Why holistic-integrative?

In the last 16 years, beginning with three years of psychoanalysis (acc. to Siegmund Freud), I have searched for knowledge that would help me on my way to inner and outer peace and to decipher the riddles of the psyche that puzzled me the most.

In the process, I first examined the individual disciplines skeptically, but gradually found a soothing security in the insight:

Through across all times and cultures, there is a kind of collective knowledge and  universal wisdom, which always recommends the same values and lifestyle: 

• Positive Psychology: is regarded as the "science of a successful life" focusing on human strengths, first used by US psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1954 and currently also popular in business in the form of the positive leadership concept.

• Huna: "The world is what you think it is," says Kahuna and psychologist Serge Kahili King, referring to the 5000-year-old philosophy of Hawaiian shamanism. In coaching, imagination journeys of Huna can be helpful.

• Neurolinguistic programming: developed in America in the 1970s by Richard Bandler as a mathematician and psychologist as well as John Grinder as linguist, was based on luminaries of family therapy (Virginia Satir), hypnotherapy (Milton Erickson) and Gestalt therapy (Fritz Perls). Many coaching methods originate from this field.

• Buddhist Philosophy: which deals a.o. with ethics and systems theory (similar to systemic coaching), is about 2500 years old, originated in India and traces back to Siddharta Gautama (later Buddha).

• Ancient Stoic philosophy: in the Mediterranean region, ca. 300 B.C., founded by Zeno of Citium. Stoics strove for integration in a universal principle, in which it is important to achieve happiness (eudaimonia) as a lasting state of serene-joyful peace of mind through emotional self-control.

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: which considers thoughts, feelings and behavior in a causally interrelated way. Founded, a.o., by the American psychotherapist Albert Ellis, who established Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy in 1955. We use an effective method derived from this in coaching.

• Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University: founded in 1937 in what was then India (now Pakistan), whose teachings (a.o. Karma, Self-mastery, RajYoga) are taught worldwide, mostly in centers run by women. by e.g. Sister Shivani.

• Christian values: which have been advocated in many places for about 2000 years. Among others also by US communication trainer and best-selling author Dale Carnegie, in his 1948 work of positive thinking "How to stop worrying and start living!".

The listing could grow considerably longer.

All of them show amazing overlaps and similarities where - in short - the path to self-responsible happiness in life leads through awareness and proactive influence on mental processes.

When I encounter a very similar systemic and constructivist* way of thinking again and again in such numerous and different places to always the same life goals ( such as happiness, peace, love, health), this gives me as a seeker security and the good feeling to be right. Right, on a path that has brought me considerably further myself and that I can pass on to others with a clear conscience.

Holistic-Integrative means for me neither to exclude the one nor the other or to let them compete against each other, but in the tradition of Carl Gustav Jung (the Swiss founder of Analytical Psychology) to gather the different disciplines at a round table, namely representatives of science, religion, philosophy, mystics etc. and to listen to all of them, to take them into account in order to create an integrative whole as round as possible.


*Constructivism is based on the assumption that the individual unconsciously creates his own image of reality. Representative a.o. Paul Watzlawick,