#165 - Philip Shepherd: Softening Into a Porous Relationship With the Present - Radical Wholeness (p.1.)

Okay a long quote, but seriously, check it out: "We feel ourselves held within a personal boundary that keeps our life separate from that of the world. It's hard to appreciate how strangely normalized that state of ours is until we look to other cultures for comparison. When we seek to promote our personal well-being, for instance, we might think about taking the right supplements, eating organic food, exercising regularly and sleeping well.

I have no issue with any of that—but it's based on an assumption that health will be achieved by doing the right things to the body. So our focus is on the self as an isolated entity, as though it were a machine requiring upkeep. For Anlo-Ewe speakers, well-being is something quite different. It has to be, for they experience the self as porous rather than enclosed.

For instance, the Anlo-Ewe sense of personhood is described as having a "nonboundedness and a lack of the kind of unitary wholeness of being that is characteristic of Western psychologies of the self." This reflects the Anlo-Ewe understanding of being itself: "Not stable, being is highly changeable, always in transformation."

(Philip Shepherd, Radical Wholeness: The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being,page 15-16 (North Atlantic Books, 2017)

I feel this so deeply - I can only hope it reaches you as well, because I am talking life-changing with this interview, feel into what Philip is saying, is my advice in this first of a two-part series on Radical Wholeness. Enjoy this interview with teacher and author Philip Shepherd, who has developed "The Embodied Present Process" (TEPP) together with Allyson Woodrooffe. He is originally an actor, and a counter-culture biker, if I should name it, and the way he shares is also an experience, that might resonate for you too. TAP in with us as we

in this first interview speak about:

-What deep fitness is about around tapping into the bodies intelligence

-How thinking moved from the belly to the head!

-Feel-Feel-at-Flesh-Inside

-We are in a Story culturally, can we step outside of it?

-How the process of balancing presents us with a model in which the self is not encased within a boundary but is oriented in the world by a fluid, felt partnership.

-Why we are teaching our children that it's better to think with a portion of their beings than to think with the whole of their beings