What Does It Mean to Be a Whole Person?

Lately I've been thinking about what it means when we talk about someone being a "whole" person. In the past I have imagined wholeness as being in a mostly regulated, positive feeling state--calm, curious, open, etc. But recently someone described wholeness to me a little differently, and I love this way of thinking about it. 

Instead of being in a certain kind of regulated nervous system state, wholeness is simply having access to a wide range of feeling states within. It's being able to weep with true sorrow, and then move from that to more resourced, positive feelings; and share with another person; laugh; dream; in essence, live the whole arc of human experience and be able to tolerate and express it all as it arises within. 

It makes me think of something that Francis Weller talks about in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow: I'm paraphrasing, but he tells the story of being in an African village and meeting a local woman who was very joyful and laughed a lot. He asked her how she was able to have so much joy. She replied that it's because she cries a lot. That is the range of experience that is wholeness. It doesn't look like a particular, fixed feeling state (like joy), but rather it is the process of living by allowing and utilizing all our senses and our emotional body and mind, so that we experience the whole human experience flowing through us. And sometimes this can look kind of "ugly." It is definitely not the airbrushed, commercial version of what is sold as a good human life these last few hundred years. 

So, how do we live our human wholeness more fully? It is by widening our emotional tolerance and range, and by welcoming our whole experience of that range. Life is sometimes heartbreaking; so let it break your heart and trust your body to know what to do to process it. Life is also indescribably beautiful and joyful; let yourself pause and take that in and luxuriate in it. It could be as simple as seeing an unexpected bee in a pink flower. And let yourself also feel that fine edge between these states, as the woman in Africa was describing to Weller. The difference between sorrow and joy can be such a thin edge. Sometimes life is so exquisitely beautiful that it breaks your heart open just to behold it. We call this being authentically "moved" by something. Perhaps it could also be called being whole.