Reflections on Wholeness, Love, and Inner Work

(This article was originally published on LinkedIn on April28,2025 )

Peter Senge used to say that systems thinking is a language for thinking and communicating about wholes — as opposed to our everyday language, which tends to be more linear and things-oriented.

I remember sitting in a little café in Berkeley 27 years ago, talking with Fritjof Capra. He said something that has stayed with me ever since: that more than systems thinking, what’s needed is a feeling for the whole. Not just an understanding, but a lived perception. He also believed that Indian or Hindu culture holds deep truths about this — that it offers pathways to experience wholeness and to live in alignment with it. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the culture has survived and evolved over millennia, enduring through wave after wave of external challenge.

Arie de Geus often spoke of organizations that lasted for decades and even centuries - the living organisation. Their longevity, he believed, came from an ability to learn, to adapt, and to create. There is something alive at the heart of these living organizations. Something that gave them the capacity to grow and regenerate across generations.

Humberto Maturana, along with Dennis Sandow, did profound work on the centrality of love. Maturana used to say, “Love is the only emotion that makes intelligence grow.” It’s a statement I’ve returned to many times. Dennis has spent decades helping grow networks of acceptance within organizations and communities — always using whatever tools or practices were necessary to enable this essential transformation.

I’ve had the privilege of speaking with each of these remarkable thinkers in person — except Humberto. My own attempts to build on their work, however, often ran aground. Sometimes in the politics of the organizations I was part of. More often, in the shadows of my own ego. It has brought home a deep truth: the inner work is essential for any outer manifestation. Without it, something — fear, resistance, the need for control — always seems to block the emergence of a truly collective intelligence. One that’s greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Over the years, in conversations with friends, colleagues, clients — again and again, the importance of personal healing and self-love has become obvious. The capacity to truly accept what is,  seems to be the foundation of a creative, peaceful, and connected life.

To be okay with discomfort, pain, even what we call “negative” emotions — that takes something. It takes the willingness to remember that all experiences are transitory, and the deeper knowing that I am bigger than my experiences. When I rush to suppress, project, or reject what I feel, it is fear that is driving me.  These so-called negative emotions often trigger conditioned responses — avoidance, suppression, numbing. And the irony is, when we dull those feelings, we end up muting the positive ones too. We rarely, if ever, fully feel our feelings.

However, I’ve started to see fear itself as an invitation: a call to shine the light of awareness into hidden spaces, to love myself out of the story of the ego.

There are so many unspoken rules about emotions versus thinking — about which is “supposed” to guide our lives. Our conscious mind wants to stay in control, editing out what it sees as noise. But emotions are not noise. They are sensations in the body, woven together with the meanings we assign to them. And all too often, we respond not to reality, but to our conditioning around those sensations.

Over the past decade, I’ve discovered again and again: “a willingness to love what is”,  is a gift that keeps giving. It has helped me become less reactive, less impulsive, less harried. And it has opened me to moments of real joy — the kind that doesn't require celebration, because it is celebration.

And in the end, this is what enables, what Capra had talked about – the feeling for the whole. Here is where the nested wholes, we and the world are, meet in a loving embrace, in an ongoing celebration of living.

I wonder, what keeps you from loving what is, in your life, currently?