You Are Already Whole

We often have experiences in our lives that "bring us back to ourselves" or some in way grant us a feeling that we had "lost" part of ourselves. For those of us on the spiritual paths, we tend to lean into feelings of needing to be better, to grow, or to constantly be moving toward some healthier version of ourselves. This episode explores what may feel like a paradigm shift toward recognizing that we already are everything we seek: already whole, never lost from ourselves.

Please note: This track may include some explicit language.

Transcript

Wake the Fuck Up.

The podcast that mingles mindfulness,

Buddhism,

Brain science,

Evolutionary biology,

And real authentic human experience.

Welcome to Wake the Fuck Up.

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Wake the Fuck Up podcast.

My name is Tiffany Andres,

And I'm your host and fellow journeyer,

Traveler,

Explorer,

Curiosity and wisdom seeker on this wild human ride.

And this episode is all about what it means to trust and believe that we are already and innately and in every single moment whole and complete.

What a radical paradigm shift to think we're broken or something is missing.

And I'll offer you know I've had this curiosity and this feeling for a long time but this episode was really spurred by a recent conversation with a friend and the reminder I'm going to quote her because it she said this in our conversation it was so powerful and absolutely amazing that there's not more.

There's just a recognition of what's already here.

And I love that because for anyone that's listened to all 23 episodes up until this point,

If you have my God,

Thank you.

But also you've heard me say quotes like the extraordinary is waiting just beneath the skin of everything that is ordinary.

The basis of mindfulness is that we spend so much of our lives caught up in the habitual reactions of this human brain which is really designed to help us survive and procreate to make it to tomorrow to make sure we have all of our basic necessities met and that we aren't in harm's way.

But what that often means is that the mind is not attuned to the subtleties of the things that are happening inside of us and outside of us in every moment because those subtleties are not a threat.

Anything that is normal or mundane becomes something that we unconsciously ignore.

And this is a fabulous,

Incredible component of this beautiful brain inside of our skulls because if we had to process absolutely everything that was happening every single minute we'd be overwhelmed like five minutes into waking up.

So it's fucking great that our brain can filter out the things that are necessary and unnecessary to pay attention to but mindfulness gives us the power to attune to and pay attention to things that normally get ignored and often there's just so much beauty,

Natural beauty,

Quiet beauty,

Subtle beauty waiting to be seen and recognized and explored.

And I think it's our missing of the subtle beauty that is present in every single moment of our lives that leads us to this feeling of needing more or wanting more all the time or wanting things to be different.

You know the science and you've probably heard me say this as well is that in any given moment there are somewhere around three million bits of information that we could be using to paint our picture of reality and typically the brain is only using about 200,

000 of those.

So while 200,

000 is still a really large number what this also means is that we have the possibility of intentionally attuning to the other 2.

8 million that naturally get missed by what our brain unconsciously deems is relevant or irrelevant,

Important or unimportant.

So what does it look like to pay attention to bits and pieces of those 2.

8 million missing pieces of information moment by moment and what beauty is waiting inside of them.

So to get back to this idea of wholeness you know I alluded in our last episode to Pema Chodron reminding us and I love calling it a reminder because I've really deeply come to believe that I mean we're talking about wholeness right?

That everything we need in order to be happy,

Satisfied,

Content and full of love in our lives already resides within us right?

All of the wisdom that we gain throughout our lives comes from our own experiential understanding.

I'm definitely going to be recording an episode in the future around the power of language because I think one of my jobs throughout my career as a mindfulness coach has really just been to give actual language to people so that when they have a felt experience they automatically have a conscious understanding of what that is,

What it means,

You know they have the language to process what's happening but the experience itself is often what changes us and so it's the wisdom of that experience that already lives within us.

And so you know the reminder that Pema offered in the talk that I heard by her was that we're all already enlightened,

We're all already awake.

It's not about transcending or growing to some far off peak that is outside of us.

You know I love the analogy of a mountain right?

That our human journey can be this process of climbing from the base to the top of the mountain but if the mountain is large enough then when we're in the middle of what feels like the forest as we're making these steep climbs our limited human perception is that there's only this small piece that we're immersed in in that moment and we forget that the mountain is still whole.

We're still climbing this big beautiful piece of earth and then you know we could go down the rabbit hole and be like the mountain is a part of the earth,

It's a part of the whole which is a part of the universe and also a part of the whole.

