Everyone’s healing journey is unique, beautiful and often times messy, especially in the beginning. And often times messier is the life that led to our healing journey.

Andrew Aponick, like so many of us on this path, was raised in an often times chaotic household where addiction and abuse played out in its various forms. Not being a stranger to trauma, Andrew developed an extreme addiction to opioids while abusing most other drugs. For nearly 15 years Andrew was a slave to drug addiction.

Although an expert on human physiology and biobehavioral sciences, having earned a masters degree from Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, as well as a strength and conditioning coach and personal trainer, deep down inside, beneath the seemingly healthy surface, Andrew suffered greatly. Exercise and bodybuilding was one of his many addictions, which led him to a career fitness modeling, acting, and eventually the music business. Working on both sides of the camera in Hollywood is a place where drug abuse and addiction run rampant. A place where, incidentally, many trauma survivors are drawn.

Andrew eventually hit rock bottom and found himself bankrupt and in a prison cell at the age of 33. It is from there that he decided to begin his healing and sobriety journey and to live in service to others as an activist and journalist, eventually running a nonprofit, Solutions Institute. Like most of those who have struggled with addiction, Andrew wasn’t quite ready to surrender, as his new life in service eventually became another addiction which eventually led to a full blown drug and alcohol relapse. And that’s because he was “white-knuckling” his recovery, not yet willing to ask for help and truly surrender to the process of inner work.

It wasn’t until Andrew hit another rock bottom of homelessness and began to not just study trauma and psychospirituality, but finally embody the healing methods he had been studying, that he began to truly heal. Such healing methods have included sitting with plant medicine, shadow work, somatic therapy, internal family systems therapy (IFS), qigong, 12-step meetings, working with a 12-step sponsor, and getting back in touch with nature and with the divine within him.

Having overcome addiction in its many forms, homelessness, bankruptcy, jail, prison, childhood trauma, chronic illness and having bared witnessed to trauma while working with and giving aide to survivors of natural disasters and victims of man-made government crises, Andrew decided it was finally time to give back and to teach others how to become their own healers, which is really what the journey is all about.

Having said all that, WHOLEistic Coaching is Andrew Aponick’s approach to health and healing.

As a Trauma Recovery Coach trained in Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS) and somatic therapy, as well as an Applied Physiologist with a 23-year background in health, wellness and exercise physiology, Andrew helps his clients to develop a health, wellness and spiritual discipline that brings out the healer within. It is through our own innate ability to heal that we are able to uncover the blocks within us that prevent us from optimal health, happiness, wholeness and a spiritual connection.

Andrew firmly believes that a WHOLEistic approach of mind, body and spirit is key to becoming our truest, healthiest and most integrated authentic self.