On Being Whole
Photograph by Rami Schandall ©2021
In my life as a creative person, I wear many hats — it is not uncommon within creative careers, to patchwork many skills together. It keeps us flexible and adaptive, able to respond to different projects, different jobs, shifting ground, with a plentiful toolkit and diverse resources. Even so, there is a strong tendency to compartmentalize — by task, by art form, by genre, by profession. This can lead to a feeling a fragmentation, or the need to wear masks rather than hats. For designers who are artists, artists who are designers, there is often a belief that we have to hide one side of ourselves to be credible to the other. Or, within the arts, am I REALLY a writer or REALLY a visual artist? Or REALLY a craftsperson? Or REALLY an intellectual? Oh, and what about yoga and philosophy? Where does THAT fit in?
It seems silly, when I am grounded in an equanimous friendship with myself, to engage in this fragmentation or hiding. I am always me, seeing through my eyes, making things, connecting with people by word by sound by touch by sight — present, never separate, never fractured, in touch with essence, being whole.
And then there are the uncertain times, when I think I am none of these things, not successful in any of them, or maybe actually terrible at all of them — a fraud! Who knows this old friend, Imposter Syndrome? One of the many mara who deceive and destabilize us. There are voices outside our heads that will echo these opinions — there are so many ways to be knocked off centre.
How do we make friends with ourselves?
As I sit in the middle of a century (mid-LIFE I hope) this seems the most relevant question — and, the path is more clear than it has ever been. As a much younger person, a teenager, in my early twenties, even into my forties — the question was still: WHAT SHOULD I DO? WHO WILL I BECOME? I remember the blessing of wise, older friends, who shared with me that it all just made more sense when they got to their fifties — all the disparate things that had called to them in their life had a logic that became clear. Maybe it hadn't made sense in a rational “career path,” but all those things pointed toward themselves. I read somewhere recently (very sorry not to have the source for you) that “life keeps on giving you perfect opportunities to meet yourself.”
Today I am making work that crosses divides: art inside design, anthropology inside fiction, bringing the unconscious into the light of day in poetry and art and body-mind practice. I am deeply grateful to have lived long enough and be fortunate enough, to see my path open and circling upon itself — to have the opportunity to sense the whole. We are never not on our path, which is life, which is forever teaching us ourselves. A beautiful feeling of “being on the right path” is simply this: I have a clearer picture of the whole, and I am at peace with the sense it makes out of me. The notion of paths, and selves, and The Way… they are all one, not separate.
I still have uncertainty — which may be a feature, not a bug! But I know, because I have lived it again and again: mara come and go, the volume goes up and down — I can and will recenter in friendship, with my human friends and beloveds, and with my own disparate parts. The practices I share with you are ones that help me find stability in this peace. In yoga and in sangha and a creative life, the practice, ongoing, is to befriend the whole.
