Searching For Wholeness

Terry Hershey, in her book, Soul Gardening wrote: “To be human is about regaining what has been lost in the shuffle when life has been relegated to keeping score and making waves.  To be human is about cultivating the good life.  To be human is about gardening the soul.”
 
I like to think that’s what we’re doing here at Journeys; tending to our souls, turning over our rich soil in order to grow in self awareness and deepen our spirituality and compassion for one another. Each time I write a reflection, I go through a process of self-discovery, and it was a chapter in Elizabeth Lesser’s “The Seeker’s Guide” that started me thinking about this search for wholeness, and led to my new understanding of what it means to be “whole”.

In it, she discusses the role of feminine and masculine archetypes and how in order to be whole we must balance both of these archetypes within ourselves. Her ideas of finding wholeness and her thoughts about the importance of respecting both the feminine and masculine within ourselves, kept creeping into my consciousness during meditation, and so I found myself going back over my life, turning over the soil of my youth, to see where I had embraced both the feminine and masculine in myself and where I had not.

Looking back to when I was a young girl, I can clearly see how I naturally and unashamedly displayed both my feminine and masculine qualities. When indoors, my days were filled drawing or singing and playing the piano. I also loved to cook with my mother and I have many fond memories of making homemade cookies and Easter candy with her and my brother. Outside, my time was spent traipsing along the shore of the river, whose bend was in my backyard, or rowing the boat my father built for me, pretending to be on some grand adventure. I was an explorer collecting rocks and shells and building forts in the woods near my home. When I was allowed, I would follow my older brother and his friends to a field for a game of pickup baseball or football. I was fiercely competitive and I loved seeing the look of shock on a boys face when I would make a good play.

Naturally, as years passed and the boys no longer thought it was right to play tackle football with a girl and my need to develop socially kicked in, these activities ceased. Instead, I joined every school club my mother would allow. By the time I was in high school, my life revolved around friends, dating, and cheerleading, and if there were time leftover, schoolwork. I rarely played the piano or sang and I no longer built forts or walked along the shore collecting treasures.

College was not a particularly good time for me. I fluctuated between obsessively worrying about what I would do with my life, and trying to figure out how to balance my increased independence with my growing responsibilities. During the day, I was so stressed about school that I would routinely throw-up in between classes. At night, I would forget about my worries by participating in the typical college scene: hanging out with friends in bars, drinking, dancing, dating. Suffice it say, I spent little time really discovering WHO I was.

After graduating college, I got a job at an investment firm and moved my way up the corporate ladder and was enjoying a pretty good life. But I had a sense that something was missing, and I mistakenly believed that it would be found in a love relationship. So I dated lots of interesting people, yet no one ever seemed to fulfill me in ways I’d been hoping. Strangely, I always seemed to be attracted to musicians. All the while, a little voice inside me was getting louder and louder. “Sing, sing”, it said. But I was too scared to admit to myself let alone anyone else, that I wanted to sing professionally.

Eventually, I met a really wonderful man, also a musician, whom I felt safe enough with to share my secret longing. He encouraged me to take voice lessons. And so I did. One thing led to another and before long I found myself singing in a band. That was a pivotal moment for me.

Singing on stage with a band in front of a crowd of people was pure joy. It was, and still is, one of the most fulfilling things I do. The little girl who sat at the piano singing for hours, and who had gone missing for so many years, had finally returned. I felt complete. I felt empowered. And at the time, I thought this was all I needed to be happy.

Four years later, on one of the first dates I had with my husband, I was reacquainted with the part of me that loved to be outdoors exploring nature. Joe took me on a hike in the woods and this too was a profound experience. I can remember exactly how I felt as I headed toward the path looking up at the trees in front of me. Every cell in my body was recalling my joy in being among the sights and sounds of the woods. It was like coming home, and again I had the sense of having found a missing part of myself.

I think it’s fairly common to lose touch with things we enjoyed as children and to rediscover them as adults. Many of us have experienced the magic of regaining a piece of our selves that had gone missing. And these are important steps in our search for

wholeness. But the real challenge for me right now, is to look honestly at how I’m living my life in this moment. Am I, and are you, living a life that fully embraces and honors both the masculine and feminine qualities we hold?

Psychiatrist Carl Jung believed each human psyche contained unique combinations of the masculine and feminine archetypes in varying degrees of potency. Elizabeth Lesser’s description of these two archetypes is this. See if you can identify for yourself those traits you might need to embrace a little more fully. She writes:

“The feminine principal loves to feel; it compels us to nurture; it is intuitive and heartful. The feminine is that part of the self that is vulnerable, receptive, open; the part that values connection and communication. …It is the part that is comfortable right here on earth with all of its pain and messiness, the part that does not want to run away from life or try to change nature’s rules. The masculine archetype sees beyond this life, looks outside of itself, identifies with the eternal, and wants to move ever forward. It plans and negotiates, is reasonable and rational. It is on a mission to achieve, invent, build, make a mark.

