Wholistic Education
My life’s work is constantly evolving to meet the me who steps more fully into form with each passing day. In many ways, it’s a bit of an incubation process, with small steps here and there, gaining confidence in what I know, how I lead and how I choose to move forward into the world. All areas of my life have been rearranged and dismantled in order to be rebuilt, and the integration of this is fascinating to live and bare witness to.
We are multi-faceted human beings, and I am an excellent example of what this means (which is why I teach on it so comfortably). I am so multi-faceted in fact, that I think I make people’s heads spin a bit when I talk about my life. My many interests, passions and professional pursuits have left traditionalists scratching their heads, or in some cases turning up their noses, so to say, because I greatly fail to fit into anyone’s box. Just as you think you’re about to figure me out, I’m onto something new.
To become whole means to weave together the different aspects of who we are, designing our life in such a way where contradictions become fewer, until they disappear completely. To become whole means to know thyself really, really well. It means to begin perceiving what society has taught us that is NOT healthy and replacing it with habits and behaviors that are. What we eat and the things we buy, the activities we take part in, the things we watch, the things we talk about (or whom, how and why!) and much more make up the many levels that either keep us from embodying wholeness or help us to get there. To be whole means to hold yourself wholly accountable: for what you do, say and think, identifying when you’re not in alignment and comfortably being able to dig deep to find out why. Once we do so, we open up our ability to deprogram to our responses and replace them with awareness, to prevent continuing the same patterns in the future.
Wholeness is not supported by our current institutions. In fact, they are primarily designed to do the opposite, as wholly embodied people are not nearly as profitable as people who are fearful, bored, lonely, sick, judgemental, distracted, depressed and underutilized (most of our current professions and lifestyles underutilize our whole being). We constantly receive signals by our societies that leave us disempowered, even when we think they’re doing the opposite for us. The point is they make more money and we slip into deeper unconscious awareness.
Many people are already wholistic educators, because rather than merely a title, it is a lifestyle and a way of showing up in the world. They are those who understand the concepts of “soul, soil and society,” (a Satish Kumar phrase I use frequently). This concept highlights the ways in which we become very familiar with the care of our soul, the self, the mind/body/spirit connection, how to heal ourselves (on all of the levels just mentioned) and every detail of our inner being. It speaks to our need to give back to the land, to know where we live, what grows there, how to grow, the history of place and how we impact the natural world around us. And then… how do we work with our community, give back, better other people’s lives and work to bring greater harmony into our public spaces to benefit the whole.
We are all connected, and the more we do the inner work, the more we recognize how important it is that we make conscious decisions. For instance, the people you hang out with impact the type of interests you have, which impacts the type of job you get, which impacts the type of food you eat, which impacts your mental and physical states, which impacts your health, which impacts your education levels, which impacts how important the environment is to you, which impacts what products you buy, which impacts how much you enjoy the arts, which impacts the books you read, which impacts how much time you spend in your community, which impacts how fulfilled you are, which impacts how you treat people, which impacts how much you love yourself, which impacts how much you love others. You can rearrange that in any way. It doesn’t matter, because everything we do impacts every other aspect of our life, as well as the lives of others, as well as the environment. Every decision each and every one of us make is absolutely connected with the rest of the world, for better or for worse.
Wholistic educators help to awaken you. We help you to remember when individuality took precedence over the well-being of the whole and what we need to do to reverse those effects. We help the whole to see our blinders, our shadows, our short comings, our ignorance- we all have them, but we do not have to keep them. Wholistic Education is important for the individual journey, as well as the collective, for as long as those in our communities sleep the whole suffers. Not just the people, but the planet, too. Because EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED.
