Radical Wholeness

By: Philip Shepherd, Jeff Brown, Grover Gardner

Narrated by: Philip Shepherd

Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

There are qualities we all yearn to experience in our lives - peace, simplicity, grace, connection, clarity. Yet these qualities evade us, because each of them arises from an experience of wholeness, and we live in a culture that enforces divisions within each of us.

In Radical Wholeness, Philip Shepherd shows the countless ways in which we are persuaded to separate from the body and live in the head. Disconnected from the body's intelligence, we also disconnect from the wholeness of the present. This schism within us is the primary source of stress not just in our personal lives, but for the systems of the planet.

Drawing from neuroscience, anthropology, physics, the arts, myth, personal stories, and his experiences helping people around the world to experience wholeness, Philip Shepherd illuminates what true wholeness means and offers practices designed to help listeners soften into the intelligence of the body. Radical Wholeness is a call to action: to recover wholeness and experience a new way of being.

©2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Wisdom in unusual abundance and simplicity

Over the past seven years, hundreds of authors have accompanied me on my morning and evening walks. Many have wowed me with amazing insights. Still, as each book draws to a close, I recognise that my world has changed only incrementally. Not so with Philip Sherherd's Radical Wholeness.

Radical Wholeness is a thesis on the origins of wisdom. No - make that Wisdom. No - make that WISDOM.

Shepherd delivers a beautiful, simple conceptual framework. Being delivered in words, it can only be conceptual. Yet it is the most compelling exposition I have encountered for how to outgrow the constraints of living a conceptualised life. Love to escape your current frustrations and step into a world of ineffable beauty? A world to which you belong? Long to address a gnawing sense of incompleteness within your being? Need a radically new approach to avoiding wider ecological disaster? Or finding more meaning in your relationships with anyone and everyone? Shepherd's approach is relevant to all Life's challenges. And it is simple.

Shepherd delivers a compassionate, gentle manifesto. The lyrical beauty of his expression may make the hairs on your forearms stand to attention. Or that may be a side effect of the incisive simplicity of his gentle message. Or those hairs may have lost their enthusiasm and responsiveness to intrinsic beauty. But I would challenge anyone to read this book and not be profoundly altered by its beautiful insights into Life and what it means to be fully human.

fantastic guide to spirituality

I loved everything about this book. I said meditating for maybe 8 years but this book took me to a deeper level

Brilliant thesis, beautifully read!

This book vividly identifies a huge blind spot in our modern, Western culture: we are stuck in our heads and it is at the root of own self-destruction. Luckily, the author provides a route back to our wholeness. And the author's naration is both engaging and soothing.

Everything about this book was extraordinary!

I enjoyed every minute of listening to Phillips’s voice. His care and concern for us and this subject is evident in all of the varied aspects of ‘voice’.

And the message: That we’re thinking with a portion of our beings rather than thinking with our entire beings.

Philip begins with an examination of what is modern day culture for many of us: “presently consumer based, patrifocal, reductionistic, technologically driven, information-obsessed, and individualistic.”

How our culture effects us: “of all the lessons we learn in the public school system, the primary one is to subdue the energies of the body and maximize the facility of the head for manipulating verbal and symbolic information”

And a great deal of research of several native peoples who possess more than ‘5’ senses and think from a place deep within their bodies.

I’ll listen again. Philip included exercises and meditations for bringing our entire being into our thought processes, a gift I will always appreciate!

WHAT NOW PHILIP??

Can you believe I stumbled on this book in my sleep?? My first time leaving my audiobook on and falling asleep so it automatically played another book included in the membership that was in the same category of books I read. So when I woke up I was LEGIT NERVOUS because I couldn’t believe my mind was being stimulated as I slept. So that day I decided to see what my mind was up to all night. Radical wholeness has been quite an experience. I find myself thinking about getting more reading done and there is an uneasiness that I battle with. ‘WHAT NOW PHILIP??’ best describes the guilt that comes over me from having an intimately understanding of the many ways we disconnect and contribute to it. But by the time he brings me full circle into the present my guilt transforms into gratitude. I am grateful for this work and it’s wisdom. I have the universe to thank for delivering it to me personally.

Excellent approach to life

I had the pleasure of taking a workshop with Philip almost exactly two years ago. Finding this book has been so helpful for reintegrating the teachings learned at the workshop. I am so grateful for this work, and feel them even stronger now after reading this.
The philosophy in here is much like the way that I started thinking about life from a young age, and it fulfills that piece of me.
My critique on the presentation of the valuable material, is that it is from the perspective of an able-bodied middle-aged cis white man, that has gone slightly unchecked. There are a few moments where I recognized that a little more thought could go into it. Those specifically being racist, gender binaried, and ableist perspectives. I do not fault Philip for he knows not of the entirety of the soup we swim in. Those of us with privilege have a much harder time seeing it, but I hope that we all continue to grow towards recognizing our privilege and how it can be ostracizing for those who are neglected or addressed inappropriately.
Well worth the listen, but being mindful of that perspective is helpful, so that we may integrate greater wholeness into all of our beings.

