your system the way sunlight is.

So go outside. Barefoot if you can. Feel your exhales. And then go one level deeper and feel what’s breathing you.

Let it be mundane. Let it be slow. Let it be real.

Orient to trees, flowers, sky, and actual earth.

Be outside and be fully human.

The difference between people who transform and people who stay stuck

Responsibility.

And I don’t mean responsibility the way most of us were taught, as in “who’s to blame.”

I mean responsibility as the ability to respond.

That’s what separates people who stay stuck from people who actually change their life.

The people who transform assume responsibility for everything. Not in a self-hating way. In a power way.

Responsible for the fact that you’re on your phone.
Responsible for your job.
Responsible for your choices.
Responsible for your alignment.
How far can you expand your sense of responsibility?

Everyone has a line. For some people it’s “skin-in only.” That’s all I’m responsible for. Everything else is happening to me.

But if that’s the game you’re playing, “I’m not responsible,” then you won’t be able to respond to anything. You’ll be trapped in reaction.

Why community matters more than ever

Community isn’t a nice idea. It’s the essence of human evolution.

We strengthen our individuality so we can eventually plug our unique experience back into the whole.

If we isolate, we’re strengthening identity but refusing the next stage, which is coherence with reality through coherence with others.

You can feel this in a room.

A room has a field. You step into a party, a gathering, a meditation event, an aligned community, and it feels different than the hallway, different than your car, different than you alone behind your desk.

Groups make embodiment easier because you’re not carrying the frequency alone. The more people aligned to a shared mission, the stronger the field.

And every time someone actually does what it takes to show up, take the shower, put on the clothes, handle the logistics, walk into the room, they leave thinking, I’m so glad I did this.

Because we’re missing the village.

If you’re isolated, you already know what to do

If you’re sitting at home, feeling isolated, and you’re reading this hoping for the magic answer, here’s what I think.

You already know.

If you’ve had the intention to find community, the answer has already bounced off you three or four times in the last year. A person, an invitation, a place, a message, a random moment where something felt like a yes and you ignored it.

That’s part of embodiment too. Being present enough to recognize what reality is offering you.

When something shows up that matches an intention you’ve cast into life, take it. Quit ignoring what you’ve called in.

My journey in a nutshell

I used to own gyms for a decade. Before that I played hockey and got injured a lot. The food in my house growing up wasn’t good, and training helped me learn how much food and movement affect the body.

Over time, I got obsessed with nutrition and performance, like a lot of people do. But the deeper I went, the more it turned into, “This is good, this is bad, this molecule is the villain, this molecule is the savior.”

And then I started noticing something.

I could suggest wildly contradictory diets to clients, vegan, paleo, you name it, and people would still improve.

So I realized it wasn’t just what we were eating. It was whether the body was actually being nourished, whether it could detoxify, and whether it had what it needed to repair.

That eventually brought me deeper into the gut, the microbiome, the holobiont idea, that a human is not just human cells, but an ecosystem of trillions of organisms. Your cravings, hormones, moods, and behavior are influenced by that ecosystem.

So health became less about hacks, and more about coherence.

Breathwork is support from within

Professionally, I meet people at a fork in the road, when they’re deciding whether they stay who they’ve been, or they transition into something else.

That transition usually takes support.

The best support is support from within.

And breath is one of the fastest ways I know to give someone the experience of that.

I created a 10-day breathwork course to pair with a detoxifying nourishment-based program, because breathwork helps you actually relate to yourself differently.

Spirit literally translates to breath, etymologically. Inspire is taking in spirit, expire is giving back to spirit.

And breath is where you meet yourself.

When you change your breath, you hit your fears.
When you hold your breath, you meet your edges.
When you move while breathing, things come out of the body, old patterns, old trauma responses, memories you didn’t realize were still stored.

But you have to enter the practice open.

Not with the “prove it to me” mindset.

You are the scientist. You observe, reflect, repeat, notice patterns.

And breath is the foundation of that experiment.

