July – 2020

Greetings from me and the team. I hope your summer is going along with some grace in this time of tremendous change. Hope everyone is hanging in there and discovering new ways to connect with ourselves and others. Certainly, it is a time for appreciating the simple things in our lives, and for seeing our communities and our loved ones with new eyes.

Since the last newsletter I have been home in New York City, and have not even left my neighborhood more than a few times. But It has been a time to get reacquainted with my neighbors and with some of the resources in our community. I will admit, that for the first weeks I was pretty dour about the closing of almost all of my favorite things in our city—the theaters, music venues, great restaurants, museums, cafes, you name it. But NYC is resilient, and people have been finding ways to make things more enjoyable and relaxing while also being polite and mindful around social distance, masks, etc. When I first came back, the city was still reeling from some of the highest infection and death rates in the world. But we now lead the nation in lowering the rates of infection, hospitalizations, and deaths. It comforts me to know the world has gone through big challenges like this before, and people have come through. And we will too.

I feel similar hope that constructive conversations about race in our country (and around the world) can unfold, and I do think the Enneagram work can be a help in this regard. I have been in conversations with Dr Deborah Egerton and other leaders in the field of race relations to look at ways that the inner work we do can be part of the healing of our country, and indeed be a model for such discussions in other countries as well.

Like everyone else, I have been watching these major events unfold, and looking at how I need to adapt my skills and offerings to meet the changes that are upon us. And this has meant more than merely offering online classes, although thank God for that technology! It has been a real lifeline for many and has allowed us to continue doing work in a time when people really need tools.

Although it has taken a few weeks of this crisis to really land, I see that many are starting to see something I have talked about for a long time. When we count totally on externals for our wellbeing, we may indeed hit a period of good luck when our job, our family, our relationships, and our health are all going well. At such times, our ego tends to take the credit, as if we deserve all the credit for our good fortune. As long as things are “going our way” we may see no need to look at our inner life. Why dig up old problems when life is okay? But if we do not know our inner life, if we do not know the paths out of our particular “dark spaces,” when trouble and loss hit—and it is absolutely inevitable that they will—we don’t know what to do, and the crisis can quickly overwhelm us. We may get lost in anxiety, depression, addiction, or political extremism as a way of trying to overcome the feelings that are dominating our experience. We never learned how to navigate our own soul.

I tell my students in all my programs, “if you practice while it is easy, it will be there for you when things are hard.” So those of us who have already been cultivating presence, kindness, and self-awareness, have some ground in them when life tilts this way or that. If we have been giving some of our life to those practices and pursuits, it is likely that we  are more able to be a source of stability and ground in our lives—for ourselves and for the people around us. If we have not done so, times like these become the perfect reminder that the inner work part of the Enneagram, the practice by which the theory is able to be manifested in our lives, is essential. It becomes clearer that outer conditions may continue to change, and in ways that we cannot yet foresee. (Take a look at the first half of the 20^th Century if you doubt this!) Knowing this, we rededicate ourselves to being a vehicle for presence, loving kindness, and wisdom in our worlds. We start to realign with the original vision of the Enneagram work.

There are usually three benefits we start to see from engaging in the real inner work. First, we have an inner resilience and strength to carry us through the tough times. We have a positivity, a trust in the fundamental fabric of reality, in Grace if you will, that does not shy away from difficulties and suffering, but holds us through them and brings dignity and compassion into the situation. Second, we truly appreciate the gifts that are in our life today, right now. Probably many of us have been rediscovering the beauty and wonder of our homes and our communities. I have had amazing adventures simply walking around the blocks of my immediate neighborhood here in Manhattan. But I am sure it would be the same if I was walking around my neighborhood in Colorado, or North Carolina, or Ontario, or the Midlands or in Cairo, Egypt. We start to take in our world, and as we see it freshly, freed from many of our assumptions and preoccupations, and more relaxed into our bodies and hearts, we feel how amazing it is to be part of this world. Our kitchen table is a wonder! And third, we learn to better discriminate what to give our attention to, in terms of work, and in terms of what we listen to our read. We may even start to notice some of the “echo chambers” we get caught in when our favorite news sources keep feeding us material that triggers our fear, rage, and shame. There is no pre-set here. We pay attention to how we use our attention, and what serves our authentic development and sense of service in the world.