You know so orders of magnitude we're always just looking at a tiny little piece but whether we're at the base of the mountain or the top of the mountain doesn't change the fact that the mountain is still whole and complete right?

And if this is an analogy to our human experience of waking up to our own true nature of being an awakened and enlightened being the truth of who we are who I've said you know many times up until this point I believe is limitless love then really it's less about climbing the mountain and hitting some peak you know that's in some way separate from the base and rather the whole process of the human journey is about slowly uncovering those barriers that we've built to actually being with the truth of who we are moment by moment.

It's a flipping the mountain upside down if you will and climbing down and back into ourselves uncovering the ways we've learned to protect ourselves in order to slowly softly tenderly over time learn to trust that it's safe to be in this space of limitless love all the time.

And you know the conversation that I had with the friend around this was also spurred by another conversation where you know I feel like we language our experience when we leave a relationship or we leave a job or we leave some life circumstance that we're in and at some point down the road we're like holy shit I really lost myself in that relationship or I lost myself in that job right and this conversation around wholeness and completeness I feel like is so powerful and important because if we recognize that we are already whole we are already complete and therefore inherently my loves we are already enough then it's impossible to ever lose ourselves it's impossible to not be whole in any moment it's impossible to separate parts of ourselves from the wholeness of ourselves now what is not impossible of course is that those different parts and pieces become loud and quiet in different moments right and in another conversation with a friend I love that she used the phrase that a part of her was benched you know and if we can think of all the different component pieces and parts of ourselves as players on our you know self team if you will our true self or our awakened self you know team then absolutely you can't have every player in the game all the time and not every player is going to be your highest scoring player right you can only really have one of those so I think the powerful question when it comes to trusting that we are always in every moment whole and complete is the recognition that we always have access to every single part of ourselves and the question is who's driving the ship like who's setting the sail and again this is this is the power of taking the time to slow down and become still and to have these moments through meditation or prayer or reflection or whatever your practice of coming home to yourself is to attune to that quiet whisper of your own loving to the sense of self that is eternal and unchangeable right and when I say self I mean self like with a capital S you know not the self that you were when you were five not the self that you were when you were 18 or 25 or like me now 35 because that sense of self driven by personality driven by which part component part of us is driving the ship right which one is playing the game and which one is on the bench means that how we self express in many moments is going to be different but I think the beauty and the power of recognizing our wholeness is that we also recognize our innate power to be in the world in the ways that we want to be in the world and to choose which players we take off the bench one of the things that I want to add here I've been doing some work recently with a group in a community around identifying our ego as our protector and for anybody who's ever heard of internal family systems therapy I think this is amazing because it helps us identify each of these component parts of ourselves and often we have you know a manager I think in internal family systems we have a manager and we have a firefighter you know somebody who's trying to put out the fires of our life you know but in more traditional wisdom traditions you might identify this simply as the ego and I did a practice where I got to meet my ego and visualize what she looked like and she was this fucking beautiful radiant goddess like super powerful like not super muscly but you could feel that that she had her shit together you know like carrying a staff she was ready and I think we spend so much of our time so much of our experiences as we reflect on these component parts of ourselves deciding that that some are good and some are bad some are worthy and some are unworthy some ways of being are okay and others are not and what we're really doing when we say that is you this part of me you are not welcome to be here I don't like you I don't want you go away but if we trust what I believe to be true our innate wholeness completeness and enoughness then we can never really feel whole or complete or enough until we're willing to accept every single part of ourselves as valid until we can recognize that nothing can take our wholeness from you really accept ourselves through this language of I lost myself right or through this language of you're not welcome here and I love that the friend that spurred this conversation we kind of had a discussion of like maybe this is like having all the pieces of a puzzle and sometimes the puzzle feels like it's put together and everything is right and we're like holy shit I've got it together I'm whole I'm complete right and then sometimes all the puzzle pieces are sitting in a fucking pile on the coffee table because somebody walked by and just messed it all up and we feel disheveled and we feel out of control but what does it do to our sense of being to recognize that even when we feel disheveled even when we feel out of control even when we feel like everything is going wrong inside of us and maybe outside of us as well that we still already have everything we need to put the pieces back together every piece is still there and for any of you who build puzzles I'm sure you're sitting there thinking like fuck that after like one time building the puzzle you always lose a piece okay I agree with you that's a hundred percent true but this is not that puzzle okay it this process and this practice of and I've said this so