151 ~ The Search for Real Connection In a Distracted World

Your life can be more “connected” than ever and still feel lonely. We sit down as two women who care deeply about desire, mental health, and real belonging, and we name what a lot of people feel but rarely say out loud: the attention economy is slicing our focus into tiny pieces, and the cost shows up in our bodies, our relationships, and our sense of meaning.

We talk about why humans were never meant to heal in isolation. Long before therapy-speak, coaching programs, and search bars, people processed life through community, movement, stories, shared meals, and rituals that were built into everyday living. Technology is not the enemy. We love the benefits of modern life, from medicine to long-distance connection. But every gain brings a loss, and one of the biggest losses is the slow drift away from village-level closeness into nuclear-family isolation, “apartness,” and screens at the table.

From there we ask a practical, hopeful question: what is the modern version of the fire circle? Not a fantasy about the past, but something you can create now, whether that is a phone-free gathering at home, a weekly park meet-up, a creative story circle, or a small community practice that helps your nervous system remember it is safe to belong. We also make an important distinction between the role of therapists and coaches and the unique medicine a true tribe offers: being witnessed and loved without being fixed.

Humans are built for connection. Desire points us back to community, and how we can create a modern version of the old fire circle without romanticizing the past.  

Episode Nuggets: 
• attention as a daily choice amid phones, social media, outrage and productivity culture  
• ancestral healing through community, ritual, movement and story  
• technology as neutral, with real tradeoffs that include lost connection  
• the shift from village life to nuclear family life and “apartness” by design  
• belonging as a core human need tied to safety, nervous system health and healing  
• modern options for community like yoga, dance, 12-step, church and gatherings  
• creating a phone-free “non-fire circle” that fits your life and needs  
• tribe support as being witnessed and loved, distinct from therapy and coaching  

If you have been craving deeper human connection and wondering what to change first, press play. Who would you build a circle with? Where do you feel most connected right now?

Transcript

Meet Brenda And Catherine

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Welcome to Desire is Medicine. We are two very different women living a life led by desire, inviting you into our world.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

I'm Brenda. I'm a devoted practitioner to being my fully expressed true self in my daily life, motherhood, relationships, and my business. Desire has taken me on quite a ride, and every day I practice listening to and following the voice within. I'm a middle school teacher, turned coach and guide of the feminine.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

And I'm Catherine, devoted to living my life as the truest and hopefully the highest version of me. I don't have children, I've never been married, I've spent equal parts of my life in corporate as in some down and low shady spaces. I was the epitome of Tired and Wired, and my path led me to explore desire. I'm a coach, guide, energy worker, and a forever student.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Even after decades of inner work, we are humble beginners, on the mat, still exploring, always curious. We believe that listening to and following the nudge of desire is a deep spiritual practice that helps us grow.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

On the Desire as Medicine podcast, we talk to each other, we interview people we know and love about the practice of desire, bringing in a very important piece that is often overlooked, being responsible for our desire.

Attention Economy And Fragmented Focus

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Hey everyone, family, friends, listeners, thank you so much for joining us again on another episode of Desire as Medicine. I am here with the lovely Brenda, having some feelings come up for myself as I've been sitting with just personal development, mental health, and the stage that we're in in this attention economy. I don't want to call phones bad because our phones aren't the only thing that are competing for our attention. Like there's social media news, people's outrage, shopping, that dress, um, the notifications that are dinging, like our productivity culture, our constant self-improvement. Our attention is so constantly fragmented, right? And I don't want to call it bad. They are just things that are pulling for our attention. And we get to get better at where we want to put our attention. And the truth is that we come from ancestors that did that back in whatever BC, when people got together and they had built-in ritual in their lives, like nobody was going to the therapist. Nobody was going to ask AI, like, what do you think about this pattern? How do I heal my generational? Blah, blah, blah. We were sort of doing all of this innately in community. I think that thought combined with the desire, like, I feel very blessed. I have a lot of coaches and therapists as friends, and we could have a specific level of conversation that is very mental. And I could also go to a yoga class or Brenda teaches Koya class or something where there is movement involved and things can be moved through the body that is available to us. But back in the day, we didn't have to do like the stairmaster. We didn't have to go to the spin class. We just like lived in the wild and we got to have cardiovascular health and we got to have connection in our tribes. Like there were tons of things happening where when I look back at that, I think to myself, like we weren't really meant to heal alone. I get that the possibilities of healing right now and the lens at which we're able to look at things is so I want to call it advanced. Because I don't think they were looking for the jungian anything or the behavioral blah, blah, blah of something. It was just like, does this space, does this tribe, does our community feel good? And I think it would be great if we could do more of that.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

