"What I have found, both in my own life and among others, is that we haven't been trained in solitude, in wholeness, in love. We find churches to be places of guilt and shame rather than schools of life-giving wholeness. We find workplaces rewarding the hardest-working rather than the most whole. We define success by what we've achieved – not by how we do what we do – and so are crushed in the face of failure.
"In our exhaustion, we medicate, we modify with cosmetic tweaks, we inhale and imbibe. We run from reality rather than toward Reality. We abandon wholeness in our self-help fascinations and machinations. We sabotage maturity through our guilt-and-shame tactics. But it's time to change these life-quenching patterns.
"The final three chapters [in this book] are an invitation to your life, which is Life itself. This isn't an invitation to an idea, but an invitation to an experience known only through participation. There is no quick fix or fast track to wholeness, no surefire method for experiencing perpetual heights of intimacy with God – only the invitation to dwell deeply in God's life, which already dwells in you. As mystics and contemplatives have said for centuries, this journey is not so much about feeling as it is about being.
"When your very being experiences transformation, the change that happens may not even be perceptible at first. But with the vision and practice we'll explore, we'll be tapping into a deeper and more transformative experience, where neural patterns shift from reactivity to reflection, where the brain functions as a whole, where our invisible bags hold no weight, where head meets heart, where division melts into wholeness."
