5
BECOMING WHOLE
The first capacity of Shakti Leadership is wholeness. By wholeness, we mean the capacity to balance, integrate, and unite all the divided and fragmented parts of oneself. It is the only state from which we can access our full power.
There is an acute quality of aliveness in being whole. The whole is indeed greater than the sum of the parts; when we achieve wholeness in any dimension, we transcend the qualities of the individual parts being integrated, while still being able to express their unique and diverse aspects.
THE QUEST FOR WHOLENESS
Powerful symbols from diverse cultures seed our collective consciousness and inspire the drive toward the fulfillment of wholeness. They show the way to wholeness to inspire us and serve as goal posts to move toward.
The “vesica piscis” symbol comes from the Western tradition and shows two interconnecting circles within a larger third circle. The interconnecting circles represent the polarities of the masculine and feminine coming together. The overlapping area acts as the yoni or womb through which one can move into the greater third circle, which represents the singularity—the oneness, the whole that contains all dualities.
Another symbol comes from the yogic tradition and shows the ardhanarishwar, which is Shiva-Shakti integrated, half man–half woman in a cosmic, eternal dance. Divinity is worshipped in this form in many Indian temples. Casey Sheahan, former CEO of Patagonia, was deeply inspired when he first encountered this image: “Seeing that statue inspired me to think about business in the same way, because we all have these traits within us. I looked at this statue and realized that’s the perfect representation of how we need to conduct ourselves energetically. We need both sides.”1
A third symbol comes from the Chinese tradition of the Tao; it depicts the complementary principles of yin and yang in dynamic equilibrium with each other, each containing the other in itself even as they dance together.
Each of these symbols represents the resolution of polarities and dualities into a harmony, a balance, and a dynamic equilibrium: sustainable, but also ever evolving to newer and more complex states of wholeness.
Shakti Leaders Speak: On the Whole Person
John Gray is the author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. He has thought deeply about where we are headed on this journey of transcending the masculine-feminine duality:
As we are becoming more conscious of who we are, our unique selves, we find that we’re not just physical beings; we have a nonphysical reality which we often call spirit or soul. That part of us is neither wholly masculine nor wholly feminine. It is the whole person, whatever unique calibration of masculine and feminine we are. As we have been moving into this evolutionary drive towards the expression of the unique self, and the self-awareness which leads to that, we feel confined by the narrow stereotypical roles that were historically placed upon us because they were necessary for survival. Why were men and women taking different roles? Because there was a partnership. As the spirit evolves, those rules become way too limiting, and there is tremendous confusion of “Who am I?” because we all have access to both sides.2
THREE VIEWS OF WHOLENESS
Wholeness is inextricably tied into health and well-being. The yogic, Taoist, and Western perspectives offer three different ways to think about wholeness.3
The Yogic View of Wholeness
The yogic view of health and well-being is a deeply spiritual one, expressed in terms of self-transcendence. Life starts with the divine or spirit, which is inherently and eternally whole. The spirit manifests in mind and body. Since life draws continually from this spiritual source, illness and dysfunction result from having somehow broken or separated from it. Naturally, a return to well-being requires a reconnection to spirit, the original source of wholeness.
According to yogic philosophy, man has two natures: an ordinary self (the ego personality or lower/outer nature) that lives in the realm of matter, and a divine self (the soul or higher/inner nature) that lives in the realm of spirit. Wholeness involves transcending your ordinary self and accessing your divine self: this state is always one of health, joy, and freedom. The divine self has the power and intelligence to heal, making the body and mind whole.
Reflections
• How and when are you aware of your divine self?
• How might you access and receive its healing power in your body?
The Taoist View of Wholeness
The Taoist view of wholeness is expressed in terms of balance. The concept of wholeness or the universal order of life is called Tao (pronounced dow). It maintains its dynamic equilibrium through the play of two equal, opposite, and complementary forces called yin and yang. The interaction of yin and yang produces the primal life energy called qi (pronounced chi). Everything, including human beings, reflects this essential duality. The yang aspect is masculine, active, strong, and rational, while the yin aspect is feminine, receptive, soft, and emotional. In addition, all creation simultaneously contains subsystems (mind/body/spirit) while being part of increasingly larger systems (family/community/workplace/nature). All these subsystems—small and large, human and natural—and the energy flows that link them make up the full “ecosystem.”
