Re-Connecting with Wholeness: What is Still Here?

When something in our lives becomes tough, changes, or goes missing, it can become the center of our attention. It could be a shift in a friendship or relationship. Or finding that our bodies don't work like they used to or the way we want them to. Perhaps it could be a plan doesn't unfold as we'd hoped it would.

No matter how it starts, in times of transition and challenge, we can often find ourselves feeling fragmented, scattered, and ... less than whole. Recently, while facilitating an Akhila Health workshop on wholeness, I invited participants to consider a simple question:

What is still here?

Because here’s the thing: In the midst of the ups and downs of life, it can be all too easy to lose sight of our wholeness, of all that is still here.

Wholeness doesn't mean that nothing is missing, broken, or painful. It also doesn’t mean covering up with positivity everything that’s hard or not working in our lives. Sometimes re-connecting with wholeness requires us to widen the frame of perception so we can notice what else is present alongside what is difficult.

  • Perhaps we can recognize that uncertainty is here and curiosity is still here.
  • Grief is here and love is still here.
  • Something our body once did easily has become exhausting and there are countless things our body continues to do for us every day.
  • A door has closed and other possibilities remain.

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This is the practice of “and.”

We tend to naturally narrow our attention around problems. Sometimes that tendency is useful; problems do need our attention. When the problem becomes the entire landscape, though, we can lose sight of all that remains available to us. Wholeness asks us to see that larger landscape.

It might begin with something very small: sunlight through a window. A conversation with someone we love. Making something with our hands. Moving our bodies in a way that feels good. Music. Laughter. A moment of unexpected kindness. The realization that something we thought we'd lost in ourselves is actually still there.

None of these things erases what is difficult.

But they can sit beside it.

And perhaps that is one way we practice wholeness; not by trying to make ourselves whole, but by becoming more attentive to the fullness of what is already here.

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