February 2012
2 posts
Losing My Religion
“For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of...
Susan B. Komen's Reversal
0 0 1 127 730 LFH Group 6 1 856 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE Yesterday, someone private messaged me after I posted a “Like” on an article about Susan B....
January 2012
1 post
A client asks: "What is the bodymind?"...
…and why is it so helpful in calming yourself? Typically, when we hear we need to “get into our bodies,” we think our way to the body…we think about our legs, our hands our heartbeat. This happens frequently when someone is new to the practice. It takes much gentle prompting to get a client to feel the sensations of a certain body part. The bodymind is a term that is...
December 2011
1 post
From a client today who feels like growing up...
Rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and calm before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with Your confidence or joy, which they could not understand. Seek yourself some sort of simple and loyal community with them, which need not necessarily change as you yourself become...
November 2011
3 posts
Peace Through Forgiveness
We’ve a need to blame and a desire for revenge when we’re hurt. I see this in myself and I see how easily I repeat family patterns which cause me to try to get from others what they are incapable of giving me due to their emotional imprinting. Childhood lasts a lifetime. We’ve needy little selves who create drama whenever someone mirrors some past memory that we never...
Penn State, the Catholic Church and the Challenge...
In 2002, a series of incidents and private e-mails from an alarmed parish staff led to my serving as a whistleblower when the pastor of the community where I’d been a member for 30 years embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars. As in many of these cases, the extent of his transgressions was never made public for a number of reasons. That’s someone else’s story to tell. ...
"There is nothing wrong with negativity"
When Pema Chodron was Deirdre Blomfield-Brown she said, “There is nothing wrong with negativity.” Poet David Whyte writes, “Deirdre saw her depression as a thing in itself, like a mountain or a cloud, with its own life, its own necessities, and therefore worthy of respect, more like a doorway than an obstacle. It was a path to follow, not an error she made that she should...
October 2011
3 posts
Considerations for Body Types' (8, 9, 1)...
Sometimes I find it a challenge to teach about this triad through the written word because not only does language can fall short, but we also have minimal cultural proficiency with accessing our “felt sense” or what is sometimes called our somatic awareness. I’ve found the best teaching is through exercises that offer an experience. So, with that caveat, I’ll do my best (with the help of...
Considerations for Head Types' (5, 6, 7)...
This triad’s autopilot stance is through the mental faculties. Thus, some sort of sensory prayer/awareness is crucial. (Touch, taste, smell your way to the holy as Frederich Buechner says). It takes them out of the dryness of their cognitive loop into a felt sense of their own experience. They tend to become fascinated with spiritual ideas, concepts and inquiries. They’ve a quest for truth...
Living as and Loving a Type Nine: The Mediator
I’m always interested in what angers each type and lately, my attention has been on Nines, who are the most out of touch with their anger. It’s not uncommon for people to say that they notice the anger in their Nine partner/child/co-worker/friend before the Nine herself knows its there. Some thoughts on Nines and anger: 1. We often hear about Nines and conflict avoidance, but a...
September 2011
5 posts
Today's Race for the Cure had me thinking of my...
Alejandro, Janice and me. When my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer 5 1/2 years ago, my initial response was the requisite, “Why her?” She’d experienced a number of life challenges and I felt as if she’d had her fill. Yet, that was then and this is now. Janice took an unconventional approach to cancer by treating it not as an enemy with which to do battle but as...
4 tags
Hidden in Plain Sight: The Origins of the...
“One way to transmit sacred teachings was by veiling them in symbolism or hiding them in metaphors. Like the spiritual lineage that preceded him, Evagrius argued that the physical reality of the manifest world displayed in the heavens, is a metaphor that reveals divine secrets.” Helen Palmer I’m often asked about the origins of the Enneagram. I heard this excellent...
5 tags
Conversations with a friend: Beyond using religion...
I just had a conversation with my friend who was raised in a secular Jewish household by liberal parents. She studied for years with a spiritual guru and is one of my more interesting friends. She’s the one of the most honest, reflective people I know and she has no interest in impressing anyone except maybe her boss. I first met her in an Integral Theory program at JFK University and...
August 2011
2 posts
Entering the Silence of Snowmass
It isn’t until I enter the silence that I fully realize the extroverted life I have chosen for myself. Dave and I spent today driving through mountains, eating lunch in Aspen and closing out the day St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass for the first time. When a monastery is within 100 miles, I’m a moth to flame as if I’ve found my people. No greeters at the door...
