Illness as an Embodied Process of Becoming

My PhD project at Alef Trust and Liverpool John Moores University has taken a major step forward.

The next stage of the project will involve developing an integrative, embodied, and meaning-centred transpersonal framework for exploring and engaging physical illness. But what does this actually mean? As an important addition, the framework will also be informed by the expertise of practitioners working with patients with physical illness across these embodied, whole-person, and transpersonal approaches.

Whole-person, meaning-oriented, and transpersonal approaches to physical illness, emphasise emotional, existential, relational, and embodied dimensions of illness experience and healing. [1-5,8,10] Rather than viewing illness solely as biological pathology, these perspectives understand illness as intimately interrelated with lived experience and as potentially carrying developmental, existential, and psychospiritual significance. [1-9]

Within this perspective, illness may carry an unfolding meaning or purpose for its presence that becomes accessible through conscious engagement, embodied exploration, and therapeutic inquiry, potentially facilitating deeper understanding, integration, transformation, and healing. As an example, Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy (FOP) invites individuals to attend to the bodily “felt sense” associated with a symptom or life difficulty and to explore the emotions, memories, meanings, or insights that emerge from it. FOP operates on the premise that experiential processes and imbalances may carry implicit meanings that can be accessed and transformed through embodied awareness. [11, 12]

Research by Broom and colleagues on chronic spontaneous urticaria provides an important precedent, adopting a whole-person, non-dual body-mind perspective and suggesting that engaging the emotional and existential dimensions of illness symptoms may be associated with symptom improvement, reduced medication use, and hospitalisation. [13–15] Similarly, clinical observations within FOP and related embodied approaches suggest that attending to the felt sense of physical symptoms may support symptom relief, wellbeing and shifts in relationship to illness. [16, 17]

My PhD will proceed in three stages. First, a focused literature review will establish the conceptual foundations of embodied, meaning-oriented, and whole-person approaches to physical illness. Second, qualitative interviews with practitioners working in FOP and related approaches will inform the development of an integrative embodied therapeutic framework for engaging physical illness. Third, this framework will be explored through a longitudinal mixed-methods feasibility study involving individuals experiencing chronic or persistent physical symptoms and conditions, particularly those that remain medically unexplained or insufficiently responsive to conventional treatment.

Research Questions: How might embodied engagement with physical illness within a transpersonal therapeutic framework correspond with changes in (a) illness and symptom experience, (b) participants’ relationship to illness, and (c) integration of its meaning or purpose, and how might these processes relate to healing-related change over time?

The core tenet or philosophy is that, in moments of high spiritual realisation or immaterialisation—for example, during meditative or psychedelically induced experiences—the individual, or rather the witness, perceiver, or the knowing of experience itself, may come to know or reveal itself as the whole landscape that is known: a kind of unreferenced or unsubjugated moment of knowing itself, no longer referenced or subjugated to any particular inherent or relatively focused form, cluster, or content of knowing within that landscape, such as the body, the idea of mind, sensations, and so forth (as in, “that is me and the rest is the world”), but simply knowing itself, as non-dual frameworks, and perhaps panpsychism, might describe consciousness—an all-pervading, self-aware reality/existence.

Why something—or exactly that thing—and not another, within that knowing, to that perspective or focus that knows, and not something else? Why the pain, the emotional sadness, or the physical illness experience within that landscape, right now, and not something else?

Like a seed inherently containing the tree and its fruits in the making, that sadness is inherent with all that is related and significant to the knowing or knower of that moment, in other words; the purpose/meaning or significance for its presence in one’s life. It is a story, a whole package, carrying its own meaning and understanding, utterly interrelated with the self—or the meaning-based contents of knowing—in which it appears. Its unfolding through time is its informing, and the self’s and its anew becoming.

Illness as an embodied process of becoming.

I am doing something slightly distinct here: converging a transpersonal or spiritual framework with an embodied and developmental one through meaning. Meaning as the acknowledgment of the present one and the opening or further informing of the future-(present) one through the detailed and ongoing fully acknowledged present one. It is also about the holding, or beholding, of that experience—like holding a baby, child, or infant—so that it may grow, prosper, and develop exactly as it is inherently meant to, in its own way. Through that unfolding, it holds the potential to inform, become, and transform itself and the individual or knower, in ways that may otherwise not be possible free from this process.

There is another possible perspective. If we see the field or landscape of knowing—all awareness—as a multidimensional space, perhaps like Rumi’s house with many rooms, where each room is an experience: a self-aware referent or relation of experience with its own story, life, and meaning, then physical illness may be understood as one such room or “spatially aware” context, carrying or inherent with its own story or meaning, in other words; its own life or purpose for its presence. 

