Expanded Awareness: A Health Psychologist’s Journey Beyond the Mind-Body Duality

by Sophie Guellati-Salcedo

“Open-minded readers will find Guellati-Salcedo’s extensive, often eye-opening work a welcome challenge to conventional ideas about healing.”
—BookLife, Publishers Weekly

“Congratulations to Sophie on her new book! It’s really a masterful weaving of mind and body.”
—Deanna Minich, Ph.D., internationally recognized teacher, author, and scientist in the fields of Nutrition and Functional Medicine

What if healing is not about fixing what is broken, but understanding what the body is trying to say?
Expanded Awareness – A Health Psychologist’s Journey Beyond the Mind-Body Duality invites you to reconsider how you think about symptoms, illness, and recovery. Blending scientific insight with lived experience, it offers a multidimensional view of healing—one that honors biology, intention, energy, and consciousness.
Drawing from systems biology, energy science, functional medicine, and health psychology, the book explores how the interaction of mind, body, spirit, and energy systems shapes our internal terrain. It reframes symptoms as signals, coherence as a foundation for healing, and consciousness as an active force in the transformation process.
Rather than offering a fixed protocol or one-size-fits-all model, this book encourages inquiry, agency, and a deeper engagement with the meaning behind physical experience. It highlights the limitations of conventional models and presents a more systems-based view—one that supports personalized approaches to healing and helps readers move from diagnosis to empowered action.
Grounded in a health psychologist’s perspective, Expanded Awareness bridges research, personal insight, and integrative frameworks to challenge inherited assumptions and open new possibilities for healing.
If you have ever sensed that healing is more than managing symptoms—that it involves rethinking the terrain itself—this book offers a coherent and accessible foundation. It is an invitation to move beyond reductionist thinking and toward a model that honors the intelligence of the body and the complexity of the human experience.

381 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 6, 2025

About the author

Sophie Guellati-Salcedo, Ph.D., is a licensed health psychologist, author, and integrative healing practitioner with over 25 years of experience. Originally trained in France and later in the U.S., she bridges traditional clinical science with emerging models of healing that honor the intelligence of the body, the power of coherence, and the multidimensional nature of consciousness.

Her debut book, Expanded Awareness – A Health Psychologist’s Journey Beyond the Mind-Body Duality, invites readers to explore illness not as failure, but as meaningful feedback—reclaiming agency and alignment in the healing process.

Sophie lives in Miami, Florida, and offers guidance through writing, teaching, and her private practice. Her work integrates health psychology, terrain-based healing, vibrational medicine, and quantum consciousness to support self-remembrance and empowered transformation.

Reviews

[Robin Morlock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Expanded Awareness Book 1 provides a full reference library for the person who desires to understand a new ‘living’ model for whole-body integrative healing; traditional medicine, alternative medicine, spirituality, and Quantum Physics consciousness principles. With a major paradigm shift in medicine and patient care on the current horizon, this health psychologist details the foundations of building this new framework that heals the whole system. This amazing book brings science, research and philosophy into a 360 degree spherical repository. We learn of human life as an intelligent ecosystem that requires a full, personalized terrain map that is achievable by a multi-disciplinary medical team. The author’s ability to break down concepts of bio-feedback, hypnosis, frequency and color light therapies, and subtle energy techniques is extremely helpful. This is paired with how it integrates with traditional medicine approaches, drug-based approaches, and the damage of a ‘single-perspective’ view of a disease or condition. This patient-centered terrain model brings the personal agency and sovereignty of the individual to the forefront, and emboldens each of us to embrace this new foundation for the future of our modern medicine world. We can and will take a more active role in our own healing and wellness choices, and with this book as a road map, we have an excellent guide! For those in the medical fields, read this as a primer for foundational information in the vein of Amit Goswami, Phd., concerning Quantum Physics with the body, and Paul Drouin, M.D., with integrative medicine approaches. For an individual looking for better answers for health concerns, this is a wonderful introduction to subjects that have felt complicated as Sophie Guellati-Salcedo simplifies and weaves everything together. Wonderful first book by this experienced and compassionate health psychologist and healer.

[Robert Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What struck me most was not any single concept, but how completely this framework integrated trauma physiology, autonomic regulation, pain, and long-term bodily adaptation. Reading it, I repeatedly found myself thinking: this is exactly what has been happening to me, even though I never previously had the language or organizing model to describe it. I am grateful for the clarity and integrity of this work, and for the way it has helped me make sense of my own experience.”
— Robert A. Harris, MPA, Vietnam & Gulf Wars Veteran

Expanded Awareness is not a book to rush. It is a book to recognize yourself in — sometimes uncomfortably — and then sit with.

What distinguishes this work is not that it offers answers, but that it provides a coherent, grounded framework for understanding how long-term adaptation, threat physiology, and lived experience shape the body over time. There is no simplification, no false reassurance, and no pressure to perform insight.

As a veteran with decades of complex physical injury and recovery behind me, I did not read this book looking for validation or solutions. What I found instead was something more durable: language precise enough to hold experience without reducing it, and a tone disciplined enough to respect the reader’s pace.