They’re a great pair; the feminine and the masculine. A person who cultivates his or her masculine and feminine qualities is able to balance power with love, inventiveness with sustainability, brilliance with wisdom. ”

She further writes, “Men and women raised in a culture that disempowers the feminine archetype are denied wholeness. And spirituality is about becoming whole. To become whole we don’t get rid of one thing and replace it with another; we don’t now negate masculine values and elevate feminine values. The path to human wholeness is the inner marriage of masculine and feminine values. When each value system is held in equal esteem, when we love and respect both, harmony within the individual, health in the culture, and peace on the planet can become attainable.”

So now our challenge, yours and mine, is to look honestly at ourselves and decide where we fall on the spectrum of this marriage between feminine and masculine qualities. The point, Ms. Lesser says, is not to “move toward androgyny. It is to become aware of the inner forces at play within each one of us and within the culture. Even as we strive for inner and outer balance, we still can depend on each other to fill in the missing pieces.”

So to become aware, to become Self aware, is key to wholeness. I am no expert on self-awareness, but I can tell you about those things that have helped me in my search for wholeness.

Conversation

One thing I try to do is to pay attention to the conversations in my life. How many times have you heard yourself say something that you had no idea you were going to say; something that revealed a piece of yourself you didn’t know existed? It can happen in any type of conversation, but for me it’s usually one with an intimate friend where I feel safe; sometimes that friend is me. Just last week I heard myself saying something to a friend about an experience I had had with a neighbor. I didn’t realize that I had been harboring anger toward this neighbor until I heard myself say it. That conversation gave me insight into myself and will have an affect on how I respond to my neighbor moving forward.

The Difficult Path

The most difficult path I’ve taken to self awareness are those times in my life when the rug has been pulled out from under me; when I’ve been knocked to my knees. Painful experiences, particularly losses, have allowed me to grow in the most profound ways. However, I must say, just because we might experience something difficult, or even tragic, does not mean that we’ll automatically grow. Many times, I’ve found it easier to constrict myself, or shield myself in denial. When this happens I don’t grow at all. In fact, I cut myself off from any insight or healing that might take place. It takes great courage to open ourselves up to our sorrow, or anger or loneliness, or whatever might be painful in our lives. And it takes a real fearlessness to allow our pain to transform us.

Elisabeth Kubler Ross wrote, “You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden, but you will grow if you are sick, if you are in pain, if you experience losses, and if you do not put your head in the sand, but take the pain as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose.”

When my son was diagnosed with autism was probably the most devastating time in my life. I wasn’t just knocked to my knees, I was knocked flat. But because the quality of his life depended on me facing this diagnosis head on, I didn’t have the luxury of being in denial about it. So it was in this state, raw with grief, my broken heart exposed for all to see, that I was most profoundly transformed. In that place, I understood that it is our expectations of how thing should be that cause us the most suffering. Learning to let go of expectations allowed me to live more fully, more wholly, from that moment on.

Mindfulness Meditation

The last path I know to self awareness is through mindfulness meditation. This is the Buddhist practice of sitting in stillness, focusing on the breath and allowing our thoughts to bubble up from our sub-consciousness, observing them and then letting them go. I will speak more specifically about this meditation practice in a moment, but for now, I’ll just tell you that for me, the daily practice of mindfulness meditation is a safe haven from the stressors of life that allows me to tap into that state of clarity and fearlessness that is deep within. Just like Sister Wendy from our reading this morning, I too do not want God to one day say “I sent you a lot of experiences and you didn’t use them.” I too want to be open to them, receive them and grow by them.

In my search for wholeness, I’ve begun to realize that there will never be a time during this lifetime in this body that I will be able to say, “That’s it. The final piece is in. I’m whole!.” Instead, I am forever expanding and growing. With each bit of clarity I gain, I become more of who I am. It’s not so much an outward expansion adding layer upon layer, but rather an inward expansion where I continue to go deeper and deeper into the depths of my being.

And the same is true for all of us. We can all expand ourselves deeper and deeper into the core of who we are, which I believe is the path to wholeness. For me, being “whole” means to exist in our natural state, unadulterated and unadorned. Taoism teaches our natural state is one of inner peace and calmness. For me, it’s a state of pure love, where there is no distinction between male and female, old or young, race or religion. We can all journey there, it’s our choice. But it’s not for the faint of heart. It takes real courage to open our eyes to the truth of our lives. It takes tremendous strength to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. And it takes loving compassion and forgiving ourselves to move forward. Ultimately though, it takes a genuine longing of spirit to be on the journey toward wholeness.

I’ll end my reflection with one last quote from The Seeker’s Guide, “Spirituality is the human search for eternal wisdom. It is not the wisdom itself. To humanize spirituality, we must look not only outside of ourselves to the limitless universe, but also inside of our own personhood - the sum total of our gender, our conditioning, our genes, and our unique challenges and gifts.”

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 and is filed under Wholeness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.