Arriving at Wholeheartedness
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Hello friends,
I miss writing to you all, so when I started drafting this Enzyme, it accidentally became about writing itself.
Every night for a while now, I’ve been looking at this list of reflection questions by the late John O’Donohue. Like any other day, I was going through the list in a state of intimate introspection.
What reached me today? How deep did it imprint?
Who saw me today?
What visitations had I from the past and from the future?
and then when it came to this line
What did I avoid today?
I was instantly struck by a response, whispered in a faint inner voice: “Writing”.
I have been jotting down thoughts here and there but didn’t get to put them into shareable posts. The excuse is not even being too busy. Rather, it is “well Khuyen, your tendency is to withdraw into your own cave and write, but you truly shine when you show up in the world and engage with other people”. Indeed that was what I’ve been doing.
And yet, the soul knows when the self lies.
Using writing as a personal example, I dove into an exposition of the journey towards becoming more more wholehearted with work and what that unveils about our source of motivation.
I hope it resonates with you, whatever you are doing.
Khuyen
Arriving at Wholeheartedness
On burnout and the truer sources of our motivation
For the longest time, I struggle to situate writing in my life, straddling between “doing things in the world” vs “doing inner work”. It’s a challenge that anyone who is pursuing the spiritual path sooner or later encounter.
For many people, the phrase “inner work” doesn’t mean anything until they hit a crisis that forces them to re-evaluate their own life. Most just see that the opposite of doing is simply resting.
But it’s not entirely true. As I’ve written before about the two kinds of exhaustion before in different kinds of work. If the doing comes from the right place, you can feel energized for days.
Yes, even if you are a scrawny Captain America.
On the other hand, if you listen to people who have burned out (or being there yourself), you’ll know that no amount of ordinary rest is enough. It will take a much more complex process of re-alignment.
The dynamics of the inner life is not simply recharge-your-battery-and-keep-running. Rather, it’s more like you have exhausted your current inner gold mines and have to find a different, often deeper and more sustainable sources. Gold mines like “this is so darn broken, need to fix it” (anger), “i want to make my parents proud” (pride) or “I’m afraid my boss will think I’m incompetent” (fear) can keep you warm for a while, but sooner or later it will run out.
Burn out, revisited.
Interesting enough, the word “burn out” is rather apt to describe the physical experience of exhaustion. Often starts with passionate big flame, it slowly flickers down and eventually anguishes, leaving a freshly burned hole in the heart.
Despite the pain, burn out is not bad per se. Sometimes it happens to remind us of the unsustainability of certain sources. I just hope that we can listen to such reminder more gently rather than crashing into the verge of despair and worse, turning ourselves numb.
This reminds me of a quote by David Whyte: “The antidote of exhaustion is not necessarily rest. It is wholeheartedness”
Indeed. We get exhausted in the long run not because we’ve given our all. It is because we haven’t, because we cannot be wholehearted and open to receive the full rejuvenation of the world, both visible and invisible forms.
I thought of a writing principle by the wise technical writer Gerald Weinberg that I’m grateful to have learned earlier on: “Never attempt to write about something you don’t care about”. Otherwise, the pain is just too much to bear. If I don’t get to write about what I truly love and care about, I’ll soon burn out.
As with any creative endeavor, writing is a challenging and exciting work not so much because we are producers churning out words on the screen but more because we have to keep digging and scouring for new sources of inspiration. While the latter doesn’t require us to be on the desk all the time, the former is a full time job.
The art of sustaining one’s inspiration and staying in touch with the vitality of the world is not just in the self-care and meditation section of the bookshelf. It’s complex skill that can be learned, best by osmosis and direct transmission from the people who have more practices in this Quality without a Name .
The tricky path towards Wholeheartedness
For better or worse, arriving at this place of wholeheartedness takes some intention, many refinements and plenty of pitfalls along the way.
Somehow in the course of life, we forget what it is like to be wholehearted, let alone at work. Like most well-intentioned Millennials whose cheesy tagline is “meaningful work that makes a difference”, I often start my work engagement with that eager spirit. Then something happens, and I start doubting if the ideal job even exists.
