Rachel Naomi Remen offers a story about how wholeness became embedded in the world, waiting for us to call it forth. I explore different dynamics of wholeness and how it relates to being agents of healing and transformation – including the power of disturbance to evoke grace.
Wholeness moving in us and the world
Rachel Naomi Remen offers a story about how wholeness became embedded in the world, waiting for us to call it forth. I explore different dynamics of wholeness and how it relates to being agents of healing and transformation – including the power of disturbance to evoke grace.
Healing is about restoring former wholeness. Health is about maintaining existing wholeness. Transformation and evolution are about generating or evoking new forms of wholeness from – as Rachel Naomi Remen puts it in the piece below – “the seed of a greater wholeness, a dream of possibility”.
To a certain extent new forms of wholeness can be created, as in art, innovative technologies, or the unique synergies and dynamic tensions of a groundbreaking work of architecture or engineering. Yet some of the most remarkable forms of wholeness are organic and self-organized, from new ecosystems and babies’ personalities to spontaneous realizations and cultural shifts. Although this kind of wholeness can’t be created in a linear sense and normally simply happens by itself, it can also be catalyzed, evoked, or nurtured by invitation, inspiration, opportunity, and – as Rachel Naomi Remen puts it – by “our listening, our belief, our encouragement and our love.”
“Emergent processes” like Open Space and World Cafe are, in essence, ways to enhance a group’s capacity for generating novel but self-organized wholeness from among its members. I like to think of these processes as thoughtfully designed channels for the Tao, the Way of Nature, whose power is not in what it does but in what it allows, evokes, and facilitates.
Continue reading “Tom Atlee: Rachel Naomi Remen on Wholeness Among Us and With World”
