Oh Brene Brown! You are seriously my favorite. I have read almost all her books, but somehow missed this one! It is a wonderful quick read and she has a podcast; called Unlocking Us and did a summer series with her sisters where they discussed each chapter. I HIGHLY recommend that. Before you read the book she asks that you go HERE to take the Whole Hearted Inventory and get a baseline for where you sit with each of the guideposts. 

Below are my FAVORITE parts of this book:

As I worked through my own wholehearted journey, I read close to 40 books, including every spiritual awakening memoir I could get my hands on. They were incredibly helpful guides, but I still craved a guidebook that could offer inspiration and resources, and basically serve as a soul traveler’s companion of sorts. I want to tell this story in a memoir! 

The Latin root of the word integrate is integrare, which means “to make whole”. How do we use what we’re learning about wholeheartedness to actually make ourselves more whole? 

Wholehearted living is the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. 

I made a promise to myself that when I felt emotionally, physically, and spiritually done, I’d try slowing down rather than relying on my old standbys: pushing through, soldiering on, and sucking it up. 

The greatest casualty of trauma- the thing that trauma often takes away from us- is the emotional, and sometimes even physical, safety that is necessary for us to be vulnerable. 

Many of these systemic forms of trauma are so pervasive that asking people to embrace vulnerability and imperfections without taking into consideration their lived experience can be asking them to do something that is not emotionally or even physically safe in all environments. 

We are all responsible for creating these brave, safe spaces and dismantling the systems that perpetuate trauma. Living and loving with our whole hearts is not just about self-work. It’s how we change the world. 

May we find the courage to let go of who we think we’re supposed to be so that we can fully embrace our authentic selves- the imperfect, the creative, the vulnerable, the powerful, the broken, and the beautiful. May we show ourselves and others the compassion that comes from knowing that we are all made of strength and struggle. May we create a just and equitable world where privilege isn’t a prerequisite for self-expression and authenticity, where everyone feels safe to express their power and their vulnerability. And last, may we experience the strength of connection, the love of belonging, and the grace of pure joy. 

We cannot give our children what we don’t have. Where we are on our journey of living and loving with our whole hearts is a much stronger indicator of parenting success than anything we can learn from how-to books. 

People may call what happens at midlife “a crisis”, but it’s not. It’s an unraveling- a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you’re “supposed” to live. The unraveling is a time when you are challenged by the universe to let go of who you think you are supposed to be and to embrace who you are. 

We can talk about courage and love and compassion until we sound like a greeting card store, but unless we’re willing to have an honest conversation about what gets in the way of putting these into practice in our daily lives, we will never change. Never, ever.

Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light. 

Shame HATES when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it- it can’t survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy. The most dangerous thing to do after a shaming experience is hide or bury our story. When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes. 

If we share our shame story with the wrong person, they can easily become on more piece of flying debris in an already dangerous storm. We want solid connection in a situation like this- something akin to a sturdy tree firmly planted in the ground. 

Courage is one of the most important qualities that wholehearted people have in common. 

I think asking for what you need is one of the bravest things that you’ll ever do. 

Every time we choose courage, we make everyone around us a little better and the world a little braver. And our world could stand to be a little kinder and braver. 

Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. 

Compassionate people are boundaried people. 

Only one thing separated the research participants who felt a deep sense of love and belonging from the people who seem to be struggling for it. That one thing is the belief of their worthiness. 

The greatest challenge for most of us is believing that we are worthy now, right this minute. Worthiness doesn’t have prerequisites. So many of us have knowingly created/unknowingly allowed/been handed down a long list of worthiness prerequisites. 

• Pairing of certain terms- LOVE and BELONGING. I can’t separate the concepts of love and belonging because when people spoke of one, they always talked about the other. The same holds true for the concepts of joy and gratitude. They don’t speak of one without the other, it’s not an accidental entanglement; it’s an intentional knot.

Loving and accepting ourselves are the ultimate acts of courage. In a society that says, “Put yourself last”, self-love and self-acceptance are almost revolutionary. 

If we want to live and love with our whole hearts, and if we want to engage with the world from a place of worthiness, we have to talk about the things that get in the way- especially shame, fear, and our resistance to vulnerability. 

Shame is that warm feeling that washes over us, making us feel small, flawed, and never good enough. If we want to develop shame resilience- the ability to recognize shame and move through it while maintaining our worthiness and authenticity- then we have to talk about why shame happens. 

The first thing we need to understand about shame resilience is that the less we talk about shame, the more we have it. 

WHAT MAKES UP RESILIENCE? 

1. They are resourceful and have good problem solving skills
2. They are more likely to seek help
3. They hold the belief that they can do something that will help them to manage their feelings and to cope
4. They have social support available to them
5. They are connected with others, such as family or friends

From the foundation of spirituality, 3 other significant patterns emerged as being essential to resilience:

1. Cultivating hope
2. Practicing critical awareness
3. Letting go of numbing and taking the edge off vulnerability, discomfort, and pain

I was shocked to discover that hope is NOT an emotion; it’s a way of thinking or a cognitive process. So, hope is a combination of setting goals, having the tenacity and perseverance to pursue them, and believing in our own abilities. Hope is learned. We learn hopeful, goal-directed thinking in the context of other people. Children most often learn hope from their parents. Snyder says that to learn hopefulness, children need relationships that are characterized by boundaries, consistency, and support. I think it’s so empowering to know that i have the ability to teach my children how to hope. 

Psychologists believe that intuition is a rapid-fire, unconscious associating process- like a mental puzzle. The brain makes an observation, scans its files, and matches the observation with existing memories, knowledge, and experiences. Once it puts together a series of matches, we get a “gut” on what we’ve observed. 

When we start polling people, it’s often because we don’t trust our own knowing. 

Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist: “…intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it’s written there.” 

A critically important component of wholehearted living is play!

Play shapes our brain, helps us foster empathy, helps us navigate complex social groups, and is at the core of creativity and innovation. Play is apparently purposeless. Basically this means that we play for the sake of play. We do it because it’s fun and we want to. Play is not an option. In fact he writes, “The opposite of play is not work- the opposite of play is depression”. 

Living and loving with our whole hearts requires us to respect our bodies’ need for renewal. Insufficient sleep is associated with a number of chronic diseases and conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity. and depression. 

We all have gifts and talents. When we cultivate those gifts and share them with the world, we create a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. 

Squandering our gifts brings distress to our lives. As is turns out, it’s not merely benign or “too bad” if we don’t use the gifts that we’ve been given; we pay for it with our emotional and physical well-being. When we don’t use our talents to cultivate meaningful work, we struggle. We feel disconnected and weighed down by feelings of emptiness, frustration, resentment, shame, disappointment, fear, and even grief. 

Sharing our gifts and talents with the world is the most powerful source of connection with God. 

What one loves in childhood stays in the heart forever.

When we value being cool and in control over granting ourselves the freedom to unleash the passionate, goofy, heartfelt, and soulful expressions of who we are, we betray ourselves. When we consistently betray ourselves, we can expect to do the same to the people we love. Life is way too precious to spend it pretending like we’re super cool and totally in control when we could be laughing, singing, and dancing. 

If you would like to get yourself a copy of this incredible book, click below: 

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