I felt a gut punch the other day when I saw that Russ Hudson and his Canadian writing partner Catherine just came out with a book on the Enneagram and Creativity. I did a double-take: creativity? I mean, it’s Russ so it will be good, but is he reading the same headlines I’m reading? Did Catherine (Calgary) and Russ, one of the world’s most important spiritual teachers (New York City), look around their respective communities and see growing income inequality, lack of housing, unaffordable groceries, and the deepest political chasm since World War II and say, “you know what the world needs more of right now? People need to lean into their creativity more.” Of course, I do love Russ and I don’t know the whole story- maybe this is a book they started in 2016 and finally wrapped up, who knows, but this is not it, guys.
Since Trump, Covid and George Floyd’s death, I’ve been frustrated with my spiritual teachers’ lack of appropriate response to the right-left divide in North America. I write this with a two caveats. The first is that I feel real love for some of my teachers. I’ve been in spirituality my whole life, and I have learned through experience not to put them on pedestals anymore, but I know when to respect that someone is doing the work, and I would not be paying for their teachings if I didn’t respect them. My beef with these different schools is that when it comes to the fact that America is bordering on civil war, they are not practicing what they preach; in fact, they are burying their heads in the sand. I don’t know if they don’t watch the news or what, but I honestly don’t know how they can avoid the searing hot political heat emanating from their television sets.
Here, for example, is what the Diamond Heart school teaches. This is a mindfulness school out of California that people (like me if I had more money) tend to end up in after they’ve studied the Enneagram for a while and need more tools and one-on-one time to integrate their practice.
“So, the primary method we use is, what we call Inquiry, which is, wherever we are, whatever we’re experiencing, we can always work on understanding what is really happening, what’s going on with us. What is the meaning of our experience? Because the meaning of our experience is always our relationship to our spiritual ground. … Experience is always non-dual. The surface of our experience is always inseperable from the depths. There is no separation. In our mind, in our conscious awareness, we might think there is a disconnection; in reality there never is. So by simply understanding the totality of our experience, it has to include the deeper ground….”
- Hameed Ali
As grateful as I am for what the Diamond Approach has taught me, I was really dissapointed with Hameed and Karen’s response to the 2020 George Floyd protests. Yes they affirmed democracy and the importance of voting, two layers in the bedrock of a healthy state, but they were speaking to an audience that does some of the deepest introspection in the world, and has some of the sharpest, most incisive tools in psycho-spirituality known to mankind (yes!), and knowing that most of his students are white, they majorly let them off the hook with the cheap platitude “We are all one”. What a valuable moment it would have been, rather, to welcome his students into an expanded territory of holy inquiry that includes the civic community in which they reside. While they gave suggestions on how to improve democracy, they skirted around what would have been the most effective response- to say that the journey outward still points inward. It is not a waste of your time to be mindful of your reactions to melanin or affirmative action or trans people because it will still point inward. It is all food for the practice. Every reactive response is an invitation homeward.
I was in a big Diamond Approach Facebook group until a couple years ago when I got into an argument with some of its members. I was trying to make the case that Diamond Approach needed to widen the scope of its “noticing” from egoic, personal trauma issues that were rooted in the mother and father to political issues like race and inequality. The one woman I talked to the most insisted she only wanted to focus on her own personal growth; Diamond Approach tools were only for noticing contractions and reactions aligned with issues around her ego structure, and that race didn’t “count” as a topic of reaction. Race, for her, was like a side dish that her server brought out but she didn’t care to eat from, she didn’t even request it. Race wasn’t in the right bucket of conscious awareness. “But”, I said, “don’t you notice your country is on fire right now? How does that make you feel?” She squarely refused to admit that it made her feel anything; as long as she could notice the delienations around her ego’s defence mechanisms, it had nothing to do with her.
Politics is personal, in the same deep sense as your relationship with your spouse is personal, because it also points to your initial wound.
