Radical Wholeness: The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being

This new book by the author of New Self, New World shows that the primary deficiency inflicted on us by our culture is the inability to feel wholeness-in the self, the body, and the world around us. Because we have been systematically trained to numb ourselves to wholeness and to confine our attention to the boundary of the self, we live in our heads, disconnected from the body and at odds with the world. We accept that it's normal to feel fragmented, reactionary, and stale.

This book is a call to action to recover wholeness and to experience a new way of being. Philip Shepherd draws from neuroscience, anthropology, physics, art, and myth-as well as his extensive work as an international embodiment expert-to explain how our culture's limitations live in the body, and to help readers transcend them. Shepherd explains that the elusive qualities that we all yearn to experience-peace, simplicity, passion, grace, connection, and clarity-arise from an experience of wholeness. He highlights how, though everything is in relationship with everything else and wholeness surrounds us, blindness to it continues to manifest in our culture and our bodies. He suggests original exercises to help us reclaim the birthright of our wholeness and to experience a new way of being. He leaves readers with a fresh, renewed way of understanding their personal lives and the problems that we face as a culture, as well as a clear sense of the way forward.