What If 'Woo' Is Just Science We Don't Understand Yet?

A Consciousness Model of Healing

The line between science and spirituality is thinner than we think.

It’s more like a veil than a wall.

As someone trained first in molecular biology, and then in evidence-based psychotherapy, my professional life was built on measurable outcomes and replicable results.

The scientific method was my north star — observe, hypothesize, test, analyze, repeat.

Yet the longer I practice as a therapist and healer, the more frequently I experience things that defy conventional thought. Moments where transformation occurs not through technique or intervention, but through something ineffable.

There is something magical that happens in the spaces between words, in the field that forms between therapist and client, in the silence after a deep sharing.

We lack language for this and it leaves many healers in a difficult position. We are trapped between our commitment to clinical rigor and the reality of experiences that current paradigms struggle to explain. We find ourselves using phrases like "energy" or "presence" in hushed tones, careful not to sound too "woo" to our more traditional colleagues.

But what if what we dismissively call "woo" is simply wisdom that doesn’t fit within the scientific method and hasn't been peer-reviewed?

When Healing Defies Explanation

There are shimmering moments in both my own life and my work as a therapist that simply refuse to fit within the tidy boxes of conventional thinking. These are the moments that ask us to loosen our grip on certainty and lean into the mystery of how healing truly unfolds.

I’ll sit with a client session after session as they seem to be caught in an eddy, spinning around endlessly. No intervention seems to land. Outside our sessions, I will hold them gently, deeply in my awareness considering what shift needs to occur to allow movement again.

Then remarkably, the next time we meet, that very shift happens naturally, organically, without me implementing any specific technique or intervention.

It's as though a question was posed to the larger field of consciousness, and that field responded.

I've noticed, too, that when I become too heady during a session — analyzing, planning interventions, thinking about the "right" thing to say — the therapeutic process moves from flow to sputter.

But when I pause, drop my breath down into my belly and ground my awareness in my body, the session begins to flow with a natural intelligence beyond my own.

And then there are those magical moments when something seems to move through me rather than from me. I become less the do-er, more the vessel. Words flow without thought, time slows down and insights surface — larger than may be expected. Something essential has been named and the seeds of transformation are quietly planted.

And I am not alone. Many therapists report this kind of experience when asked privately.

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."

~ Albert Einstein

Something else is at work, something that points toward consciousness as a more fundamental aspect of reality than we were taught.

The Consciousness Model of Healing

What if consciousness isn't an emergent property of brain activity, but something more primary, more fundamental? This question is often referred to as the “hard problem of consciousness” — how can matter (brain) gives rise to something non-material (consciousness)?

(Spoiler, it doesn’t.)

Aldous Huxley was ahead of his time when he postulated that, rather than consciousness coming from the brain, the brain acts as a reducing valve for “mind at large”¹ (i.e. consciousness), and that psychedelics open that value just a bit so we can glimpse a Greater Truth.

The perspective of consciousness as being fundamental rather than emergent — once left to philosophers, mystics and sages — is now gaining traction in scientific circles.

Bernardo Kastrup holds a PhD in computer engineering, and has developed sophisticated arguments suggesting that consciousness is the fundamental nature of reality², with individual awareness arising as localized expressions (such as humans) within a unified field, similar to how multiple whirlpools can form in a single body of water.

It’s all water, the whirlpools are just how the water takes form at that particular moment.

"We are the universe experiencing itself"

~ Alan Watts

Donald Hoffman's research in cognitive science suggests that our perception evolved not to show us reality-as-it-is, but to show us what we need to survive. What we perceive as "physical reality" may be more like a user interface (i.e. computer screen)³ than direct access to what's "out there." He believes that our understanding of reality is just an interpretation of a greater reality that we cannot fully grasp, not unlike in The Matrix.

Maybe the Wachowskis were onto something more real than real.

These emerging perspectives align surprisingly well with healing traditions from around the world.

What Chinese medicine calls Qi, yogic traditions call Prana or kundalini, and various spiritual paths describe as universal energy or consciousness may be pointing toward the same fundamental reality, one that modern physics is beginning to explore as well. All starting from a different context and all ending with the same conclusion.

The growing shift from a materialist to a consciousness-based understanding of reality transforms how we conceptualize healing.

When consciousness is seen as relational, not just individual, therapy deepens.

