Exploring the ENNEAGRAM

— exploring yourself

The blog

“But when my ‘gut feelings’ are thrown off balance — then listening to them isn’t helpful, surely?”

Inner growth

A little bit or well into our growth journey (that is, life), some people realise that their gut feelings aren’t always that well informed — that previous experiences have warped their instinctual sense of what’s a threat and what isn’t. Of what’s an actual need and what’s a off-balance craving. Of what’s true joy and what’s just an adrenaline rush or hysterically funny. And so on.

When this happens, it‘s easy to dismiss our gut wants and attractions, and even our more heartfelt longings and wishes. We start getting ideas about what “evolved” or “mature” wants and longings look like, and we feel embarrassed when we exhibit what we have come to think of “childish”, “needy” or “co-dependent” tendencies within. Of course we don’t need someone to hold space for us — we’re adults, and we should be perfectly capable of holding space for ourselves. Obviously we don’t really want to eat the chocolate — it’s just a stupid craving. And clearly, our well-being doesn’t depend on our boss’, mother’s, friend’s or children’s approval. So surely, entertaining those sensations and feelings would just be feeding a ghost, or at least be a complete waste of time?

Well. Not necessarily. The key to whether a feeling, impulse or sensation is worth your time, your exploration, or not is simple: if you have it, it’s worth exploring.

The key to whether a feeling, impulse or sensation is worth your time, your exploration, or not is simple: if you have it, it’s worth exploring.

Many of us have a tendency to believe that if a feeling — for simplicity’s sake, let’s include emotions as well as instinctual impulses and somatic, felt-sense impressions in the word feeling here — is based on immature or otherwise faulty ground, it’s not worth our time and should be ignored. Giving space for your feeling of disappointment when your boss completely overlooked your contribution to a successful project seems childish, humiliating, and useless. Paying attention to your fear of someone, when you know for a fact that this particular fear is just a projection that stems from this person’s physical similarity to someone else you once knew; equally pointless. After all, you know for a fact that the fear interpretation is faulty, so why engage it? And to give compulsive impulses and obsessions the time of day when you know with still equal certainty that they aren’t productive can feel borderline dangerous.

A word of caution

Here, of course, a warning in called for: if you do have impulses that are harmful to you or anyone else, in the moment or as a long-term destructive behaviour, please seek help. This article is not directed at you. The giving-space-to-feelings-within is for feelings (etc) that you know won’t drag you under. So if you feel the urge to have a drink when you have a drinking problem and know from experience you don’t want to be drinking, please process those urges only with professional help.

Being aware of is not acting on

But the huge majority of feelings, impressions, emotions, impulses, and physical sensations, for most people, don’t fall into the warning-flag category just above here. What’s interesting is, we often act as if they did. That is, we act as if we weren’t equipped to deal with the experience of disappointment or loss or anger or urges. We don’t know what to do with them. Or we believe that to feel them means to act on them, and if we already know we don’t want to do that, it feels safest to just try and disregard them. What good would it do to give space to them? Stepping closer to that which we ultimately want to avoid anyway doesn’t make sense, right?

As it turns out, the answer is: a lot. Because they are a part of your experience. Shutting off bits of your experience is very rarely helpful — and yet, it’s what we have been taught to do since we were little kids. In the interest of turning us into well-adjusted, social adults, we were taught to swallow our rage, camouflage our disgust, smile through our grief, and hide our fear as best we could.

Parents can’t teach what they don’t know

A lot can be said for this, obviously. Often, the world is a nicer place when people don’t readily punch offensive-looking others in the face or made retching noises to illustrate revulsion. But the people who were teaching us this missed a key point: in these examples, it not having the reaction that is bad. Sometimes expressing it in action is frowned upon. In some cases, it’s even illegal. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t better off being aware of what goes on inside of you.

So most parents weren’t able to teach their kids to behave nicely without also teaching them to suppress their authentic responses — because no one had taught them, so how could they? We can’t pour from an empty cup. So most parents, then, do the next best thing: they teach us, like they were taught, the ways they know of to not end up being rejected from society. If they were taught by painful experience, and if we’re lucky, they teach us in more humane and kind and emotionally present ways. But they will still teach us to hide those feared or unwanted aspects of ourselves from others (and often, from ourselves, too), as they never realised that the hiding creates more pain than it spares us from — just in a different format. Only a very lucky few might have had parents who were either raised by very psychologically well-balanced people, or by people who did a substantial amount of their inner work before they got kids. And even those parents might have realised that quite despite themselves, they resorted to tactics from their own childhood when raising their own children. It’s not their fault — childhood conditioning dies hard, and the last area it will stain is our own conditioning of our own children.

So “listening to our feelings” — yay or nay?

