Wholeness and Evolution with Shaleen Kendrick

In this episode of Hunger for Wholeness, Ilia Delio continues her conversation with neurotheologian Shaleen Kendrick on the practical meaning of Christogenesis, wholeness, and adaptive evolution. Shaleen reflects on what she calls “evolutionary mismatch,” the gap between our rapidly changing world and the neurobiological capacities we need to meet it with wisdom, compassion, and creativity.

Together, Ilia and Shaleen explore how spirituality can become a lived practice of integration: not simply what we believe about God, but who we are and what we do each day. Drawing on neuroscience, process theology, epigenetics, and the image of living systems, Shaleen invites us to imagine people less as machines to be optimized and more as plants to be cultivated toward wholeness.

Later in the episode, the conversation turns to Christianity in transition, the need for new systems, and the possibility of “wholeness-making” as a guiding concern for families, institutions, and the planet. Shaleen also shares the metaphor of jazz as a way to understand harmony, difference, and the creative work of becoming whole in real time.

ABOUT SHALEEN KENDRICK

Rev. Dr. Shaleen Kendrick, ThD, is an emerging neurotheologian who developed the Neuro-Relational Integration™ (NRI) model—demonstrating how conscious integration across Mind–Body–Spirit neural systems can facilitate rapid adaptive evolution in how we think, act, and relate to ourselves, others, and the challenges of our time. NRI integrates neuroscience with liberation theology to show that through daily wholeness-making practices we can expand our human capacity and create new abilities that nurture not just individual flourishing but transform the systems we live in. She serves companies, practitioners, and faith communities, translating evolutionary spirituality into embodied practice—because the world needs humans who can evolve as quickly as our challenges emerge. This is Human Evolution in Practice.

Join us for the Center’s 10th Anniversary Conference, November 9–11 in Villanova, Pennsylvania, with a virtual option available. In a time of deep political, social, ecological, and spiritual division, this gathering explores how love can become a compass for transformation. Learn more and register at christogenesis.org/conference.

We are currently in the midst of our summer fundraiser, From Fear to Hope: Change and the Perpetual Growth of Life. As the Center marks its tenth anniversary, your support sustains our conferences, webinars, publications, and emerging global learning platform. Please consider making a generous contribution at christogenesis.org/donate.

Transcript

Robert: Welcome back to Hunger for Wholeness. I’m Robert Nicastro. In the second half of Ilia’s conversation with Shaleen Kendrick, they move from brain and body to the broader question of Christian transformation: exploring evolutionary mismatch, adaptive change, human systems as living gardens, and wholeness as something we grow into through practice.

Ilia: Even in the Middle Ages, there was always a difference between Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure. Thomas thought there’s nothing in the mind that’s not first in the senses. He was very Aristotelian. But Bonaventure actually had this internal idea in the mind, and that was really, really interesting.

I think some people still have this idea, like, so God gives us these spiritual ideas, that they’re not related to anything in the world or anything like this. And I’m like, oh my goodness gracious.

How do you see your work helping to build a new church today? Where do you think we should go now that we know so much more about neurobiology and belief and faith and opening up to those deeper levels of existence?

Shaleen: For me, we’re in evolutionary mismatch. If you haven’t heard that term, friends, look it up. Because of supercycle and the convergence of basically our technology and our society, it has outpaced what our neurobiology can manage well.

So, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition of overwhelm: we are all overwhelmed. We are exhausted. It’s not because we’re failing, and it’s not because humans are broken innately, morally, or otherwise. But we truly are living in a time where there’s a gap between our neurobiology and our actual reality. It is stressing all of our capacities. Our cognitive, biological, social, spiritual capacities are truly maxed out, truly, truly overloaded.

For me, where I see my work going, and you really helped cast the prophetic vision of Christogenesis for me and evolutionary spirituality, is that I see my work in neurotheology, neurospirituality, as making that practical.

Do you know about the polar bears in Greenland? Have you heard? I think about polar bears, people, and possibilities. There are polar bears in Greenland who are a genetically distinct species. Because of environmental collapse, not all polar bears, but a specific subset in Greenland, has actually changed their patterns of behavior. Where the rest of the polar bear population is collapsing into extinction, this certain subset is not only surviving but thriving because they participated in their own adaptive evolution through epigenetics.

Very interesting.