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Despite the developments in these fields and its present approaches, an integrative embodied, meaning-centred, and transpersonal framework for engaging with physical illness remains lacking. Existing approaches have often developed in relative isolation and have rarely been synthesised into a coherent model for clinical application and research.

This project seeks to address that gap through practitioner-informed framework development across relevant therapeutic traditions. The study will identify common therapeutic principles and processes that may contribute to wellbeing, symptom improvement, healing-related change, and shifts in individuals’ relationship to illness. It will then explore the resulting framework through a mixed-methods feasibility study involving individuals experiencing chronic physical or medically unexplained conditions. I might share more on the mixed methods approach in the future. 

Together, these studies aim to provide an exploratory foundation for future research and practice in integrative healing modalities for physical illness.

Keep following for more progress.

References

1. Broom BC. Meaning-Full Disease: How Personal Experience and Meanings Cause and Maintain Physical Illness. London: Routledge; 2007. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780429477140/meaning-full-disease-brian-broom
2. Broom BC. Medicine and story: A novel clinical panorama arising from a unitary mind/body approach to physical illness. Advances in Mind-Body Medicine. 2000;16(3):161–207. https://doi.org/10.1054/ambm.2000.0186
3. Broom BC. Somatic metaphor: A clinical phenomenon pointing to a new model of disease, personhood, and physical reality. Advances in Mind-Body Medicine. 2002;18(1):16–29.
4. Newman MA. Health as Expanding Consciousness. 2nd ed. New York: National League for Nursing Press; 1999.
5. Linders EH, Lancaster BL. Sacred illness: Exploring transpersonal aspects in physical affliction and the role of the body in spiritual development. Mental Health, Religion & Culture. 2013;16(10):991–1008. https://doi.org/10.1080/13674676.2012.728578
6. Kalla M, Simmons M, Robinson A, Stapleton P. Making sense of chronic disease using Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT): An existential view of illness. Explore. 2020;16(4):214–224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2020.03.006
7. Assagioli R. Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques. London: Hobbs, Dorman & Co.; 1965.
8. Nicolaou T, Elliott R, Robinson A. Extending empathy to physical symptoms. Person-Centred & Experiential Psychotherapies. 2024;23(1):20–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/14779757.2022.2159503
9. Ferrer JN. Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality. Albany (NY): State University of New York Press; 2002. https://www.jorgenferrer.com/revisioning-transpersonal-theory
10. Goli F. Body, meaning, and time: Healing response as a transtemporal and multimodal meaning-making process. In: Nadin M, editor. Epigenetics and Anticipation. Cognitive Systems Monographs. Vol. 45. Cham: Springer; 2022. p. 119–143. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17678-4_6
11. Gendlin ET. Focusing. New York: Bantam Books; 1978.
12. Gendlin ET. Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy: A Manual of the Experiential Method. New York: Guilford Press; 1996.
13. Broom BC. A reappraisal of the role of ‘mindbody’ factors in chronic urticaria. Postgraduate Medical Journal. 2010;86(1016):365–370. https://doi.org/10.1136/pgmj.2009.096446
14. Lindsay K, Goulding J, Solomon M, Broom B. Treating chronic spontaneous urticaria using a brief whole-person treatment approach: A proof-of-concept study. Clinical and Translational Allergy. 2015;5:40. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13601-015-0082-7
15. Lindsay K, Goulding J, Solomon M, Broom B. Experience in use of a non-dualistic whole person approach to patients with chronic spontaneous urticaria. Internal Medicine Journal. 2017;47(Suppl 1):31. https://doi.org/10.1111/imj.9013578
16. McGavin B. Focusing with Small Physical Ailments. The Focusing Connection. 1997. https://focusingresources.com/learning/back-issues-focusing-connection/
17. Stevenson B. A remarkable focusing session with pain from severe physical damage. The Focusing Connection. https://focusingresources.com/learning/back-issues-focusing-connection/

Maj Marušič Member since January 5, 2026

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Maj Marušič is currently a PhD student in Applied Transpersonal Psychology at Alef Trust, in academic partnership with Liverpool John Moores University (UK). He also holds a pre-doctoral background in Somatic and Spiritual Psychology from the International University of Professional Studies (USA). His current focus circulates around two main streams: developing an IRD cosmology or framework of existence; consciousness as an infinitely relational differentiational structure, and applying his experience and calling toward healing and patient care, particularly in relation to physical illness and the inherent (self-)healing capacity therein. https://aleffield.org/my-profile/majmarusic

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