In my experience, listening is only ever good in this kind of context. Automatically acting upon, not so much — equally consistently. That is, in time, it’ll become automatic: your way dealing with yourself and others, of handling disappointments, flares of rage, sadness, frustration or whatever it might be. It will be “automatic” in the sense that you learn to trust yourself. You learn to distinguish so clearly between listening to your inner sensations, reactions, and impulses on the one hand and acting blindly from an unconscious motivation on the other. In short, you get to know yourself.

Getting to know ourselves isn’t selective

So here’s the rub: We can’t “get to know ourselves” cherry-picking which aspects we want to be aware of or not. We need to be open first, experience what we opened to second. Of course, this unfortunate (at least, from the ego’s point of view) catch is why we unconsciously decided to not be too aware of these inner responses in the first place. I mean, who knows what they might turn out to be? Maybe we’re horrible, stupid, selfish, mean, or otherwise nasty human begins under there? Perhaps best to just go with what we can control (or so we think 😉).

If you’re reading this blog, my guess is that you have already realised you do in fact want to know what’s going on in there, and you are willing to open to all of it. Then, for many people, the next problem arises: It seems like what goes on has gone into hiding all by itself, quite automatically sliding under the radar of our conscious awareness. What then — and why is that, even?

Well, actually, it’s no great wonder. As I said above, childhood conditioning goes deep. Most of the strategies and habits we established in our formative years survive quite unscathed long into adulthood. For those who don’t do active inner work, they might follow us to our grave. (That’s not meant as a threat or to shame or scare you into doing such work; it’s just that society isn’t designed to point these patterns out to us. In fact, a lot of structures of our society relies on us still being children inside, much like a domestic pet remains much more like a puppy or kitten even in old age, courtesy of having their owners fill the “parent” role.)

Approaching yourself

So how, then, do we work on it? How do we start making conscious that which is habitually and automatically made unconscious? We start taking an interest. We start being curious, non-judgementally exploring sensations, responses, impulses and reactions. If we’re not used to doing that, we might want to start initiating a new relationship to our body as a partner in inner work. (If that’s what you want to do, you might want to check out the book Body Wisdom). We might also want to do a structured course looking at patterns and habits and how to start shifting them (in which case The Crash Course on Patterns might be what you’re looking for. Other possibilities involve taking sessions with me or someone else or reading other material about befriending yourself, your body, and what goes on in your system.

Either way, it’s a sweet, rewarding, and often fun journey. I wish you the very best on it.

”As I say yes to myself right now …” — restoring order to the universe

Centres of intelligence, Inner growth

“The cosmos is always in motion but it is never in chaos. Only humans create chaos.” This sentence was staring me in the face one day when I opened the file to continue the translation of the book The Ultimate Guide to Yinyang. And what made it stick out for me was a cat-related incident right before it.

Me and my husband share our living space with to feline creatures. Having grown up with dogs and exceedingly allergic to cats, I didn’t have much experience with them other than the at-at-distance acquaintance with the outdoor cats at our country house during my childhood. I didn’t quite speak “cat”. Dogs I could read, could easily communicate with. Cats, not so much.

Due to various circumstances, we ended up with not one but two Siberian cats — fluffy, gorgeous creatures that trigger zero allergic response in me. (And no, it.s not because I hitherto imagined my allergies. It turns out these fluffballs so not, despite what one might think, produce that much of one of the three cat-relatated substances that might trigger cat-allergies. And apparently, that was the one I’m reacting to in other felines. Sometimes life’s funny like that.)

So, as it turns out, very few people do speak cat, actually. I read a study that concluded that pet vets are usually the most skilled at it. Cat owners (or servants, depending on where you stand) are usually adept at reading their own pets, but it turns out cats are individuals in this respect, too. Reading one, you don’t necessarily read them all.

Anyway. As you might be aware, one of the most significant differences between dogs and cats are that dogs are a gregarious species, whereas cats aren’t. This is not to say that cats aren’t social animals, as we might use the word referring to instinctual capacities. They do read each other, and they do form bonds. But their well-being not being directly linked to their social skills — as, roughly speaking, is the case with dogs — they tend to be much more their own person. And what’s been fascinating to me is observing how this means they don’t weigh their preferences against those of others (their owners or fellow felines) in the same way dogs, or humans for that matter, do.

As I say yes to myself right now

Because if this, cats are keenly attuned to the constant movement mentioned in the quote at the top. I forgot the specific nature of the cat-related incident, on this occasion, but it illustrated this for me, yet again. I prefer this now. And then they leave. Or eat. Or don’t. They lovingly wash their “kitty’ (in our case, she is well into adulthood now, but since she lives with her mummy I suspect the who-washes-whom balance will never truly even out), or they hiss at her for coming smelling of Something Foreign. This climb onto your lap, intensely enjoying a belly rub for 4.5 minutes — and then they abruptly get up and go off somewhere else, not looking back once. It is fascinating to watch in its simplicity.

In an experiential growth retreat once, we were encourage to move around the room, feel whatever we were called to do, and then do it saying, As I say yes to myself right now, I … As I say yes to myself right now, I’m walking over to the window. As I say yes to myself right now, I lie down on the floor on my back. As I say yes to myself right now, I scratch my shoulder.

