Integral Coaching
Embracing the full spectrum of human experience while staying rooted in direct, embodied transformation.
What is Integral Coaching?
Integral coaching recognizes that you are a multidimensional being inhabiting a complex ecosystem of relationships, communities, cultural contexts, and systems.
This approach has roots in Ken Wilber's Integral Theory, which offers a simple but powerful insight: genuine transformation requires attending to all dimensions (mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual) and domains (inner and outer, individual and collective) of human experience.
Imagine, for example, that you wish to develop more confidence. It could involve internalizing new mental models to interpret situations differently, emotional regulation to stay steady under pressure, somatic grounding to inhabit your body more fully, and perhaps spiritual insight that facing discomfort serves a deeper purpose. It might also mean exploring how confidence emerges relationally through mutual trust, or recognizing how your organizational culture or social conditioning reinforces or inhibits it.
Different approaches use Integral Theory in different ways, some emphasizing its frameworks, others holding them lightly as orienting perspectives. What they share is a commitment to honoring the full spectrum of what it means to be human—so that your presence naturally becomes more attuned, responsive, and alive within the larger web of life.
Integral coaching is part of my broader approach to coaching. Continue below to explore it in more depth.
The Five Dimensions of Integral Development
Integral Theory speaks of five interrelated dimensions of development, each essential and each naturally catalyzing the others:
Growing Up — Vertical development through expanding stages of meaning-making and complexity. As you grow, you develop new ways of perceiving yourself, others, and reality itself. You become capable of holding more perspectives, navigating greater complexity, and responding from deeper wisdom. Growing up is about expanding your capacity to meet life's fullness.
Waking Up — Shifts in states and stages of consciousness. This includes expanded states of awareness, contemplative deepening, and the progressive recognition of your essential nature. You discover dimensions of experience beyond the thinking mind—presence and the spacious awareness in which all experience arises.
Cleaning Up — Working toward psychological wholeness by meeting all aspects of yourself with presence and compassion. This includes engaging with unintegrated emotions, protective patterns, and wounded places that shape how you move through life.
Opening Up — Expanding your range of being by cultivating multiple intelligences. It’s about becoming more receptive to life, deepening empathy and sensitivity, and allowing new capacities for love, insight, and expression to unfold.
Showing Up — Embodying your deepest gifts in authentic expression and service. This is about living your purpose, bringing your full self into relationships and work, and allowing your unique contribution to emerge naturally.
In essence, the integral path is to awaken to Wholeness (Waking Up), mature into it (Growing Up), heal what separates us from it (Cleaning Up), expand through it (Opening Up), and embody it in love and service (Showing Up). Nothing is left out.
The AQAL Framework
At the heart of Integral Theory lies the AQAL framework—All Quadrants, All Levels, All Lines, All States, All Types. It's a practical map for ensuring nothing essential gets overlooked.
The Four Quadrants recognize that every experience has both interior and exterior dimensions, both individual and collective:
Interior-Individual (Upper Left) — Your subjective experience: thoughts, feelings, intentions, meaning-making
Exterior-Individual (Upper Right) — Your outer presence: body, behavior, skills, health, measurable outcomes
Interior-Collective (Lower Left) — Shared cultural dimensions: values, worldviews, relationships, mutual understanding, the "we" space
Exterior-Collective (Lower Right) — Systems and structures: organizations, institutions, environments, the technological and social systems
Many approaches privilege one or two quadrants. Performance coaching, for example, often focuses on the exterior-individual quadrant—developing skills, behaviors, and measurable outcomes. This serves real purposes and creates genuine value for many people.
Integral coaching simply asks a different question: what becomes possible when we work with the whole picture?
Our Approach to Integral Coaching
Integral Theory offers powerful maps. It illuminates the architectures of human development, honors multiple ways of knowing, and helps us recognize the intricate patterns that shape both individual and collective life. These maps are invaluable. Yet they also reveal a profound limitation:
Integral Theory excels at mapping development. It is not a theory of transformation.
This distinction matters profoundly for how we work together.
In this work, the living process unfolds through Aletheia Coaching. This framework understands development as the natural emergence of your deeper intelligence when you meet your experience with presence and attunement.
This work is integral not because it relies on integral maps but because it embodies its central insight—that all dimensions of human wholeness co-arise and evolve together. It embraces the full spectrum of your being—inner and outer, individual and collective—while staying rooted in direct, embodied transformation.
If you’re drawn to Integral Theory, you’ll find this work fully compatible with it. We can explore those frameworks together whenever they illuminate your journey. Yet when we enter the actual work, we gently set the maps aside—so that what they point to can be directly lived and realized.
Working Together
Integral orientation is part of everything I offer. In integral language, developmental coaching is centered on growing up and cleaning up. Meditation coaching is about waking up. Consciousness coaching supports opening up. Purpose discovery invites showing up. These are all interconnected journeys.
If you feel called to explore, I invite you to schedule a conversation and sense how integral coaching might serve your own unfolding.
Do you feel called to explore?
I invite you to schedule a free 30-minute consultation. We'll explore what's alive for you, whether this approach feels aligned, and how we might work together.