It would be so great if we could do more than that. I think we're trying to do that. I think that's what everyone's trying to do through all of these modalities of social media, Zoom, podcasting. There's more group coaching than ever. There's more online programs, there's more Facebook groups, there's more social media apps than I probably even know about. Thank goodness, because I'm at my limit. We're all trying to have connection. We're trying to be connected in this new world. We're meant to evolve. We were never meant to stay the same. So I think we look back at those sitting around the fire days with some nostalgia. I think life was hard back then. People didn't live that long. There was disease, they didn't know what we know now. Like we've had a lot of advancements that make our lives, quote, better and live longer, right? But like anything, with technology, with the advancement of technology or with our desire, when we gain something, there's also something lost.

Technology Gives And Takes Away

SPEAKER_00 5:19

That's the way it goes. So you want to have a baby, you're gonna lose your free time. You want to get married or have a partner, you're going to live your lose your privacy. That's just the way it goes. Creation includes some form of destruction. There's a cost. This isn't a bad thing. It's neutral in nature. It's neutral. But it's true. So we need to look at that. We can't expect to have a baby and then have our lives be exactly the same. If you do, then you're a little dolu. Like it doesn't work that way. To use one of Catherine's favorite lines, let's get into reality, right? She's so good at reality. So there's a cost. The advancement of technology has given us something. And I think as humans, we're innately curious. We always seem to want to know well, how do I make this better? What can I invent? What can I create? We're we're creatrixes. And so we create this technology, and it's amazing. Look at the cool shit that we have in our world. Just from penicillin to cars. Now we have cars that drive themselves. What? What? We have AI, we have AI, we have podcasting over Zoom. Like we there's everything. You know, I could just video anyone at any time in any part of the world. That is super cool. And that's a good thing. So we don't want to call that bad, but we lose something inside of that. And

Why Modern Life Feels Disconnected

SPEAKER_00 7:03

I think that what we've lost in all of this technology and social media and those phones, our crack candy phones that we love to carry around, is the human connection. We're strangely more disconnected than ever. Because with the advancement of technology, we've had more choices. We've moved away from our little village. It didn't used to be that way. People would stay in their village or the next village. Even going to the next village might be, ooh, so far, right? But they did it to get married and have children and have families. And now we move very far away from our families. In our culture in America, we have a nuclear family. We don't have our extended family living with us. So the value of elders has changed as well. And so we don't have that built-in family, that built-in sense of community the way we always did. Okay, now Catherine and I are both New Yorkers, so I'm going to give a little New York reference. I always heard my grandmother talking about like the old Brooklyn days. People lived in apartments. They were always going to each other's apartments, hanging out on the front stoop all summer because nobody had air conditioning. There's a built-in connection there. There's a built-in community. And so now we have air conditioning. Now we have our own apartments. And my friend Alice Frank, who I'm going to give a shout-out to, maybe we'll have her on one of these days, absolutely love this woman. She works with language. And so she said, apartments. We live in apartments. We live apart from people. And just the way she talks about that is super cool. You could check her out. And it's like, oh, we want all this connection, but there's so much apartness built into our lives. And so, you know, we went from sitting around the fire in our village to houses where kids would live in their own houses. And now, you know, we introduce other forms of technology. It used to be sitting around the dinner table was sacred. How many people really sit around the dinner table as a family these days every night? That used to be a thing. But then radio was invented. And people thought that was bad. Oh my God. What? You're gonna have a box that has somebody else's voice come in and broadcast? And then people would sit around the radio and listen to the radio shows together in the living room. And that would take away from the singing and the dancing and the talking that they used to do. And then there was TV. Now they're not listening anymore. Now their eyes are transfixed on this box. I mean you could see the progression of how we get more and more separate. And then you add in phones. I mean you go to a restaurant right now, and I dare you to not see families with the kids are just all on their own phones. So we just keep getting more and more distracted, more and more separate from each other. And we're also wanting that connection. And there's a lot of problems and difficulties that come with all of these things, this separateness. We're in a time that's kind of unprecedented, and our bodies aren't really designed for all this technology. And I think that our physiology, like you said in the beginning, is designed for connection and we want it. And we're struggling. People are struggling with how do I get this connection that I really so desperately need. I I don't think it's a luxury, it's a need. And I think that's why we're seeing so many people struggling these days. Yeah, I think it requires people to be on board.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Like when we were around the fire, we were on board. Granted, you also brought in the fact that we were dying from disease, that is true, but we were sort of on board, you know, like we were on board to be around the fire. We were on board to tell stories, and we that was our the way that we learned at that time. Like information was shared via story. And like passed down generation to generation, we'd hear stories and then we'd learn. And I guess that's transformed into books, and then books transformed into courses, courses transformed into therapy. Now we're checking out AI. Like there are ways where things have progressed, but our needs, our basic needs, are kind of the same.