When we got the cats, it was striking how completely they lived like this. Innocently stalking prey, sleeping on the sofa, washing themselves or each other, eating or refusing to eat, fighting off neighbouring trespassers, crouching near the bushes when strangers walked dogs past our house. No malice. No sense of conflict, or doubting what was best. Only relying on their inner, instinctual response, listening to and heeding the signals within. I like you. That guy’s scary. No, I don’t want to cuddle; the moment passed. It was just so refreshing.

Inadvertently creating chaos

“The cosmos is always in motion but it is never in chaos. Only humans create chaos.” When I read the sentence, it was just so obvious why this is. And how — at least in theory — we could not. How we could navigate back to the subtle but clear inner guidance, “saying yes to ourselves now”, and how that is the way not to create chaos.

It’s challenging, of course. Sometimes it’s not too bad — when we’re alone, when the choices we are facing are “softer” rather than hard, when it’s only a matter of actually taking the time to listen to all three centres within instead of trying to think our way through life. Sure, “only” might feel a bit hollow; sometimes, that’s challenge enough.

But at other times, the challenge is a major one. When we want to express our sympathy but are afraid it’ll be misconstrued as something else. When we waver between pride and compassion, and they seem to be mutually exclusive. When we know that tomorrow, we will want to have chosen one option, but in the moment our whole system is crying out for us to choose the other.

In those latter situations, it’s easy to believe that what creates the chaos is our inner discord. That’s what we’ve been taught, in a way, to believe. Worst case, we have been taught to go with reason, with logic, with understanding, with what we can figure out, and ignore whatever impulses or reactions or emotional responses that don’t seem to go along with that. Don’t you see — they just screw up your judgement? Behave yourself! While not in so many words, our western cultures taught us that it’s listening to the gut and the heart that leads to chaos. A few of us might have clawed our way back into one of these faculties but in that process, on the contrary, been taught that we should “get out of our head” because there’s no truth to be had there. So the culprit is still the discord between these inner channels.

But in fact, that’s not true. The chaos is not the result of the seeming discord between gut, heart, and mind. The chaos is our resistance to that seeming discord.

Taking a look at “seeming”

So is there truly a discord? If one part of me wants to punch someone in the face, or run out of the conference room, or ugly-cry in my superior’s office, while another part of me tells me how a mature adult should behave (in short: not like that) — isn’t that the definition of discord?

Well. Our instincts, our emotional responsiveness, and our thoughts — even our superego, actually — ultimately all want the same thing. They want to keep us safe from harm, and having accomplished that, they want to provide love, acceptance, and a safe space to be as we are. On the surface, in our day-to-day busy lives, how they want to do those things seems contradictory. But if we just scratch the surface a little bit, not willing it to make sense from a adult-at-the-office perspective but with open curiosity, what we find starts seeming more harmonious. Feelings under feelings, instinctual impulses in response to tender emotions, instinctual impulses in response to instinctual interpretations of mental material — of course it seems like a mess. We’ve been stacking things on top of one another for so long, now we are going to have some work set out for us trying to de-tangle the mess.

Restoring responsive, quiet order

But then we do. We go home, and we revisit the situation at work to probe deeper into our various layered responses to it. Curiously, we explore what lies beneath the surface. We might find old feelings there, things that don’t really belong to this situation but which were triggered by it. We might sort those out: sit with them, feel them, address them to the extent that they can be addressed, or just exploring for them get more accessible to us. Then it starts becoming clearer what was actually going on in the office, and to whatever extent we actually do want to address a particular concern with our colleague. It might not be the same concern we thought that we might be wanting to address, now that we’ve weeded out some of our old baggage.

So, basically, we go home to say yes to ourselves for a bit, and see where that lands us. We sit on the sofa and feel into something. And then, a minute or thirty, or two hours down the road, the moment is gone and it’s time to cook dinner, or go for a walk, or say yes in another way. Granted, sometimes the window of saying yes is narrowed by the fact that we have children to tend to, or other duties that must be handled. That’s another challenge — but still one where we can practice saying yes to ourselves.

When we do, we gradually climb our of chaos and start restoring the quiet, natural movement of our innards, our relationships, and, by extension, our world. Now, creating the most beautiful kind of order.

The perceived but non-existent sameness AND inequality of the centres — how we got it backwards

Centres of intelligence, Types and typing

When it comes to the centres and type, there are some paradoxical misconceptions floating about in the Enneagram world. Ironically, out of the two major ones, one is about a perceived but non-existent inequality, and the other, paradoxically, about a perceived but non-existent sameness.

