Friends, “healing” isn’t something that lives in one place, even though it’s regularly spoken like it is. 

“Fix the body”

“Change the thoughts”

“Process the trauma”

“Find purpose”

Sounds great and catches our attention when we’re looking for something, but lived experience tells us something different. You see, human suffering doesn’t arrive neatly packaged, and healing doesn’t unfold along a single line. 

Pain moves through the body, the mind, our relationships, and our sense of meaning all at once. So, to address one, without the others, is to treat symptoms while leaving the “roots” untouched. 

This is why a biological, psychological, social, and spiritual (BPSS) approach is necessary and not just helpful. 

The Body Remember What the Mind Tries to Forget (the biological)

The body isn’t a passive vessel. It’s an active participant in our suffering and our healing. 

Stress reshapes our nervous system. Trauma alters sleep, digestion, muscle tone, and hormonal balance. Addiction rewires reward pathways. Chronic anxiety lives in breathing patterns, posture, and tension long before it becomes a thought. 

So, when healing ignores the body, we’re left feeling like we’re “doing everything right” mentally, but still feel dysregulated, exhausted, or stuck. 

The biological lens invites you to ask:

• How is the nervous system functioning?
• Is the body chronically mobilized, collapsed, or disconnected?
• What role does movement, rest, nutrition, breath, and sleep play in my healing?

Healing the body doesn’t mean chasing perfection or optimization. It means restoring safety, rhythm, and trust in the body as a home. 

The Stories We Carry Shape What We Feel (the psychological)

Our psychological world gives meaning to what happens to us. 

The psychological dimension shapes how we understand our experiences, how we speak to ourselves, and how we anticipate the future. Beliefs formed in moments of pain WILL become the invisible architects of ongoing suffering. 

So, unhealed psychological wounds often sound like:

• Something is wrong with me
• I should be further along by now
• I can’t trust myself
• This will never change

And when we take a psychological approach, it helps individuals to:

• Name emotions without being consumed by them 
• Understand patterns rather than judge them 
• Develop skills for distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and self-compassion
• Separate the experience of pain from the meaning that’s assigned to it

But, psychology alone can unintentionally reinforce the idea that healing is a mental task. Something that we need to think through, analyze, or solve. Friends, insight without embodiment can create awareness without relief, and insight without context can slide into self-blame. We MUST practice what we’ve learned. 

The mind is a powerful tool, but it wasn’t meant to heal in isolation. 

Healing Happens in Relationship, Not Isolation (the social)

Much of what hurts us didn’t happen alone. Much of it is relational, and so is our healing. 

We’re shaped by families, cultures, communities, systems, and expectations long before we develop language for our inner world. Attachment wounds, intergenerational trauma, cultural displacement, poverty, racism, gender roles, and social exclusion all leave imprints that no amount of individual insight can erase on its own. 

So, putting a social lens to it and we’re reminded that suffering is oftentimes relational and so is the healing. The perspective asks us deeper questions:

• Who taught us how to cope?
• What did we have to silence or suppress to feel like we belonged?
• Which relationships nourish our growth, and which maintain our old patterns?
• How have social systems and cultural narratives shaped our sense of worth?

Isolation intensifies pain. Shame thrives in secrecy. Disconnection dysregulates the nervous system in ways that no self-help practice can fully undo. 

Healing though, through relationships, through group work, community, supportive family systems, or shared cultural spaces, allows us to experience something profoundly reparative: being seen without being fixed. 

Connection doesn’t remove the pain, but it does make it survivable.

Healing Feels Empty Without Meaning (the spiritual)

Many of us reach a point where symptom relief isn’t enough. 

We’re still functioning, but not fulfilled. 

We’re coping, but not connected. 

We’re stable, productive, sober, but still hollow. 

This is where the spiritual dimension becomes essential, it’s the underpinning to all healing. 

Spirituality isn’t about belief systems or bypassing suffering. At its core, it’s about orientation:

• To what gives life meaning
• To what values guide our choices
• To what helps us stay rooted when certainty collapses 
• To how we relate to suffering without becoming consumed by it

For many of us, crises like depression, anxiety, burnout, or addictions are spiritual fractures rather than just psychological disruptions. And they come when life loses direction, coherence, or sacred-ness. 

The spiritual dimension invites us towards humility rather than to answer. It highlights relationships – to the self, others, nature, cosmos. It reminds us that healing isn’t just about feeling, but about living differently. 

Friends, without this layer, healing becomes this odd mechanical thing where we may improve on paper but still feel disconnected from that essential thing within us. 

Integration Is Where Healing Becomes Whole

The danger isn’t focussing on one domain, the danger is in stopping there. 

• Body work without meaning can feel empty
• Insight without regulation can feel overwhelming
• Community without self-reflection can feel unsafe
• Spirituality without grounding can become escapism 

True healing rises at the intersections. 

When the body feels safe, the mind can soften. 

When the mind understands patterns, relationships can shift. 

When relationships heal, meaning becomes possible. 

When meaning is restored, then the body no longer carries the burden alone. 

Integration doesn’t mean doing everything at once. It means listening for what is being asked for right now and responding with humility rather than force. 

Healing isn’t linear. It’s relational, cyclical, and deeply human. 

Healing Is About Returning. Not Becoming Someone New. Not Fixing.

Friends, a BPSS approach doesn’t ask us, “what’s wrong with you?”

It asks:

• What’s been carrying too much?
• What’s been silenced?
• What’s been disconnected?
• What’s been forgotten?

Healing, then, isn’t an arrival point or a perfected self. It’s a return. A return to the body, to relationship, to meaning, to wholeness, to One. 

When we honour the biological, psychological, social, and spiritual dimensions together, we stop fragmenting the human experience. 

And it’s in that integration that something subtle and profound happens…

We don’t just manage, we begin to walk home and feel at home again. 

With love,

Gurmukh