Novelty slows time down

There’s another reason I love breathwork.

It creates novelty.

One of the reasons time feels like it speeds up as we age is because we’re doing the same thing over and over. When days blur, years blur.

I’ve heard stories from people who were incarcerated that some prisoners intentionally do the exact same routine daily because it makes years fly by. Psychologically, it’s like slipping through time because nothing gets marked as different.

A lot of people are accidentally living like that now.

Breath variation is a micro version of novelty. It makes moments distinct again. It makes life feel fuller. It keeps your life from passing you by.

The “healthy is expensive” argument

In the short term, a lot of things look expensive.

But long term neglect is always more expensive.

Like dental work. Ignore a small cavity because you don’t want to pay now, and it becomes a lifelong issue that costs way more later.

Health is similar.

A lot of it is free.
Walking.
Sunlight.
Breathing.
Moving your body.
Being outside.

Some of it costs money because we’re outsourcing the work of growing food and producing clean products. And in a way, you’re always paying either the farmer now or the doctor later.

Also, if someone walks into a health food store once, sees high prices, and never returns, they didn’t learn how to navigate. You can be savvy. There are tricks. There are real deals. And there are also brands that just slap “organic” on a label and overcharge. Learning the landscape is part of the path.

I don’t “work out,” and I’m still fit

This surprises people, but I stopped working out the way most people mean it around 2011.

I had injuries from hockey, and if I trained hard in the gym, I’d get compensation patterns and hurt myself.

So I started spending more time outside, relaxing, being in the sun, living differently.

And I still performed at a very high level in competitions for years, even going long stretches without touching a barbell.

That forced me to admit something.

There’s a way to harness power that’s more foundational than exercise, and even diet.

A lot of gym training gets you to 95% of your potential, then you spend years fighting for tiny improvements that cost massive time.

You could take some of those hours and go do something that actually expands your humanness, forest bathing, climbing trees, learning how to relate to discomfort, building real versatility.

The gym is artificial. It teaches you how to fit into the gym.

One of my favorite definitions of fitness came from Mick Dodge, a man who lived in the rainforest in Washington without a house for 12 years.

His definition of fitness was “fitting into the nest.”

How many nests can you fit into?

Your house is a nest. Your city is a nest. The forest is a nest. Heat is a nest. Cold is a nest. Rain is a nest.

Can you turn off the heater? Can you turn off the AC? Can you handle being a little uncomfortable without collapsing?

That’s fitness too.

And I love little experiments that don’t look like exercise but train your nervous system and your expression as a human. Like walking and holding your breath from one telephone pole to the next without panicking, then relaxing and breathing again. It’s not about proving toughness. It’s about building coherence.

For the spiritually aware but not embodied

It’s common to be spiritually aware and not feel it in your body.

Early spirituality often feels like “non physical,” so people sit, scroll, get comfortable, and the body gets soft.

But mind, body, spirit is a real triad. You don’t drop one and expect the other two to thrive.

So go do the things you’re not good at.

If you’ve never moved your body, maybe the gym is medicine.
If you’re always in your head, maybe a walk in the sun is medicine.
If your body is in pain, that’s a leak in the boat. Fix the leak. Don’t let your body be the reason you’re not here in 20 years.

Where to begin

Small stable steps.

Consistency matters more than intensity.

People get distracted because they’re trying to change the world before they change themselves. They point out what’s wrong out there, but they don’t resolve the same conflicts in here.

Start with regulation.

Start with one daily act that brings you into coherence with yourself.

Then watch what you notice in the world change.

Final message

Find a home.

Maybe it’s a physical community. Maybe it’s digital at first. Maybe it’s people you don’t know yet who eventually become friends, then family in the real sense.

If your home life is great, extend it outward. If it isn’t, get support from another home while you build your foundation.

There are people around you, in your environment and online, who are on the same path.

There’s wisdom to share.

There’s a collective field we’re building together.

And the more you step into it, the more everything starts to feel like home.