I’ve been thinking about the word WHELMED. W-H-E-L-M-E-D. When I looked it up, it was actually synonymous with overwhelm. That is how it was originally used. But the word came to me in a very different way. I realized I wanted to give it my own definition.
For me, WHELMED is neither overwhelmed nor underwhelmed. It is something in between. A feeling of being full right up to the brim without spilling over.
It is a sense of saturated gratitude… a recognition that everything is just as it should be, right in this moment. And yet, it is not a denial of impermanence. It is not ignoring the transient nature of life. On the contrary, it is an unconditional acceptance of that impermanence; the acknowledgment that this fullness, this experience of feeling WHELMED, is fleeting, and that is precisely what makes it so profound.
It is the Goldilocks of states. Not too much. Not too little. Just right. And there is the deep knowing that this feeling exists whether I notice it or not; whether I interpret it as fullness or not… because that is the nature of awareness itself.
WHELMED is empty fullness (as the Buddhists might say). It is exactly as it is. It has its own energetic signature; a vibration that can be felt even when life is challenging… when tragedy and difficulty are unfolding in the world and in our own lives. It is a steady, ceaseless hum, like the deep resonance of a bass line in music, grounding and constant. Even in hardship, the resonance of enoughness remains.
What if a state of WHELM is simply the recognition of the aliveness of the current moment… without interpretation, without separation, without judgment?
What if this enoughness is the default, and we only step out of it when the mind (innocently) creates distance from something that was never separate in the first place?
What if we simply remembered that beneath all surface experiences, in every moment, there is a constant, fundamental state of WHELM upholding everything?
What would it feel like to rest in that alive enoughness right now? To breathe into it fully… without needing to understand it, control it, or grasp it?