Journey to Wholeness by Eric Hepburn
- Admin SGUUF
- Aug 11
- 20 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
We're experimenting with a new earth-centered Wednesday night program this year. Why? What are we doing on Wednesday nights that's different from what we do on Sundays? Why is it different? Why does it matter?
Journey to Wholeness — Stephen Jenkinson, Embodied Practice, and Why Wholeness Is Not a Hierarchy
"Your body is neither an inconvenience nor tertiary to your existence." This episode is an invitation into embodied practice — and a correction to something the summer sermon series may have implied.
Over July, the four-part Social Change series read Deepa Iyer's ecosystem through gut, heart, head, and spirit. That sequence could sound like a ladder. This message says otherwise: the mystery underneath our words is about the wholeness of the thing, not the hierarchy of the thing. Gut, heart, and head do come online in developmental order — infancy, the terrible twos, the teenage brain — but the work of midlife is reintegration, not ascent.
The heart of the episode is a story about two teachers. The Dalai Lama, who says of himself that he is a simple monk working toward his death. And Stephen Jenkinson, the palliative care writer whose Die Wise argues that we know everyone else will die but do not know it about ourselves until the bad news arrives — and who, six months after his own Parkinson's diagnosis, told a retreat that he had not been ready either. Asked what he would change, he named embodied practice: yoga, breathing, meditation, begun thirty years earlier.
From there: why Sunday in a liberal religious tradition runs head-first and top-down, why the new Wednesday evening program runs bottom-up, the yin-yang rotating around love at the center, joy found under a rock called grief, and ego in the second half of life as the thing you cannot think your way past.
The Great World House marks a hunger strike at an immigration detention center in Tacoma, Washington. The Voice of Wisdom, from Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, is read by Fran Holt. Recorded live at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas.
Full Pulpiteer Podcast Transcript
Eric Hepburn: Welcome to the fifth episode of the third season of The Pulpiteer. I'm your host, Eric Hepburn, and I'm glad to have you join us for today's episode.
Today's episode is called "Journey to Wholeness." It is an invitation to deepen embodied practice, and while much of it is focused on our plan for doing that at San Gabriel, I hope that it will also resonate as an invitation to deeper practice for you, my podcast listeners.
We'll begin with our Great World House segment, and then our Voice of Wisdom, read by Fran Holt.
Great World House
We pause to honor the Great World House of which we are a part, lifting up the needs, the hopes, and the voices beyond these doors.
This week in Tacoma, Washington, one hundred and forty people stopped eating.
They are being held in an immigration detention center: a private for-profit prison, where profits increase when more people are held longer. Most have not been convicted of anything. They are waiting. Some of them have been waiting a long time.
We do not have a list of their demands. We rarely do. But that is not an accident. The silence is not the absence of a message. It is a message prevented.
But we do not need their words to know what they are asking. Any of us, held in that place, would ask for the same things.
To eat unspoiled food. To drink clean water. To see a doctor. To have my medicines. To know how long I will be held. To be told why. To see my family. To see my spouse. To see my children.
A hunger strike is a body speaking when a voice has been silenced.
This morning we listen to one hundred and forty bodies. And we lend them our voice.
Amen.
Voice of Wisdom
We welcome this Voice of Wisdom, carried through Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza.
Since the reality of the [kingdom] for Jesus spells not primarily holiness but wholeness, the salvation of God's [kingdom] is present and experientially available whenever Jesus casts out demons, heals the sick and the ritually unclean, tells stories about the lost who are found, the uninvited who are invited, of the last who will be first. Not the holiness of the elect but the wholeness of all is the central vision of Jesus.
Not the holiness of the elect, but the wholeness of all, is the central vision of Jesus. The central concept of the kingdom.
Unfolding in Word: Journey to Wholeness
Now, some of you are new and don't know this, so I'll talk about it for a minute. My own personal religious pluralism runs in the following way.
There have been many peoples, communities, and cultures in this world, and they have all sought relationship with that which is ultimate — with that which is at the edge of knowing, the leading edge of mystery, the corner of darkness. Because after you get good at thinking, you realize that thinking only gets you in a circle. It's all tautological. It can't answer the big question about why you're here. Not on its own.
So all cultures have struggled with this. They've developed spirituality and spiritual practices. They have institutionalized those practices into religions. And occasionally, as you might be aware, those religions have sometimes forgotten that they were about spirituality and spiritual practices, and become about other things.
