The Wholeness of Experience
2013
We all have these moments sometimes, don’t we? Fleeting, maybe, and rare, but we all have these moments of suddenly noticing the fact that we’re alive. After days or weeks, months or years of having all but forgotten, there’s a jolt of recognition and there we are, electrified with the awareness that all of life is pulsing around us. That the moment where we stand is the only moment, and that in that moment everything is connected to everything else.
They often show up when we’re caught off guard, these moments, when something unexpected happens or when for one reason or another we find ourselves acutely noticing our surroundings. When beauty catches us unawares and suddenly we expand into it, tiny energy-fine tendrils of ourselves keenly aware that they exist in a vast, infinite network of tendrils that all live and beat and breathe together. This is the deepest truth of what we know at a visceral, cellular level. That we are alive, that we are aware, that we are all connected to each and every thing in existence in some achingly, powerfully beautiful way. And we feel it in a way that is incomparable to any other feeling.
And, if we pay attention, we notice that it is a feeling rather than a thought. It’s not brought about by logic, by careful dissection, by intense mental focus.
Let me be clear: I’m a big fan of logic and reason. They’ve brought us countless gifts, and they’re valuable beyond measure. But they’re only capable of accessing part of the world, and therefore part of the truth. When we restrict ourselves to operating solely within their realm, we close off vital ways of knowing that are just as valuable, just as interesting, just as compelling.
This is something that we do regularly in our culture, though; we shut down our bodies, shut down any way of knowing that isn’t rooted in logic. Many of us spend our days living in a mental world, disconnected from the awareness of our bodies and the parts of ourselves that don’t “make sense.” As we grow up we find it easier and easier to sort, to categorize, to believe that we have it all figured out. And when that’s the way we approach the world, our vision shrinks and narrows until our way of seeing the world is so cramped as to barely allow anything new to enter. When this happens we think we already know what we need to know, and anything that doesn’t fit into our worldview can be discarded as irrelevant, uninteresting, or just plain wrong.
But when the chance comes to take a step back, to re-enter the body and its moment-to-moment experience, fresh information is once again free to flow in, to bring us into the awareness of our whole selves–not limited to the selves of our minds. It’s all there in the ever loyal and patient body, accessible to us anytime we’re willing and able to feel for it.