For the entire ecosystem to be healthy and whole, yin-yang balance needs to be maintained within and between systems. The Taoists see illness as an obstruction or stagnation of the flow of qi, which is associated with the imbalance of yin and yang. Wholeness and health are restored when yin and yang are rebalanced and the free and optimum flow of qi is enabled, both within a person and within the ecosystem. This can be done through different energy-work tools and techniques: in medicine, through a balance of herbs, and, for personal equilibrium, by practicing Tai Chi and Qi-gong.
Michael Gelb, author of many books including How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, has studied Taoist wisdom extensively. He says, “The wisdom of the yin and yang is the balance and harmony of the opposites. It’s the very principle that sustains and nourishes our existence. You breathe in, and you breathe out. Your heart expands and contracts. All your cells expand and contract. What we call ‘health’ is the rhythmic pulsation of our whole being.”4
Reflections
• What ecosystems are you a part of and how balanced or polarized are they?
• How balanced or polarized are your yin (feminine) and yang (masculine) aspects?
A Western View of Wholeness
In most fields of Western thought, the concept of wholeness is hard to find. Much of Western thought has been directed toward specialization, focusing on individual parts rather than on the whole. This approach has propelled the world’s knowledge forward in myriad directions. But it can be limiting and exclusive rather than expansive and holistic.
The most compelling Western concept of wholeness comes from Carl Jung’s work on the ego-shadow. We each have a shadow or dark side, which consists of our denied, disowned, rejected, or repressed parts. If we don’t recognize this, it can hold us back from realizing our true potential. If we do not become conscious of the unconscious, it can rule our life. As Jung said, “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”5 This also holds us back from truly connecting and collaborating with people around us; as the expression goes, “We judge in others what we deny in ourselves.”
Jung took the ancient understanding of man as composed of psyche (mind) and soma (body) one level deeper. He discovered that the psyche itself was composed of multiple aspects, including ego and shadow. A person’s ego is his sense of self or personal identity, the part of himself he is aware or conscious of; this ego is based upon his upbringing and experiences, as well as his aspirations and choices. Each person also carries a “shadow” within the psyche that he is unconscious of; this shadow self is composed of qualities that are the opposite of what is displayed by a person’s ego. Deeper wisdom reveals that nothing is true without its exact opposite also being true; thus the universe seeks equilibrium.6 The way to cultivate wholeness is by embracing the shadow. While the ego does its utmost to deny, reject, and repress the shadow qualities because it judges them as undesirable or threatening, real growth comes from integrating them in your life. This integration returns you to psychological wholeness, a process Jung called “individuation.” This can be done through self-understanding, presencing the shadow, polarity mapping, etc. Shadow work is its own field of psychotherapy that one can undergo with a Jungian therapist.
Reflections
• What do you know and acknowledge about your shadow?
• What aspects or qualities of yourself are you giving up in order to be the kind of person you are at present?
• How and when do you cause yourself/others pain or conflict?
• How can you bring your shadow material into the light and express it in a healthy way?
Jung observed that after integrating the ego-shadow, the next level of integration needed to come into one’s psychological wholeness or individuation is to integrate your anima (your inner woman/feminine complement if you are a man) and your animus (your inner man/masculine complement if you are a woman).
In sum, these three great traditions give us three different perspectives of wholeness. The yogic perspective points to a higher spiritual wholeness that can be attained by uniting your ordinary self with your divine self. The Taoist perspective embraces a wider, systemic wholeness that can be attained by balancing the yin and yang within yourself and within your ecosystem. The Jungian perspective calls for inner psychological wholeness that can be attained by ego-shadow and anima-animus integration.
THE HOLY FAMILY REUNION
Another split or duality that exists within our own psyche is between our parent-self and our child-self. As we grow and develop a functioning ego in the world, we learn behavioral and belief patterns from our parents.
For a man to individuate, the primary parent he orients himself toward is his father, the first role model for manhood in his life. Similarly, for a woman, the primary parent she orients herself toward, as a model for womanhood, is her mother. As we mature, the voices of our parents continue to resonate inside us, offering us protection and giving advice to our immature, fragile ego or child-self. According to Transactional Analysis (a psychoanalytic therapy for understanding interactions between individuals), we so internalize these voices that they become powerful, archetypal energies that drive our psychological car. We develop an “inner parent” even as we contain within ourselves the archetype of the inner child, which is the wondrous, playful, creative instinct within the psyche.
As we grow up, we individuate out of our primary relationship with our external parent. In order to come into her own adulthood, and become self-driven and self-caring, a girl moving toward maturity needs to disconnect from her bonding pattern with her mother and find those same nurturing, caring qualities within herself. In a sense, she has to become her own mother.
