Awakening to Wholeness is a series of prompts, reflections, and teachings about how holding the tension of opposites can help us to heal division and experience wholeness. If you feel moved to share your own reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites” or tag us on social media with #EHoPWisdomOfOpposites.
This post is adapted from Into Your Heart: A Creative Path to Healing and Wholeness, a workbook by EHoP Artist in Residence Julie Ann Stevens.
I release my idea of who I am & who you are. I allow myself to be held in the mystery that holds all things together.
In a regular practice of stillness, one comes to experience a felt sense of oneness with all.
And this only arrives as we die to who we thought we were over and over again.
I am not my thoughts, my emotional reactions, my achievements, my illness, my health, or aspects of my personality admired by others.
Your identity is beyond these aspects too.
I am not you
and you are not me.
But in the truth of
who we are
beyond who
we think we are —
We are one.
Contemplative Questions
We offer the following questions as prompts to help you reflect on the presence of opposites in your spiritual practice and your life.
- What behaviors do you find especially off-putting in others? What behaviors do you find especially appealing?
- Are there times when the off-putting behaviors can be helpful, or when the appealing ones can be harmful? Take some time to consider the possible positives in the negatives, and the negatives in the positives.
- What practices, teachings, or people help you look beyond the opposites of negative and positive, self and other, in order to experience wholeness?
Join the conversation! If you feel moved to share your reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites” or tag us on social media with #EHoPWisdomOfOpposites.
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