The imaginary inequality in centre access

The first misunderstanding is that, courtesy of which Enneagram type we belong to, we operate only or mainly out of one of the centres. In conversations about the centres in the Enneagram world — where we are talking about the gut, heart, and head as they exist in all of us, not referring to the centre triads — at some point, someone usually says: “But it’s different for different people. For some, this [whatever feature we are discussing] needs to come from the gut (or the heart, or the head).” But the thing is — no, it does not. Take agency, for example; our capacity to take action. In absolutely everyone, this is a function of the instinctual centre, or the gut. It is just one of the many things the instinctual centre provides for us. Saying that for some people agency originates in the heart, is like saying that for some, it’s actually the pancreas that cleans the blood, not the liver. It just doesn’t work that way. “Gut people” do not find love in the instinctual centre, while “heart people” find it in the heart. And “head people” most certainly don’t have “instincts” coming from the intellectual centre. Discussing things such as how different centres express compassion does not make sense. (How different people of the various Enneagram centre triads express compassion, however, is another matter. But half the time, these discussions focus on centres’ capacities, not people’s. And when they do focus on the people, they often fail to make that clear. Hence, misunderstandings about the centres themselves can thrive.)

Yes, our type has a particular relationship to the centres depending on our position on the Enneagram. In some ways, our personality will indeed tend to “manage” the centres a certain way depending on our type. And yes, this might mean we prefer some modalities — of inner work, for example — to others. In the average levels of balance, it also means we each scramble and compartmentalise the centres somewhat differently, strongly contributing to the typical functioning we see in average level types in action. But in themselves, the centres are the same in all of us, regardless of type. In that, there’s absolute equality.

Which is great news, of course, since, to truly listen and receive someone else, everyone is going to be accessing their heart. And since we are all equipped with one, we can all to this, too (albeit with varying success rates, depending on other factors 😊). Likewise, to move — in the room, as well as in life — requires access to the gut. And as we know, everyone moves, everyone has physical needs and urges, and we’re all, equally, use guided by our instinctual drives on a daily basis. And finally, everyone needs to use their head centre to even consider the future or to have an idea about something that is not here, now — endeavours which we all frequently engage in, again, regardless of which centre is our “home base” on the Enneagram circle. We possess them all, and we use them, too.

The seeming but illusory sameness of the centres as such

So the three centres work the same way in all of us. However, they don’t work the same way as each other. As we have seen, they each process different things, in different ways, with different capacities. And this includes their ability to incorporate information from the other centres. It is not a bounce-back-and-forth kind of trio; there more one-way flow here than we might have realised. (I have touched upon their differences somewhat in the article Heart and gut “distinguished” (at least for relatively creative, flowing and open minds 😉.) Briefly, one can see the centres as a bottom-up process, where each new centre, much like the instinctual drives, brings a new protocol. Since the old protocol (say, that of the gut) was in place when the new one (say, the heart) came online, the new one can “read” the information from the old one, but not the other way around. This puts them all in a quite unique place in relation to the other two. If you are interested in reading more about this, I unpack it quite thoroughly in Aspects of You.)

The fact that the centres are so different — that the gut possesses certain qualities that the heart and head do not, and so on and so forth for the others — sometimes has people respond with disbelief or accuse me of favouritism. “Why are you saying only the gut has agency? What about the heart types?” This is obviously because they are still holding on to the first misconception, as the answer is that the gut is the centre providing agency — and that, contrary to what they might think, we all have a gut so we can all move. Image types or types belonging in the intellectual centre (a k a “heart types” and “head types”) have gut centres, too. The centre you are “in” does not mean you only have that, or even that you have more of it. It only means that it’s the centre that your ego will tend to overidentify with and where the majority of your most stubborn issues will be found. (Also, the ego’s relationship to our home-base centre might affect our “vibe” or style, but this is a consequence of our ego preferences and does not signify more “access” to one of the centres.)

Misconceptions spawning confusing conclusions

The idea that one type sources everything from, or even through, a specific centre spawns some intellectual misconceptions on this topic (which, obviously and interestingly, all spring from the head, regardless of the “centre of the person” 😉), where people try to create a perfect symmetry for the centre, so that it looks “fair”; so that we each (despite the fact, as the belief may go, that we “do not have equal access to” all the centres) have access to equally impressive and not-so-impressive traits and skills. But this is an example of where the idea of equality is taken too far (and unnecessary so, since we do all have all three anyway) — a bit like someone coming into zoo insisting that all animals should be fed the same food, so it’s not “unfair”. But it would be unfair to feed everyone the same, since their needs and preferences are different. As long as we are talking about the centres as such, the differences are real.

But at the same time, the perceived (and equally mistaken) inequality of the distribution of the centres in different types opens up another bag of misconceptions. One is when I hear many people say things to the effect that they do not access all three centres on a regular basis. (An example would be a Seven who “doesn’t access” the heart on account of being connected only to the gut — type One — and back to the head — type Five — by the inner lines of the Enneagram model.) This is very seldom true. The centres all provide necessary bits of our life, and of our experience (just as the instinctual drives, which mostly operate under our conscious radar and which all work fine, despite not sticking out enough for us to notice them our conscious experience). However, sometimes, we have an overly narrow understanding of what a certain centre is or does, and our ways of thinking about ourselves can, in turn, help us keep that in place. This may have us go to that centre over and over to solve issues in our life which may well be coming from somewhere else (and therefore keep returning again). This, too, is something I cover in Aspects of You.

