In and Out

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”.

If you ever played the Hokey Pokey as a child, you’re familiar with the thrill of placing a body part “in” and then “out” and then “shaking it all about!” Whereas the ups and downs are found on the vertical spatial plane and the back and forth are found on the horizontal spatial plane, to be “in or out” is a three-dimensional take on spatial reality.  

The Hokey Pokey is played by forming a circle. To be “in” the circle is to belong to the whole. To be “out” of the circle is to be dismembered, fragmented, and isolated. Socially, we see the meaning of this spatial metaphor at work among children when they pick teams, among teens and young adults when they negotiate membership in clubs, and even in mature adult communities in churches and organizations that define membership by right behavior or right belief. 

In these settings, symbolically speaking, the game of Hokey Pokey is not always fun. Social division separates the “ins” from the “outs” over and over again in human society. We see the same tendency at the level of the individual when we divvy up our inner world from our outer world. Most of us expend a lot of our energy and attention on the outer externals, to the detriment of the development of our rich, expansive inner worlds.  

The irony of this game of “ins” and “outs” is that we are actually in the formation of a circle when we play. A circle is a symbol of wholeness. For some strange reason, we concoct a sense of separateness and the illusion of division. Yet in three-dimensional reality, you are always still “in” the circle even when parts of you feel “out.” Lucky for us, the hand of the Holy One is “in” even as it is “out.” That paradox can help to remind us of healing and wholeness when we are tempted to resign ourselves to the illusion of separation and division.   

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.

• When have you experienced being “in”—accepted, belonging, part of the whole?
• When have you experienced being “out”—left out, separate, isolated?
• How has the experience of in and out—and the paradox that even when you feel most divided, you are still part of the circle—taught you to remember wholeness?