My Journey to Whole-Self Integration™ …

Before I Knew What I Didn’t Know

Have you ever known someone who talks a lot about personal growth, healing, and development, but doesn’t quite seem to walk the talk? I’ve known many. And, I can recognize now that for a time, I was one of these people.

I truly believed I was doing the deep work, and in many ways I was. But in other ways, I was avoiding essential parts of the process. At times I was in my psyche, all the while disconnected from my body. At other times, I was so focused on excavating my shadows that I missed what was unfolding right in front of me. There were moments when I was tending to my physical needs, yet unable to listen to my heart.

And this didn’t just occur in my self-guided work. In fact, many of the practitioners I worked with, though well-intentioned, only reinforced this fragmentation. One focused solely on the mind. Another on the body. Another on spiritual practices. But no one held the whole of me. And without realizing it, I was missing out on something crucial: The interweaving of all the aspects of myself. My Whole-Self. 

A Life Immersed In Consciousness

The truth is, my life has always unfolded in the context of healing and soul work. I was raised in a home where conversations about psychology, consciousness, and integration were not considered eccentric — quite the contrary, they were the norm. My parents, both clinical psychotherapists, were leaders in the field, and deeply immersed in group therapy, esoteric traditions, psychedelic medicine work, and transpersonal psychology.

Through my parents’ community, from a young age, I was in sacred company. I crossed paths with people like Ram Dass — though of course, as a child, I had no idea who he was. Dr. Leo Zeff (to me, “Uncle Leo”) was a regular at our dinner table. Rick Doblin of MAPS held fundraisers in my childhood home. On a daily basis, I was surrounded by people who were shaping the very edges of the modern healing world, and those conversations and ceremonies became part of the fabric of my inner world.

My childhood was shaped equally by my father’s fiercely original take on Gestalt therapy — a unique synthesis of psychology, nutrition, fitness, and mental reprogramming — and by my mother’s work in First Nations communities, where she facilitated social care programs, practitioner trainings, and interdenominational consciousness trainings along with tribal leaders. 

At the age of 8 I did my first fire walk, a rite of passage where one enters a meditative state to walk across coals. Shortly thereafter, I attended the first days of a Sundance ceremony that was held in honor of children by a tribe experiencing a high infant (under age five) mortality rate. It was then I realized that what my “normal” peers were not getting access to with their “mainstream” upbringings was a level of consciousness in regard to all stages of life, including death, and that I had a desire to understand more — not just about the human life, but the life of the self, the life of this planet, of the universe, and to connect in community with others who were exploring the same. 

These experiences imprinted me with a reverence for the sacredness of life. They taught me that grief and transformation are not problems to solve, but thresholds to walk through. They showed me what it means to live between worlds — to honor both the physical and the unseen, the body and the soul.

And yet, even with this richly layered upbringing, I still internalized the fragmentation so many of us carry. I absorbed the belief that I needed to be a certain way to be worthy — to be palatable, pleasing, productive. I learned to disconnect from parts of myself in order to survive, even within a home immersed in healing.

It wasn’t until I turned fully inward, and began tending to the deep wounds of my own childhood, that I came to understand what true integration actually requires.

The Birth of Whole-Self Integration™

Through nervous system healing, somatic awareness, and years of deep inner work, I came to understand that we don’t heal by fixing ourselves in fragments. We heal by learning to hold every part of who we are.

This is what led to the creation of Whole-Self Integration™, a living framework for embodied transformation that invites the full spectrum of your being into the process of healing, discovery, growth, and development.

Rather than isolating the mind, the emotions, the body, the spirit, or the energy, Whole-Self Integration™ honors all five aspects of the Self:

• The Head-Self: your psyche, thoughts, beliefs, and mental patterns

• The Heart-Self: your emotions and relational presence and behaviors

• The Human-Self: your physical body, somatic experience, and nervous system

• The Higher-Self: your soul and intuitive knowing

• The Halo-Self: your energetic and etheric body

These aspects aren’t meant to be treated in isolation. They are designed to be woven together. Through this integrative lens, healing becomes less about control, and more about remembering what is our most true, innate state of being. It’s about coming home to ourselves, over and over again. 

A Path Still Unfolding

I didn’t arrive at this work because I’ve figured it all out. Far from it. I came to it because I was trying to make sense of things I couldn’t name — patterns I kept repeating, parts of myself I kept abandoning, truths I didn’t yet know how to hold. Because I got lost in the very ideas I thought would save me. Because I bypassed, pushed, performed, and pretended — and still found myself aching to feel whole.

Even with a life immersed in healing, I had to learn, again and again, what it meant to actually be with my whole self. Not just observe or analyze or adjust, but to be in the experience. To feel what was happening without turning away. 

Much like most journeys, my journey has never been a straight line. It’s been cyclical, spiraling, and at times seemingly all over the map. There were years where I was so deep in the process that I lost my center. Times I thought I was healing, when I was actually just performing healing. Times I thought I was broken, when I was simply shedding what needed to be shed in order to clear a new path. There have been moments of profound remembrance and moments of forgetting. 

It took time and honesty to recognize how much I had been bypassing, even inside the right language and the right spaces. It took humility to slow down. To stop trying to fix what needed to be felt and lived and experienced. 

Of course, there are still moments that stretch me. Still patterns that surface. Still layers I meet with more tenderness than before. 

If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that integration isn’t something we achieve. It’s something we live, it’s a relationship we develop. This relationship deepens over time through practice, flexibility, presence, and openness.

It’s incredibly liberating to live life as one’s whole-self. And from this place, everything is more honest, more human, more true.

In my life’s work it is my role not to be the healer for anyone else, but always be in service of others on their healing paths, so that we can all come home to our Whole-Self.