Connection As A Core Human Need

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Do I feel safe? Do I belong? Am I in danger? How can I continue to develop while also handling my core needs and human connection? I would argue is a core need. Like feeling like we're part of a community is a core need. It was a lot easier to meet when we were in small tribes living in a specific area. Now we're sort of scattered, right? Like I could just use myself, my own family. I have some family in New York, some family in Miami, some family in California. Like there's family all over. You're not just a staple in this specific land. Yet we don't really heal in isolation. We heal with our people. And yes, we can create our own families. They don't have to be blood related. I'm more using that example to show that it was built into our day-to-day. And it's not necessarily built into our day-to-day now. And how do we build that in for ourselves? And there are some things that took the place of that. So it could be maybe a yoga class, it could be 12-step, it could be a church, it could be a dance class, maybe a spiritual gathering. There are things that we have created or that we join and go to so that we could have that a sense of that.

Creating A Modern Fire Circle

SPEAKER_01 13:17

I think that has its place. But I guess the question we're bringing to you today is is there a way, if we know that connection is part of what's needed for healing, is there a modern version of what used to be, of what it used to look like that can be created by you for today? Like, can you create a non-fire circle that's like a fire circle that maybe takes place in your house or maybe in somebody else's house, or maybe at the park bench or somewhere where a bunch of people are together, getting creative, whether it's dancing, singing, telling stories where you're in community, not on your phones, doing your best to be connected so that you can we can continue to form new ways because clearly we've evolved past the old tribe ways. How can we bring it into the modern day so that we can continue to heal and transform in community in the way

Tribe Support Versus Therapy Support

SPEAKER_01 14:16

that we've done? I don't think that our tribe has to become our therapist. Like we don't have to have that form of heady, what's the the word? Um, when you keep a secret, NDA form of communication, nondisclosure agreement amongst your tribe. I don't think it's necessary because I think that there is a place for a coach. There is a place for a therapist. And that coach and therapist can feel like it's part of your tribe, but your tribe can bring something to you that a coach and therapist cannot, which is just for you to be witnessed and loved. And that's it. Just for some people, people's plural to hold space for you to be seen, for you to belong and be part of something that you're creating, that when you share of yourself, they get to feel the gift of being helpful, and you get to feel the guilt, the gift of reception. I do think that there is a tribal healing component that doesn't really exist in our today. I'm not quite sure how it can be created. I don't think there is a one-way. I think it could look different for all people, and it could look however is best for it to look for you because it will require attention, it will require curation. Like you will have to create it. It's not something that's built into our society at this time, not in the way that it was. But I can see that there are people that aren't really doing well in rehabs. There are people that 12 steps not helping. There are people that their ADHD, ADD, whatever medication is not helping. And I think that as a society, it would be smart for us to remember that there was a travel component to our living environment that is no longer present.

Questions On Loneliness And Belonging

SPEAKER_01 16:15

It's been replaced by separation, by jobs, by travel space. I'm open to whatever you guys think. Like I'd love to hear more. This is something that I've been sort of flushing out and looking at and seeing because I recognize that we are not a one size fits all in that whatever helped me or whatever helped Brenda is what's going to help you. We're not a one size in that way, but we are a one size in the sense that we want to feel safe, we want to belong, we want to feel loved, we want to feel like we're part of something. And those are human needs that span race and space and age. So I would love to talk more about this, and I will continue to just keep my finger on the pulse as this evolves. But I wanted to bring it here. I wanted to bring it to the podcast, I wanted to bring it to our family, friends, listeners for you to feel into like how connected are you? How are you feeling in regards to your tribe, your people, your loved ones? How connected are you feeling to yourself and others? Is there a strand of loneliness that could potentially be eased by changing some things or introducing some things that we've long ago let go of that maybe we can reintroduce in some way? Thank you so much for listening and for being part of our community. We love you deeply. Bye for now.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

Thank you for joining us on the Desire as Medicine podcast.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

Desire invites us to be honest, loving, and deeply intimate with ourselves and others. You can find our handles in the show notes. We'd love to hear from you.