So, if the polar bears can do it, so can people. Through neuroplasticity, through epigenetics, we can actually participate in our own rapid adaptive evolution. Not maladaptive, not lethal, but we can be like the polar bears. Christogenesis isn’t abstract. It’s actually something we can participate in on a daily basis through our routines, through how we live.

You gave this beautiful definition at a conference I was at, that religion is not what we believe but who we are and what we do on a daily basis.

So welcome to the second axial age, friends. The first axial age consciousness and the first axial age religions are crumbling. They’re not going to work. They’re just not.

We are either going to answer the question, “What does it mean to be human?” and figure out that we’re neurobiological, relational, living systems capable of our own rapid evolution, or we will go extinct.

We can expand our human capacity. We can expand our capacity for complex problem-solving, our capacity for relational attunement, empathy, compassionate action, ethical awareness, but it’s not going to happen by accident.

Let’s be like the polar bears who showed us what’s possible, and it’s innately spiritual. I love that definition of religion. Howard Thurman mentioned the religion of Jesus. When you think of the religion of Jesus as subject, as opposed to about Jesus as object, when you think of the religion of Jesus as living integratively all day, every day.

So if religion isn’t what you believe about God, but as you integrate your neural capacities here on earth, you actually be and become a new type of human. You change your epigenetics. You change your neural structures for the better in adaptive ways that can then meet the reality that we now live in.

I think this is what the historic Jesus meant by, “You will do greater things than I,” because I think he meant you will actually evolve into a new human being with different capacities through emergent possibility.

I obviously am very passionate about this because we need religion, but we don’t need more religion and more beliefs about God. We need integration to be who we are and what we do on a daily basis. And we need to participate in our own adaptive evolution as part of our innate spirituality and our spiritual praxis, because it will actually evolve us.

Ilia: Yeah, that’s great, Shaleen.

Shaleen: In our lifetime. Not like someday.

Ilia: You’re right on target here. I agree with everything that you’re saying, and you have some really interesting terms here that I’d like myself to think more about.

I think you’re absolutely right in terms of the AI piece as well. I like your evolutionary mismatch and then your capacity to be like polar bears, to adapt to the change and to rewire, restructure, move on.

Shaleen: Reorganize like living systems do.

Ilia: Like living systems do, right.

What I’ve thought about recently is that our problems are exacerbating not because we lack religion, but because we have too many old ideas. Our systems are old.

Shaleen: Yes.

Ilia: And they are actually preventing us from doing exactly what you’re talking about, which is this kind of adapting, letting go, opening up, and understanding things in new ways.

So I hope you’re writing more on this because I think it’s very, very important.

Shaleen: I am. I use you a lot, obviously, but you define Christogenesis as the universe evolving toward greater complexity, consciousness, and wholeness.

Friends, humans can too. It’s not just the universe and the cosmos. Humans can evolve. We can reorganize toward greater complexity, consciousness, and wholeness so that we would become made able. Theologically, we would know, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” It does not mean get stronger. It means become more complex, conscious, and whole.

You can do all things. You can close the gap between this adaptive lag. We can close the gap between our neurobiology and our present reality and become made able to meet the challenges of our time, like, I don’t know, planetary collapse. Seems like good news if we do that.

Ilia: I like your connection with scripture as well, because we continue to interpret scripture in terms of old paradigms, or we’re still farmers in the field and planting seeds. When we think about a new mind and spirit, we have something very spiritual in that.

So you’re bringing to our awareness that it’s real physiological change that we’re talking about.

Shaleen: Yes.

Ilia: We’re really matter brought to consciousness. That’s really what we’re saying here. We are the cosmos on a very complex level, enfolding real life, open to energetic life, which is spirit.

Honestly, Shaleen, I think we developed this language of religion and spirituality that has us so disconnected and divided. I think it’s just kind of all over the map. Then we have academics who really drill some old recipe of something into people’s heads, and it’s a downward spiral. So there is a lot of work to be done here.

Let me just ask. Do you think Christianity is in a kind of transition, or do you think that we need a kind of transition? Do you see any evidence, like we actually are in the beginning of some kind of major transition in Christian life?

Shaleen: Absolutely. I think both/and. We are in one, and we desperately need it to go faster.

In my own experience, because that’s all I have, when I was deconstructing, I didn’t have that language. I was just falling apart. Now, 15 or 20 years later, there is a sea of people who are asking these questions.

