Radical Wholeness: The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being

The hero’s choice is ultimately about coming back into relationship with the female principle of ‘being’. You cannot enjoy a freedom of being without submitting to being. Choosing that path is not just doable—it is necessary if we are to recover our balance in this world, learn to live intelligently in it and prove ourselves an asset to its harmony

is so ingrained in the Story that we accept it as a given of human nature: thinking and feeling are separate. We come to believe that our thinking will be clearer if we disconnect from all the noise of the body’s sensations. This belief is instilled in us systematically in childhood. Of all the lessons we learn in the public school system, the prim

Objective knowledge values known relationships; self-knowledge values felt relationships.

If we are looking for a framework within which to contain the reality we belong to, we eventually have to face the fact that there is a dimension missing from our Chosen Four of space and time. The missing dimension is the one in which everything is in contact with everything else at all times. It is the dimension of unity that coexists with the di

For contrast, consider the Anlo-Ewe culture. One of their foremost markers of success is balance. As children grow up, their expression of balance is noticed, cultivated, encouraged and praised. They come to appreciate what it means to achieve balance in their personal lives, in their families, in their community and in relationship to the world at

Objective knowledge is disembodied knowledge. It stands apart from the Present.

The intelligence that lives through the body is a much-neglected resource in our abstract lives—but in hunting-gathering cultures it is the primary resource that enables them to harmonize with their world and to notice its gifts and live in accord with them.

For simplicity’s sake, we might consider that your being includes all that you discover when you are fully present—for everything to which you are present is a part of your presence, and so is also a part of the process of your being.

Your wholeness is felt, then, by feeling the wholeness of the Present.