Reflections on Wholeness
Image from Kayobi, August 2020
It's finally sweater weather in my locale, which I welcome. It's getting darker earlier, I'm sure you have noticed, and I imagine we all have feelings about that, one way or another. It is a transition for sure, and transitions can be hard. Whatever may be stressful in your life right now, remember that you are still essentially whole. The premise underlying MBSR is that, as long as you are breathing, there is more that is right with you than there is wrong. Below are some reflections on this.
Have you ever looked up at a starry sky and contemplated your place in it? Did you feel separate from it? Maybe more connected? Maybe at some point unable to fathom it’s existence or our place in it? Einstein had some thoughts on this:
"A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness..."
Meditation is one of the ways we can have direct access to what might be called the ground of our very being. My first exposure to MBSR came through Full Catastrophe Living, where Jon Kabat-Zinn reflects on wholeness throughout.
"These are true moments of wholeness, accessible to all of us. Where do they come from? Nowhere. They are here all the time. Each time you sit...you are affirming your intrinsic balance of mind and body, independent of the passing state of either your mind or your body in any moment." (Full Catastrophe Living, 2nd edition, chapter Sitting Meditation, p. 70).
Being broken and yet still whole; One of my favorite representations of this is when artisans mend broken pottery by joining the broken fragments with precious metals read more about this art form in Kintsugi: The Art of Precious Scars, which is where I found the image at the top of the page.
How may we embrace the whole of who we are? Discussed profoundly in On the Brink of Everything and quoted Wholeness and Self-Compassion:
“Being human means being broken and yet whole. The word integrity comes from a root that means ‘intact.’ At bottom, it has to do with being ‘integral,’ whole and undivided — which means embracing our brokenness as an integral part of life. Everyone has a shadow, even high-minded people like us. Especially high-minded people like us! But when you are able to say, ‘I am all of the above, my shadow as well as my light,’ the shadow’s power is put in service of the good.
“There are no shortcuts to wholeness. The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around everything we know ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, ‘I am all of the above.’ If we can’t embrace the whole of who we are — embrace it with transformative love — we’ll imprison the creative energies hidden in our own shadows and be unable to engage creatively with the world’s complex mix of shadow and light.”
So, as we grab our sweater while our warmer weather whispers to us of the colder months ahead, regardless of where we are on the calendar or the arc of time we might call our lifetime: live all your precious moments (which means all of them.) To even consider what it means to live them fully, we glimpse our own wholeness unfolding.