So today we're just off the rails, because I actually spent time developing a video graphic that I'm supposed to show you on the screen, and it isn't working. That's okay. We'll put it in the newsletter, but I'll describe it for you. And I'm going to use a whole bunch of mixed metaphors. We started with Jesus and the kingdom of God, and I'm now about to grab something from Hinduism, layer it with something from Taoism, and then we'll go from there.
Over the summer, in July, we talked about this idea that one way to look at humans is to think of us as gut, heart, head, and spirit. Now, when we went through that — based on some ancient traditions, like the Enneagram — I might have given you the impression of some sort of linear progression that was necessary, or some sense of necessary hierarchy in the thing.
But this theme today of wholeness — this theme that the mystery underneath the words we can come up with is somehow about the wholeness of the thing, not the hierarchy of the thing — is part of what I want us to uncover today.
The developmental sequence, and what comes after it
It is true, in the unfolding of time as developmental entities, that there is typically a progression.
Gut. Anybody ever known an infant? They are all gut.
And then the heart gets involved, when the gut's too unhappy. And then the terrible twos and threes — now it's like the terrible five years, I don't know, they keep moving the goalposts. It's all about oh my God, I don't know what to do with all these big feelings. My heart came online and I am just overflowing with feelings about everything.
I also happen to have the good fortune of having a teenager in the house. And I think when you get older, like I am, it's easy to discount how smart we were when we were teenagers. The teen years are the brain coming online, grappling with so much — and a lot of times it gets tired of all that heart noise and gut noise and just squashes it down so it can have more space for thinking.
And then the journey of midlife is figuring out: oh, wait. I kind of need my intuition and my body on this journey. Oh, wait — I think I might need my feelings too. Maybe they ought not go neglected.
And if we do that work of the midlife, of reintegrating gut and heart —
Now, this is an average thing. This isn't going to fit everybody. Some of us stayed gut people. Some of us stayed heart people. But I think at this stage in history, in evolution, whatever label you want to put on it — most of us, the problem is we get stuck in the head.
It's why anxiety is such a crippling sociological, anthropological phenomenon where we live. It's why I haven't met a person in this church yet who, when I talk to them about anxiety, says I don't know, that's not one of my struggles. There might be a few of you. We haven't talked about it yet. For most of you, the anxiety and the fear that generates it is one of the big struggles.
And I'm here to tell you that it's normal, and it's okay, and it's surmountable. You might have been stuck in it for twenty years. That doesn't mean you have to stay there.
So we have spirit. Now, spirit could be the next step on that ladder, right? After we do this integration work in midlife, we can live out of a more spiritual place — and that might mean different things to different people in the audience. I'm not going to try and dig all the way down that rabbit hole today.
Instead, I'm going to share a story with you first, and then we'll get back to describing the graphic that you can't see. This will translate perfectly into my podcast, by the way, because they also can't see the graphic. So maybe this is just spirit's way of getting me to do what I should have done in the first place, which is to not spend three hours with AI trying to make the right graphic.
Two teachers
I had the pleasure, once upon a time, of showing up to a large venue at the University of Texas and seeing the Dalai Lama. And if you've ever seen any of the many documentaries he's featured in, or read his work, you'll know one of the things he says over and over again:
I'm just a simple monk working toward my death.
I'm just a simple monk working toward my death.
Our finiteness has something to do with this whole thing. We don't have to know what, exactly. But recognizing that it does — that matters.
Now into this story I'm going to weave another teacher of mine.
Quite a few years ago now — I think it's been about seven years — my middle sister died of an opioid overdose. And a good friend of mine, Amy, was studying at the time to be a death doula: someone who helps people at hospice points in their life navigate that. She found out that this had happened, and she brought me a book. She said, I've had to read a lot of books on this stuff in my studies to do this work, but I knew immediately which one was for you.
And she brought me a book called Die Wise, by a man named Stephen Jenkinson.
If you've been coming here for a while, you hear me drop his name at least once a month. So that's not a surprise to anybody — except new people, who are like, who's Stephen Jenkinson? He's one of the founding voices in palliative care. He ran a palliative care unit at a teaching hospital in Canada. He's also just a fantastic writer.
So the first summer that I was here in this pulpit, I used my professional development money to go to a retreat that he offers at his school in Canada.
Now, here's the interesting thing about the timing of all that. Six months before the retreat, or thereabouts, he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's.
Here is a man who had written eloquently, touchingly, deeply about how we all know that everybody else is going to die — but we don't know that we are going to die until we get the bad news. We don't really know it until we're dragged to it by a cancer diagnosis, or some other happenstance in life that tells you your tunnel is almost over.