We begin to see the client not as a bundle of pathology, but as a field of intelligence interacting with ours. Healing becomes less about control and more about coherence and bringing the system back into resonance.

• Instead of trying to fix pathology, we're engaging with consciousness as it moves toward wholeness.

• Rather than treating isolated individuals, we're working with interconnected fields of awareness.

• Beyond managing symptoms, we're helping create conditions where meaning and integration can emerge.

In this model, the healer isn't applying techniques to a passive recipient but participating in a shared field where transformation becomes possible.

Depth psychology, somatic psychotherapy, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, and parts work are just a few of the approaches that hint at this. They treat the whole being; working with the nervous system, the relational field, and the unconscious patterns stored in the body.

In this model, the therapist is not a mechanic. They are a witness. A companion. A tuning fork.

The Body as a Conscious Vessel

Perhaps nowhere is this perspective more relevant than in understanding trauma and its healing. Trauma doesn't just live in our thoughts or memories. It inhabits our tissues, our postures, our breath patterns.

The body itself seems to hold conscious awareness, it lives in different time periods simultaneously.

The over-emphasis we place on brain versus body is shown in split-brain research. When the corpus callosum, the structure connecting the left and right brain hemispheres, is severed something truly fascinating happens.⁴

The left hemisphere is where our language centers and analytical capacities reside, while the right hemisphere holds emotions and imagery. You can communicate with one hemisphere at a time, and split brain experiments⁵ have shown that the left hemisphere will literally make up explanations for actions initiated by the right hemisphere, unaware that it's inventing a story rather than reporting the truth.

This suggests that much of what we consider "rational understanding" is actually post-hoc storytelling trying to make sense of the non-sensical.

Developing a coherent narrative, once the Holy Grail of Trauma Therapy, is actually just storytelling after the healing.

It is not the mechanism by which healing happens.

This perspective aligns with what somatic therapies have long recognized: that the body holds its own intelligence, its own consciousness, its own path toward healing. The nervous system knows how to return to regulation when given the right conditions, just as a wound knows how to heal itself when tended to.

In Hakomi or Sensorimotor psychotherapy this tendency to return to an innate wholeness when barriers are removed and healing conditions are aligned is called the Principle of Organicity.

Perhaps the most powerful of the healing conditions needed for a return to wholeness is authentic presence in relationship.

I've witnessed how one regulated nervous system can help another remember its own capacity for calm. This isn't metaphorical. It's observable in the synchronization of breath, heart rate, even brainwaves between people in attuned connection. Dan Siegel, professor of psychiatry at UCLA, calls this Interpersonal Neurobiology. It is communication from one nervous system to another, through a field of consciousness.

The awareness that healers bring — our capacity to be fully present with another's suffering without trying to fix, change, or escape it — may be our most potent offering.

Toward a Sacred Science of Healing

I’m not suggesting abandoning scientific rigor. Rather, I’m inviting open-mindedness and curiosity toward an expanded perspective that allows for more nuanced ways of seeing and understanding the subtle dimensions of healing.

It’s both-and.

Not either-or.

We can seek to understanding biological mechanisms, attachment patterns, and trauma responses, while also recognizing that the therapeutic relationship creates a conscious Field that transcends the sum of its parts.

The therapeutic relationship becomes a sacred container where consciousness can evolve, where new possibilities can emerge from the relational field itself.

The same insatiable curiosity that once drove me to peer through microscopes now compels me to explore consciousness itself. Not as something separate from the material world, but as its foundation and context.

I can imagine nothing more exciting and fulfilling than to participate directly in the mysteries of healing. It's taught me that integration, not elimination, is the path forward. We don’t need to choose between scientific understanding and the wisdom of direct experience.

After all, if consciousness is indeed fundamental to reality, then developing our capacity for awareness may be the most scientific approach to healing we can take.

From my heart to yours,

I'd love to hear about your experiences. Think of a time you noticed healing happening in ways that were surprising — what did you notice?

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1. Aldous Huxley and the “Mind At Large”

2. Is Consciousness The Final Reality? Interview with Dr. Bernardo Kastrup

3. Reality is a User Interface by Donald Hoffman

4. Neuroscientists Jill Bolte Taylor shares her lived experience of experiencing only the right brain following a stroke in My Stroke of Insight.

5. Summary of Roger’s Sperry’s Split Brain experiments, which led to a Nobel prize in 1981.