The Arc of Human Experiencing: A Journey of Being and Becoming

The Arc of Human Experiencing: A Journey of Being and Becoming invites readers into a profound exploration of the human condition - one that honors our deepest wounds while illuminating the innate intelligence that guides us toward wholeness. Rooted in principles of complexity science, integrative psychiatry, and contemplative depth psychology, this book offers a developmental map that begins not with pathology, but with presence.

Drawing upon a layered model of human experience spanning the unitive, sensorial, symbolic, and patterned dimensions it traces how the self emerges, fragments, and ultimately reorients through a dynamic process of reintegration called coherogenesis. Through evocative metaphor, clinical insight, and philosophical reflection, the book reimagines trauma, diagnosis, and healing as natural inflections within the arc of becoming.

Rather than proposing a formula or fixed framework, The Arc of Human Experiencing offers a fluid orientation - a compass that attuned us to the rhythms of transformation already unfolding within us. It speaks to clinicians, seekers, and anyone drawn to understand how consciousness, physiology, relationship, and meaning coalesce in the living story of the Self.

“Human experiencing is like the life of the ocean—vast, rhythmic, and layered in depth. At its stillest depth lies the Unitive, the boundless field from which all experience arises, undivided and whole. As energy stirs from these depths, it crests into the Sensorial, where presence takes form and the felt texture of being meets the world. From there, waves of meaning gather into the Symbolic, shaping language, image, and narrative; codes through which experience is given coherence. With time and repetition, the tide etches grooves into the shore, forming the Patterned, where roles, defenses, and identities solidify into structure.

Yet in the motion of these layers, something can be lost. When the inner sun is obscured, an eclipse occurs, not by erasure, but by shadow. What cannot be fully met is not gone, but cast into the unconscious, echoing through behaviors, symptoms, and cycles that seek return. Still, the ocean remembers. Coherogenesis is the ocean’s memory in motion, the process by which the field of the Self organizes toward wholeness, drawing even the fractured and forgotten back into the tide. Each wave, each return, is not a repeat, but a rhythm—an invitation to remember what we are beneath the surface.”

— The Arc of Human Experiencing

Book Contents

Introduction: A New Way of Seeing Human Experience Reframes human suffering not as failure, but as part of a natural, developmental movement toward coherence. Introduces key metaphors: ocean, eclipse, wave, field.

Part I: Sounding the Depths: Preparing the Vessel. Examines fragmentation in modern psychiatry and introduces coherogenesis as an alternative, a living process of reorganization toward wholeness. Chapters 1-4.

Part II: Rising Currents: Formation of Self. Outlines a layered developmental model (Chapters 5-8):

  • The Unitive: pre-differentiated presence

  • The Sensorial: embodiment and the felt world

  • The Symbolic: meaning, story, language

  • The Patterned: structure, identity, adaptation

Part III: Turbulent Waters: Seeing Through the Eclipse. Explores fragmentation, trauma, and the veiling of wholeness; reframes diagnosis as a descriptive, not definitive, tool. Chapters 9-16.

Part IV: Returning Tides: Descent into Presence. Details pathways of return: how the self, through presence and relational safety, reorganizes toward wholeness. Chapters 17-22.

Part V: The Ocean Beyond: Resting in the Rhythm of Wholeness. Invites readers to live from coherence as an ongoing, unfinished, but deeply human process. Chapters 23-27.

Epilogue: The Still Point A quiet reflection on mystery, being, and the simple presence beneath becoming.

Coming Soon!