***Choose Wholeness!

What happens if I believe I am physically, emotionally and spiritually whole? Better yet, what if I take a leap of faith and I think, behave, make choices, and live within the belief that I am whole, healthy, secure, peaceful, loving and lovable?

Belief
Silence.
We are born from silence.
If we live from the silence within, we know our wholeness lives there too.
It is limitless, eternal, trustworthy, joyous, compassionate, loving and real.
Wholeness is not broken.
It cannot be broken, as each piece is part of the whole and contains the mystery of the whole.
We cannot run from wholeness or turn away from it.
It goes with us, because we are wholeness.
I look at my finger and it is not only a finger. It is a part of a hand that is part of an arm, that is part of a shoulder, that is part of a body, that is part of creation, and creation is wholeness.
This truth is challenging to understand. We cannot find wholeness because it is not lost.
We are wholeness. When our mind is quiet and still, our heart is open, and our trust is strong, trust turns and looks straight into our eyes and speaks, “Here I am, I am wholeness. I have always been here. I was
with you before you were born and I remain throughout time, because I am you.”
It is up to us to live our life in wholeness … to turn to it, and grasp it, through conscious living.
Wholeness is the part of us that we touch from time to time when we pray, meditate and contemplate.
The more we touch our wholeness, the more we believe in its existence. It is our belief in the existence of our wholeness that makes us whole.

Janet Gallagher Nestor

Most of us have the same basic goals in life: Good health, happiness, comfortable home, loving family , enough money to provide the life style we choose and the personal freedom to obtain our goals as we see fit. We want to laugh and have fun. We want to be personally powerful. We want to believe in and feel connected to something greater than ourselves. We want to know our authentic self and live within that knowledge. We want to be loved and nurtured. We want to be a functioning human being.

What are the elements of wholeness? Some of them are mentioned in the poem Belief and others are associated with what we might call our virtues, our positive personality attributes. You and I might define and experience wholeness differently, but we both want it. I like to image the elements of wholeness as the leaves on the Tree of Life. Maybe the following ideas are some of the elements of wholeness that we all share.

Connection and belief
Feeling rooted and grounded in life
Feeling centered (within our energy field)
Unity and Synchronicity
Laughter and joy
Peacefulness
Clarity of mind
Open flow of communication
Silence within
Trust
Conscious living

There is an exercise that I teach to those I work with in therapy. I would like to share the activity with you. Close your eyes and envision your body. What do you see? If you see yourself from head to toe, all parts working, you are exceptional. Many of us don't see our whole self when we form and inner image. We might only see our head and shoulders. Perhaps our feet our missing from our body or we can't see our face. Some of us perceive our body, but we can't image it. If you are unable to see your whole self when you close your eyes, I encourage you to keep practicing the image until you are able to see your whole self with all parts working. Maybe even see your image in full living color. See the texture of your clothing, the color of your eyes, the smile on your lips. When this wholeness image is normal and natural to you, you will be at a whole new level of functioning and living because your mental picture of yourself will be that of a whole person, living and functioning with all your parts working together. When you think about it, that is quite an advanced accomplishment.

Adapting a mindful, conscious and aware lifestyle helps each of us to achieve our life goals. Some people say to me, “If I loose my edge, become peaceful and content, I'll never get where I am going. My motivation, my will to achieve, will be gone”. The opposite is true. When we become peaceful and content, what we want out of life is clear and real to us and the barriers to our goals seem to melt away. We no longer perceive barriers as barriers. We simply see life as life and make positive, life-giving decisions. Our view of life is now one of abundance instead of scarcity. There is enough of everything, including time, to achieve our innermost dreams … as long as those dreams are honest, positive, and productive for ourselves and the world as a whole. This is as true for a banker, a professional athlete, a construction worker and a housewife as it is for a monk living in a cloistered spiritual community.

“Joy is within each of us all the time. We learn we can touch joy at any moment we choose to touch it”