You know how some mornings you wake up and you think, gosh, I just have so much to be grateful for… so why do I still feel off?

You move through your day and everything looks fine on the outside, but inside there’s this nagging sense that you’re kind of just going through the motions. Almost like you are moving through the world with the volume turned down or earmuffs on.

And I don’t know, maybe you’ve felt this way too? Like the second guessing, almost a feeling of numbness. You just don’t feel connected to yourself like you once did.

How Disconnection Shows Up

Now sometimes that can show up as losing touch with yourself. You can’t quite hear your own needs or your inner voice the way that you used to. You’re so used to drowning it out.

Sometimes it can show up as losing touch with the moment that you’re in. You catch yourself maybe sitting at the dinner table or even walking into a room, but you’re strangely distracted thinking, you know, I’m here but I’m not really here.

And the third way that disconnection can show up in our lives is when we feel like we’re losing touch with others. So you look around at the people in your life and you feel alone and disconnected even though you love them and they love you.

So if any of this sounds familiar, my friend, you are not the only one.

Why We Feel Disconnected

We live in a world that celebrates constant doing, right? We tie our worth to productivity. We try to be helpful. We try to be steady. We try to look like we’re fine and we’re holding it all together.

So of course it feels confusing when you realize that you’ve lost touch with yourself and the moment you’re in, and sometimes even the people closest to you.

There’s Good News

The good news is that this disconnection isn’t permanent. When you begin to reconnect with yourself, with the moment, with the people around you, life starts to feel richer, more real, more like it has more depth. Feels more clear, more honest, more steady.

You feel more like yourself, and not the version that feels like you’re always on, but the one that feels more grounded.

So in this episode, I’m going to be walking you through three gentle ways to begin coming home to yourself. We’re going to talk about simple ways to reconnect with yourself, simple ways to connect in the moment you’re in (body and mind), and how to connect or reconnect with the people that you care about.

So my friend, let’s take a deep breath together and let’s dive in.

You can watch the full episode on YouTube below, listen on your favorite podcast platform, or continue reading.

1. Create a Simple Daily Check-In Ritual

So my first invitation to you is to create a simple daily check-in ritual. Now I know your first thought is going to be, “I do not have time to add one more thing to my plate.” So let’s talk a little bit about this, because it doesn’t have to take much time and it doesn’t have to be complicated.

This is for, you know, when you feel like you can’t hear your inner voice anymore. You’ve lost touch with who you are. You feel like you’ve lost yourself somewhere along the way.

What Is a Daily Check-In?

This quick daily check-in, this sacred ritual, you can think of it as a quiet conversation with yourself. So again, it doesn’t have to be anything big or dramatic. It’s just a moment where you take time out of your busy day for you.

You can ask yourself:

• What am I feeling?
• What do I need?
• Where am I pushing too hard?

It’s so easy to feel disconnected from ourself when we feel like we’re moving through our days on autopilot. So this daily check-in helps you to rebuild that inner bridge. It reminds you that your voice is still in there, waiting for you. That you are still here.

My Personal Morning Practice

So I’m going to share my own personal practice with you to show you how simple this can be.

When I wake up in the morning before I get out of bed, I give myself three deep breaths:

• The first one I imagine cleansing my mind
• The second one clearing my body
• The third one cleansing my spirit

Then I name three things that I am grateful for, and then I choose an intention for the day.

So, three parts to this practice: Three slow breaths. Three things I’m grateful for. One intention for the day.

Sometimes it’s a word like “presence.” Sometimes it’s a phrase like, “In this moment, all is well,” or “I follow joy like it’s my job.”

That’s it. It takes about a minute total, but in that minute, I come back to myself. I check in with myself before the world starts pulling me in all these different directions.

Closing Your Day

And then to wrap things up at the end of the day, I close about the same way. I just take a couple of deep breaths and I think about three things that I am grateful for from the day behind.

And again, it’s just a simple way to check in with myself at the beginning and the end of what is very often a full and busy day.

So I invite you to consider how you can create your own personal check-in ritual, just a sacred check-in with yourself. And again, it doesn’t have to take long, it doesn’t have to be complicated.

