Expanded Awareness
A Health Psychologist’s Journey Beyond the Mind-Body Duality
Expanded Awareness is an encouraging guide to integrative health that fosters awareness and self-advocacy.
Looking beyond conventional medical treatments and mindsets, psychologist and hypnotherapist Sophie Guellati-Salcedo’s wellness guide Expanded Awareness is about alternative and integrated approaches to illness and healing.
The book’s advice is prefaced by Guellati-Salcedo’s personal health story. While living in France, she developed a thyroid nodule; after she received holistic care, the benign nodule shrunk. Upon moving to the US, Guellati-Salcedo’s thyroid troubles returned, attributed to her increased exposure to stress, processed foods, and environmental toxins. Her doctors’ diagnoses felt vague, and she was prescribed medication; she decided to become her own health advocate instead. Experiments with elimination diets, peptide immunotherapy, and home detoxification followed, sans pharmaceutical treatment. Her thyroid issues, she says, subsided.
The book argues that conventional medicine excels in dealing with “acute” or urgent health issues but fails to discover the “root causes” of chronic and interrelated symptoms and autoimmune conditions. It critiques pharmaceutical approaches to pain management and symptom control, which extends to the treatment of mental health and is indicted for leading to long-term chemical dependencies.
Beyond contrasting conventional and functional medicine, the book covers a range of complex information. Topics including epigenetics, systems biology, and somatic patterning are detailed, alongside supplemental therapies like vibrational medicine, hypnosis, Reiki, meditation, and targeted nutrition. Studies of the light-based photobiomodulation therapy are championed for having “shown promise” in alleviating “pain, inflammation, depression, traumatic brain injury, and neuro-degenerative conditions.” The topics are outlined in a somewhat clinical manner, though.
Further, beyond its references to outside research, many of the book’s recommendations are built upon personal, albeit passionate, experience. It is forceful in encouraging the formation of a new “paradigm” of cooperation: “We no longer outsource our authority to a white coat or a data chart. We enter into partnership—with the practitioner, with the body, and ultimately with ourselves.” Further, as it delves into theories of “consciousness and spirit,” it becomes more metaphysical and abstract, discussing holographic realities, fractal selves, sacred geometry, and numerology as part of its speculative “blueprint of healing.” Its case studies and self-guided exercises are more edifying thanks to their direct examples of certain therapies and treatments, and its charts, graphics, glossary, and summary text boxes help when it comes to navigating its range of topics.
An inspiring holistic wellness guide, Expanded Awareness calls for new perspectives and practices in the evolving realm of healthcare and healing.
Reviewed by
Meg Nola
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