This is not a book about “fixing” the body or overriding pain. It is a book about learning how awareness itself evolves, how regulation replaces vigilance, and how meaning emerges only when safety is restored.

I am currently reading the second volume, slowly, with the same care. Expanded Awareness has already changed how I understand my own history — not by rewriting it, but by allowing it to finally make sense.

[Rachel Knox · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a quantum healer, I found Sophie Guellati-Salcedo’s ‘Expanded Awareness’ very useful. I appreciated the clarity of her writing. Many academics don't use plain English, but Sophie’s book is well written and easy to follow. I feel it’s an important book for spiritual healers in particular. Sophie spends time at the beginning of the book highlighting the position of the scientific community. The lack of research into energy healing and widespread use of terms such as ‘pseudoscience’, has more to do with the grip of the pharma lobby and not because it cannot be proven to work. I feel most spiritual healers would benefit from reading this, just to understand their position as healers and the opposition they face, and most importantly, how to stand up for their beliefs with well-articulated arguments. There are also numerous references for further reading and evidence.

Later chapters explore the multidimensional nature of humanity, human health, and the role of consciousness in energy healing modalities such as BQH, QHHT, and Genius Insight. Sophie encourages a terrain-based approach, moving beyond symptom treatment into identifying underlying causes, in a holistic approach that works on many levels. There are exercises for the reader to do, and the writing is clear and accessible even when the book becomes more technical. I have highlighted many passages in this book and recommend it to other practitioners without hesitation.

[Frankkie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I went into this book really excited - this is my field, and Guellati-Salcedo is writing about exactly the things I think matter most in healthcare. The focus on whole-person medicine, on patients being active in their healing, on creating a team that looks at the full picture is all so needed. I agree with so much of it, and I appreciate how seriously she treats topics that often get dismissed as “woo.”

Where it lost me was accessibility. I know these concepts, but if I didn’t, I think I’d struggle. Some chapters are dense, and by the time I hit the sections on soul and sacred geometry, my eyes were glazing over. Those were the pieces I wanted unpacked the most, but they felt rushed. And while the idea of assembling a team of practitioners is wonderful in theory, it isn’t realistic for a lot of people who are navigating health mostly on their own.

Still, the heart of this book is important. It’s researched, ambitious, and best suited to practitioners or readers already curious about integrative health. For everyone else, there are gems here, but you just might have to work a little harder to find them.

Thank you NetGalley and SGS Quantum Press for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

[Aura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading Expanded Awareness was an unusual experience for me. The author even thanked AI in her acknowledgements, which instantly made me question how much of the book she actually wrote herself. That suspicion only deepened when I noticed there were more em dashes in the first ten pages than I have ever seen in any other book. It honestly felt like AI had a very heavy hand in shaping the writing, and that distracted me at times.

That said, the book was not without value. I found some of the insights about functional health doctors to be genuinely helpful and thought provoking. Those sections stood out because they felt grounded in real research and practical application.

Overall, while I appreciate the attempt to bring big ideas forward, the style and the clear reliance on AI left me feeling disconnected. Still, if someone is interested in functional health perspectives, they might find pieces of this book worth their time.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

[Dglabarbera · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an important, wonderfully well written book, bridging conventional therapeutic ideas with integrative practices. The ideas expressed in Expanded Awareness will resonate with therapists and clients alike, as well as the reader interested in the developing thread of psychological thinking. Partly a synthesis of various thinkers, partly a self-revelatory exposition of the author's own self-discovery, and partly a manifesto of developing ideas that are challenging outdated thinking, this work by Dr. Guellati-Salcedo is essential reading. Dr. Salcedo's thinking is a mature synthesis based on research, her own training, her own sharply inquisitive mindset, and eclectic background, providing a theoretical perspective of current but neglected ideas that are sure to inform the future of the future science of psychotherapy.

[Eduardo G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is an easy read, even though it introduces complex ideas and concepts. Sophie presents them in a way that is accessible, understandable, and flows smoothly. I especially appreciated the box definitions and glossary, which make it useful as a reference guide. I also valued the clear font size and layout. The book builds a bridge between science and esoteric or metaphysical concepts. It works both as a manual to supplement what is available elsewhere and as a journey that kept me wanting to see what would come next. I also appreciate that Sophie shares ideas without imposing her views, instead inviting the reader to form their own interpretation of well-supported ideas. The ample, peer-reviewed references provide opportunities to dig deeper. In the end, I am excited for the next book in the series.

[Shelly Dressel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book to be filled with information. Some of it I had to wrap my head around it, other parts of it I realized this was going to become a reference book! Sophie has such a way of taking something abstract and really different and making it seem true, or normal, or gave me an 'of course that's true' moment.

If you want to understand quantum healing, the energy fields, the link between your soul, your human body, and everything associated with that, this is the book for you. She helped me to put into words, things I knew but had trouble describing.

Great book! Thank you for writing it.