* * *

So the centres are much, much more than a basic and obvious bit of Enneagram theory that one covers quickly in the beginning before advancing to more complicated stuff. Besides offering a beautiful world of discovery, deepening our awareness of and relationship with them can serve to dissolve stubborn tangles in our journey, clear up a whole lot of confusion, and overall give more peace, freedom and clarity. Isn’t that something? 😉

I am currently converting recordings of my online course Going DEEPER — Inner Work with the Centres into an evergreen self-study course. If you are in the newsletter (sign up for free here), you will be the first to know when it’s available!

The qualities of shock absorption — how’s the energetic suspension?

Inner growth

I’ve been thinking about a phenomenon in our inner growth journey — something that shows up occasionally, or perhaps frequently, in the challenges we meet. I’ve come to think of it as shock-absorption, as in the suspension on a car, or a bed. And it started with some reflections upon reactivity.

Everyone is reactive, to a larger or lesser extent, outwardly or mostly inwardly. So, say we get exposed to various things, such as being snapped at by a passing stranger on the bus or in a department store. We might snap back, as a knee-jerk reaction, or maybe we are not that externalised in our reactivity, but inwardly, something tenses up and we argue with this seeming idiot for fifteen minutes before we can let it go. Or something similar. Something reacts, wants to throw something back, if only energetically and in only in our mind. We tense up energetically, as it were, so our surface gets hard and things bounce off of us onto the person, onto someone else, or even onto ourselves if we internalise it (which is where the analogy doesn’t really hold up any more, but never mind, I’m sure you get it).

Sore spot, strong reactivity

And this bouncing effect happens because whatever came at us hit a sore spot. Maybe the spot in question is that we already thought we did a crappy job of something, and then we got criticised for exactly that from the outside. But the spot might just as likely be something entirely unrelated, such as a general increase in stress that day which just makes us get triggered by less. So the reactive patterns might be triggered by random, unrelated negativity. We might have our “favourites” — that is, we probably don’t favour them of course, but some patterns might be more common to us than others. (Want to explore patterns? Check out the Crash Course on Patterns!)

What happens when we start engaging in activities that we hope will lead to inner growth, if we really do grow, is firstly that we start seeing this dynamic in action. As per usual, it tends to start with us noticing after the fact. In the heat of the moment or in the actual exchange, our actions and reactions might seem entirely relevant and reasonable, but afterwards, looking back, we realise that we actually reacted from a pattern, or disproportionally strongly. Then, we might realise that only a small part of our feelings and responses in the situation where actually to with the actual situation at hand, while most of them was old baggage that was triggered in the moment. And then eventually, we notice it in real-time, while it happens.

As always, there’s this exceedingly frustrating stretch where we are fully aware of reactivity playing out but still helpless to stop it. But eventually, we can start owning the reactivity for what it is, and see that, to quote a dear friend, “I’m the only one here”. It’s not that, out there — but rather, what I need to be looking closer at is what happens within me. And this, as we know, can be a tad (or wildly) uncomfortable. It’s much easier to deploy the absolutist, hard surface that has things bounce back at whoever they came from, or even internalises them and make them “our problem”; anything is better (or so the ego will have us believe) than to actually approach our inner “ouch”.

Starting to own the bounce

But when I start having the choice — when I can choose to not do that bouncy-offy thing — I become a bit like the thick, semi-soft mat that we had in gym class at school. You could be bouncing a ball on the floor, and it bounced fine — but then if you went over and tried to bounce it of that mat, and, well, that just didn’t work. The soft density of the mat absorbed all the bounce out of the ball’s momentum, and so the ball didn’t jump back up to meet your hand again. Like that. Like that absorbing layer. That is what starts happening.

So when we start owning this process, it’s like if someone throws something at us, instead of smashing it right back as a knee-jerk reaction (whether we do this in out outer reality or just within), we rather “absorb the shock”, hold whatever was thrown in our hands for a while and look at what is triggered within us.

This might look like when you were a kid and they told you to count to ten and not take the bait or whatever analogies they tried to have us reflect before reacting. But as a kid, at least if I go to myself, I had none of this absorbing quality, so the only thing happening within any counting or reflection was a massive effort to control myself (with varying success). Nobody told me what was supposed to happen during the counting, or the deep breath, or the turning the other cheek, or whatever the prescription was. All those lame self-control effort tips might very well originally stem from this idea of shock absorption, but I’m, not sure that those who told me about them had that understanding or experience.