You know, inside my Signature program, Radiantly Rooted, we walk through practices like this together. So you get the gentle prompts, the guided awareness work, and the support so that you don’t have to figure out what listening to yourself really means. You learn the skills slowly over time until it feels natural again.

2. Come Back to the Present Through Your Senses

All right. What about when we feel ourselves disconnected, mind and body? So physically you are in one place. Maybe you’re at the dinner table surrounded by family or friends. Maybe you’re driving down the road and you realize that your mind is far off in la la land while your body’s here in your life.

We can come back to the present moment through our senses.

“The mind’s first step to self-awareness must be through the body.”

— George A. Sheehan

Living in Our Heads

Now, so many of the women that I work with live in their heads. They spend so much time in their heads. And trust me, I get it. I spend a lot of time up there too.

Planning, remembering, replaying, trying to stay ahead of everything. And it’s so… it’s no wonder that the present moment slips away.

Now, the simplest way that I have found to come back, body and mind, is through our senses, because they’re always there. Our body is always in the physical moment, even when our mind wanders off.

So if we can bring our mind back to our body, we can come back to the here and now. And the more often we practice this, the more of our lives we’re actually present for. The more of our lives we actually get to live.

The 3-3-3 Rule

Now, my favorite… I don’t know, I have a lot of favorites. One of my favorite ways to do this is the 3-3-3 rule. Now, I have heard different variations of this, so you may hear something different than this one, but the one that I like is to:

• Notice three things you see
• Notice three things you hear
• Move three parts of your body

So if you want to try it with me, you might look around and just notice three things that you see:

• The light on the wall
• A cup on the table
• The shape of a tree outside your window

Three things you see. And then notice three sounds:

• A hum
• A bird
• The sound of your own breath

And then move:

• Maybe you roll your shoulders
• Maybe wiggle your fingers
• Maybe you unclench your jaw

And again, it’s nothing fancy, but it is a very simple, grounded way to return to the moment that you’re already in.

And those sensory anchors are woven all through my ALIGN framework in Radiantly Rooted. You learn how to feel the ground beneath you, how to let your breath help to settle and calm your mind, and how to pull yourself back when you catch yourself moving through your day on autopilot so that you can step back into your actual life with grounded presence and mindful awareness. So that you can move through your day really enjoying, or at least being present for, every moment that we’re gifted.

3. Let Your Relationships Become Real Again

All right, so the third way that disconnection tends to manifest in our lives is through disconnection from those around us.

We talked about disconnecting from ourselves. We’ve talked about when we disconnect from mind and body. Now thinking about when we feel disconnected in our relationships.

You know, a lot of us are feeling lonely even when we’re surrounded by people. And it’s not because people don’t care. It’s because everybody, it seems, is trying hard not to be too much.

You know, we don’t want to upset anybody. We don’t want to make things heavy. We don’t want to ask the wrong question or put our foot in our mouth or, you know, put ourselves in a spot where we feel vulnerable or embarrassed.

So we try to keep things light, safe, surface level. My invitation to you is to let your relationships become real again so that we don’t end up missing each other.

A Personal Story

You know, I think about, gosh, my mom. She had her first stroke when she was 49, and she lived for many, many years with her symptoms, you know, worsening and worsening over time. And it was a topic that I tended to avoid because I didn’t want to make her feel worse than she already did. I didn’t want to rub it in that I can, you know, I can move both my arms. You can only move one of your arms. Your life is so much more challenging now.

But in hindsight now, I wish that I had spoken to her more about this. What was going on for her, what she was feeling, how hard her life was. Because I feel like now in hindsight, I left her in isolation with, you know, not having me, her daughter, to talk to about the things that were going on in her day-to-day life.

I heard another example about this recently. A woman had confided in her friend that she was waiting on some rather scary test results, and, you know, they met for, I think it was coffee or tea, I don’t remember. And her friend didn’t want to bring it up. And she thought she was being respectful, but the woman who was scared and waiting on these results was really waiting for someone to say, “Hey, you know, how are you doing?”

She needed someone to check in on her.

The Two Main Barriers

And so a lot of disconnection in our relationships with others comes from two things:

• We don’t ask the real questions
• We don’t say the real thing (what’s really on our mind)

And it’s not because we don’t care, but it’s because we are afraid of misstepping, of overstepping, of saying the wrong thing. And so we end up feeling disconnected, shallow, like we’re missing out.

