A Letter from Pippa on Wholebeing: Why We Need More Than Wellbeing.

Most of us know what it feels like to live in pieces. There’s the “you” who works, the “you” who maintains relationships, the “you” who manages your inner world - and somewhere beneath it all, the quiet awareness of an original or ‘natural’ you, bracing against societal strain. Our culture treats these aspects as separate pieces-of-personhood, and as things we need to keep ‘in good-order’.

Wellbeing itself has become a bit of a personal project, as if flourishing were something an individual could shoulder alone through striving, fixing and improving. But a person cannot flourish alone. Not emotionally, not relationally, not ecologically. We are entangled beings, shaped by everything we are in contact with. This is why wellbeing, although helpful, is no longer enough.

What we need now is wholebeing. Wholebeing is what happens when your inner life, your relationships, and your sense belonging to the wide web of life, are no longer treated as separate territories. It is the way a life becomes coherent again - inside, between, and around us. Wholebeing is what we have when we realise that we are not a personal improvement project that will be marked and compared to all others to see if we measured up in the end. It’s about feeling like you can inhabit your life now, as it is, even if there are things you are working on. It is also what we have when we realise that if we want to thrive and feel authentic, real and truly well, we have to be willing to step outside of our little bubbles and participate, be in community, be with.

Why Wellbeing Falls Short.

Wellbeing culture often focuses on lifestyle, stress reduction, and productivity - a view built around the individual self. That’s great, but it’s not all of it. The problem is the scale - self-view keeps things very small and very insular and what helps us flourish most is connection, not individualism.

Wellbeing feels like a thing you initiate and manage. Wholebeing feels like a thing that already exists that you decide to let yourself participate in.

Wellbeing focuses on habits. Wholebeing focuses on relationships.

Wellbeing aims for calm. Wholebeing aims for coherence - a pattern of living that makes

sense and feels true.

Wellbeing treats flourishing as a personal responsibility. Wholebeing recognises it as

something that happens between people and places.

Wellbeing says: take care of yourself. Wholebeing says: take care of the web of life and

communities that you belong to, and accept that they take care of you too.

Industrial vs Ecological Mentality.

Much of modern life is built on industrial thinking: optimisation, efficiency, productivity, compartmentalisation. This mentality treats people as machines with parts to be fixed - and fixing or improving is what wellbeing can tend to focus on. But ecological thinking sees the world differently. Most importantly, wholebeing sees you as already whole, even if you have forgotten that fact. In ecology and in us as part of ecology, everything is connected. Nothing thrives alone. Diversity is what creates resilience. The cycles and seasons of life that we are in matter and exert great influence. This is what wholebeing tends to focus on. We have been trying to heal ourselves and improve how we feel as if we were mechanical. But we are far more like ecosystems than machines.

In short, wholebeing recognises that our best health emerges through relationships we have with life as well as the relationship we have with ourselves.

The Three Layers of Wholebeing.

Wholebeing recognises three living layers that shape every human life:

The ME - Your Inner world

Your inner world—emotions, thoughts, instincts, imagination, nervous system, meaning-making - is kind of like a living ecology - think of it like a coral reef or a woodland with many different aspects and influences. You don’t help it thrive by concentrating on only one part. If you are a committed yogi but you’re actually isolated and lonely, you’re not thriving. If you turn up for supper club but never notice your nervous system is fraught, you’re not thriving. If you do hours of exercise every day but never rest, that’s not thriving either. The inner world thrives on diversity, rest, nourishment, and allowing a bit of wildness. It cannot be ‘optimised’ by pushing - it must be tended into wholeness.

The WE - Your world of relationships

Human flourishing happens through connection. We co-regulate and calm our nervous systems with one another. We play and grow together. We find our identities and our ambitions and what we care most about through each other. We find our place and our belonging through each other. Just about every way that we truly expand comes through relationships and networks. The “we” includes friendships, family, intimacy, community, mentors, collaborators - anywhere we feel met, understood, or shaped. In fact, to flourish, we need relationships where we don’t just communicate; we commune.

The US - Your Belonging in the web of life

Ecological belonging isn’t just for bees and badgers, and the web of life is not something ‘out there’. It’s not limited to forests or coastlines or places that we ‘get away’ to either. We are mammals too, and we are 100% part of ecologies. For us, those ecologies might be urban - whether villages or cities - but they are alive too - weather, birds, microbes, seasons, light, shadow, street-corner ecosystems. You are nature in body (with a soul), whether you live among skyscrapers or mountains. Wholebeing recognises your body’s deep connection to the living web and that we are really pretty lonely when we forget that connection.