However, given the patriarchy in which most women have been raised, many have oriented themselves away from the mother figure, denying and undervaluing her essential qualities. This has left a wound in our own psyche—a wound that we need to heal. We can do so by validating, acknowledging, and owning all the powerful capacities of the mature feminine within ourselves. This is called “healing the mother-daughter split, the deep feminine wound.”7 It is how we become mature women. A man has to do the same with his father-figure, by finding and integrating all the positive masculine qualities within himself.
Having come into adulthood, we are now ready to engage in the next level of integration, the “sacred marriage” of the inner masculine and the inner feminine qualities—what Jung called integrating your animus (if you’re a woman) or your anima (if you’re a man).8
In short, we have to reclaim our lost halves to become a whole person. As we become our own parent and our own child and find both our inner feminine and inner masculine natures in a creative, self-sustaining dance within, we achieve a “holy family reunion” and come into our whole, healthy, individuated self (Figure 5.1). This is a happy state where, our inner man-woman union gives us the ability to exercise “tough-love” and our parent-child integration makes us a “wise-fool”!
The Inner Wedding
The Holy Grail of the quest for wholeness in many mythologies is the inner wedding, which can be understood as a dance of love and power within ourselves. Building on the yin-yang symbol, it depicts the sacred union of the “mindful” woman and the “heartful” man, or “woman of wisdom and man of heart.”9 In other words, our own inner masculinity achieves mature wholeness by integrating the complementary yin qualities within; equally our inner femininity matures into wholeness by integrating the complementary yang qualities within (Figure 5.2)
Figure 5.1—A Holy Family Reunion
The journey to the inner wedding is a lifetime’s work. It takes a significant amount of inner work to discover your complementary other half, to find and meet that beloved and achieve a sacred union. It is about finding your masculine strength and wisdom—the Shiva—as well as awakening the Shakti—the feminine, emotional nature that vitalizes and nourishes deeply from within. In this way, both men and women become the ardhanarishwar, with traits that are simultaneously feminine and masculine; they are each whole, in their own individual way.
Figure 5.2—The Inner Wedding: A Dance of Love and Power
Once you are whole, you can enter into perfectly harmonious relationships with anyone because you no longer need them to complete you. When you really come into your individuation, your psychological wholeness, you can step back into the world and know how to accept and include everyone. You know how to “hold the whole” in a way that helps others without making them codependent on you. You know how to hold the space for them so they can journey.
This is the ultimate feminine capacity: to be able to hold the whole and bear the journey of life. Nilima speaks to this based on her own personal experience of the process of individuation and being able to relate deeply to the yogic goddess Shakti.
I have been on the path of a yogini since the year 2000. My journey of searching began in 1998 with a professional crisis, followed by a personal crisis when my husband was diagnosed with cancer in 2001. I came to yoga through the Sivananda yoga tradition, and then to the Integral Yoga of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Since then I have never looked back as I’ve gone through my journey into the grace of the Mother. Step-by-step, I have turned all aspects of my work, my relationships, my life, my being into the ground and opportunity to do yoga. This is the path of Integral Yoga: to submit and surrender to the supreme Shakti, the bridge between the transcendent source and its material creation, who mediates and integrates the two. Shakti spiritualizes matter and materializes the spirit. We call this supreme Shakti the Divine Mother, or simply the Mother, and relate to her as a child would, finding great joy and strength in a relational and personal experience of a transcendent principle.
The Mother is the agency of the divine that leads evolution to its fulfillment and perfection. As part of that work I, as a woman, have had to awaken to the reality that in order to grow, a woman has to experience the use and abuse of power, which manifests in many ways, including and especially in your deepest, most loving relationships.
The Dual Nature of the Goddess
The divine consciousness is Shiva, the masculine, and its creative dynamic force is Shakti, the feminine. The goddess in the yogic tradition carries two very beautiful natures. When Shakti is in a harmonized state (i.e., not in conflict with the masculine), she is Parvati or Gauri, which means “the white (or light) one,” who sits alongside Shiva with their children Ganesha and Karthikeya. They are a holy family living in harmony, presiding over their universe. But when she has to overpower the masculine that shows up in an unconscious, aggressive, violent way, this same Gauri becomes Kali, the black (or dark) one.
In yogic iconography, a wild, devouring Kali is shown dancing on the corpse of Shiva. A corpse is called shava, which literally means a body without Shiva, i.e., consciousness. Only when Shiva awakens and intervenes is Kali, as the chaotic Shakti, appeased and harmonized.
