At the core of our being, many of us are hungry to feel fully alive and be connected to ourselves, others and to what matters most.

For much of my life, I was fortunate to feel a deep sense of vitality and purpose. I led a full life and didn’t question what the meaning of life was, because I was living it. While it was a stressful life with my work, raising kids and juggling all sorts of priorities, I felt a sense of wholeness.

After my kids left home and I had retired from my vocation as a nurse, a deep sense of emptiness began to creep in. I had no idea how to look inside myself for answers, and I felt lost, confused and stuck. For the first time, I found myself questioning what is the meaning and purpose of my life.

After a decade of searching, I’ve come to understand that the deeper purpose of our lives is to become whole. To integrate the fragmented parts of ourselves so we can bring our whole selves to life, love and our purpose.

But if the heart of our seeking is wholeness, what exactly does coming home to wholeness mean? As I began to explore that question more deeply, I started to understand its opposite.

The Opposite of Wholeness

The opposite of wholeness is fragmentation, disconnection, and self-abandonment. Wholeness is not the absence of pain or struggle. It is the reintegration of what has been divided.

When I speak of wholeness, I mean the process of bringing our body, mind, heart, and soul into harmony. It asks that we integrate our past experiences and the parts of ourselves we had to leave behind to fit into families and cultures that expected certain things from us. Hidden beneath that conditioning is our essential self—the person we were born to become before the world taught us who we were supposed to be.

Integrating the past is only part of the equation. Wholeness also requires that we nurture the seed of our future self. The soil of this becoming is what we call presence, our capacity, as Ram Dass taught, to “be here now.”

Wholeness and Healing

The word healing comes from the Old English hælan, meaning “to make whole.” At its root, healing is about wholeness and the process of restoring integrity to what has become fragmented.

As we move toward greater wholeness, we move toward healing. Yet it’s important to understand that while healing requires wholeness, wholeness does not always mean being cured.

Cure happens at the level of the body, while healing happens at the level of the whole being. You can be healed in spirit even when the body remains ill.

What we often call disease or disorder can be seen as an invitation to return to wholeness. Our symptoms are not the enemy, they’re the soul’s way of getting our attention and a call to wholeness.

The Crisis We’re Living Through

I believe we are living through a crisis of fragmentation and disconnection—and wholeness is the medicine we need.

When the majority of illness is stress-related, we are facing something deeper than individual struggles. We are witnessing a collective crisis, a profound loss of relationship with ourselves and with what makes us human.

Our healthcare systems speak of the mind-body connection but still treat people in parts. Our workplaces demand productivity while depleting our spirits. Our digital lives fragment our attention into a thousand competing directions. We are told to optimize our performance, manage our time, and fix our flaws, all while the deeper question goes unasked: How do we become whole again?

This fragmentation isn’t a personal failing. It’s the water we’re swimming in. And it’s making us sick—body, mind, heart, and soul.

A Season of Fragmentation

There was a season in my own life when stress accumulated until it overwhelmed my system and got stuck. Over time, I began to collect diagnoses, one from a neurologist, another from my family physician, another from my chiropractor. It felt like I needed a spreadsheet to track them all. Yet somewhere inside, I knew these symptoms were messengers rather than mere labels.

I sensed that my task was to find the root cause, because no one else seemed trained to look through the lens of deep healing, the lens of wholeness. My gift has always been connecting the dots and seeing how the pieces fit together. That season taught me in a very embodied way that wholeness is not the absence of disease. It is the integration of body, mind, heart, and soul.

Over time, I began to see that my body’s symptoms were connected to the emotional exhaustion of caring for my aging parents. My nervous system had become dysregulated, the communication between my body and brain disrupted. My symptoms showed me how deeply intertwined my emotional, physical, and spiritual health were.

The Path to Coming Home to Wholeness

The first step in my return to wholeness was self-regulation, learning how to bring calm and coherence back to my body and mind. This became the first of what I now call the Four Keys to Inner Peace.

