Coined by Stanislav Grof to mean ‘turning towards the Whole’, in a similar manner to heliotropic ‘turning towards the Sun’. However, the related Greek verb trepo ‘to turn’ has two meanings, as in English: ‘to change direction’ (as in ‘turn into a side-road’), and ‘to change form’ (as in ‘turn into a frog’). So holotropic can be said to have two meanings, the second being ‘transforming the Whole’, using -tropic in the same sense as entropic. In order to return Home to Wholeness, to our Divine Source, we need to transform the Whole; a partial transformation is not sufficient.
Greek olos ‘all, whole, entire’, where one is safe, as the PIE base *sol- indicates, also root of Latin salvus ‘whole, safe, healthy, uninjured’, and Greek tropē ‘a turning, transformation’, from trepein ‘to turn’, from PIE base *trep- ‘to turn’.