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

He uses objective knowledge to empower himself, not others. His currency is ‘insider information’. By contrast, we might understand self-knowledge as a world-centered understanding of the self. The insights of self-knowledge are offered to you by the kinship of the world to which you belong. When your attention is surrendered to the world without s

So speech can be thought of as a sense that facilitates discovery. When you understand it in that way, the whole of your being is invited to be present to your act of speaking. By contrast, if you believe, as our culture’s Story has it, that speech is a means of delivering your ideas, your concern will not be on discovery—it will be on the task of

Objective knowledge is a self-centered understanding of the world; self-knowledge is world-centered understanding of the self. • Objective knowledge is fact based; self-knowledge is experiential. • We acquire objective knowledge; we surrender to self-knowledge. • Objective knowledge grows by accumulation; self-knowledge grows by shedding.

A person’s voice is like an MRI that reveals immediately how much of her body is available to the breath—and so, too, how much of her being is available to the Present. When the body is liberated from its divisions, it becomes a fluid medium through the entirety of which the breath travels like a wave. Like a living graph, the voice reveals the pro

Speaking is an experience that is felt in the mouth and the body; and they feel spoken words as something that could be directed “with the intention of hitting a mark”11 as your senses might direct an arrow.

These two realms of knowing—knowledge and self-knowledge—are not different varieties of the same stuff but are opposites. And they are bound by a delicate balance: the more our knowledge grows, the more our self-knowledge needs to grow. If that doesn’t happen—if the roots of our self-knowledge don’t deepen to support the growth of our knowledge—the

The funny thing about the nucleus basalis is that it is ‘switched on’ all day every day until the age of ten or eleven, at which point it pretty much turns off. And then you are no longer a sponge for new information or experience. Past that age the nucleus basalis will switch on only “when one of three conditions occur: a novel situation, a shock,

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.

So the truly extraordinary isn’t a transcendence of the ordinary; it is found within it.

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