Understanding nervous system regulation became my gateway to wholeness. When our nervous system is dysregulated, we lose access to our deeper wisdom. We cannot feel our emotions clearly, connect with our intuition, or hear what our soul is trying to tell us. Regulating the nervous system isn’t just about managing stress, it’s about creating the inner safety and stability needed for body, mind, heart, and soul to come back into conversation with each other.

As I practiced, my symptoms slowly eased. Even now, when they surface, they remind me that wholeness is a process, not a destination. When I meet them with self-compassion instead of resistance, I feel a softening. A reminder that wholeness is possible even in imperfection.

Lessons from Palliative Care

Some of my deepest insights came from working in palliative and end-of-life care. From the beginning, I felt I had come home. Palliative care was as close to a truly holistic approach as I had seen in healthcare. It honored that healing and wholeness are possible even when a cure is not.

It was during my graduate studies that I first encountered Rosemary Parse’s Human Becoming Theory, a philosophy that would shape everything I came to believe about health and healing.

Parse taught that health is not the absence of disease but the lived experience of meaning and wholeness. She understood that people are not problems to be solved but unfolding beings in the process of becoming.

Later, Carl Jung’s work on individuation deepened my understanding that wholeness isn’t just a goal, it’s the fundamental human journey.

This was revolutionary to me. It gave language to what I had intuited but couldn’t yet name: that genuine care is not about fixing people but being with them as they unfold into new ways of being. That wholeness, not cure, is the true measure of health.

The miracle is that, by focusing on wholeness rather than cure, I sometimes witnessed both. In his book Cured, physician Jeff Rediger shares stories of people who experienced unexpected healing when they transformed their inner lives, a reminder that wholeness can change biology in ways we are only beginning to understand.

That work taught me that while healing requires wholeness, wholeness does not depend on being cured. We can be whole even in the presence of illness.

Integrating All Parts of Ourselves

Wholeness asks us to integrate the parts of ourselves, the seen and the unseen, the masculine and feminine energies of doing and being, our personality and our soul, the dark and the light. It also calls us to integrate the three centers of intelligence described by the Enneagram: body, heart, and mind, so that wisdom can flow freely through all of them.

This return to wholeness is meant to inform how we live and how we support those who come to us seeking help. Our healthcare systems speak of the mind-body connection, but still treat people in parts. Our spiritual traditions speak of the soul, yet often neglect how spiritual disconnection affects physical and emotional health.

Wholeness and the Soul’s Hunger

I’ve also experienced a season when my soul sent its own symptoms, a deep ache I came to call soul hunger. It wasn’t physical stress that drained me but spiritual stress, the fatigue that comes from living out of alignment with your truth. That kind of disconnection feels like depression. It is the quiet depletion of our life-force energy that happens when we stray from the path that is ours to walk.

From those seasons of illness and soul hunger, the Four Keys to Inner Peace were born, a path that helps us return to wholeness through self-regulation, self-love, self-discovery, and self-expression.

Who This Is For

This crisis of fragmentation and disconnection shows up differently for each of us. You might be a caregiver who has lost yourself in caring for others. A professional who has built a successful life but feels empty inside. Someone navigating a major transition, midlife, loss, or awakening, and sensing that the old maps no longer work. Or perhaps you’re simply exhausted from the constant doing, the relentless self-improvement, the feeling that no matter what you achieve, something essential is still missing.

Wherever you are, if you sense that you’ve been living in pieces, that some essential part of you has been waiting to come home, this is for you.

The Journey Home

When we return to wholeness, something profound becomes possible. We stop trying to fix ourselves and start remembering who we are. We access deeper reserves of energy, clarity, and peace. Our relationships become more authentic. Our purpose comes into focus. We feel genuinely alive, not because life becomes perfect, but because we are finally present for all of it.

Wholeness isn’t something we achieve. It’s a dual movement: remembering the authentic self we left behind and discovering the self that’s waiting to emerge. Integration and actualization, past and future, held together in presence. Each moment we choose presence, compassion, and authenticity, we bring more of ourselves home.

When we come home to ourselves, we come home to the whole.

Reflection:
What part of you is asking to be welcomed back into wholeness today?