Confessions of a Reluctant Activist
I’m one of those people who has occasionally admired people who get in their cars, brave all sorts of weather and stand on street corners for something they believe in. I beep at them as I pass them in my car and I wave out the window if I support them. Yet, the closest I ever came to participation was standing on the corner of Montgomery and Cooper Rd. with my second grader and her...
July 2011
12 posts
6 tags
Sexual Shadow and Scandal in Christian Churches...
In the Catholic Church, a bad situation continues to get worse: The top papal advisor on the pedophilia scandal has recently been arrested for arranging sexual encounters with young boys and exchanging cocaine with drug dealers for sex. He was caught on tape allegedly saying: “I do not want 16-year-old boys but younger. Fourteen-year-olds are O.K. Look for needy boys who have family...
The Tree of Life: A Stunning Masterpiece or a...
Someone asked me on Facebook about the Tree of Life, a film by Terrence Malick: “How was the movie? Would you recommend it?” If anything illuminates our mood, typological and cultural preferences along with systems of meaning making, it would be Tree of Life. So my response reflects a personal experience on a given day so it’s a straightforward…maybe: ...
We are not our Enneagram type: On Irish-ness,...
Last night, as I taught a class on the false self through an Enneagram lens, something struck me that never fails to give me a certain reverence for the Narrative Tradition: a human being can never be reduced to a type. The very essence of each person is distinct and the stories which shape their becoming are rooted in a vast array of personal and cultural experiences. If you walked into...
“Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time? My greatest...”
– Jonathan Safran Foer (via theorthodoxheretic)
Living and Loving as a Type Eight: The Protector
Recently, in my role as Social Media Coordinator for Enneagram Studies in the Narrative Tradition, I wrote an article in response to a question a Facebook fan had about Enneagram type 8s. He asked for insights and strategies which might be helpful to 8s. I thought I’d share: When dealing with 8s, it’s helpful to recognize the defense structure that holds this type together: denial....
Each Enneagram Center's Primary Strategy, Response...
You will notice each type has a primary strategy when triggered in some way. The head center will try to figure things out and assess whether they and others can be trusted through their faculties of mental perception (a fearful response rooted in search for safety and security); The heart center will try to make a connection through the faculties of emotional intelligence (a deceptive...
Sally Kempton: So why would a yoga practitioner or...
“Prayer—especially the kind of prayer where you ask God for favors—has a mixed reputation in my world, where many people tend to be postmodern, skeptical yoga practitioners or Buddhist meditators. For some of my yogi-friends and students, it simply feels too religious. Some of us also suspect that prayer is useless, at best a sort of spiritual placebo. (Studies on healing prayer have yet to...
Liz Wagele: What Does a One (Perfectionist) Look...
I’ve been appreciating Liz Wagele’s view on careers and the Enneagram. This piece on Ones was helpful in giving me a glimpse into the worldview of my mother. While she did not work, she had a specific vision for her children and husband…I found it both useful and limiting even before I knew the Enneagram. She writes: Perfectionists want to carry out their ideals, which can...
“We want to create a context of dignity for suffering people. To do so, it is...”
– Roshi Joan Halifax
In order to remember the vision of America, we...
Deep within ourselves we know we do not wish to dream our life away; we wish for truth, not “truth”; we wish for freedom, not “freedom”; we wish for an independence that enables us to serve what is greater than ourselves, not an independence that is little more than an adolescent fantasy of power or nightmarish cosmic isolation. Truth, freedom, independence; yes, these...
June 2011
12 posts
Dreams and the Enneagram
I have a friend who goes to a dream group facilitated by an Enneagram teacher. She said it’s rather compelling the way type shows up in dreams. I am a social subtype and my dreams are often occupied by a lot of people. She is a one on one subtype and her dreams are usually just her and perhaps, an intense relationship with one symbol in the dream. I also have noticed that symbols of our...
Fly Away. A Song for Leaving Home and Returning
My friend, Meredith wrote on her Facebook wall: “Ever noticed the parallels between baby birds and your kids? They’re born, they stay, they leave their crap all over your house and then they fly away. And…mom’s miss them anyway.” As I read her post, I thought of this song by the Indigo Girls, “Fly Away.” I used to played the song song so I could have...
Enneagram Types at Work
Ingrid Stabb, who certified with me through the Enneagram Professional Training Program (EPTP), has written a book with Elizabeth Wagele called “The Career Within You.” She also has a nice site which gives brief synopses of each type at work. Here is a sample as she looks at Enneagram Type Four
Nurse Reveals Top Five Regrets People Name on...