The man who wrote that, who did amazing intellectual, poetic, spirit-filled work to try to help people learn that lesson so they could do what the Dalai Lama was preaching — so they could become simple practitioners working toward a good death, becoming whole and wise before the bad news gets here — realized in his own life that he had written about it, he had talked about it, he had counseled others on it, some of them even helping them get to that place before their bad news came.
But when his came, he wasn't ready. It was just the same bolt out of the blue that he had described for everyone else.
Over the three days of the retreat, he brought in some former students and did Q&A sessions. And one of them asked: It's clear from what you've shared for the last three days that even though you had written about this, even though you had counseled others down this road and tried to prepare them before they got there — even with all of that, you still weren't ready. Do you think you missed something? Or is the advice different now? What has changed for you, Stephen, having now come to the place where it's not theoretical anymore, where it's not a mental exercise anymore, where the tunnel and its length are now apparent and real for you?
And he said, It won't surprise you to know that I've been thinking about this a lot.
And he said: In the last six months, I've really started exploring some embodied practices. Yoga, breathing, meditation — practices for being present in my body. I never took those seriously before. But I think if I had started those practices twenty or thirty years ago, that combined with my other work, I think I would have been able to show up to that moment very differently.
Top-down and bottom-up
Now I'm going to tell you something that won't surprise most of you, but may surprise some of the new folks. I don't know if you know this about Unitarian Universalists and the liberal religious Christian heritage that spawned them: they're pretty intellectual. They're pretty much head-first.
And be honest. I roll that way many days, and it's how we roll together on Sundays. We bring in music and we bring some other things in to try and get the heart active. We try to stand up and sing and get the body into it just a little bit. But we're still pretty self-conscious, because we're mostly up here still.
Sunday is our head-first day. And I'm not saying that as an indictment. I'm saying it as a loving observation that I think applies to me and to most of y'all. We come in here on Sunday and we do some songs and some sermon and try to wrap our heads around stuff. And it's good, and it's necessary.
But Wednesday night is going to be about bottom-up.
If Sundays are about top-down — starting with our head, trying to get the heart involved — Wednesday nights are going to start with embodied experience, and then try to engage the heart in that, and let the head take a little bit of a rest.
It's still allowed to show up. Quieting the mind is a many-many-year practice, for those of you who have tried some of the Buddhist methods. So you don't have to already have a quiet mind to show up on Wednesday. You just have to be willing to try some things that invite you to realize the truth: that your body is neither an inconvenience nor tertiary to your existence.
Despite what Descartes said. Your body is not tertiary.
Whatever this experience is that we have, this thing called life — it is an embodied thing. When done properly, it is an embodied thing. This isn't, as some preachers will say, some temporary prison of punishment for your soul or your mind. It is the thing you are invited to find harmony within, and harmony without.
And that is what we're going to try to do on our Wednesday nights.
What Wednesdays will hold
For a while now, we've been having Singing Resistance on Wednesday nights, because getting together and singing together — for those of you who have participated already, you realize it's not so much about thinking. It's about letting the body sing and the emotions come up in the face of injustices that you know about intellectually. It's following a movement that started in Minneapolis.
And following that, we are going to do some earth-based practices.
This past Wednesday we had a sound bath — a guided sound meditation. For those of you who are like, I don't know what that means — the simplest version: it's a guided sound meditation. It happens on the Wednesday closest to the new moon, because there are cycles of life happening around us, inviting us to be engaged with them, that we've been taught to ignore and ought to remember.
This coming Wednesday, on the rising quarter moon, we will do drum journeying. I will be leading it, and it will be another kind of sound-guided meditation.
On the full moon, we'll do a drum circle — all ages, everyone's welcome, we all play together.
And then on the waning moon, we will do grief tending.
For those of you who were in the congregation after the election, when we did the posters on the wall with the five gates of grief and did some work to come to terms with our sadness, to be in relationship with our sadness — here's the secret, folks. It's one of many secrets that's not really a secret.
When you push down on your sadness, that glass ceiling that you just pushed down — it affects your joy equally. Your unwillingness to feel sadness translates into an inability to feel joy.
It's one of the things I discovered in the wake of my sister's death. I had been searching in my life for some lost joy. I didn't know where it had gone. I didn't know why it wasn't showing up in moments where I expected it to be there.
And I found it under a rock called grief.
When I found a way to let myself really deeply grieve my losses — suddenly I showed up into those other moments, and my joy was there again.
What a gift.
So: the journey to wholeness. I told you the story of the Dalai Lama and Stephen Jenkinson, and I'll cap that story in this way.
We honor our teachers by learning the lessons that they had to learn the hard way.
We honor our teachers by learning from them the lessons that they had to learn the hard way.
