Wholehearted Living: Welcoming What Is

To live wholeheartedly means to live courageously from the whole of our human experience. To do this, researcher and author Dr. Brene Brown writes, “We have to talk about the things that get in the way – especially shame, fear, and vulnerability.” Vacating the human experience to avoid difficulty means not being home for the joy either. Taking flight from certain experiences of my life caused a sense of emptiness within me. Re-inhabiting that emptiness has been the call of the second half of my life.

To live wholeheartedly means to live courageously from the whole of our human experience.

Brown defines living wholeheartedly as living from a place of worthiness. I agree and would add that living wholeheartedly means living honestly – being in touch with the whole of oneself by listening closely to what is actually happening in oneself. It is about learning the skills to navigate the whole, and where we usually vacate the human experience is when we encounter difficulty. As Parker Palmer, pioneer in the field of holistic education, writes, “Wholeness does not mean perfection; it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness…need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.” To see every experience as worthy of our attention, including our brokenness, is to live from wholeness.