In another yogic myth, the demon Mahishasura (who represents the drive for sexual aggression) is battled over nine days and nine nights and eventually vanquished on the tenth day by the goddess Durga, also an aspect of Kali energy. Durga is a virgin goddess; it’s interesting that when the goddess is in her virgin form, she confronts the aggressive sexual force of the masculine. Equally, once that battle is done, she returns to being shanta or peaceful Durga, and reintegrates with Gauri, the happy consort to Shiva.
Such are the beautiful ways in which mythologies from around the world show us the psychology that is at work between the masculine and feminine. It is something that’s being worked out in the collective body of humanity.
HEALING THE WOUNDED INNER CHILD
Eastern wisdom and Western psychology both address the different aspects that make up the ego or personality.10 It is as if one carries within the body not one but many selves, each of which has its own preferences and way of being in the world. To be a well-rounded and functioning person, one needs to be anchored in one’s most authentic and aware self, while also being able to access all other parts of the being as required. One such self is the inner child, the self that is creative and curious, with a great capacity for wonder and joy.
This inner child has remained at the psychological age of seven or younger. In an ideal world, our inner child reminds us to have fun, see life afresh in each moment, and be happy. All too often, though, this vulnerable inner child was wounded in the early years and developed coping mechanisms such as tantrums, withdrawal, and self-aggrandizement to deal with difficult situations, feel safe, and get love, acceptance, and security. As we grow up, this inner child can remain wounded; the wound inevitably surfaces when one is under stress or feels threatened. Such situations trigger the memory of the reaction one used as a child to defend or protect oneself, and the same reaction is repeated.
While emotions such as anger, self-pity, or pride may have been useful in difficult childhood situations, they are not usually appropriate responses in your adult life. As an aware adult, you need to uncover your wounds and heal them, thus replacing unhealthy responses with more effective and healthy ones. This will come as a huge relief to you as well as to those around you who have to bear the brunt of your inappropriate behavior patterns. However, even after understanding how negative emotions can impair their health, people are often still unable or unwilling to change. Their well-cultivated habit of negative patterns may still be serving them in some way; perhaps it is the only way they know to satisfy their unmet need to heal the wounded inner child and enact patterns that nourish life and its processes. Connecting with one’s genuine needs and learning how to fulfill them in healthy ways are essential aspects of become whole.
Reflections
• What are some of your recurring emotional patterns? When did you first learn them?
• What purpose did they serve then? How are they serving you now?
• Can you identify the feeling under the emotion and the unmet need under that feeling?
• How can you meet this need in a legitimate and healthy way?
The Masculine Wound in Men
The feminine wound is adolescent in nature. Many women today are psychologically stuck at the developmental stage of adolescence, not yet ready to grow into adulthood. They have to wrestle with the myth of romance and dependence on a male figure who will validate her and sexually partner with her.
With men (or the masculine within), we are dealing with an even deeper, more infantile or archaic level of development in the psyche which may have remained unaddressed or incomplete.
Much like our body has an immune system to defend it against attack by foreign antigens, our psyche too has a psychological immune system to defend it against perceived threats to its integrity and equilibrium from an external source. In autoimmune disorders, the very system that protects the body turns to attack and destroy it. Similarly, our hyper-psychological defense systems, if left unaddressed, can stymie our own psychological growth and, worse, make us dysfunctional.
Many men carry a very vulnerable wounded child within and build a formidable defense system to cover that vulnerability. This shows up in some men as aggression and a tendency to ferociously counterattack when they feel threatened. This deep wounding is at work in the collective psyche of men and the masculine within, of which much of the conflict in the world is an expression: violence, wars, terrorism, territorial conflicts at home and in the workplace, power plays, and turf battles.
It is not the purpose of this book to call out the wrongdoing of men, but to compassionately uncover the psychology at work in order to help move it to healthy and more inclusive expressions. The first step is recognition and awareness, followed by taking responsibility for healing and maturing one’s undeveloped nature.
With reference to Jung’s individuation process, the first journey we must undertake for psychological wholeness (i.e., to integrate the ego-shadow) is to integrate our parent-child selves. The shadow is often a part of our infantile child-self, left undeveloped for various reasons of self-defense. The masculine or inner hero’s journey is one of facing our fears and retrieving the shadow or child-self from the unconscious. The second journey is to integrate our anima-animus. This is a journey for love.
Once we have integrated our inner child/shadow and inner beloved, we come into our mature human self and can now set forth on the third journey, the greatest human adventure: the journey into the superconscious, to embrace our higher self, to embody capacities hitherto ascribed to the godhead.