Small Acts of Courage

It takes courage, right? So reach out to somebody and just ask, “How are you doing?” I did this recently with my newsletter and I was so grateful for the trust people placed in me to send me how they were really doing. I got so many emails back.

I said, you know, I don’t want the “I’m fine. I’m fine” that you’re telling everybody around you. I want the raw truth. How are you doing? What are you carrying? What’s going on for you?

I got some really magical updates. I got some really hard updates. And I got everything in between.

So think about somebody you care about and ask them:

• “What’s on your heart today?”
• “How’s your heart today?”
• “I’ve been thinking about you. What’s going on in your world?”

Not the “I’m fine” version, but the raw, real truth. And just see what comes up.

Maybe share your truths with somebody to open up that dialogue. That courage to speak up when you need something:

• “I could really use someone checking in this week.”

Or on the flip side, if somebody asks you something that oversteps, that you’re not comfortable talking about, you can say:

• “I actually don’t want to talk about it right now.”

And that’s okay too.

You know, it doesn’t have to be dramatic. It doesn’t have to be perfect for sure. It just has to be honest and real, heart-centered. Opening up these doors to connection so that we’re not so alone in this world where we are constantly overstimulated, we’re always looking at people’s perfectly curated social media feeds, right?

And so it can be hard for us to admit that our life is not perfect, but none of us have a perfect life. Not a single one of us. So just keeping that in mind.

As you reconnect with yourself, as you bring your mind and your body together into the present moment, you might find that it becomes easier for you to let others meet you there too. You might find that your relationships feel more grounded, safer, more true, more honest, raw, authentic, real.

You Might Be Wondering…

Let’s Bring This All Together

So let’s bring all of this together. We’ve talked about disconnection on three levels:

• Disconnection with our own selves (not knowing what we want or need)
• Disconnection from the moment when our mind wanders off to la la land while our body’s physically here
• Disconnection from the people around us, even though we all love each other so very much

So becoming reconnected with ourselves, it begins quietly. Again, it doesn’t take a whole lot of time or effort or energy. You can start with:

• Just a minute in the morning to hear yourself again
• A simple pause or a moment in the afternoon to take a look around and see what is going on in your world, to return to your senses
• A moment of vulnerability or an honest, real, heart-centered check-in inside of your relationships

These tiny choices, they help to rebuild that bridge to connection. They rebuild your inner world. They help you to feel steadier and more clear, more rooted in who you are.

And when you are more rooted in who you are, the people around you sense it. They feel it. And it gives them the courage perhaps to maybe tune in a little deeper, maybe be a little more present. Maybe ask tough questions in their own relationships or be a little more vulnerable in their own relationships.

Slowly, life begins to feel more like yours again. You begin to feel more like you again. You come back to yourself, and that, my friend, changes everything.

A Gentle Invitation

So I do have a gentle invitation to you if you are listening to this and thinking, “Wow, I can relate to so much of this, and I don’t want to stay disconnected. I want to feel like myself again.”

You are not alone, and you don’t have to figure it out on your own or squeeze it into the tiny corners of your already full life. There is a softer way forward.

My signature program, Radiantly Rooted, opens this Friday, and I would love to walk with you on this journey through this next season.

Now, this is a calm, supportive space where you’re going to learn how to:

• Reconnect with yourself
• Come back to the present moment
• Build relationships that feel real and nourishing
• Create rhythms, patterns, habits, and routines that help you to feel steady again

But that fit into the life that you’re living now, without having to totally reinvent everything, right? We need practices that meet us where we are.

So if this is something that stirred something inside of you, I would love for you to join the wait list. You’ll be the first to know when the doors open and you’ll receive the limited-time bonuses that I’m only offering at launch.

Here’s the link to the wait list: rachelhupp.com/radiant

I would love to see you inside. You do not have to do this alone.

And I just want to thank you so much again for tuning into Radiantly Rooted with Rachel. I hope that you found something in this episode to help you feel more reconnected to yourself, to the moment, to those around you. And I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

Take good care, my friend.

Rachel