The Future of Healing is Bio-psycho-social-spiritual: Why We Must Rethink the Body, the Mind, and the Spirit
There’s a scene early in The Myth of Normal where Dr. Gabor Maté recalls a medical school lecture in which the body was divided into tidy systems: cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, nervous. The human experience, he was told, could be dissected and labeled, diagnosed and treated in isolated pieces. “We were not taught about people,” he writes, “we were taught about parts.”
That dissection—of organs, of symptoms, of people—is the legacy of a reductionist healthcare model that views the body as a machine, the mind as a malfunctioning circuit board, and the spirit as irrelevant. And it is a model in crisis. Because while we’ve become experts in managing disease, we remain profoundly unequipped to address the roots of human suffering.
What’s needed now is not just reform—but reintegration.
Enter the biopsychosocialspiritual model.
Not a tongue twister, but a paradigm shift.
A model that finally acknowledges:
We are not brains on sticks.
We are not disordered diagnostic codes.
We are not separate from nature, or each other, or our lineage of pain and resilience.
We are complex ecosystems—biological, psychological, social, and spiritual—and our healing must be, too.
The Bodymind: Stop Pretending They’re Separate
For centuries, Western medicine has privileged the brain over the body, and in doing so, has failed both. The Cartesian split—thank you, Descartes—insisted on a dualism where mental and physical health could be treated in isolation. But neuroscience, trauma research, and every somatic tradition that predates modern psychiatry tell us otherwise: The mind is the body, and the body is the mind.
Maté calls this the “bodymind unity,” arguing that the body is not a passive container for trauma but an active participant in its creation, expression, and healing. Trauma doesn’t just “live in the mind”—it embeds itself in tissue, posture, immune function, gut microbiota, inflammatory pathways, and pain perception.
Studies from Harvard and Stanford show that early childhood adversity increases the risk of autoimmune disease, heart disease, and cancer. Not because trauma causes these diseases directly, but because chronic stress dysregulates the bodymind system: cortisol spikes, inflammation persists, and self-regulation becomes a lifelong uphill battle.
So, when a woman shows up in my practice with “treatment-resistant depression” and a drawer full of SSRIs, I don’t ask, what’s wrong with her? I ask, what happened to her body? What does it remember that she no longer speaks?
Social Beings in a Sick Society
Maté’s brilliance lies in turning the spotlight from the individual back onto the collective. In a society where the metrics of success are productivity, thinness, and emotional self-containment, it is normal to be unwell. In fact, if you’re not burned out, anxious, inflamed, numbing yourself, or clinging to a morning routine for dear life—you might actually be the anomaly.
The biopsychosocialspiritual model doesn’t just look at symptoms. It contextualizes them.
It asks:
Who has access to rest, safety, and pleasure?
Who was taught to override their body to survive?
Whose culture was pathologized in the name of mental health?
Who gets to be “well” in a system that defines normal through a white, male, able-bodied, neurotypical lens?
Healing is not only personal—it is political.
And no, self-care cannot solve this.
But collective care can.
The Sacred Is Not Optional
This is where people can get uncomfortable:
You cannot heal what you do not reverence.
The modern mental health industry is built on observation, measurement, and intervention. But human transformation also requires mystery, meaning, and surrender. What Gabor Maté alludes to—and what sacred traditions have always known—is that healing is not a checkbox process. It is a return. To land, to lineage, to language, to the part of you that never needed fixing, only remembering.
This is where the spiritual reclaims its rightful place in the model.
Not religion. Not bypassing. Not “good vibes only.”
But the spiritual as connection—to something greater than your trauma, greater than the DSM, greater than the cage capitalism built around your nervous system.
In my practice, this looks like:
Plant medicine not as an escape, but as an opening.
Rituals that regulate the body and anchor the soul.
Microdoses of rosemary and saffron paired with self-inquiry and somatic integration.
Sessions that begin with breath, attunement, and silence—not symptom checklists.
Treating every session like a mini-ritual retreat, where nervous systems are honored, and discomfort is witnessed—not pathologized.
Nature Heals
No, Really.
Let me be clear: I’m not anti-medicine. I’m anti-fragmentation. I’m anti-sterility. I’m anti-hustle-healing, where progress is measured in productivity and feelings are optional.
I’m for a return.
To wildness. To wonder. To the wisdom of the body, the breath, and the seasons.
Studies from Japan’s Shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) to ecotherapy practices in the U.K. to Indigenous models of land-based healing in North America have all demonstrated:
Time in nature decreases cortisol, blood pressure, and symptoms of depression.
Sunlight and soil exposure increase serotonin and immune function.
Touching the Earth literally discharges the nervous system’s static and rebalances electromagnetic fields.
In short: the natural world is not a luxury—it’s medicine. And any model that ignores that is missing half the story.
From Theory to Praxis: The Expanded Method
This is the foundation of The Expanded Method, my biopsychosocialspiritual framework that reorients people toward wholeness. It blends neuroscience, quantum physics, behavior analysis, Buddhist psychology, sacred ceremony, and plant-based support to create an experience that is structured and soulful.
Clients don’t come to me just to “cope better.”
They come to come home—to themselves, their bodies, their stories, and their power.
And that can’t be done without recognizing:
The bio: your gut, your hormones, your trauma-influenced physiology
The psycho: your thoughts, narratives, coping mechanisms
The social: your lineage, your family, your culture, your environment
The spiritual: your sense of meaning, connection, intuition, and reverence
This isn’t a feel-good rebrand of therapy.
It’s a demand.
To stop pretending that compartmentalized, symptom-focused systems will save us.
To honor the full complexity of what it means to be human.
To weave back together what colonized systems tore apart.
Final Word: Healing Is a Rebellion
Maté writes, “Illness is not a cruel twist of fate, but a consequence of how we live.”
And healing, then, is a sacred rebellion.
To heal in this world is to say:
I refuse to live as a fragmented being.
I refuse to be reduced and distilled.
I refuse to abandon my body, my culture, my spirit in the name of fitting in.
The future of mental health is not more diagnostics.
It’s more depth. More connection. More ceremony. More truth.
The biopsychosocialspiritual model isn’t just a framework—it’s a remembering.
And if you’ve made it this far, you already know:
You were never just a collection of neurochemicals.
You were never just a body made of siloed parts.
You are whole, even if it doesn’t feel like it right now.
And — you are already on your way back.
If this resonates with you, visit our booking page to get started and begin your return to the life you’ve been missing — today.
