“You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest? … The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.” ~ David Whyte
Wholeheartedness, you now know, is its own special type of strength and is something that you are consciously looking to maintain. Wholeheartedness, you now understand, is a verb and not a noun. It’s an act of doing and being, and it lives in the space between thought and action.
Reactivity and the need to defend is what closes the shutters on wholeheartedness. The armor comes on when we feel like our worth is under attack, or our sense of self is threatened in some way and we get tight and restricted; in physical feeling, in thought, and in perspective.
Wholeheartedness instead, is the tricky process of allowing there to be a space between. A moat between the island that is you, and the mainland, which is everything that you send out into the world.
To live, ride, and work in a wholehearted way means occupying the space of considered action.
And that action, at the deepest level, has an opening sentence that reads:
You are enough just as you are.
Onwards.
❤️ Jane
