Review: Coming to Wholeness by Connirae Andreas
“Wholeness Work is all about finding inner separation and inviting integration” – Connirae Andreas
“After more than 40 years experience developing and teaching personal transformation techniques, I can say with complete confidence that often in the past, with other methods, I’ve thought a transformation was deep;
yet what you’ll learn in this book is deeper than anything else I’ve experienced, for myself and my clients.”
With those words of encouragement—I’m all game to see it through and extract as much as I can from Connirae’s wealth of knowledge.
Connirae has walked an interesting path. With a Ph.D in psychotherapy and an extensive background in NLP—her years of experience has culminated into a transformative method she calls Wholeness Work.
I’m intrigued, to say the least. Let’s dive into it!
Section I. Understanding the Core of Wholeness Work
The tone of the book is set early on.
She takes us through the classical route of sharing success stories and describing the uniqueness of the work.
Reading about people sharing their stories of transformation—big and small—keeps me turning the pages in excitement.
The section can be beautifully summarized with Connirae’s own conclusions of what the Wholeness Work has to offer:
- A simple way to discover unconscious structures that governs our limitations.
- A process to dissolve and transform those limitations.
This is where things get really interesting.
Connirae offers a brief explanation of her wholeness work model where we start off with finding the I.
The I can be summarised as the perceiver of whatever illness or issue that we’re facing.
Say that you’re worried about not getting a promotion at work. Rather than going head-on with that—she goes deeper and finds the I that perceives that worry.
The wholeness work model is based on practicality.
That means that instead of settling with the fancy-sounding theory of finding an ego—she offers a practical way of finding and dissolving it.
That’s right. A step-by-step how-to guide.
This is what sets her model apart from most other systems that often leaves much to be desired.
The section ends with a guided exploration on finding the I from one of her training sessions.
Section II. The Wholeness Work Basic Process: Working With Issues
If the previous section served as a theoretical introduction, this chapter starts off with a deepening of the theory—while slowly turning increasingly practical.
We’re offered yet another transcripted training session with Connirae breaking down the steps of the Wholeness Work, but in more details.
She goes over the 9-step process (there’ll be another shorter process later on in the book) with different pointers and suggestions.
If you think 9 steps sounds like a lot of steps—you’re not alone!
However, like me, you might be surprised to find how easy they are to follow even if I may have a preference for the shorter process coming up in a later section.
Next up is all of our pragmatists favorites:
“Doing the Basic Process yourself”.
If you came her for practical reasons, you’ll be having a hay-day at this point!
Connirae has a very gentle, pedagogic and above all—clever approach in her teaching.
We’ll have gotten the basic theory of the process at this point, along with several examples and pointers towards your own preferred style of learning.
And now you get to put it to the test before we continue and deepen the knowledge in the method.
Her psychotherapy background truly shines through!
The section ends with managing expectations, more testimonials and her own experiences with the method.
There’s also a highly valuable Frequently Asked Questions section at the end.
Section III. Additional Principles: Expanding Your Understanding
If you haven’t gotten practical at this point and got some experience under your belt—you may find the following parts to be a bit of an overload.
Once again though, we’re not launched into anything shocking.
The conversation starts off decently light with going into metaphors of Wholeness Work to deepening our understanding.
Progressively we start moving towards increasingly advanced topic until the conversation finally lands on a part she calls;
“The Three Directions of Integration: Matching the Invitation to the Inner Structure”
If you’ve got a background in personal transformation, awareness training, energy healing or anything associated with the inner subtle arts—you’ll love this!
While it’s definitely a more advanced topic, it’s quite an eye-opener.
If you’re decently new—don’t worry about it. It’s by no means a dealbreaker.
Section IV. The Meditation Format: Making Changes in the Moment
I loved the book up to this point, but had one worry in the back of my mind.
While this is all great, how am I supposed to apply the 9-step process into my daily life when problem arises?
Do I need to pause whatever I’m doing in order to deal with whatever I need to deal with? Sounds impractical, right?
That’s when Connirae makes her next move—The Meditation Format.
Everything we’ve learned so far gets scaled back to a 3-step process.
Once again, she starts off with demonstrations and goes through the same pedagogic teaching style with follow-ups including overviews, step-by-step guides and a meditation format Q&A.
She then moves on to breaking down spiritual myths and offering a more general Q&A.
This is by far my favorite section in the book.
In the conclusion I’ll talk a little bit more about how you can use this in your own practice.
Section V. More Advanced Topics: Getting the Most from Wholeness Work
This section dives deeper into integrating Wholeness Work into a life practice rather than a separate practice you’ll utilize in your “times of need”.
She addresses the much-needed topic of reactions.
What if you’re not feeling anything?
What if you’re resistant to the process?
Or just feel confused?
Here’s the kicker. You can apply the process to that very reaction.
True to her teaching style, Connirae follows up with transcripts of previous sessions with clients who experienced a chain of reactions to Wholeness Work.
“This won’t work”
“This won’t last”
On and on the chain of reactive distractions continue.
Connirae refers to it like surfing a wave, and offers greats pointers and ideas on how to stick with the natural flow of the wave and allow it to integrate as a part of your present experience.
Whereas in many other modalities—such reactions may have been seen as momentary distractions where you’d just return your flickered attention to its original focus—here it’s considered a part of your present awareness.
And you allow it to integrate as such.
Since your present experience is going to be whatever your present experience is, it’s quite hard to get it wrong.
Finally the discussion emerges on topics such as what happens when we dissolve our conditionings? And our Stories?
Connirae summarizes the potential results from Wholeness Work beautifully:
“It isn’t really that the problem is solved: it’s that the problem isn’t there any longer.”
The section is concluded with tips on how to make Wholeness Work a part of your daily life.
Section VI. Resources & Roots: Easy Guides and More
Though this chapter is valuable, there’s nothing too exciting to report.
There are well-needed reminders, worksheets and resources along with links to video companions, retreats and more advanced material.
At the end of the section and the book though, there’s a throughout description on how she invented the method.
Definitely interesting reading!
Conclusions
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Should you spend your time and money on this book?
I strongly recommend that you do.
You may or may not use any of her processes described above, however—the pragmatic approach of finding your I’s (small egos, if you will) is like nothing I’ve heard before.
It’s practically outlined step-by-step and you could use your own processes and energy healing modalities on these concepts with fantastic results.
I’ve personally been experimenting with combining Other Methods Such As The Wonder Method with her concept of finding the I’s, and dissolving them through that.
Does it work? You bet it does!
And that is the value of the book Coming to Wholeness—it’s a complete system with practical step-by-step applications.
You can either apply the system full-out—or take the bits that you enjoy and run it with your own preferred modality.
At the end of the day, it’s an enlightening read, as well as practical.
And that’s a rare combination.
Thank you Connirae!
P.S, if you’d like to learn more about her work you can also check out her website here.
