You hear a lot about "wholeness" in New Age circles.  It's a concept that's not only pretty common but pretty commonly misunderstood as well.  Misunderstood because no one much bothers to explain what it is or how to achieve it in everyday life.  Being whole is to be complete, even perfect.

The only way you move towards wholeness is through wholeness.  That may sound like some kind of mystic mumbo-jumbo, but it's not.  Like so much else that's worth doing, it's a matter of practice.

You can practice being whole when you get into your car, for example.  That may seem inconsequential, but being whole isn't a matter of thinking and wishing or even studying but one of doing.  And since few of us are willing, able, or interested in leaving our families, giving away our belongings, and moving into a monastery or ashram, making use of the events and requirements of our ordinary lives seems a good way to practice the act of becoming whole.

Let's say you're off to work in the morning.  You've arisen, gotten dressed, gulped your coffee, and said your good-byes.  Now it's time for you to get in the car and head off to your place of business.

If, instead of the way you usually approach this morning ritual, you do it differently, you can actually begin to practice wholeness on your way to work.  If you've moved your body behind the wheel, and you know that's what you're doing, you're paying attention to your every action and allowing your emotions to be connected to those actions, you're on your way.  You've begun to disengage from the auto-pilot that drives most of our lives.

What's going on in your mind as you open the door, sit behind the wheel and buckle up?  Ideally, nothing.  Your mind is alert to what your body is doing, so that you move as a whole being into your car.  Your mind isn't idling behind the action like a motorcycle idling in a speed trap.  And neither is it racing ahead of what you're doing, like that same cop who's suddenly been called to the scene of an accident.  You - the totality of your senses, your emotions, and your mind - have moved as a whole.  If you've ever experienced what I'm describing, you know it's like doing a thing for the first time, and it's a remarkable feeling.  It's the experience of wholeness.  If you were to do this every time you went to work, your job might come to mean something to you.

What usually and most stubbornly gets in the way of a practical exercise like this are thoughts.  Thoughts of being elsewhere, thoughts of how well or badly you're doing, thoughts of how pleasant the weather is or how nasty it is.  It's not that thoughts are somehow bad.  But they're not real and what matters when you're trying to get real is whether you listen to them when they cross your path.

The temptation, once you recognize how many thoughts are spinning through the mind, is to push them away.  But you can't do that.  If you push away thoughts, they push against you, then come back, even stronger, more insistent than before.  What you have to do is stop paying attention to the thoughts that pop into your mind.  You can't hand yourself over to them.

This is achievable, though it's something that takes practice.  The result will be that you will be in the present, which is the most natural thing in the world.  Because we've lost touch with the present, because we're not whole, it seems like an impossible, mystical sort of experience.  But if we weren't listening to our thoughts all the time, acting as if they were real, we'd be in the present all the time.  Instead, we grant the thoughts that bedevil us license to carry us away from wherever we are.  We believe in them, they mean something to us, and they make taking action all but impossible.

Here's an example of what thoughts can do, how they can undermine our every effort.  Let's say your job is selling brushes door to door.  Your family is depending on you to finally make a little money.  You go up to your first door and you start thinking... maybe they've got a dog.  Maybe they've got an alarm system.  A shotgun.  Maybe I'll try the house next door.

The same type of useless thoughts follow you next door, until you think yourself out of your job.  And probably out of doing your next one as well.  Thoughts are the enemy of action.

If you want to (or need to) sell brushes door to door, what you've got to do is knock on doors.  You take the action you know you need to take.  You see through the thoughts as they arise and you just make a fist and rap your knuckles on that door.  Then something can happen.  A person comes to the door.  You give your spiel.  If they say yes, fine.  You're in business.  If they say no, then you go next door.  It doesn't mean they don't love you, that the world doesn't love you, or whatever it is that your mind tells you.  You don't have to go home to get some rest, or quit your job.  You can't (literally) afford to pay any mind to your thoughts.  They will undo you, stop you from doing whatever needs to be done.  Thoughts don't beat thoughts.  Action overcomes thoughts.

If something lives in you, it's only because you feed it; it can't live otherwise, whether it's thoughts or a fibroid, it still has to be nourished in some way.  lf you give your attention to thoughts you enrich them, they gain strength through that, so now how are you going to fight the thing you're giving strength to?

You know the old joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall.  It's the same story with wholeness.  Your way to wholeness is practice - taking action, and by taking action overcoming the siren song of our thoughts.

But don't take my word for it.  Try it tomorrow, on the way to work.