And so I'm honoring those lessons by showing up here in Georgetown every Wednesday, and inviting you to come along.
The invisible graphic
Now let's return to the invisible graphic.
We talked about the gut, the heart, and the head. Now I'm going to overlay Unitarian Universalist theology, the newest version of which says: love at the center. And we're going to overlay the chakras.
We've got the heart chakra — love at the center. We've got the gut chakra — intuition and embodied experience matter, and they're valuable. And the head chakra.
I'm not asking anybody to give up thinking. I'm asking you not to be a slave to your thinking.
One of the core lessons that I try to teach my teenage son is this: not every thought you think is true.
How often, though, do we walk around assuming that every thought we think is true?
The essence of developing spirituality as a practice, as a known reality in your life, is that that spirituality layer is the truth-sayer that can answer the question of whether a particular thought you had was true or false. Whether it was ego or divine insight. Whether it was an accurate perception of reality, or a projection of your own woundedness.
Your mind, that just generated that thought, isn't that good at self-awareness. The self-awareness comes from that spiritual layer — that ability to say: that unkind thought I just had about my spouse was about my defensiveness, not about their value as a human being. Even though, had I given that thought voice, it definitely would have sounded like the latter.
So we've got love at the center. We have the head chakra. We have the gut chakra.
Now I want you to envision a yin-yang symbol. It's got the white dot and the black dot, surrounded by fields of alternating color. They begin over these chakras, and they rotate — with the heart at their center.
On Sunday, we will begin here in the UU tradition, in our head space, and we will talk about all this stuff, and I will describe diagrams to you. And that will be our Sunday.
And on Wednesday, we will show up, and I won't talk like this. I will invoke a ritual, and I will play drums, and we will have an embodied experience together — from here.
All the while keeping love at the center.
Does that make sense?
Practitioners, and an invitation
So I found some practitioners in the community who I trust and have a relationship with. Sabine Countryman is running our sound bath. June Williams and Ashley Blackwell will be running our grief tending. I will be running our drum circle and our drum journeying.
We're going to share with you the practices that we've found. But I talked at the very beginning about my own brand of pluralism. I am not teaching you these practices because they're the ones. I'm teaching you because they're the ones I know, and they're the ones that have helped me and worked for me.
And I cannot and will not even try to guarantee that they're the right practices for each and every one of you. I'm asking you to be brave enough to experiment and answer the question for yourself: does this work for me, or does it not?
And I bet there are several of you who have practices that you've developed that work for you. Maybe you're feeling an itch right now — well, I mean, maybe I could share the practices that I've learned with my community. Maybe that is something that's calling to me.
If that's true, please send me an email.
My vision is, in five years, we've got every room of this campus full of people. We've got people painting, coloring, drawing, because that's a practice for them. We've got people doing seated meditation. We've got a group doing yoga. We've got groups doing ecstatic dance, really getting out of it. We've got Singing Resistance and other things.
All these things happening in that six o'clock to seven o'clock hour — individual groups doing practices that work for them, members of this community who've spent a lifetime developing a practice that works for them, sharing that practice with others so they can find out if it's something they want to add to their repertoire.
And then after that hour, we come together and do a big group thing. That's the Sacred Currents thing, for those of you for whom those practices work.
So that's the idea.
Why I don't preach that life is beautiful more often
I've had a fair amount of feedback that says something along the lines of: You tend to get dark pretty easily, and outline the troubles and the stumbling blocks. But you don't preach "life is beautiful" kinds of stuff very often. I wish you'd do that more.
And I've responded to that by saying: if I thought you could get to a place where you could experience deeply the beauty of life and keep the bad stuff repressed, I'd say yes.
But the problem that I see when I look out at the world is not that there aren't enough people trying to preach the good news. Yep, just going to pretend that's not happening, isn't it? That's so great. It's so great to be a privileged American in today's world. I love it. It's just wonderful. I mean — not so great for my gay friends, and not so great for my friends of color. But my 401(k) is doing smashing.
If I thought that that was the kingdom all the sages spoke about, I would do that.
But what I see is people filling up a God-sized hole with other stuff, and wondering why it doesn't work. I see them stuffing their self-satisfaction and their social status, or their productivity, or their 401(k), or their life accomplishments into the hole.
But they're not showing up — as the Dalai Lama said — whole, at the time of their death.
Their death arrives and they are like: what have I been doing? No, seriously. What have I been doing?
That's the look that I've seen on people's faces when they hit that moment, and all they have is their bag of stuff. It is, as Stephen Jenkinson describes it, a white-knuckled affair to show up to your death and realize that all you collected is meaningless, and to wonder where your attention has been.