Balanced, grounded and informative

Loved the content. Good examples from both science, culture and experience. Occasionally I got lost with too much detail and felt like I needed to relisten to fully grasp.

Nothing Compares

This is the perfect book for our time; a guide to discovering our way through it.

Incredible!

No exaggeration: This book blew my mind within the first chapter. I read a lot of books on spirituality and psychology, and most of them offer information that is lovely but not all that unique or surprising. This book provided a truly unique perspective, with insights from anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and spirituality all combined with neurophysiology, to describe wholeness in its true form.

Clip and note sharing

The book is amazing, the audio application has a glaring lack.
When notes and clips are stored, the sharing feature has been removed.
Poor choice from the developer.

The ordinary grace of being

In Philip Shepherd's second book, he stands like a poet on the battlefield singing the song of our times. Exploring the way we have arrived at this place, this retreat into a culture of abstract thinking, crowning the decisive top-down 'knowledge knows best' society that allows us, as a culture, to consume our world with mere lip service to any consequences. To the point where we have become blind to our sense of the wholeness of everything, our participation in this wholeness, and can only theorize about it. We no longer feel it, or know it in our bones. We no longer feel our place in the world, except as a sense of entitlement. Philip explores this with an uncanny clarity, recognizing the way our body has been treated in the same way, and how we suffer the separation from the whole in our experience. Our sense of being.
And at the same time he also does a wonderful thing: he speaks about all of this from the experience of wholeness, from a deeply grounded awareness of the differing qualities of thinking we can access. He encourages our awareness back into a bodily sensitivity (there are exercises to play with) where we can begin to recover our partnership with our physical self, and through this, with the world around us.
A wonderful book, that opens the door to perhaps the only place you will specifically explore the support our heads cannot provide: wholeness. Philip Shepherd's work is a much needed missing piece in the puzzle of what it is to be embodied, conscious, grounded, and alive, and this book will help you unlock all of these ideas. Read it, and give it some time to sink in, and then read it again and find how your relationship with the world has begun to deepen. Your experience will make more sense!

Philip teaches/facilitates workshops that explore our body's awareness of the themes explored in the book, and one of the themes is the difference between presence and presentation. Presence as a state of mutual relationship, and presentation as an attempt to make someone receive our information. It's why we listen to a sample before we buy an audiobook: sometimes we can hardly hear the book for the efforts of the narrator. Philip's narration is rather, his sharing of his understanding and actually adds clarity to the text. It's a beautiful gift.

Life Changing

I always feel drawn to books, and this one was no exception. I'm looking for something, aren't we all? I usually find the sense of something that feels right but I'm still not quite there, always outside looking in.
This book took me right to the centre of my search, and it's no surprise to find that I met myself there. However, there are different ways to meet self and Phillip brings you home in the truest sense of the word.
I'm starting to sense parts of myself that have been dormant for years and I can feel old unhelpful patterns fading for the first time in decades.
This is only the start of my journey and I will be forever grateful that this book crossed my path.
Thank you Philip.

Brilliant, anyone who has a body must read this!

This book is so brilliant you will begin to live it. Philip is authentic, humble and really funny, he will bring you on a journey you don’t even know you need to go on. Read it!

Excellent

An important book, beautifully read. A guide on how to take our place as part of the natural world and to embody our full humanity.

The Compleat journey to Wholeness

Stunning subtlety nuanced reading of such authenticity- listen & feel it’s message deeply resonate within.. touching hidden truths about ourselves and reality.

Unsure

There were some interesting points made in the book, but I am not too sure overall. Perhaps I will work on the descent from the brain into the pelvic bowl and see if it begins to make more sense.

Dreary

Could be good if you have trouble sleeping.
Unfortunately this narrators voice just had me nodding off so I'm not too sure what he was on about. There might be merit in the content, who knows?

eye, mind and perineum opening

lovely narrator! thank you for sharing! ❤
heard it 3 times now and it probably wont be the last

This book changed my life

A beautiful journey into existence that had me rethink the way I relate to myself, others, and the world in profound ways. Wonderfully narrated by the author and a delight to take in.

Life changing

Outstanding, wisdom from 'the whole'...I didn't want this to end, I will read this every day