What we absorb, we also need to dissolve

So, if we receive these instructions without the understanding the principle of shock absorption, we easily hear it as, “don’t react, swallow your reaction, suppress whatever surfaces within you.” But that doesn’t help anyone. Or, well, obviously, it might help in the moment if what we were otherwise going to do had been really destructive. But it doesn’t help us change the pattern; it doesn’t neutralise the aggressive or negative charge being thrown back and forth. So long as we don’t absorb and dissolve this negativity, it’s going to either get passed along, or eat away at ourselves, or both.

But if I can absorb and dissolve the energy — this negativity that is being thrown about between people and possibly even from one generation to the next — instead of maintaining it, that changes something. And not just for me, but for everyone. This is when I say, energetically: OK, I’m going to take it upon myself to neutralise this charge, within me. Then the charge can be truly neutralised, and there’s nothing left to throw around or let fester in forgotten nooks and crannies within. Nor is there a need for it to be, as the whole dynamic is neutralised. Of course, others (or, for that matter, we) can then generate new charges from whatever happens in the future — but what I did still means I’m not contributing to the accumulation of that particular parcel of negativity or energetic reactivity that was being passed around. That’s one piece of negativity — of ammo, of charge, of load, of potential or actual trauma — removed from the world.

So, it’s not a question of turning off your reactivity, “rising above”, or just ignoring things. Sure, if they truly don’t poke something within you, you might. But when something does hit or leave a spot of soreness for me, what is needed is meeting it and sitting with it; listening to my own impulses and emotions and thoughts, without judgement. When I do this, eventually, having dissolved the passed-along negativity, I might find there’s still something left that I want to address. If the trigger wasn’t a sneer from a stressed-out customer in a store or a randomer on social media, but, say, my partner my friend — then, there might still be the need to clear something up. But now, I can address this in a much more productive way, as I’m only addressing what’s actually relevant here and now, and not the whole load of old reactivity.

I can only dissolve my own reactivity —
but also, only I can do that

If someone else energetically attacks me, throws something at me, and this triggers reactivity in me — then I can work with that. I can’t dissolve reactivity that belongs to someone else. (However, though, when I do it for myself, miracles have been known to happen — especially if it all plays out within a close personal relationship such as with a spouse, family member, or close friend.) Likewise, I won’t ever go into reactivity only on account of someone else already being there. There has to be a place within me where it can attach, as it were. If there’s nothing within me to be triggered, or if my shock absorbing qualities are in place, I won’t feel upset. Then, any negativity thrown at me reaches a dead end, fizzles, and dies. If on the other hand I do react, I have work to do. It’s that simple. At times, someone might throw a ball of negativity at you with a lot of accusatory energy — but if there’s nothing within you that gets triggered, you’ll just absorb the energy, and let the ball fall to the ground. Sure, you can pick it up and sit with it — but there’s really nothing for you to work with, as none of it is your ball. Perhaps that other person were just having a bad day.

From the above, it’s easy to conclude that reacting is wrong or bad. It’s not. It’s a path — neither right nor wrong; it just is. However if we believe it’s wrong, and especially if your reaction is mild and barely there, it’s easy to dismiss it. But those milder reactions can actually be the perfect thing to happen. Maybe someone else receiving that same insult or accusation would have bounced it right along, with more anger or whatever other poison attached to it. So this kind of situation offers two bonuses for you: help dissolve a piece of free-floating pain in our world, and to boot, you have the opportunity to go deeper into something that is not that painful or exhausting, but which might still dissolve something bigger within you, too. So don’t dismiss the minor reactivity bursts: in a way, those offer the most bang for the buck, with regard to therapeutic processing! 😉

We don’t stop feeling stuff

Also, just because you might have done your inner work for a while, it doesn’t mean you never get angry, or upset, or afraid. Let’s say someone randomly approaches someone I love and starts attacking them — of course I’ll want to spring to their defence, and perhaps angrily so. You’re allowed to get angry (or have whatever completely appropriate emotional response). But that in itself doesn’t mean you are throwing negativity onto the person.

When it’s more of classic reactivity, though, what good shock absorption does for us is that after sitting with something, we might just find the whole upset is gone. There is no negativity left — it just dissolved. In those cases, it was all reactivity and none of it was relevant in the here and now. And other times, something might still be there, needing to be sorted out. But whichever is the case, it all works so much more smoothly if I first dissolve what does not belong.

Also, and most of all, this dissolving, or the shock absorption, massively reduces the risk of the same thing triggering equal reactivity the next time something I encounter a similar energy. So whenever you do get triggered, it’s actually life’s way of giving you a freebie session for inner growth 😉❤️.

When our efforts to be present lead to more of the opposite

Inner growth

As strange as it may sound, sometimes (at least for some of us) it’s actually time to eat chocolate and stream shows. Or, you know, eat, or do, something else — but something equally pointless and distracting and “non-present”.

