The moon’s still there...
Stress Resilience Retraining Practice — part 4: remembering your innate wholeness
This is the final article about the four steps of my Stress Resilience Retraining Practice:
Invite internal wholeness (this article)
Step four itself is short and simple. However, I think it’s time to explore a deeper understanding of:
what wholeness is;
why we seem to lose touch with it; and
an effective change model to help us remember and experience it.
Mimi and the moon
My grandmother, we called her Mimi, used to look up at a night sky and whisper, "Well, there’s no moon tonight." Turns out she genuinely didn’t know the moon gets hidden by shadow. Mimi lived 75 years believing the moon simply vanished now and then. (Eventually, my dad gave her a children's book on moon phases; we think she figured it out.)
This is how most of us think about our own wholeness.
Wholeness is innate
Across multiple disciplines—spiritual traditions, psychology, and neuroscience—wholeness is regarded as our natural state. When we’re connected to it, we experience:
Creative flow
Source
Calm
Power and agency
Present-moment truth
Access to inner wisdom, memory, and skill
Ability to act wisely
The stress response, however, pulls focus away from all of that good stuff, directing all our attention toward a perceived threat. In this stressed state, awareness of wholeness disappears. Like my Mimi and the moon, we believe it’s gone. Or worse, that it never existed.
In western culture, we’ve also learned to internalize beliefs like:
If I can’t fix myself, I must be broken.
Wholeness is a myth.
A life run by stress is normal.
The ‘whips and chains’ model
Western culture teaches us that the only way to improve is to forcefully strive our way through suffering. I call this the “whips and chains” approach to change—reliant on willpower, shame, and unrealistic standards.
Not surprisingly, this whips and chains model mirrors authoritarian leadership. Both systems use:
Shame and control
Punishment over compassion
Denial of emotion and complexity
Impossible ideals of strength and suffering
Rejection of personal experience and self-care
This model leads to disconnection, fear of change, and we even dehumanize ourselves by identifying as a failure. It strips away empathy (toward self and others) and blocks healing.
A more helpful model: Beginner’s mind
To develop resilience, we need a change model based on curiosity, not criticism. Beginner’s mind is the right model for the job. The term is borrowed from Zen Buddhism, but has parallels in ancient spiritual traditions and modern psychology. It offers a more expansive, nonviolent, and compassionate path by inviting us to meet each moment as if for the first time—free from assumptions or fixed identity.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”
— Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
For the purposes of Stress Resilience Retraining, beginner’s mind includes four key elements:
Curiosity — A gentle desire to observe and learn without judgment.
Neutral, non-judging awareness — Creates a container for safety and observation without emotional distortion.
Non-striving — The radical choice to stop forcing change. It replaces pressure with presence and alignment.
Playful experimentation — A creative mode of testing, adapting, and starting again—free of perfectionism or fear. I emphasize the playful, with absolutely no long, hard sessions. A few seconds, a few times per day is wonderful. You can’t do it wrong.
Together, these principles generate a healing path on which growth and integration happen naturally.
The neuroscience of wholeness: Gamma brainwaves
When you use beginner’s mind during step four of Stress Resilience Retraining Practice, you're doing more than calming yourself. You’re learning to invite gamma brainwave activity, a fast (30–100+ Hz) and highly integrative brain state associated with whole-brain coherence and joyful expansion of the self.
Emerging research shows that gamma is associated with:
Loving-kindness
Gratitude
Compassion
Non-dual awareness
The good news is you don’t need 10,000 hours of mediation practice under your belt to access gamma. In fact, step four of the Stress Resilience Retraining Practice includes gamma-linked practices that anyone can use.
Quick review
Before we outline step 4, here’s a quick reminder of steps 1–3.
Step 1: Notice the stress
Use clear, neutral language: “I feel anxious and tired.”
Step 2: Untangle stress feelings
Acknowledge old patterns: “I feel alone and overwhelmed.”
Name the truth: “There’s no tiger. I’m not a child anymore.”
Observe without trying to fix.
Step 3: Focus on the physical
Let stress recede by focusing on:
The sensation of tapping on your head and torso
Breathing
Curiosity and somatic presence
Repeat as long as it’s helpful.
Finally, step four: Invite wholeness
Like floating, wholeness is not something you do—it’s something that happens in the absence of doing.
Once you’re grounded in focus tapping and breathing (which can be done in 90 seconds—even less), begin another tapping round. At each tapping point, breathe, focus, and expand your attention to include these self-suggestions in any order:
a) Releasing
“I am softening around this.”
Relax, unclench, breathe.
b) Giving space
“I’m creating space around this.”
Expand, zoom out, take a fuller breath.
c) Sending non-judgment
“I send compassion around this.”
