Loneliness and the Longing for Real Connection: A Spiritual Renaissance

Jasmine Shah • June 7, 2025

In an age of constant digital contact, why are we still aching with loneliness? Loneliness, anxiety, and depression feed each other in a feedback loop, revealing how emotional and spiritual disconnection can mirror and magnify psychological suffering.


More than 1 in 5 adults report serious, chronic feelings of loneliness (Harvard, 2024). And while our minds reach for obvious explanations — social media, remote work, the breakdown of community — the root often runs deeper.


Dr. Lisa Miller, clinical psychologist and author of The Spiritual Child, names what many of us intuitively feel: loneliness is not just a social issue — it’s a spiritual crisis. She reminds us:


“When we feel lonely, we may have narrowed our perception of reality, forgetting we are innately connected — to one another and to a larger, spiritual consciousness” (Miller, 2023).


In Jungian terms, this is a loss of archetypal grounding. Carl Jung wrote that our spiritual needs are as vital as food or safety (Jung, 1928). When these needs go unmet, we begin to feel unmoored — not just emotionally, but existentially.


Loneliness is the soul’s alarm bell and a call to return to what is sacred and alive within us.


From Dopamine to Oxytocin

We are living in a dopamine-driven world, where likes, messages, and quick hits of digital feedback mimic connection but rarely nourish it. But true belonging happens through oxytocin — the hormone of trust, touch, and presence. One gives us the rush of being noticed. The other gives us the roots of being known.


We are not starving for more information. We are starving for intimacy, for a spiritual resonance for the kind of connection that doesn’t flicker out when the screen goes dark. 


Our Disconnection from Nature, Spirit, and Soulful Community

As we drift further from nature, spiritual rituals, indigenous wisdom, and collective healing, we lose the very threads that once held us together. 


We’ve traded sacred communities for curated content.


And yet, something ancient is stirring. As Dr. Miller observes, we may be standing at the threshold of a spiritual renaissance, a reawakening of our longing to live in communion with the sacred (Miller, 2023).


Many of us feel the pull to return to sacred circles, to breath and experience stillness, to forests and rivers, to each other. A kind of collective tapestry to bond and heal. 


Real Connection: A Grounded Return

So then, what is real connection? 


It is presence.
It’s being witnessed in our wholeness — not just our highlight reel. It’s communal care.
It’s a shared breath. Shared silence. Shared story.
It is the remembrance that we belong — to one another, and to something greater than ourselves.


Jung would call this the reunion with the Self — a return not just to intimacy with others, but to soul-level grounding in who we truly are.


At The Jung Center’s Mind Body Spirit Institute, we believe healing happens in relationship — with ourselves, community with each other, and the sacred. This is where we  bring the numinous to life. 


As James Hillman reminds us in The Thought of the Heart and Anima Mundi, our deepest psychological and spiritual healing depends on the return of the soul to the world. To end loneliness, we don’t need more noise–we need more noticing. We need to hold relational space, as the forest does, linked by a vast mycelium network, present into reverent communion.


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In the Community

By Alvia Baldwin • February 16, 2026
In my professional life, I am the Director of Counseling for Alief ISD, one of the most culturally diverse districts in Texas, with our students speaking over 85 languages. In my personal life, however, I am like many of you—a spouse, a parent and grandparent, a sibling, a daughter, and, always, a champion for mental health. During the height of the pandemic, all of those roles were stressed, strained, and stretched. In my professional life, I was feeling those same pressures, especially as I led our District Crisis Response Team (DCRT), which is deployed throughout our district when there is a death of a staff member or student. Last school year, when I had the great fortune to become more acquainted with The Jung Center through the generous support of H-E-B, our DCRT was being requested more and more frequently to support issues of death, grief, and loss. I became increasingly concerned that my team of amazingly dedicated counseling professionals may begin to give way to compassion fatigue and burnout. I shared my concerns with The Jung Center team, and Dr. Sean Fitzpatrick and Dr. Alejandro Chaoul created a dynamic two-day training for our team. I vividly remember that before the first day ended, there were already members of my team in tears as they expressed in small groups some of the collective toll of trying to balance work and home, and how it was impacting their emotional wellness. Over those two days, The Jung Center provided us space and understanding as they walked us through self-care versus community care, how to combat burnout, and mindfulness techniques among other tools, reminding us to navigate life in healthy ways. And if that was not enough, The Jung Center returned to present a full-day workshop to over 100 of our amazing school and district nurses, who, at the time, had conducted more than 25,000 COVID tests over nearly a two-year period, always with a warm smile—while understanding that every interaction could have put them at personal risk. During their “Day of Care for the Caregivers,” as we coined it, the nursing staff kept coming up to me and saying, “I can’t believe someone did this for us. Someone did this just for us.” Since then, The Jung Center has sought and received funding from The Junior League to return to Alief. This year, Jasmine Shah and Dr. Fitzpatrick led two workshops for our counseling team as well as a full-day workshop for our district and school nurses. So, when I think about the impact The Jung Center had in Alief ISD, I think about the thoughtful support and stellar resources that The Jung Center provided for our counseling and nursing staff to ensure that we were emotionally healthy while we cared for ourselves and others. For that, we, along with the over 40,000 students that we serve, say, “Thank you!”
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Sherpas and Guides

By Karleen Koen • February 2, 2026
When I had passed midlife but didn’t quite think of myself yet as old, I came across a quote from Carl Jung: “No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening become a lie.”* The words hit me in some truth center of my being. They clarified feelings of unease, displacement, restlessness, uncertainty—quiet and deep—that had been building in me since midlife. They gave me the beginning of a way to age differently from what I had seen modeled in my family and the culture around me. Family— despair and bitterness. Culture—Botox and pills. And then I stumbled onto the beginning of the Community for Conscious Aging at The Jung Center. It became a home with fellow sojourners in this journey that we all face: growing old and dying. How does one do that in a way that is vital and purposeful, willing and willful—creative, and real, and in community? How does one live from midlife onward when the way ahead is unclear and goals of the past may no longer work as well as once they did? There is no ritual or meaning out there to help me move into this. Carl Jung writes in his essay “Stages of Life” that there is no university for midlife onward, but I feel like the Community for Conscious Aging gives me what I need. I find knowledge and advice. I find people who are on the same journey as I am, or even ahead of me. I find community. I’ve attended free programs, as well as book studies and workshops. Every month, I can hear a speaker over Zoom talk about some aspect of aging, from the practical to the esoteric. The talks are called Lunch & Learns, and they are free. I’ve learned about everything from how to age in place, to what records and documents I need done before I die, to the fact that “my kids don’t want my stuff” and the practice of Swedish death cleaning. This spring, my Lunch & Learn choices are: “Understanding Death in a New Way,” “Ethical Wills,” and “Stories We Inherit.” This spring, I can attend workshops like “Letter to My Children on Inheritance,” “Positive Aging: The Spirituality of Later Life,” or “What Matters Most: How Can We Accept Mortality?” I can meet in circles to talk deeply about anything and everything. I can go to a Jung Center Gallery Artist Talk to learn that creativity is ageless. And being part of The Jung Center means programs exist in its other divisions— The Mind Body Spirit Institute, Creating Your Life, The McMillan Institute for Jungian Studies—that cross over to enrich and feed my life. I’m now 77. I am climbing the high mountain whose summit I cannot see but know is there. Two of my sherpas and guides are the Community for Conscious Aging and what it offers, followed by The Jung Center itself with all its riches. *“The Stages of Life”, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 8)
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My Father’s Telescope

By Lois F. Stark • January 5, 2026
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