The question about the true sources of our motivation doesn’t come up only in my personal example of writing but also in many of my conversations with people from different walks of life who had once cared about their work.
It doesn’t matter what the stories we tell from “I’ve always loved to write since young” to “I care for women empowerment because I have been through it” and “I cannot stand this broken education system” or “I just love my interesting colleagues”, there are only a handful of underlying motivations.
Categorizing those has been an ambitious endeavor of development theorists for a long long time, since ancient spiritual leaders like Buddha and Jesus to modern day psychologists with many frameworks such as Power vs Force that I’ve been using more under my apprenticeship with MindKind Institute .
(Note: this framework definitely needs to be read in full context to understand each of the state, not just the name. PC)
The challenge is that these motivations often get mixed up or mistaken for one another to the point where pure motivation is more of an ideal than reality.
The question that I’m most interested in now, both from a personal and collective level, is not even how to move up this ladder. It is simpler than that: how might we become aware of the source of our actions and understand its impact? Because lasting systemic change can only come from consciousness shifts, which only deep understanding can bring about.
As an example, most of us know what it feels like to be stuck: nothing works, and the more we try certain solutions, the worse things get. The nature of stuckness is that we are holding on to something that we aren’t even aware of. One of those is this inner blind spot of motivation from which we operate, which will also have the biggest leverage to get us unstuck.
I’ve known several people whose entire successful careers come from a dissatisfaction with broken systems and therefore brokenness of life. (notice how common is the language of “X is broken. Let’s fix this” in the entrepreneurial circles) I’ve also known people whose stellar performance comes from a drive to fulfill an unmet expectation by a parental figure. Unfortunately, they are not exceptions but rather norms.
For a long time, I also felt like a grand purpose or overaching theme for my existence is missing (sorry, precocious philosophical child). I’ve spent much time agonizing about the point of life. First world problem maybe, but still a problem.
The hippie & spiritual circles have a nice phrase, “our best gifts come from our most sacred wounds”. In many cases, our entrepreneurial drive, hunger for success or insatiable curiosity have indeed been wonderful gift that have driven us to do and achieve much. However, eventually the gift will dry out if we don’t pay reverence to the wound, to take the time and space to get to know its unique pain.
To use a geeky Christian metaphor, perhaps God chose a freemium model when he was developing a plan for this business of human existence. At first, we can use a free, limited and yet still powerful version of our God-given talent, but after a while if we truly wanted to level up, we’ve got to sign up for the full package: to devote yourself to Him. The only difference from traditional freemium model is that God doesn’t reveal to each of us when the free version runs out. Instead, he’ll give us signs along the way like burnouts and stuckness so that we will know when we are near. Behind what can sometimes seem to us like impossible conditions is His unconditional love, disguised by a twisted logic only He can comprehend.
In a way, our truer life, what Richard Rohr calls the Second Half of Life, only begins with this realization that there is something much more beyond our own personal will of the sort “This is what I want. This is my dream. I’m going to do whatever it takes to achieve it.” I’m not even talking about goals like getting a job, a car, a house or a stable family. Sometimes they are grand, noble missions like “world peace” or “women empowerment” or even “raising consciousness”.
It’s not that anything is wrong with having a strong personal will. On the contrary, it’s indeed necessary, and in fact anyone we admire from the famous heroes and cultural icons to an uncle we respect all have it. At the same time, they are also aware of a larger Will — what we often casually term “the Universe” — and know that they aren’t alone at whatever depth of the journey they pursuit.
David Whyte writes about this realization in Everything is waiting for you.
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions.
To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings.
[…]
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation.
Without this realization, we are stuck with trying to get ourselves unstuck using only the small personal will, no matter how strong it is (and oftentimes precisely because it is too strong). What makes it even harder is that the patterns that eventually lead us to this big Stuckness are often first rewarded by other people. As a personal example, I by default tend to analyze things to a T, so I do well in that kind of analysis work and often get rewarded for my good performance in previous jobs, which motivate me to keep going.