Let’s take an Enneagram Self-preservation Two who wants to come across as cute to attract an archetypal parent into their lives to take care of them- what about black people makes you feel like you need protection? In your need to be small and defenceless, how might you be using your ego structure as a tool to reinforce your child-like identity? What would it feel like to be an psychological adult around a black man?
I can use myself as an example. What about the ever-suffering Enneagram Self-Preservation type Four- is she introjecting the suffering of black people to get in touch with her illusory depths, trying to take a deep dive on someone else’s dime (dignity), taking on someone else’s suffering to reinforce her identity as a sufferer, and ultimately to attract the pity of the initial father figure? Doesn’t the work right-size our suffering?
That would be a liberal Four. A conservative Four might romanticize essentialized gender roles to avoid having to initiate on her life and attract a rescuer. They might essentialize racial “roles” too and insist that her romanticism is respect.
The thing that is so beautiful about the Enneagram is you can speak to both conservatives and liberals in the same breath. For example, conservative Eights might be looking for where to project their weakness (outside themselves where they might exaggerate the under-qualifiedness of those being lifted up by affirmative action, for example, which in turn exaggerates their sense of vulnerability), and liberal Eights are looking for someone to protect, and may inadvertently make small who they want to project their own inner smallness onto. Isn’t this the work? To right-size the people upon whom we’ve projected?
What about the type Three who whose self-esteem may come from the value of their home? What does it feel like when a black family moves in next door and potentially lowers the value of the neighborhood’s real estate? What does that anxiety feel like? Where does one feel it in the body? I don’t want to specifically pick on Threes- we all do this, and there is scientific proof that white homebuyers and appraisers of all types have at the very least a financial reaction to race and real estate. I’m not shaming us white people- this is the society we were raised in, but isn’t home ownership part of the ground of our being?
A liberal type nine like Obama might overemphasize our one-ness while chuckling off real problems, while a conservative type nine might deride “snowflakes” while oversimplifying psychological, sexual and social issues as a defence against complexity. Doesn’t the work help us own the projections we benefit from politically?
What about a conservative type Five who, under stress, retracts to the head and says, “let’s be rational here- I am capable of seeing past colour to objective truth, and my obectivity helps me see that affirmative action lifts weaker candidates to the top while pushing to the side more competent white men like me”. A liberal type five might retract to the head and say, “Fighting for racial justice is someone else’s job. I am a head person, and I will just mind my business in here.” Isn’t politics a legitimate way to remind a Five about their illusion of objectivity and disconnection from the heart?
Race is indeed connected to our initial traumas, we as white people have just silently agreed that our response to race is neutral, which is bs- we clearly experience reaction and contraction around race demonstrated by the very fact that we resist allowing it into our ground of being. I do it too, we all do it, I did it when I was on the right and I do it now when I’m on the left. I don’t know if I’ll ever not react to race, it is so entrenched in me at a cellular level. It is for all of us. This is knocking on our doors. I am letting you know from experience that there is relief when you answer the door, take a breath, and notice your body’s reaction around something political.
Which is my second caveat- that I know, as a white person, how difficult it is to see that our ego natures are reinforced by our place in society. I resisted it for years before someone I respected called me out on my innocent doe-eyed look in the headlights around race. “Who me? I’m not involved. That’s not my jurisdiction. I’m just working on myself.” I know it’s hard because I’ve been there. It’s hard to push through the forcefield to the other side, but once you’re on the other side, there’s actual, physical relief.
I have been trying to articulate a solid, grounded response to North America’s collective political trauma in the last four years and I could probably fill a few pages, but I don’t necessarily have the experience and thousands of hours of conversations around the nine types that my spiritual teachers have. If I started now in mid-life, I’ll still never catch up to them. Maybe they’ve given talks on this, but I haven’t heard or seen much of anything. If anyone has heard a respectable talk on politics and the ego from a spiritual, Enneagram or Jungian perspective, I’d be delighted and grateful if you would forward it to me.
It’s true what they say, we expend more energy resisting presence than relaxing into it, even if that presence reveals hard truths about us.