By Bronnie Ware (who worked for years nursing the dying)
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people have had not honoured even a half of their...
How Each Enneagram Type Typically Misreads Other...
Jerry Wagner has a good new book out on type called Nine Lenses on the World. It’s quite good in making some fine distinctions. I appreciated his take on how each type typically misreads other people. I took some notes to share: Projections of the One: Since Ones avoid their own anger and imperfections, they project their anger and faults onto others. Others are experienced as being...
The Tallow, Wick and Flame: The Dynamic Trinity of...
“Behind personality stands essence and behind essence stands real ‘I’ and behind real ‘I’ stands God.” This is how Cynthia Bourgeault began her talk at the Association of Enneagram Teachers in the Narrative Tradition conference. She was speaking of the trinitarian nature of the personality, essence and soul. Because each of these things means...
I Get Lost in My Mind
Someone in one of my Enneagram groups posted this song on our Facebook wall…she thought it might have been written for head types (Types 5, 6, and 7). Enjoy.
Sunday Morning Chant
The first chirps of the waking birds mark the “pont vierge” of the dawn
under a sky as yet without real light,
a moment of awe and inexpressible innocence,
when the One in perfect silence opens their eyes,
They speak to the One, not with fluent song,
but with an awakening question,
that is their dawn state.
Their condition asks if it is time for them to “be?”
She...
The Spirituality of Nature: Stalking the Divine in...
Put the sacred texts on the shelf for 20 years, Thomas Berry suggested. That includes the Bible, the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao. Step into nature. Look around. Breathe. Religious fundamentalism abounds. The texts, the language of the past has lost its meaning because we lost ourselves in a confusion of ideas. The divine is communicating in the silence and the sound of the natural...
Breathing instead of screaming...
A lawyer with a lot of opinions was none too thrilled when I asked she and 51 of her colleagues to drop their eyes for a breathing practice. She questioned its practicality. After a 5 minute breathing meditation she said, “I’ve been telling warring clients to breathe for 20 years but never did it myself. It really works.” “Works” means it’s healing, it...
May 2011
10 posts
Fundamentalism and Excommunications of Dissenters...
The best part of our Integral Coming Home community is that we are composed of a countless variety of Christians (the vast array is kind of dizzying); non-Christians looking for a fuller way of understanding the Christian experience and then we have the people who will not call themselves anything at all because it just creates too much misunderstanding (the projections on religious labels are...
Oprah Impressively Sees in Herself What We Saw: An...
I remember watching Oprah interview James Frey, author of the bestselling A Million Little Pieces. I was sitting with my son and we both had the same reaction: she went for the jugular and the interview was about her rather than about allowing Frey to share his story. She felt she had been made to look stupid by Frey’s lie and she went after him. It’s not about holding someone...
A Man Without a Country: A Final Prayer →
matthersh:
Dear Lord,
If indeed you do exist, if Harold Camping is right, if the world is going to end at 6 p.m. on Saturday, May 21, and if these are my last few days on earth, I have a few things to get off my chest.
I am sorry, Lord, for refusing to believe in you for all this time. Please don’t take…
Being Mary...Holy Week for the Not So Holy (Or a...
So, every once in awhile, I get snarky about the Integral* universe where I can feel myself getting preachy/teachy ( a sure sign of stress) that Integral is not the end-all and it is simply an elegant and useful map marking out a vast territory.
Then, I might proselytize that maps are flat while Reality is living and breathing. If I really get going on tangent, I might say something like...
Nobel Peace Laureates Disagree on importance of...
“Too much emotion, attachment, anger or fear, that kind of mental state, you can’t investigate objectively,” he said. That did not sit well with Ms. Williams, an American, who is, as the Dalai Lama put it, “quite blunt.” “I thought it was strange to be asked to be on this panel on inner peace, because I don’t have much,” she said. “It’s anger at injustice which fires many of us.” Read more...
“I think the definition of a man’s man has shifted in recent times to this sort of fratty bro, different from the older version, which was aloof and distant — Gary Cooper or Cary Grant or James Bond. Now it’s a little vulgar, kind of lowbrow, adolescent. I’m not that guy. Part of being an adult is treating women like women.”
— Jon Hamm
“Be humble for you are made of earth.
Be noble for you are made of stars.”
– Serbian proverb (via theorthodoxheretic)