Radical Wholeness

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.

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!

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

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.

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.

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.