What we learn from those who refused to learn
We honor our teachers by learning the lessons that they had to learn the hard way.
We also honor our ancestors, sometimes, by learning the lessons they refused to learn.
I'm going to end on this story. I'll try not to make it too bleak.
My mom was sixteen years old when she had me — she was seventeen when I was born. From the age of around two and a half, I spent every summer with my grandparents, which I think was a good thing for a great many reasons. So my grandmother was like a second mom to me.
Now, I get to tell this story in part because both my mother and my grandmother are dead. Speaking for the living without their permission is one thing. I'm willing to speak for the dead.
When I was a child, I thought my grandmother was one of the most loving people. She certainly cared for me and loved me. But as she aged, I watched her become more and more calcified and closed off and resentful. I just watched her, over the course of forty years, toxify. I don't know how else to describe it.
Maybe you all have friends. Maybe you've known some people in your life like that — who just kept getting more and more bitter the older they got. Whatever their dysfunctions were that were kind of manageable in their thirties were, by the time they were in their eighties, so intense that people who loved them could barely stand to be around them.
Is this resonating with anybody? Has anybody known people like this?
I preached on this on Mother's Day a few years back, if you want more details. I'm not going to go there today. But I honor her by learning how not to do what she did.
Don't be afraid of being angry. Don't be afraid of being sad. Don't be afraid of looking weak. Don't tell yourself that you're worthless if you don't do X, Y, Z.
These are the patterns in her life that continued to grow and constrict and congeal, until she was a precious soul trapped in a box she couldn't escape.
And she died that way. She died because — well, she was going to die. We all are. But we just don't know it until they tell us.
She could have gone to the doctor. But she refused to tell anybody the symptoms of what she was going through. She didn't want to look weak. Grandma, you know, we can get some people to come. Over my dead body will someone clean my house for me.
I guess she got her wish. Nobody cleaned her house for her.
But the message that accepting help from another person is weakness, and not courage, doesn't resonate with me.
So one of the lessons I learned from her is that being able to say — I'm not well today, Bob. I'm going to need some help setting these chairs back up after the meeting yesterday. Will you come help me? — that's not weakness.
That is not strength here, or here, or here. That's strength here: to admit we need help. To accept the love from others that we would freely give them.
We're all so willing to give, aren't we? Oh, I'll go help so-and-so. Oh, let me do this for you. — No, I'm fine, I'm good. I don't need any help. — Oh, are you in need, Dave? Dave, let me help you out. — Oh no, Dave, I'm good. I'm good. You know me, I'm good.
Does that resonate with anybody? Do you see that?
So it's just ego, friends.
Whether we talk about it from Jesus, or the Eastern wisdom traditions, or Islam, or the humanists — secular or non-secular — it's the same wisdom. When you shine the light on it from all these different directions, it's the same truth.
Be in your body. And stop being afraid that other people's perceptions of you define you.
That's just ego stuff. And ego stuff — I've said this before, I'll say it again probably a thousand times, you'll probably get sick of me saying it, probably you'll send me off to another church in a few years because you're tired of hearing about it — ego is absolutely one hundred percent normal as a developmental part of being human.
When I see strong egos in teenagers and twenty-somethings, it causes me no grief, stress, or surprise at all.
When I see ego lauded in people in the second half of life, it tells me that the train has gone off the rails. If you are in the second half of your life still struggling with ego, you know what your work is when you leave here today. You know. And if you're not showing up to that work, you're not showing up to the only work that matters in your life — because that ego is the thing between you and the Dalai Lama's vision.
And you can't think your way past it.
But the ego will try to say: oh yeah, I can. I'm so smart. Watch this. And we'll just talk it right around in a circle, until I convince you that you're dizzy enough to forget me.
But when you sit quietly on the mat with the drum, imitating the sound of a human heartbeat — your soul can see the lies of ego for what they are.
And that is why embodied practice matters.
Amen.
Eric Hepburn: Until next time. Thank you for joining us on The Pulpiteer.
One quick correction: I made an error in the pulpit. The sound bath sessions are on the new moon, not the full moon.
If you enjoyed the podcast, you can help others find it by liking and subscribing. If you'd like to support the podcast directly, you can make a donation at sangabrieluu.org/give.
The Pulpiteer podcast is a production of the San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Georgetown, Texas. The podcast is hosted by Spotify, and theme music is by John Faber. Our live recording tech crew is Frank Sanders, Rob Berthold, Keith Hutchinson, and Andrea McDaniel. The podcast is produced and performed by Eric Hepburn.
See you next time.
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