Non-criticism, kindness, love.
d) Inviting wholeness (even joy)
“I imagine light in every cell of my body.”
Experience any sparkle, color, sensation.“I am much bigger than I thought.”
Imagine your light as a beautiful, shimmering field, growing larger than your physical self.
Optional gamma-linked practices to add:
Feel the whole body as one field
Rest awareness behind the eyes or in the heart
Recall an experience of sincere gratitude (yours or someone else’s)
Send compassion to yourself and/or others
Breathe slowly in stillness
Intentional positive emotions
Repeat step four as long as it feels good and helpful.
Finishing the Stress Resilience Retraining Practice
When you’re ready to end your practice:
place your hands on your heart (or anywhere it feels nurturing);
take a deep breath; and
anchor positive feelings or shifts with a sense of gratitude.
Step four (like all the steps) can be performed as a standalone micro- and mini-practice (10 seconds to two minutes), as well as the final step of a full Stress Resilience Retraining Practice. Experiment, and see how you feel doing one or the other.
Chances are you will feel calmer and more centered. You may also begin to observe changes in your habits and cognitive shifts, even between sessions.
As with all things, the more often you practice (even short sessions), the more likely you are to get glimpses and glimmers of gamma-like wholeness. Eventually, you’ll be able to sustain that felt sense of wholeness for longer periods of time, inside and outside the practice.
Pro tips
To get the most out of this practice, I recommend:
Go through the entire Stress Resilience Retraining Practice (4-10 minutes) one to three times per day (at the very least, I always do it just before sleep).
Use any step as a standalone micro-practice (10 seconds to two minutes). The positive impact is cumulative over time, so I highly recommended you do as many micro sessions as you can throughout the day, looking to make them enjoyable. Think: mini-vacation from stress! The more often you practice, the sooner wholeness will become your new normal.
We all deserve to reclaim our relationship to stress, returning it to it’s rightful place as a temporary signal, not a permanent identity.
Questions? Wholeness experiences to share?
Leave a comment below, and I will get back to you!
Ready for a chance to experiment with the practice?
Stay tuned for video and live practice sessions, coming soon!
📚 Resources and further reading
🔬 Neuroscience, stress, and wholeness
Church, D. (2020).
Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy.
Hay House.
🔗 Hay House
🔗 Bliss Brain website
Davidson, R. J., & Lutz, A. (2008).
Buddha’s Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Science of Meditation
🔗 Read summary on NIH
Summary of how meditation induces brain changes, including gamma activity linked to integration and joyful awareness.
Lutz, A., Dunne, J. D., & Davidson, R. J. (2007).
Meditation and the Neuroscience of Consciousness, in The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness
Explores how meditation reshapes consciousness and enhances brain integration—especially in advanced practitioners.
Siegel, D. J. (2010).
The Mindful Therapist
Shows how presence and awareness foster internal wholeness and emotional regulation through “mindsight.”
Porges, S. W. (2011).
The Polyvagal Theory
Explains why stress blocks access to calm and integration—and how we recover through safety and regulation.
🧘 Beginner’s mind and its cross-cultural parallels
Zen Buddhism – Shoshin (“beginner’s mind”)
Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970)
Opens the door to unconditioned awareness through non-judging, receptive presence.
Taoism – Wu Wei (“effortless action”)
Laozi. Tao Te Ching
🔗 D.C. Lau translation
🔗 Stanford Encyclopedia
Describes the power of natural, non-striving action aligned with life's flow.
Christian mysticism – The Cloud of Unknowing
Anonymous, & Hanson, A. (n.d.). The cloud of unknowing. Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
Ofm, R. R. (2023, March 24). Entering the cloud of unknowing. Center for Action and Contemplation.
Encourages surrender of knowledge and control to experience divine presence and inner stillness.
Indigenous wisdom – Sacred listening and presence
Cajete, Gregory. Look to the Mountain (1994)
Highlights the power of deep listening, humility, and present-moment wisdom rooted in the land and spirit.
Holm-Olsen, E. (2025, March 27). The wisdom of Indigenous cultures. Earth Day.
Highlights various Indigenous beliefs and practices that emphasize environmental stewardship and the sacredness of nature.
Jewish mysticism – Tzimtzum (“divine contraction”)
Robinson, G. (2019, January 18). Isaac Luria and Kabbalah in Safed. My Jewish Learning.
Fine, L. (2022, August 25). Tikkun in lurianic Kabbalah. My Jewish Learning.
Tzimtzum models how divine space-making allows awareness, healing, and connection to arise.
Humanistic psychology – Unconditional positive regard
Rogers, Carl. On Becoming a Person (1961)
🔗 Amazon
🔗 APA Dictionary
Shows how transformation emerges from non-judging, empathic attention—mirroring beginner’s mind in therapy.