I was so alone, Dr. Delio. Back then, you were my only friend. My books were my friends. I would have to find these scholars because here in Arizona, I live in a very evangelical world here in Phoenix and a very conservative world. There was no one around me that was asking the same questions. And I would ask them, okay, with a lot of Enneagram Eight fire. So there was that. I have no one to blame but myself. I was not asking with kindness, how’s that?

What I have seen in the last 20 years is there is now a sea of people who are asking these questions that were not asking these questions 20 years ago. I really have seen, because I do believe in collective consciousness, and again, that language of the second axial age has been so helpful for me, I am watching everybody around me hop into a new consciousness, and they’re going faster.

I was like, damn, that took me a lot of work. And you’re just jumping in. What’s happening here?

Ilia: Yes, it’s really true. It’s fascinating. I can agree. I think there is a definite shift in consciousness taking place because there’s now so much more available to aid that shift in consciousness. The amount of information has really quadrupled. Of course, the internet makes a lot of stuff available, and there are just a lot more means of communication now.

So I think you’re right that this shift is taking place. I guess what I would like to see is that shift take place in the systems that actually affect us as well.

Shaleen: Yes, because we have institutionalized the first axial age consciousness. We’ve also systematized it, right? So our systems, our mechanistic systems, fundamentally treat humans as machines to be optimized or fixed.

I work corporate, so I’m bivocational. A lot of my job is still in corporate America. We want mind hacks, and we want optimizations. I just keep being like, okay, the first thing, I’m a culture coach or culture expert. So I go, okay, we have a mechanistic culture. The people on your teams will thrive when you start to treat them more like plants than machines.

As our systems start to see humans more like plants than machines, as living systems that can be cultivated, when you want a plant to grow, you cultivate the environment around it so that you are nurturing and supporting the plant’s growth.

As soon as humans start figuring out that we work in the same way, we’re a living system just like a plant, and when we start creating environments like organizations and systems that are more interested in cultivating human wholeness, we will see an insane jump in innovation, productivity. I mean, have you seen what a living plant does? They produce fruit.

It’s almost like you’d be a tree planted by streams of water that would yield its fruit in season. Psalm 1, people. You know this. And that is about our environments. So if you actually want to optimize people, stop trying to optimize them. Start cultivating their integration and wholeness, and they will produce an insane amount of fruit that is good to eat, filled with wisdom, creativity, innovation.

Ilia: I think your metaphor there of the people as plants, as living beings that need cultivation, is so, so helpful today. I think you’re right. There are a lot of people who say they go to church, and they say these psalms in one hand, and then they go to work Monday through Saturday, and they’re part of the machine. We’re all part of the machines. So people are a machine part.

Shaleen: And depending on what church you’re going to, you might be singing psalms about your brokenness and innate unworthiness. Y’all, that is physiologically, cellularly damaging. I’m not kidding you. It causes actual neurobiological relational harm. I have a strange amount of data to help prove it.

Ilia: I completely agree. I think it is very, very unhelpful on many levels, that language, and it’s so deeply rooted. Even my students, quite honestly, have this idea of, “Oh, we’re still fallen.” I’m like, you can’t fall because you’re unfinished. You have to be finished to fall.

Shaleen: Yeah, you don’t look at a plant and go, “It’s fallen.” You go, “Oh, it’s wilting.” Well, why? Because the environment is not supporting it.

Ilia: It’s not supporting what it needs. Imagine if we actually reconceived our systems as an organic garden. Imagine if politics and education and economics, if we thought of this as a living ecological world where these are living systems and every being within that system is a vital aspect to the wholeness of that system. That’s a whole different worldview.

Shaleen: Sounds like it’d be good news.

Ilia: It’d be very good news. You said before, and I think this is absolutely right, I think Jesus was definitely pointing in this direction. I think Jesus would have been completely in line with what you’re saying here because he himself was thinking along these lines of organicity and nurturing and connecting and wholeness.

There’s no mention of original sin or Adam and Eve. Even sin in that time was more like, you really messed up. But we know that we mess up. You can read, I think, even sin in the New Testament as being unfinished as well. When you’re unfinished, it’s like the painting is halfway there. You’re still going to have to work, and a sculpture piece is still in the bowl.

Shaleen: Yeah. If you think of sin like, “Oh, I missed the mark of wholeness-making. Okay, let me come back into alignment. How can I nurture and support my own wholeness-making and your wholeness-making?”