I think I can say with comfortable assurance that no one always chooses the mature, most fulfilling, wise, long-term sustainable thing, every moment of every day. And that’s okay. This goes for everyone who has embarked on the road to inner development, whether we have travelled a long distance or just spotted the exit. And this specific piece of writing is for those of us who are prone to sometimes believing that we are supposed to always choose the challenging option, the character-building option, the productive option, the adult option. Who believe that this would score us extra points, or that something must be out of balance and “less than it could be” if we don’t choose growth at every turn. But the point is that there are many ways to choose, just as there are many ways to justify (or not) our choices.

Inner value judgements and our need to justify, explain, or defend

The justification thing is a bit interesting. The fact that we even feel the need to justify our actions to ourselves sometimes reveals that there are judgemental, assessing thoughts about what we choose. We might describe them as inner criticism, our parents’ opinions, the neighbour’s opinions, God’s decrees, or the value-judgements of society at large — but still it’s us, ourselves, who think the thoughts and apparently, on some level, believe in them. And we react by either justifying, excusing or defending ourselves in some way.

The moment value judgements of this kind come into play, a polarity is established, and as a result, and a tug of war ensues within. Right and wrong. Good and bad, or at least not so good. Evolved and egoic. It generally boils down to (in slightly different terms depending on the paths we explore) that it’s good to be present and compassionate and bad not to be those things. As the ego sees it, this division is provides pointers on how to be: if we can just get clear on what is good and desirable (i e, in this context of inner growth, what leads to increased presence), we know what to avoid, and we’re halfway there. (Yes, as I said, from the point of view of the ego.)

If behaviour is condemned, it also gets hidden

Let’s make a small detour here. Imagine a child. Or for that matter — imagine two teenage girls. Both have parents who want to prevent unwanted pregnancies, but the two sets of parents handle the situation differently. One girl is not allowed to socialise with boys except accompanied by an adult, and the parents make it clear that meeting boys alone would be strongly frowned-upon, or even punished. The other girl’s parents explain what it is they want to avoid and say that they are happy to help their daughter navigate these matters, so that she does not suddenly become pregnant against her own wishes. Which daughter do you think is more likely to tell her parents about her activities and feelings?

The point is that when we polarise — making one behaviour ‘bad’ while the opposite is ‘good’ — we stifle openness. And when it comes to our inner development, we are our own “children”. We have been given an overall goal that we call “increased presence and awareness”. And we have a pretty specific idea of what that should look like.

The work of the ego: How one self becomes many different parts

So the ego divides us into different parts: those who do the right things and those who do the wrong things. That’s part of what the ego does for us in our life: it separates. Black from white, you from me and spiritual from profane. And the separation itself is not really a problem; life on Earth without this capacity to separate would be hard indeed. The problem comes when our beliefs about how we should be (and the inner critic’s judgements about how well we are doing) cut off the channels of communication between those different parts. The “fallen” part — the one that doesn’t head as wholeheartedly productive and mature a life as we think we should — has to defend itself, make excuses and hide things from the inner police who are trying to maintain order. And no matter what happens next, we’ve already messed up our life by having an idealised goal that we call “increased presence and awareness”, as well as a pretty specific idea of what that should look like.

Okay, we might think. But it can’t be that bad, surely? Isn’t it enough that I notice that there are judgemental thoughts within me, and that I don’t listen to them but rather acknowledge that it’s fine to deviate from the ideal sometimes? That I actually deserve it, even?

Well, yes, in a way. But then — can you hear the justification that just snuck in there? The defensiveness? It’s actually not that easy for me. I may well have to watch some television from time to time! Or maybe what’s creeping in is an outright defiance, where the tone is more along the lines of I don’t give a damn, I’ll eat as much chocolate as I like!

Here it starts feeling like we’re in a bit of a bind. Ok, so what are you saying — I shouldn’t treat myself, then? But also, I shouldn’t defy that inner goody-two-shoes, either? How then will it ever be OK to have that piece of chocolate, or watch several episodes of my favourite show? I give up!

Take a step back

These questions are a kind of internal conundrum, and in fact it’s really the critic (or the goody-two-shoes, or the part of you that thinks watching TV is doomed) that asks them. We need to take a step back and look at the notion that it’s undeveloped to do something that isn’t productive or creative or developed. We need to find the part that doesn’t constantly either rate our level of presence. When my whole self can accept and participate in what I do, no matter how “spiritual” or “unconscious” the superego thinks the behaviour is — then I am being present.

Something inside us wants so badly to keep believing that we have to do something too, change or get somewhere. But you know what? We can’t get anywhere. We can’t freeze proceedings when we arrive at what we believe is “good”. It’s a physical impossibility. Life is always flowing. And letting it flow — with presence AND without trying to force it to be different than it is — is the most fulfilling thing we can do.

To the ego, it sounds super ridiculous. But we’re supposed to get better, right? Wasn’t that the whole point? Well. The best thing is if we can be here, if we can participate in what we do anyway, during the time we live here on earth.

