Wholehearted Living

           

                                     
Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.
                                                               
The Journey
Wholehearted living is not a onetime choice. It is a process. In fact, I believe it’s the journey of a lifetime. My goal is to bring awareness and clarity to the constellation of choices that lead to Wholeheartedness and to share what I’ve learned from many, many people who have dedicated themselves to living and loving with their whole hearts.

Before embarking on any journey, including this one, it’s important to talk about what we need to bring along. What does it take to live and love from a place of worthiness? How do we embrace imperfection? How do we cultivate what we need and let go of the things that are holding us back?

The answers to all of these questions are courage, compassion, and connection—the tools we need to work our way through our journey. If you’re thinking, Great. I just need to be a superhero to fight perfectionism, I understand.

Courage, compassion, and connection seem like big, lofty ideals. But in reality, they are daily practices that, when exercised enough, become these incredible gifts in our lives. And the good news is that our vulnerabilities are what force us to call upon these amazing tools. Because we’re human and so beautifully imperfect, we get to practice using our tools on a daily basis. In this way, courage, compassion, and connection become gifts—the gifts of imperfection.

I’ve learned about courage, compassion, and connection and how they are truly the tools for developing worthiness.

Once we get some clarity about the tools that we’re going to use on this journey, we move to the heart of the matter: love, belonging, and worthiness.

I answer some of the most difficult questions of my career: What is love? Can we love someone and betray them? Why does our constant need to fit in sabotage real belonging? Can we love the people in our lives, like our partners and children, more than we love ourselves? How do we define worthiness, and why do we so often end up hustling for it rather than believing in it?

We encounter obstacles on every journey we make; the Wholehearted journey is no exception.    we’ll explore what I’ve found to be the greatest barriers to living and loving with our whole hearts and how we can develop effective strategies to move through the barriers and to cultivate resilience.From there, we’ll explore the  guideposts for the Wholehearted journey, daily practices that provide direction for our journey.
                                                                Defining Moments
This article  is full of big-concept words such as love, belonging, and authenticity. I think it’s critically important to define the gauzy words that are tossed around every day but rarely explained. And I think good definitions should be accessible and actionable. I’ve tried to define these words in a way that will help us unpack the term and explore the pieces. When we dig down past the feel-good words and excavate the daily activities and experiences that put the heart in Wholehearted living, we can see how people define the concepts that drive their actions, beliefs, and emotions.
For example, when the research participants talked about a concept such as love, I was careful to define it as they experienced it. Sometimes that required developing new definitions (like I actually did with love and many other words). Other times, when I started looking around in the existing literature, I found definitions that captured the spirit of the participants’ experiences.

A good example of this is play. Play is an essential component to Wholehearted living, and when I researched the topic, I discovered the amazing work of Dr. Stuart Brown. So, rather than creating a new definition, I reference his work because it accurately reflects what I learned in the research.

I realize that definitions spark controversy and disagreement, but I’m okay with that. I’d rather we debate the meaning of words that are important to us than not discuss them at all. We need common language to help us create awareness and understanding, which is essential to Wholehearted living.

Practicing courage, compassion, and connection in our daily lives is how we cultivate worthiness.

The key word is practice. Mary Daly, a theologian, writes, “Courage is like—it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: You get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.” The same is true for compassion and connection.

We invite compassion into our lives when we act compassionately toward ourselves and others, and we feel connected in our lives when we reach out and connect.

Before I define these concepts and talk about how they work, I want to show you how they work together in real life—as practices. This is a personal story about the courage to reach out, the compassion that comes from saying, “I’ve been there,” and the connections that fuel our worthiness.
                                                                                                                              ....to be continued....