Like when I just screamed at you, like I just did with my teenager recently, and I had to come back and say, “Oh, love, I’m so sorry. I mean, you’re still in trouble, and also, I am so sorry that I missed the mark of wholeness-making for you, that this was not kind. I was not kindly calling you back to yourself. I was living in this. I was missing the mark of both your wholeness-making and mine.”

It has been, we try to live our home like a plant, actually. We’re doing exactly that in our family system, trying to think of this like each one of us are plants. What do we need to grow? What do we need to support and be nurtured?

A screaming mom was not it that day. I lost it. I crashed out. My Gen Z kids would say, “Oh, you’re crashing out.” I was like, “I knew it.”

Ilia: And that makes us human, right? That always makes us human in this dynamic process of life. It’s not that we reach some utopia, and then we all get it, it all falls together, and that’s called the end, I guess.

Shaleen: Yeah. That rupture-repair cycle can happen in corporations just like it can in family systems.

Ilia: So what is your hope for the world today? Are you hopeful that we can move beyond the difficulties of our age, the polarizations, the racism, the tensions, the political conflicts that abound now? Do you have any hope that we can move toward a more plant-like, congenial, maybe respectful democracy and unity? Can we move toward unity?

Shaleen: Absolutely we can. I know we can because we literally are neurobiologically wired to do that. Doesn’t mean we always follow it, but that is actually our universal human architecture. We physiologically need each other to live. Surprise. So we are able. We just don’t always follow that.

My great hope for the world is wholeness-making. This is where I love Tillich, despite having, as a feminist, a lot of issues with Tillich and his skirt-chasing. However, I really appreciate the ultimate concern.

My great hope for the world is that more people across the globe would be ultimately concerned with wholeness-making, because when you make wholeness-making your North Star, when you make supporting and nurturing the wholeness of all beings the thing that is most important to you, it doesn’t matter what your religion or your politics or your zip code or your economics are. Wholeness-making is universal.

Yes, it’s a lot like love. We’re going to experience it uniquely. Each individual would experience wholeness-making uniquely, but there is something universal about it as well. We know love is universal, but we all have very different experiences of it.

I do think that wholeness-making as our ultimate concern can and will radically save the universe. The planet, anyway. The universe is probably fine. The planet, however, and all the people on it, we’ll see.

My thesis is salvation as wholeness-making, because we are saved personally and collectively through wholeness-making.

Ilia: How do we know when we have arrived at that wholeness? What are our signs? What will it look like? Because people often ask me, what is wholeness?

Shaleen: Yes, right. I think of integration as the mechanism. So the linkage of differentiated parts into a functional whole, whatever the different parts are. Wholeness is the experience of coherent flow.

We are going to experience that differently, but think of wholeness like jazz. Think of it like a jazz band. You can just kind of tell when they’re out of tune and playing in discord. You can also tell if they have forgotten how to play together at all. But there is something magical. We all experience jazz differently, but we can all see when they’re playing in this harmonic functional whole. They’re all playing their different instruments, but they’re creating something greater than the sum of the parts.

It’s lyrical. It’s rhythmic. It’s experiential. You can see it and feel it when it’s happening, and you can feel it when they’re singing out of tune or when there is discord. There is no concrete answer because we’re talking about human experience, but there are guiding lights.

I think of harmony as the guiding light of, oh, we’ll know we’re in wholeness when we’re functioning in harmony as a functional whole.

Ilia: Yeah, I like that. I like the example of the jazz band. I think that’s true because they’re all playing different instruments and different rhythms. There’s something about the asynchrony of jazz, or sometimes it’s dissynchronous and yet it’s synchronous. The whole thing works together.

Shaleen: Yes. And it happens in real time. Unlike classical music, which is written ahead of time, what I’ve loved about jazz is that you actually have to walk in and create the music as you’re playing. That’s what it’s like to be human. You have to create wholeness as you’re living. It’s different in every context and with every player. You and I creating wholeness is going to be different than when I walk out of here and I go pick up my teenagers.

Ilia: Well, that’s really good. That’s really good. I like that a lot.

So what are your plans now? Are you teaching this material? Are you writing a book?

Shaleen: Yes, I’m for hire. Who would like to hire me?

I actually just got picked up by Orbis. So Dr. Delio, I’m an Orbis author with you. I feel very honored.

The first book that I have coming out will be available for pre-order. It’s Your Three Brains, and it talks about our three neural systems: the head brain, heart brain, and gut brain. It’s the neuroscience and spirituality of wholeness.

