Monday Mindfulness Minute: There is No Peace in Pieces

If you've ever felt the numbness of not feeling like you could bring a piece of yourself to a certain situation, whether with your family, at work, or out in public, you understand exactly what no peace in pieces means. While it may seem that the belief, value, or some other indispensable part of ourselves is so small that it won't hurt to cover up or hide, we know we'll never be at peace because there is a piece of us missing.

On top of that, where is the peace in trying to juggle which piece of our story we'll reveal depending on who we are around? Have you ever felt that exhaustion? Better yet, have you felt the peace of not having to keep those stories straight anymore?

It turns out that trying to present a certain picture of "who we are" depending on how we arrange the pieces isn't a trait we inherit at birth but is a habit that we learn from watching our family and society trade in their authenticity and uniqueness for a shallow mold of themselves. While living in pieces may gain us a bit of acceptance in the short run, we eventually mature to see how living this compartmentalized life slowly eats away at us from the inside.

So how do we return to ourselves and the wholeness that is our birthright? I think it's a little like the process of alchemy described in The Alchemist, whereby "impure" base metals comprised of many different individual parts are heated and purified until they reach oneness, purity. I imagine that when we come to this plane as babies, we are pure gold. The trip that society/parents/everybody lays on us causes us to lose purity, and we devolve to a state (base metal in this analogy) where we care more about what people think of us than how we can live authentically. The only way to get that metal back to its pure form is through exposing it to heat, in our case, the suffering we feel from living in pieces, which slowly removes all that is not us. As Eckhart Tolle recounts in A New World, "In the midst of conscious suffering, there is already the transmutation. The fire of suffering becomes the light of consciousness."

An ease to life returns when the pieces of who we are finally combine because suddenly, maybe for the first time since childhood, we can be the same person with everyone. No more covering. No more shifting. Life becomes effortless this way. More importantly, by having the courage to live our authentic life, we encourage others to thrive in their wholeness.