So, whether man or woman, the hero in us needs to quest thrice: once for adventure as we face down our fears, then for romance as we come into our love, and finally for enlightenment, as we attain self-mastery and bring it in selfless service of our world.
THE FOUR-FOLD SELF
The human experience of the heroic journey happens at two broad levels: at the level of the mind and at the level of the body. The level of the mind is called the psyche and the level of the body is called the soma.
There are two forces that each have two sides; one operates on the body, the other on the mind. This creates what Brian Skea called the four-fold self. It is a model of the self with four archetypal aspects: logos, mythos, thanatos, and eros (Figure 5.3).11
Humans differ from animals in that we have a mind. The somatic evolution in the animal body, which we still carry, attained a high level of refinement in the course of evolution. In the world of animals before humans, the body became perfected—cats can jump and land with ease, monkeys can hurtle effortlessly from tree to tree. But when the mind came to define what it means to be human, logic, planning, and thinking began to upset the apple cart of evolution. The minute we became thinking animals, we became very confused animals. The body and mind have been in a tremendous tussle with each other inside each of us ever since. The psyche says, “Stay, do the work,” but the soma may say, “I don’t care. I just want to sleep.” We can only become whole and attain physical health and mental clarity to the extent that we are able to balance and harmonize our psychic and somatic energies.
Figure 5.3—The Four-fold Self
Different forces are at play in the psyche and the soma. In the soma there is a drive for life, or eros. All animals are driven to mate and reproduce life. There is also in each of us a death drive, or thanatos. This is also essential. Consider what happens when some of our cells fail to die; that is how we get cancer, because thanatos is not working anymore. Without death, there can be no further life. Where there is a drive for life, there has to be a drive for death. Otherwise, the cycle cannot continue.
A book called Terror, Violence, and the Impulse to Destroy was released soon after the traumatic events of 9/11. Psychologists sought to understand what in human nature could cause individuals to wreak such destruction. Where do these destructive impulses come from?12 They are in our biology. Along with our sexual instinct (“kama” in sanskrit), inside each of us we carry a death drive (“mara” in sanskrit) from which the impulse to destroy emanates.
Our psyche also has two sides: logos and mythos. Logos is the logical and rational mind that helps you to think things through, to understand and discern. That is the drive trying to evolve us to the next level of consciousness. To balance it, you have the unconscious mythos, which dwells in the mythical, symbolic world, the special world, with archetypes embodying emotions such as lust, anger, hatred, greed, and jealousy. In the yogic tradition, these two aspects are known as vidya and maya. Logos or vidya is considered the realm of the masculine and mythos or maya the realm of the feminine.
As thinking beings, many of us would prefer to stay in the upper realm. However, we have no choice but to also cycle through the lower realm. That’s where the real power, the Shakti, the juice of life is to be found. It is not found in the unmoving masculine, the eternal, unmanifest Shiva, or its representative, the reasoning mind. It has to be lived and gained by traversing the vivifying, mythic ground of Shakti.
This is the four-fold self. Your body-mind is constantly being churned by these four forces. It’s as if we’re being turned through these four arms. They are pulling one against the other and we are right in the middle of it. That is your journey.
A UNIVERSAL SYMBOL OF WHOLENESS AND AUSPICIOUS BEING
Somewhere there is only one psyche, the collective consciousness. Whenever it discerns a truth of the journey of life, it tries to put it together in some kind of diagrammatic form. The resulting symbols capture eternal truths.
The incredible geometry and physics of creation have been understood and captured across all the great wisdom traditions in the symbol of the cross, which is closely associated with Christianity but has universally come to signify wholeness and auspicious feeling. You see it across many wisdom traditions, such as the Hindu and Buddhist swastika and in the chakana, the “Inca cross.” It represents the originating and organizing principles wherein the divine, the eternal, can manifest here on earth. At the center, where the two arms cross, is the portal between all that is and who you are. Standing there is what it means to be centered, to be fully and truly present. The four arms represent the four directions or the four faces of Brahma. The drama of reality and the dynamics of creation and how it works are captured in these symbols from different traditions.
The conscious and unconscious are two worlds: that which you know and that which you don’t know. To master life, you have to know how to stand in that still space at the center, the calm eye of the storm. This center is where you access your wholeness, all parts of your humanity. It is where you harmonize and balance, integrate and align with the four main drives required to express yourself as fully human.
Your presence is also located in this center. When you are thus centered, you are truly present.