What’s the Right Path to Healing and Integration?

Perhaps you are considering healing yourself through spirituality or through one of the major world religions. Or perhaps you are considering engaging in therapy or a psychological practice or somatic practice or an energy practice.

Or perhaps you are drawn towards more scientific or medical approaches. There are many paths to healing and integration, and we all need to find the path that resonates with us. There are pros and cons to each path, and ultimately, you are the one who knows which path you should be on. This is not intended to convince you to engage in any one path. It's actually encouraged to help you connect to your own inner divinity to find the path that is right for you.

Considering Spiritual Paths

Many people are following one of the major world religions, which all in their own way have rules and structures to help their followers be more in alignment with the religious teachings so that they engage in the world as a more compassionate, kind person, so that they can be a good human being.

That said, many world religions—if you study the history of how they were formed—were not created by the teachers of the original teachings, but by governments or followers of the original guru who first taught or had the spiritual experience that led to the teachings. In my upcoming book, I explore the theory that major religions and spiritual practices become what they become because one person has a mystical experience connecting to something that helps them heal and step into wholeness, and then they decide to teach that to others as a path to help them achieve the same things.

In fact, my book does the same thing in its own way. The difference is that these teachings can become dogma, can become an absolute truth—this is the only way to achieve what can be achieved. My book actually says there are millions of ways to achieve this, so you have to find the way that resonates with you, and it offers some potential paths and exercises to experiment with.

The Cons of Some Spiritual Teachings

You might get trapped in some of the woundings that are built into some of these traditions. You might actually engage in behaviors that lead you to cause harm to self and others, rather than engaging in the original teaching, which is being a compassionate individual and working towards the common good of all and causing no harm.

There are distortions in some of the teachings that actually lead you to do the opposite of what the core teaching is—do no harm to self or other and be compassionate.

Some of these teachings lead you to suppress or spiritually bypass the aspects of ourselves that are shadow aspects of ourselves. We are all capable of causing harm and of being compassionate. We all do engage in behaviors or hold belief systems that cause harm to self or others.

Some spiritual practices and teachings lead you to avoid or deny those aspects of yourself, or they lead you to shame and guilt yourself for those aspects, which then lead you to engage from those wounds.

Even some teachings like yoga—some teachers of yoga—can teach you to watch those aspects of yourself as if they are clouds, but not actually get to know them and integrate them and heal them. I'm not saying those ways of engaging are wrong, but I am curious whether they actually lead to full healing and integration. They might be right for some people.

Psychological and Healing Modalities

Healing modalities such as psychology, somatic practices, and energy work can also support integration.

Let’s take psychology for example. It’s a way to integrate your unconscious and your shadow and to heal and get to know the aspects of yourself that are causing you and others harm. Some of these practices are science-based and some are more socially based. All of these practices lead to some form of healing and integration, just like spiritual practices can.

But they don’t always take into account the spiritual aspect of yourself. They don’t always take into account the body aspect of yourself. They often lead to just intellectual processing and an intellectual understanding of yourself. So although they can lead to some healing and integration, they don’t always address all aspects of healing and integration. But they are often a great path for some.

Energy Work

There are many teachers out there who do energy work, and it can be a great foundation. We are all energetic beings. In my book, I explore what energy is—even from a science and quantum physics perspective. For those of you out there that are like, “Energy doesn’t exist, I don’t believe in that,” that’s okay. There are scientific ways to understand it.

Energy work works with the energy body to heal and raise the vibration, which then helps clear and purge emotions and thoughts and belief systems. But it doesn’t always lead to a deep understanding of why the wound was there in the first place. It might lead to changes in behavior, but you might not have the self-awareness of why you did what you did. There are benefits to understanding why you did what you did that can help speed up the process.

Somatic Work

Body work is another way to heal. It addresses the muscles, the fascia, and can help release things because emotions are stored in the body. But it doesn’t always lead to the spiritual aspect. It doesn’t always lead to the energetic aspect. And it doesn’t always lead to the psychological understanding. Although it can be helpful, it doesn’t always address the others.

How My Book Is Different

My book explores each of these paths in some format and explains the benefits of each. It helps you understand what each can offer.

It offers a step-by-step guide on how to integrate all of these paths through mindfulness as the primary tool of learning to witness. Mindfulness is a spiritual practice of observing your internal workings—your thoughts, emotions, body sensations, beliefs—and getting curious.

I teach you to get curious about them. Some traditions teach you just to observe them as clouds and let them wash away. That is a form of spiritual bypassing because you’re basically ignoring them, and that traumatizes them.

I teach how to get to know them, how to integrate them, and how to heal them. I also teach energy work and how to feel your own energy and how to release things energetically. I also teach spirituality—how to connect to what I call the collective divine, which is what I think the spiritual teachers who created religion connected to. They interpreted it in their own way, and that became the spiritual teachings.

I teach you how to have a personal relationship with this energy, because I believe it’s unique to you and your needs.

I also offer a few somatic practices like yoga. I’m teaching you how to tap into your own innate wisdom so that you know what you need at any given moment to heal yourself.

Developing Your Own Path

At any given moment, you might need just the religious path. Or you might need just the mindfulness path that spiritually bypasses. Or you might need the energy path. Or you might need the somatic path.

I believe they all eventually lead to the integration path—integrating all of those practices at once.

I’m teaching you how to tap into your own innate knowing to develop your own path of healing that resonates with your unique needs.

Thank you for taking your time to watch this video and to be curious about how you yourself can undergo your own hero's journey of healing and integration and returning to wholeness.