And you know, about that “oneness”?
It has to start inside of you 😉

There is a lot of talk about oneness, about us all being one at the deepest level of existence. (For many people, that experience might be at the top of this particular list of great spiritual insights.) But how can we experience our connectedness to others, or to anything else for that matter, when we can’t even accept all parts of ourselves? That’s where our “oneness” must begin — inside. Only then can the whole me meet the whole you.

This does not mean that we must always show the “whole self” to those we meet. It doesn’t mean we have to become transparent to the outside world. And it doesn’t even mean that we have to find it an appealing idea to become one with everything else. But becoming one within ourselves instead of being divided into a lot of little parts that hide from or banish each other — for me, at least, that seems to contribute to more joy and grounding in life overall ❤️

The most basic definition of freedom — not only “free will”, but one that we actually utilize?

Inner growth

“Freedom” is a pretty standard and high-ranking post on lists on things worth having. We want to be free, break free, be uninhibited, unrestrained, untethered, not in anyone else’s captivity or control, and generally free to be our own person, to choose what we actually want — right?

Obviously, freedom can mean many different things, both with regard to which scale we’re referring to and what activities we have in mind. For someone who is involuntarily detained, freedom might be the capability to leave a room or building and proceed to go wherever you please. For someone who is stuck in grief, anger, or other uncomfortable emotions, freedom might be laughing, or even taking a deep, unrestrained breath. These are concrete and “gross” examples of free versus un-free states.

But the freedom I have in mind in this email is what we might simply call “free will”. It’s an inner thing. Most of us, if we are not detained, stuck in trauma or in other obvious un-free states, might consider ourselves using our free will on a daily basis — when we talk to people, when we go where we want to go, when we choose what to eat … and a ton of other such everyday activities. The question is, though, are we? Or, perhaps more keenly phrased: are we utilizing the freedom that we in fact have?

When the answer is no (which on closer inspection we might realise is the case on more occasions that we’d have cared to admit), it is often because of the ingrained patterns that we live with: defences, strategies, and impulses that run under the radar our everyday consciousness, and which we might not have taken out and scrutinised, as it were, for a very long time — or even since they were originally installed.

Our patterns, habits, auto-pilot existence

This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course. If we were to have to figure out how our toothbrush works every time we went to brush our teeth, or mindfully manage every move in, say, the check-out in the grocery store, we’d have to use a lot of unnecessary brain power. So we don’t. It gets automated.

So far, so good. But then, drawn towards efficiency as our psychology tends to be, we start using these automated patterns in all kinds of situations — and this happened early. We established patterns for how to be with our family or with people in general, how we get our needs met, how we think around particular matters … and before we know it, we have established auto-pilot functions for a large part of our lives.

This then carries on unencumbered — as the purpose of the patterns is, after all, to just do their thing without bothering the active decision-making parts of our systems — for years and years. Until well into adulthood, we might start realising that a fair amount of annoyances, problems, limitations, conflicts, and other unwelcome aspects arise from these automated structures. And so we start trying to change.

If you recognize what I’m talking about, and if you tried to make such changes, you have most likely also noticed that this is not necessarily easy. Patterns tie into other patterns, which are in turn strongly tied to fundamental concepts like self-image, personality, and ”who we are”. And what’s more, as such, they are maddeningly persistent.

From effortful change to peaceful transformation

For many years, in the experiential growth workshops that I created and facilitated, I worked with people and their patterns. I worked with myself and my patterns. I talked to friends about their. And in 20+ years of doing this work, some things have pretty consistently proven to constitute the ticket to transforming the patterns. Not attempting to change them by willpower, from the outside, as it were … But rather, doing the inner growth work that allows them to shift and dissolve, quite of their own accord.  A few of years ago, I launched a crash course on this topic in Swedish, which I’ve now finally translated into English. It guides you into the world of auto-pilot patterns and habits, helps you navigate among them, and teaches you a time-tested process by which to dissolve them … that is, those of them which you actually want to dissolve!

The Crash Course on Patterns

The crash course involves a total of 100 minutes of teaching divided into three modules, PDF worksheets for you to implement what you learn, and a guided exercise to help you arrive at the inner state most helpful for the explorations you will be doing. For the first week of the Crash Course on Patterns being out there, I’ll give the first 100 people buying it more than half price off — just use the code SEEPATTERNS when you check your purchase out!

THE CRASH COURSE ON PATTERNS

THE RESULT OF 20+ YEARS OF EXPERIENTIAL WORK WITH PEOPLE AND THEIR PATTERNS, BOILED DOWN TO A 3-MODULE, CONTENT-PACKED COURSE!

Learn to recognise unwanted reactive patterns and automatic strategies that you keep returning to, but which might not always be in your best interests. Of course, we will also explore the freedom that waits behind these patterns, once we start dissolving them, making them more conscious. The speed of your progress is entirely up to you — but please don’t rush. The content will be yours forever ❤️