“What maybe wrong about that?”, you ask.
Nothing. Except that external validation doesn’t always equal internal nourishment. Oftentimes these two sources of motivation can get pushed further and further apart, even if just by a little each time, until the tension becomes too much too bear. We get burn out or depression when the pretension of “everything is ok” stops working.
It took me a while to have just a glimpse of how behind my insatiable appetite to understand and scrutinize how things work is a sense of disconnection from life itself. Tools like the Enneagram has been extremely helpful as a starting point to understand that deeper source of motivation. Then, with gradual practice in stillness and contemplation, I learn to dwell more in the contour empty space on this canvas called My Life and become more lucid of the patterns that once were rigidly named “this is Who I Am”. From that empty background that highlight my thoughts, emotions and behaviors grow a sense of acceptance and compassion for that conditioned way of being.
What continues to unfold is a sort of paradoxical dual awareness of both the gift and the wound. Richard Rohr again comments on his experience after being in longer silence.
All I know is that there is a deep “okayness” to life — despite all the contradictions — which has become even more evident in the silence.
Even when much is terrible, seemingly contradictory, unjust, and inconsistent, somehow sadness and joy are able to coexist at the same time. The negative value of things no longer cancels out the positive, nor does the positive deny the negative. When the situation requires, I can use my strength, and I also don’t take both strength and weakness so absolutely anymore.
Becoming Composter of our own experiences
If anything I’ve learned from my own experience of getting to know the source, this process is very much like natural composting to enrich the soil. The right heat, humidity, invisible bacteria, space, time: all are needed for this process.
We need the heat of the experiences, the lubricating moisture of openness, the psychological enzymes to make meanings, the inward spaciousness and vast patience. The question is how might we cultivate an inner environment most conductive to such alchemical shit-turning-into-flower? How might we foster together an ecology of active experience composters, because there are plenty of shitty things we need to digest?
In many ways, these “lower” sources like Anger or Fear are the necessary raw living materials that need to be composted so that something more beautiful can grow from that heap. Love may win hate, but hate might have been the mother of love. Courage may trump fear, but fear was probably the father of courage. Even if “Love” can be above “Fear” in the hierarchy, the way to get to love is to go down into the fear.
What will come out on the other end may not be a permanent transformation (“I’ll never hate / get angry / be afraid again”) but an understanding that these states of being are never that separate. They always co-exist, first inside of us and then projected outside onto others.
Which brings me to what Joanna Macy, a renowned teacher and personal heroine who’s now in her 90s, once told me: “It’s not a war between the good guys and the bad guys. The line between good and evil runs deep in the landscape of every human’s heart”.
The work is not to erase the line, but to see it clearly, accept it and choose where we stand. This is the real work I can be wholehearted about, and it’s definitely not for everyone.
And yet, if life compels you to step on this marvelous and frightening path, I wish you lots of wholeheartedness and grace.
Sharing is sprouting.
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Quotes I'm contemplating this week
“What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents have not lived.” - Carl Jung
Woa. I've been really contemplating on this...About the life that my mom hasn't had. An almost arranged marriage. And the near-unknown father figure.
"Vulnerability is not a weakness but a faculty to understand what kind of visible and invisible help you need to ask for. " - David Whyte.
Yes, we need a lot of help, most of which is invisible. That's why the faculty of vulnerability needs to be continuously practiced and refined.
Lastly..
In the spirit of contemplation, I’d invite you to reflect before you sleep on this wonderful poem, a Mirror of Questions by John O’Donahue.
Print out, or better yet, write down those reflection questions and put in front of your bed. Do it regularly and you’ll slowly find the deeper, sometimes indescribable source of your actions.
Here are last few lines
What reached me today? How deep did it imprint?
Who saw me today?
What visitations had I from the past and from the future?
What did I avoid today?
From the evidence, why was I given this day?”
Khuyen
P/s: Do reach out for the Inner Critic Assessment or general conversations about life. I'd love to be of service when you get stuck.