"Pieces of the Whole Story" is a blog about the return to wholeness of our self and world, both of which we tend to see as broken, isolated, and wrong. I draw on the world’s spiritual traditions, therapies of psyche, soma, and spirit, poetry, folktales, and the epiphanies of everyday life to bring us into awareness of the whole story.
Whatever state you are in right now, it is organized by some story, a relational story about you and others, you and life, and the expectations that characterize your relationships and the parts you play. The story is made of images: images of self and others, and the ways the various images interact. That story is possessive and does a good job of excluding from your awareness other possible stories that are also true, have been true at other times and could even be true now. If the story is, for example, one of you being lost and confused, then that story will try to erase all memories of times when you were clear and knew what you wanted and how to find your way.
That whole portrait I just painted of you and your state and the stories that organize it… well, it’s certainly not the whole story! Another story is that something else in you is not settled with the current story, and like the sand in the oyster, the irritation it contributes allows something to grow in you that is very valuable: I think of it a divine discontent. That divine discontent can show up as symptoms: a climate of restlessness and worry, poor sleep, over-eating, moods that show up like some severe weather system that just parks over your psyche, moods of irritability, of despair and hopelessness, of frenetic thinking. If you learn how to listen to these symptoms, they can give you clues as to what stories, what of your many parts, have been excluded from your current understanding of self, others, and life. One topic I will be exploring in this blog is how we can listen to and dialogue with our discontent so as to allow ourselves to get free from our stuckness and unfold. For we hunger for wholeness, for an ease that comes when nothing is excluded, and everything belongs.