Long before there was The Jonas Project, there was Reconnection.
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When I founded Empowered Health Foundation in 2010, I created Reconnection around a belief that had already begun shaping my work as a physical therapist: our experiences don’t simply live in our memories. Stress, grief, relationships, loss, trauma, and generational patterns can influence how we experience life and respond through the body.
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The original purpose of Reconnection was to help people understand those patterns, move and engage the physical body, and reconnect with parts of themselves that had become lost along the way.
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At the time, I didn’t know where that work would eventually lead.
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In 2023, I lost my beloved 26-year-old nephew, Jonas, to an accidental drug overdose.
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Jonas struggled with addiction, but addiction was never the whole story of who he was. He was a person I loved deeply, with a life, a body, relationships, pain, gifts, struggles, and a story that existed long before substance use entered it.
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Losing him changed the direction of this work.
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It made me return to a question I had been asking throughout my career: What happened before the symptom?
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In addiction and recovery, that question becomes especially important. What happened before the substance? What pain was present? What was happening in the body and nervous system? What losses, relationships, trauma, family patterns, or experiences contributed to the need to escape, numb, soothe, survive, or disconnect?
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The philosophy behind Reconnection had been there for years. Jonas gave it a new purpose.
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Today, Reconnection has evolved into The Jonas Project: Recovery Begins in the Body, an initiative of Empowered Health Foundation dedicated to bringing the body, the nervous system, emotional experience, and the human story more fully into conversations about addiction and recovery.
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This project is shaped by more than twenty years of my professional work with the body, and by everything Jonas taught me through his life and his struggles.
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I cannot change his story.
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But his story can help us ask better questions about someone else’s.
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And perhaps help another person find their way back.
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Jonas’s name means “dove,” a symbol of peace, hope, and renewal. That is what we hope this work carries forward.
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Dr. Gina Calderone, PT, DPT, Founder
Jonas' Auntie G