I explore ancient or sacred stories, biblical texts like seeds and soil, the Syrophoenician woman. I weave together both contemporary stories, my own and clients that I work with, along with biblical text. And don’t worry, it’s not boring because I teach neuroscience and theology inside story. I’m doing everything I know how to show, not tell, and not lecture, but help you experience very complex concepts through narrative, both ancient narratives and contemporary narratives.

And then yes, I would love to teach. My life dream would be to create one of the first neurospirituality programs because currently there’s no degree in it. You can’t get a degree in it, and there are no real classes in it either.

I’m hoping to start a class at Northwind, and I’m hoping to continue to work with you. I would love to see where your center goes and what educational possibilities pop up. I’m starting classes for graduate credit and also continuing education, so you can find me.

I’m also certifying practitioners, if you’re interested. I’m certifying people to practice the neurorelational integration model, whether you’re a spiritual director, a chaplain, an organizational coach or consultant, or an Enneagram consultant. I’m helping teach people the actual neuroscience of it so they can use it as a therapist or teacher.

Ilia: Is that a particular method that you’ve developed for neural integration? The model?

Shaleen: Yeah. I created it. It’s a neurospiritual model. It basically puts neuroscience and process theology in very simple, easy-to-understand terms so that you can use it with your kids, with your clients, with your spouse.

When you’re fragmenting and falling apart, you can go, “Oh, I’m experiencing disintegration right now. Oh my gosh, I know what that is. Oh, my nervous system is dysregulated. Oh, I actually know how to regulate my nervous system as spiritual praxis. Oh, I actually know how to rewire my brain toward compassionate action.”

So it’s giving people very practical, easy ways to participate in their own evolution and to create cultures that are concerned with wholeness-making.

Ilia: Yeah. So being attentive to, in a sense, what’s taking place within us.

Shaleen: Yeah. Even like, it’s been so sweet. My kids, who are 12, if I start to get activated, will say, “Oh, Mom, you’re in the middle of your ladder. Do you need a 20-second hug? Do you need me to co-regulate you?”

Ilia: Really?

Shaleen: Yes. I need you to co-regulate me. Thank you.

Ilia: Do they practice this as well, or are they picking up pointers from you on how to modulate their own lives neurologically?

Shaleen: They do. Caden, who you met, Dr. Delio, got to have breakfast with my oldest. He wrote me a Christmas card this last Christmas. I prefer words of love as a gift rather than actual material gifts. So he wrote me this card, and Dr. Delio, I totally wept.

He said, “Mom, the most important thing that you’ve taught me how to do is regulate my nervous system and integrate my three brains.” This is a kid, a freshman in college at Loyola.

It was so sweet for me. When you’re living this, you’re not totally sure if you’re, well, A, if anyone’s getting it, much less your kids. So it was such a gift. It was the best Christmas gift ever to have this card from him saying, the most important thing you’ve taught me is this science, this neurospirituality, how to actually do Christogenesis on a regular basis.

He’s a humanist. He’s not at all, he wouldn’t identify as Christian at all. And also, he’s one of the most Christ-like people I’ve ever met.

Ilia: Yes, that’s kind of difficult sometimes.

Shaleen: Yes. So yes, even kids can learn this. It’s very simple. Hard to be human.

Ilia: I realize that Caden is a neuroscience major going on for medicine. He’s a really smart kid and really, really interesting.

Well, I think we’re out of time. You really brought in a lot here, Shaleen, that I really want to think about more myself. I think you’re onto something really important for our time. Thank you.

Shaleen: Well, you taught it to me. I just took it, my ADD brain just created a web and made it all connecting to everything else.

Ilia: Very interesting.

I have a colleague, Heidi Russell. She just wrote a book you might be interested in. She’s at Loyola, actually Loyola Institute for Pastoral Studies, on trauma and neuroscience. It’s coming out on Liturgical Press. It’s on trauma and neuroscience. I don’t know the exact title, but her name is Heidi Russell. I’ll get on the pre-order.

Ilia: I wrote something for it. I forget, either an endorsement or something.

Well, thank you so much. I think this will be of great interest for our listeners. So thank you.

Robert: Our thanks to Shaleen Kendrick for this thoughtful conversation, reminding us that faith is not an escape from the body or the world, but a deeper participation in the unfolding of life.

As always, I’m Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.