It's the heart of holiday season. Many of us are with family, which can be lovely, hard, and complicated. As a gentle reminder, there is a 72-hour threshold for maintaining new brain patterns when we return to the familiarity of family settings. For those who want a little extra support or some reminders, here is the Beyond Survival Holiday Guide on my blog.

Remember: You're not broken. Your patterns aren't character flaws. They're just neural highways that served you once. Now you're building new roads. It takes time. It takes practice. It takes courage.

Inviting All Parts Back again and again…Intention, Integrity, Wholeness

What if your integrity is wholeness? Not wholeness as a destination you arrive at, but wholeness as a practice—a continual calling back of all your parts. Guided by your intentions. 

From a physics perspective, when all parts of a structure are working together, it can hold more. It's sound. It has integrity. But when parts are pushed out, excluded, denied—the structure becomes unstable. Those pushed-out parts don't disappear. They become your blindspots. They show up sideways. They run you from the shadows.

We all have parts we've exiled. The angry part. The needy part. The part that failed. The part that's too much or not enough. The part that got the message early on: You're not welcome here. And so we split. We perform. We please. We show up as the acceptable version of ourselves while the rest waits in the wings.

Wholeness asks: What if all parts of me are held and seen? What if I can do the same for the people around me? This doesn't mean acting on every impulse or letting every part run the show. It means acknowledging them. Making room. Calling them back into the fold so they're not running you unconsciously.

When you stand in your own wholeness—when all parts of you are present and accounted for—you can hold more. You can be with others more fully. You're not trying to hide anything, which means you're not using energy to perform or protect. That energy becomes available for something else: connection, creativity, presence.

The Patterns Underneath

Here's the deeper layer: the way we live, the way we connect with others, with our partners, our children, our communities—these patterns reflect what's inside us. Patterns we've had since we were young. And we have so much agency over how we navigate these patterns—if they're conscious.

The challenge is they're not always conscious. Sometimes we're just running on autopilot, following through on patterns without any assessment of them. These autopilot patterns are often the places where we've pushed parts out. The patterns protect us from having to feel something, face something, be something we decided long ago wasn't allowed.

So the first step is to examine: What are my patterns? What do they look like? Which ones do I want to keep? Which ones don't serve me anymore? What parts of me have I been leaving out?

Then comes the intention—one that guides you toward a new pattern, a new way of being, a more whole version of yourself.

Why Intention Matters

When I pair intention with integrity, I'm talking about creating a clear focus that filters through your entire life. Your intention becomes the thing you use to assess: Is this moving me toward what I want to create or how I want to connect? Is this aligned with who I'm becoming?

Take a look at your schedule right now. How much time are you spending working? With your children? In community? Doing creative things? Playing? These questions matter because what you're doing shows you what you currently value most. And if your intention is to delight in life more, to play more—but all you're doing is working—there's a gap. Your intention can become the filter that helps you close it.

The Intention Hacks:

Amplifying Results

Let's say you go swimming. Great. It keeps you healthy, keeps you exercising, keeps you moving. But what if you added an intention to it? Maybe your intention is to move through your emotions, to allow anger to move through you, or to process a significant loss. Intention allows you to use the resistance of the water to move through the unconscious or conscious resistance to feeling your feelings. Suddenly that workout has a twofer effect—you've amplified its impact by adding intentionality.

This is also a way to call parts back. That anger you've been pushing down or out? It needs to move. That grief you've been compartmentalizing? It needs somewhere to go. Adding intention to movement or an embodied activity gives those exiled parts a seat at the table. You're not just exercising—you're integrating.

Let Go of the Outcome

Here's where it gets sneaky. We set an intention, but underneath we're actually holding an expectation: If I do this, THEN I'll be happy. That's the quickest route to suffering—looking for the outcome instead of participating in the journey.

Even patience can be a trap. If you're patient for something, you're waiting for an outcome instead of allowing for what could arrive that's even better. Your intention is the focus you keep returning to—not a destination you're trying to reach.

Wholeness isn't something you achieve and then you're done. It's a practice. You call parts back. They drift. You call them back again. The intention isn't to arrive at wholeness—it's to keep returning to it.

You Can't Do It Alone

This is the piece we often forget: intentions require support. We need people to assist us, especially if our intention involves shifting behavior or changing deeply rooted patterns. Just like our individual New Year's intentions aren't sustainable without accountability, without community, without someone to witness our progress—the same is true for families and organizations.

Calling parts back is vulnerable work. It's hard to do alone. We need witnesses. We need people who can see our exiled parts and not flinch. We need spaces where we can practice being whole before we take it out into the world.

A big shift for two weeks is brilliant. But how do you hold that thread consistently, sustainably? It might mean starting smaller. It might mean celebrating the little wins. It might mean celebrating when you mess up and celebrating your renewed commitment. It might mean feeling like a failure, and recognizing it's not the end yet—so you couldn't have failed.

Showing Up More Fully You (During the Holidays)

Building off last month's newsletter on courage and nervous system patterns: How can you go into your holiday gatherings with a new intention this year? To show up more fully you—with more of your parts present.

