889th Week: Embracing Wholeness with Kindness

ByNancy Napier

Note: At the bottom of this written practice there is a recording of it, if you would prefer to listen. In the practices that contain a guided meditation, please remember never to listen to these recorded meditations when driving or working with dangerous machinery.

One of the themes I’ve noticed in my work in recent years is an increasing emphasis on inviting clients to notice their wholeness, and on accepting the fact that our human wholeness includes aspects of ourselves that we don’t particularly like. This means acknowledging and accepting these aspects of self, recognizing that we can’t remove or eliminate parts of our human wholeness. 

One metaphor I use for managing wholeness when we’re in touch with things about ourselves that we want to hide or exorcise is a rainbow. We can’t take a color out of the rainbow, even if we don’t like it. Another metaphor is the foreground/background dynamic I’ve written about a number of times, where aspects of our wholeness are sometimes in the foreground of our awareness and behavior and then sometimes in the background. Whatever moves into the foreground can be invited into the background and whatever lives in the background can be invited forward.

In addition to becoming aware of and engaging more consciously the foreground/background dynamic inherent in our wholeness, one of the practices I’ve encouraged people to engage is to imagine that they put a gentle arm around parts of themselves that they don’t like. This would include aspects of themselves that generate shame or discomfort of some other kind, ways of being that they see in themselves that they swore they would never express, responses and behaviors that embarrass them or that they dislike intensely. We can’t escape our wholeness, but we can learn to relate to this fact of being with kindness and gentleness rather than with criticism, aggression, and anger.

And so, for this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to explore the following guided meditation and notice what works for you and what doesn’t. Please be sure to allow and track mixed feelings, as they are inherent in our wholeness. The key is to bring awareness to them without having to do anything with them right now.

  • To begin, settle in so that you are well supported and able to be relaxed and also alert.
  • Follow the next out-breath down to the place in you that is your natural internal home base, the place in you where you connect with what you might think of as your core or your internal center of gravity.
  • Take a moment to notice the steadiness that’s here in this special place inside you. This is an aspect of your being that cannot be disturbed no matter what unfolds. If you don’t find the steadiness, take a moment to imagine what it would be like if you could touch into that unflappable aspect of your being.
  • Now, bring to mind an aspect of your wholeness, a quality of your personality or style of being in the world, that you don’t particularly like but that you notice is a part of you no matter what. This might be a vulnerable younger aspect of being. It might be an envious or selfish part of you. It might be a part of you that says things you wish later you hadn’t said. Whatever it is, take some time to acknowledge it as one of the colors in your rainbow and that it sometimes seems to pop into the foreground of your experience whether you want it to or not.
  • Next, imagine that you can put a gentle arm around this aspect of your wholeness. Just that—a gentle embrace that offers support and kindness, the recognition that this is part of your body-mind being, part of the unique configuration of aspects of being that constitute your wholeness.
  • Bring your awareness to your heart space and notice if your heart is open right now. There’s nothing else to do but to be present to this experience of putting a gentle arm around this aspect of your being, offering acknowledgment and acceptance, if not agreement with how it expresses. You might notice that this response and action often allow this part of your wholeness to settle into the background of your awareness as your present-day adult self fills up the foreground.
  • Notice what it’s like if you were able to experience the quality of living with acceptance of your wholeness, acceptance of yourself. So often, one of the deep lessons we all need to learn is to deepen our self-acceptance and kindness toward ourselves. The beautiful outcome of achieving this ability is that we automatically and spontaneously express more kindness to others. 
  • Take a few moments now to be present to the resonating tone of your experience. Continue to orient to your heart space, noticing if your chest is loose and relaxed or if there’s any tension. If you find tension, breathe in and out through your heart a few times and focus your awareness on kindness. Remember that kindness is a frequency of being, a quality of energy that you can resonate with whenever you want.
  • When you’re ready to conclude this meditation, wiggle your fingers and toes, open your eyes and look around your environment, and come all the way back.

As with all these practices, please remember to bring along curiosity as your constant companion. And, also please remember to pat gently on the head any judgments that may arise, allowing them to move on through without your having to do anything with or about them.

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One of the truly challenging practices for many of us is to live with harmlessness, called “ahimsa” in Sanskrit.  A question that arises is, how do we engage the world actively without causing harm?  I remember someone once saying that the Buddha said it’s impossible not to cause harm in many small ways, simply by living.  We eat other beings as food, we inadvertently step on insects when walking around, we use and then throw away many things throughout the course of our daily lives.  And, when it comes to social action, how do we engage that if we have a commitment to ahimsa?
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826th Week: Being, Doing, and Self-Talk

826th Week: Being, Doing, and Self-Talk

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As I write this practice, it is vigorously snowing outside and I am deeply grateful to be tucked in and warm. As I watch the snow fall, I find myself pondering something that came up recently and that is the relationship between, and differences around, being and doing. 

This got me to thinking about the importance of how we be and that our being is so much more important than our doing. That doesn’t mean doing doesn’t play a significant role in how we engage and impact the world, but it seems to me that the bottom line really focuses on the quality and tone of our being.

I’ve said before that our internal self-talk is a form of self-hypnosis and that the quality of our self-talk plays a major role in determining the quality of our internal life, of our felt-sense of who and how we are in the world. There are many practices that invite us to track our self-talk, along with suggestions as to how we might shift from self-critical internal conversations to those that reflect acceptance, support, and gratitude for who and how we are. Some are from cognitive therapy approaches and some are from the ever-expanding influence of mindfulness practices.

For this week’s practice, first, I invite you to become even more aware of the internal conversations you have with yourself and to notice how these moments of self-talk affect you. Do they lift you up and make you feel more able to engage the world, to dive into activities and projects that nourish you, to help you settle into a deeper sense of comfort with yourself? Or, do these moments of self-talk drag you down, generate shame, or make you feel that you want to avoid connecting with your world?

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863nd Week: Exploring “Asset Framing”

863nd Week: Exploring “Asset Framing”

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Listening to an interview this morning with Krista Tippett and Trabion Shorters, the subject they explored resonated deeply with me. Shorters describes his approach as viewing people, institutions, and society within what he calls “asset framing” instead of the usual “deficit frame” we draw on to think about and perceive people who may be in need or are in a challenging situation. It reminds me of the solution-focused psychotherapy approach where we are encouraged to see what’s going right rather than focusing on what’s going wrong. It also reminds me of the way that our brain’s default mode network. It’s the part of the brain that—when nothing else is going on—drifts into daydreams, thoughts, or questions about ourselves and our world. If our fundamental beliefs are negative, this is where our default mode networks hangs out. If they are positive, that’s where our awareness will go. Fortunately, if we find ourselves mired in negative or deficit thinking, we can talk to our default mode network and create shifts toward the positive or asset frame.

Listening to the interview, I could sense how important it is to actively promote an “asset frame” as part of our fundamental assumptions about the world and about the people around us. Instead of thinking of people in terms of their poverty or lack of opportunity, we can begin with focusing on what’s going right in their lives, on what they have accomplished, what their dreams are. For me, this also touches on connecting more realistically with the fact that we all—regardless of our culture, race, socialization, gender identity, or any of the other aspects that support our diversity—want much the same things in terms of quality of life. It reminds me of the Buddhist Lovingkingness meditation where we ask that all beings be free from suffering and be happy.

For this week’s practice, I invite you to first listen to this interview if you haven’t already heard it. Here’s the link from Tippett’s On Being website: https://onbeing.org/programs/trabian-shorters-a-cognitive-skill-to-magnify-humanity/

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