No Bad Parts: The Power of Wholeness

Rev. Jim Boone always keeps it real.

I show up on Sundays because I need a weekly mindset reset. Sunday didn’t disappoint. I didn’t want to show up. And I’m glad I did.

Despite practicing our principles and using our tools, sometimes I feel like I'm hit over the head with reality, and it’s hard to get back up. That was this weekend.

We’re all human, yes?

It started with the music. "(Spirit), I Have My Doubts," by Jon Foreman, echoed my insides. The world feels like it's in pieces… beliefs are in question… and there’s doubt that "truth" will find me in the darkness, the silence. Yep. (Even Rev. Jim had a few tears with that one.) 

Graciously, the last song and everything in between spiraled upward with hope and healing.

Closing with "I Am Light," India.Arie's words told me I'm not my mistakes, nor am I my critical inner voice on continuous loop, not even the broken pieces that, 30-minutes ago, I was sure I was made of. Phew.

Right On Time

Rev. Jim skipped his usual micro-practice for a shout-out to this blog (thanks, Jim!), then launched into a talk I'm pretty sure he wrote just for me.

No Bad Parts, kicking off our July theme Whole No Matter What, opened with an agenda - Proposal, Principle, Paradox, Power - and asked:

Will this be worth your time, talent, and treasure?

My answer: yes.

If you missed it, watch the recording.

The Proposal: Is This Worth Your Time?

(Adding another “p”), the newsletter framed it as a promise: what personal power could we unleash if we saw ourselves clearly, did our best, kept evolving, and supported ourselves the way we'd support a friend?

Rev. Jim made the case from the Ernest Holmes premise that our word doesn't restore wholeness; it reveals it.

So much going on inside...

Most of the time we don't notice our running monologue or the habitual thinking underneath everything, deciding what to criticize or excuse in ourselves, as if wholeness had to be earned. It doesn’t.

We're already whole. There's no destination to reach.

The Principle Behind No Bad Parts

Core Concept No. 5: spirit is a whole that already contains every apparent opposite. We have free will to choose our experience.

Rev. Jim shared a stat from Pam Grout's E-Squared (a book our community read last year): we each have somewhere between 6,000 and 60,000-plus thoughts a day, with 95% of them automatic. Much of that inner dialogue is leftover from childhood, based on what got rewarded and what got punished, which we later buried. Those hidden parts often become unconscious coping mechanisms, or our trigger points.

The Paradox: Knowing It and Feeling It Aren't the Same

Knowing you're whole and feeling whole aren't the same thing. Rev. Jim pointed to author David Burns, who he also referenced in his last talk. We get enmeshed in circular causality - influencing each other's behavior in a reciprocal feedback loop. No one's necessarily wrong. It's a feedback loop that can spiral downward just as easily as it can spiral upward.

The missing piece is a shift in perspective. You don't have to disbelieve your story, but it can help to view it from a different place (literally). He described a practitioner-training exercise: Face the wall and tell it the whole problem, then face the opposite direction and say where you want to go. (Yes, out loud.)

One more thing: your flaws and your strengths are often the same trait, seen from a different angle.

The Power of Being Whole Anyway

Teach, treat, move your feet. Learn it, practice it, then let Life bring you what's next.

This includes forgiveness — Core Concept No. 8: there's no room in the eternal now for divine anger or punishment. The need for forgiveness is strictly human. A great practice is to forgive ourselves for the things we hold against ourselves. It creates space for us to create the lives we truly want.

Rev. Jim's daily practice: write down what you're holding against yourself, then forgive yourself - for the thing you did, said, didn't do, failed at. Let it go. Throw it in the ocean, burn it, get rid of it. No fixing required. That's from Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It. It does.

And Rev. Jim, knowing all the good questions, asked a bigger one: After talking about thinking,

what do you feel?

His story resonates. Around 2014, with a life that looked good from the outside, he stopped functioning. Life felt unlivable for no obvious reason. What brought him back was this community: people sharing and telling the truth about their own struggles, and offering a new way forward. He learned he wasn't broken. He gained tools and insights. He was whole, no matter what.

I showed up here in 2016. Similar but different.

The Promise, Kept

My take: he kept his promise. I walked in second-guessing myself, feeling like nothing mattered, like I didn't matter. I walked out feeling a little kinder to myself, remembering I'm not the broken pieces, not the voices, not the mistakes.

That's where Rev. Jim's four words led. I’m whole, even with the shadows, pitfalls, and stumbles.

When we all show up – for ourselves and for each other - we're stronger, and we send that energy out into the world: love, forgiveness, connection, belonging.

As one of us heals, we heal each other.

With gratitude,

Laura