Maybe it's in subtle ways—excusing yourself to the bathroom to reconnect with yourself before returning to a crowd of family. Maybe it's dressing how you'd normally dress with your friends, even if it's not what your parents or relatives expect. Maybe it's using your voice in new ways. Maybe it's letting the part of you that usually stays quiet have a little more room.

The intention is simply: How do I stay present with all of myself while being present with others? How do I not abandon parts of me in order to belong?

Walking your Talk

Say you're working for an organization with great intentions—maybe transforming generations through economic opportunity. But it's not caring for its own people very well. There's a huge blindspot: the organization isn't “walking its talk”. Parts of the mission have been pushed out.

Wholeness in organizational intention means there's room for mistakes, for challenges, for struggles—because those are part of all of us. Part of all organizations. Sometimes that's the space where we do our best work, where we connect most deeply. When we try to present only the polished parts, we lose integrity. We become structurally unsound.

By "best work," I don't mean best by polarity. I mean work done with the most integrity, the most alignment, the most foundational congruence—where all parts are invited back, held and acknowledged. It becomes easeful. There's less burnout. Less harm in order to create good. Less of a need to positively impact others at any cost, while negatively impacting those providing the impact, which is never sustainable.

If You Aren't Sure What Your Intention Should Be…My Suggestion: Presence.

OFFERINGS

Develop Nervous System Agility in the infrastructure of your Org or Business, Includes Developing Peer Community and Peer Mentorship Training Programs: we provide the infrastructure and training to efficiently build the individualized structure your organization needs to prevent burnout, through circles of support. By incorporating how we care for our own nervous systems, the nervous systems of others and the organization nervous system, through incorporating peer mentorship as well as conflict and repair, we build sustainable systems and community, ensuring the outcomes you want in your org or business.

Connect with me for Coaching or Mediation: My intention is to help you build structures that support nervous system agility and exquisite (higher volume) care for yourself, your family, your business and your communities in challenging times of uncertainty, big divisions and fear through finding new options and pathways for outdated patterns and past traumas towards more resilience, joy and even playfulness. I offer Family System Coaching Packages for 7, 14 and 21 sessions. I offer individuals an introductory 5 session package as well as 4 sessions a month for a minimum of 6 months. My business and non-profit consulting is customized to the needs of the organization. For a 20 minute free consultation: Connect

CHANGES in my work…

Moving forward I will be offering more group opportunities with more limited availability for one on one work. If you are curious about group work, have never done it, and feel like you need more information to feel open to it…please reach out for a chat.

I am really excited about some new groups….Reach out if you are interested in learning more…

Fight Better - Conflict Resolution Group: Learn individual strategies to regulate your nervous system and co-regulate. You will also learn interpersonal relational and mediation skills, you can apply to conflict resolutions in all your relationships. Connect 

Co-Parenting Group - This group is for parents, step parents or aunties/uncles/grandparents/fairy god parents who are collaborating in parenting and raising children. You will learn strategies for conflict resolution and how to create effective co-parenting structures that support everyone, especially children. It takes a village, this is how you create one. Connect 

Kids Co-Regulation Groups (in person): Small groups of tweens (9-12) and  teens (13-16) using activities to build social skills, confidence and full range emotional literacy. Reach out if you want to get your kid involved. (Groups are created on an on-going basis, must be at least 3 participants to start a group, times vary based schedule availability of participants.) C

ADDITIONAL GROUPS AND OFFERINGS:

Family Coaching Drop-in Group: Parenting with Support - Wednesdays at 12pm PST. Join any Wednesday, just reach out for zoom link!  

My dream is to disrupt the isolation in parenting and prioritize thriving family nervous systems, transforming generations through support and intentional community.  This group invites parents into a container of support to have the opportunity to parent together. All with the vision that more webs of communities and connections will grow from there.  Please reach out if you are interested in joining the parenting group and please share the opportunity with parent’s who you think might be interested!

Social Entrepreneur Networking Group - Mondays at 8am PT, join any Monday.

Join a growing community of entrepreneurs from underrepresented or underestimated communities who are dedicated to giving back to their communities. We meet monthly to network, collaborate and dream up the world we want to co-create. Connect

Finding Hope in Times of Despair Writing Group : Moving Beyond Survival towards …Together building a new world for ourselves and the next generations Fridays at 8am PT, Join any Friday, just reach out for zoom link!  

Join a writing group that focuses on curiosity with prompts, sharing and community support around how we can all better support our nervous systems through inevitable change to build the world we want for ourselves and the generations to come. The group’s intention is to find hope in despair as well as agency in knowing when to stretch to take risks, and when to slow down and nurture - better caring for ourselves, others and the world. Connect

Add Climbing Coaching and Boxing Coaching

Add indoor or outdoor climbing or boxing to your coaching package to embody your or your child’s shifts in a new way. Reach out if you are interested!

Check out climbing website: www.katwhippleclimbing.com

If you are CURIOUS about my offerings…connect with me for a 20 minute chat.