many times I love the word practice right because for all of us as human beings we were unconsciously practicing everything that was ingrained in us by our parents by our friends in our youth by our society and the voices of propaganda by our teachers by our peers we adopted those in an age where we didn't know anything else was available we didn't have any other information to go on and often we adopted it from a place of fear and unworthiness of not being accepted we learn as children to change fundamentally how we express ourselves in order to be rewarded with love we learn that love is conditional we learn that we have to bench parts of ourselves in order to be okay and worthy of the love that we want from our parents and from our friends and from the people that matter we hear stories like if you do this thing then I'll hug you you know but if you're bad or if you stay angry you need to go to your room and be alone and it tells us that these parts of us are not okay but those parts never go away right we're all always whole we're all always complete we all always have every single piece of the puzzle that we need and it's really just about taking the time enough time with ourselves to make friends with every single one of those pieces there's a story by a teacher named Mingyur Rinpoche who his father was a very widely recognized Tibetan Buddhist master and he tells the story of growing up with this tremendous anxiety and that eventually he went to his family and he asked for meditation instruction and he started meditating and you know he felt like it wasn't helping he said as a child he used to run away from his home how amazing would this be into the mountains the Himalayan mountains to try to run away from his anxiety and I love that when he tells the story he says but guess what happened my my friend anxiety followed me and as he learned to meditate and as he learned to be with himself he was given the offering the instruction make friends with your anxiety and again he's just a silly teacher and I really adore this about him he says so finally I made friends I made a friend me and my anxiety were gonna be buddies for the rest of my life and he says and then you know what happened my friend anxiety left me and it's like when we make friends with our experience when we make friends with all of these different puzzle pieces of our component whole we have the ability to finally recognize our wholeness to not be rejecting part of ourselves to not be trying to get rid of of who we are and the beautiful thing that I think arises naturally here is you know I've alluded to Sarah Blondin's podcast quite a lot and she has one that I absolutely love called our warring self versus our infinite self and I love this one but I will tell you very openly that I always listened to it when I was in a state of warring and I wanted to remember that my infinite self has been was on the bench but she was still there right but what I didn't notice for the many years that I was working with this practice was that I was also quietly telling myself that the warring one was bad but the truth is the warring one this ego protector has been the one that up until this point where we have the choice to consciously change our relationship to our warring protector that for me she's a she that she has been the one that lovingly protected me through every difficult moment of my life where some of her actions confused yes did it mean that sometimes I moved through things with no grace at all absolutely but who doesn't right this is the process of coming to understand our habitual patterns and tendencies towards reactivity and when we see them the beauty is we have a choice what I'm offering here fundamentally at the core is that part of that choice is to not shame yourself for what you learned in the past and how you learned how to protect the beauty of being whole and complete and the truth of knowing that nothing and no one can ever take that from you is that there's really nothing to be afraid of you will always have yourself you will always have your wholeness and completeness pain cannot take it from you shitty relationships cannot take it from you horrible bosses cannot take it from you being betrayed by friends cannot take it from you you always have everything you need to keep moving and to make your life more beautiful in every single moment there is nothing missing there is not more there are not things that you have to attain or achieve when we talk about growth I actually think that's horseshit what growth for me really means is an uncovering and an undoing we are uncovering releasing letting go and undoing all of the things that were wired into us without our choice and control and now we're saying I'm willing to express my wholeness my completeness and do as much as we possibly can live from the state of infinite love and that does not mean that life won't suck sometimes because it absolutely will things will be hard they will be painful they will as the episode control is killing us suggest be out of our control and that is hard and painful and my dears I guess let me end with this just because we're whole and complete just because all the wisdom of the universe resides deep inside you and your awakened spirit we're already enlightened and awake does not fucking mean that you're not still human this is something I have to tell myself probably almost every day I am not a Buddha I am still gonna fuck shit up I am still gonna get it wrong I am still gonna be human and have all of these human experiences but God is that so rich so I hope you take these next breaths into the rest of your day with a tender sense of knowing you are everything you already need you already are everything you seek you are whole you are complete and so is every other person on the planet and if we can see each other from those eyes if we could treat each other as though each person and ourselves that we encounter was the most holy being you had ever met what would come out of us towards ourselves and each other maybe that's something to think about thank you so much for taking the time to explore this whole and complete puzzle with me may you discover that all your pieces are beautiful and everything that you need until next time my loves

Reviews

A comforting reminder that we have all the pieces we need already. We just need to use them wisely (when we can) 🙂