Biography

Nick Bustos is a California licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT), with a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, emphasis in Integral Psychology. He currently serves as faculty in the M.A. in Counseling Psychology concentration in Integral Counseling Psychology and has also held faculty and administrative positions at other graduate institutions focused in integral education. He earned his master’s degree in counseling psychology from the University of San Francisco and doctoral degree from the California Institute for Human Science. In addition to his positions in higher education, Dr. Bustos provides program development and psychotherapy services in K-12 special education programs for students and families faced with serious mental health challenges. He likewise maintains a private psychotherapy practice where he works with individuals, couples, and families utilizing a psychodynamic, transpersonal, and somatic/energetic treatment approach. Dr. Bustos' publication history includes scholarly journals related to psychotherapy practice and consciousness studies, among various other projects. He regularly conducts trainings, workshops, and presentations on a variety of clinical topics, both regionally and nationally. Dr. Bustos’s academic and clinical passion lies in the healing journey of the therapist, incorporating the insight and experiential foundations of nondual philosophy and contemplative traditions along with a critical, developmental approach to the person — in the family, in society, and in the universe. Dr. Bustos has an extensive background in meditative and contemplative spiritual practices, with additional training in healing and energy medicine. He is a musician, a lover of art and cinema, and especially loves spending quality time with his partner and spouse, Heather, and their son, Mason.

Statement of Self

I grew up in the Bay Area, the son of Mexican immigrants, exposed to the burgeoning growth and richly varied cultural milieu of the 1980s Silicon Valley. Yet this is only one part of a much larger story (as it is for all of us). I thus incorporate a wide and thick tapestry of diverse experiences, identifications, and understandings, all in the name of a journey that is very human and very dynamic. I am radical, I am traditional, I am privileged, and I know otherness; I am educated and I am ignorant, I am body and I am spirit. I resonate with Whitman’s famous verse: I contain multitudes. Additionally, I say this: I am a straight, cis Brown male who feels a profound affinity with marginalized and underrepresented groups of all types. This comes as a result of my own multidimensional positionality coupled with an insatiable curiosity into the human experience — the joy, the suffering, the growth, the tragedy, and everything in between. Laced within all of this, however, is the integration of my own nondualistic, psychodynamically framed, critical perspective: one that rejects the atomistic, reductive, physicalist framework of the dominant culture and puts spirit back into the equation in a very real, very visceral way. I live, work, and play on the razor’s edge of these thoughts: That we are many and we are one; we are everything and we are nothing; that I am completely unique yet also an undivided, undifferentiated part of the universal Whole.