Tangible Minds™

The state of optimal well-being is based on an experience of wholeness. Wholeness can be described as an easy balance and flow between my interior experience and my exterior experience, such that the boundary between the two becomes fully permeable. Examples include the so-called "flow" state of being immersed in a creative task, the experience of "connection" or "union" with a loved one, the feeling of "belonging" in a community, and the profound "oneness" sometimes found in spiritual practice. In the experience of wholeness, there is no erasure of my interior, but rather a heightening of its specificity in balance with an enhanced awareness and felt sense of my exterior. There is an exchange, a flow, an interface, an interpenetration of the two such that an integration happens and I get to experience myself as greater than the sum of the interior and the exterior. Something new comes into being through the intimate connection of inside and outside.

With the concept of wholeness as a foundation, we can say that all of human being strives for wholeness. Everything we do and are is in service to wholeness. Every motivation derives from it, every inspiration returns to it, every intention is focused on creating it.

From this place, it is clear that so-called "negative" emotions are signals that wholeness has been breached. These signal states serve as an alert that some essential need, some requirement for wholeness, is no longer being provided, and they call attention to the situation that has undermined that need.

When I map that signal state and move it, it returns to its whole state, the feeling it naturally expresses when it participates in an experience of wholeness.

The value of restoring signal states to whole states is this. When I have access to my felt experience of wholeness, I have a baseline, "This is what I want, this is what is important to me, and this is what it feels like to have that." From that baseline, I can re-enter the context that triggers the signal state with new insight. I can easily compare the current state with my desired whole state and through that comparison create a dynamic tension between the two. I want to narrow the gap, and I will take creative action to do so.

Without access to the baseline of wholeness, I find it far too easy to focus on the negative. The signal state provokes reaction, the classic "fight or flight" syndrome. When I'm stuck in the signal state without access to my wholeness, I will often find myself participating in creating the very conditions that triggered the signal to begin with. I find myself caught in the loop of non-wholeness.

When I instead act from a place where I can access both signal states and whole states, my responses are far more creative, human, and productive for myself and those around me.