Contemplative Practices and the Enneagram

Contemplative practice is the essential element in transforming consciousness as it is in a contemplative space, we drop the tenacious identification with the false self.  There are a number of practices which include: vispassana meditation, Centering Prayer, lectio divina, dance, chanting, contemplative writing, breath concentration, breath of fire, Ignatian prayer, body prayer, tai chi, object contemplation, conscious work…please feel free to share your practice.  

In facilitating groups, I often use a book by Suzanne Zuercher called, “Enneagram and Prayer.”  She looks at each of three triads and the ways in which type is a doorway to contemplative practice and the way our type can be an obstacle to prayer.  

Each triad has a sort of dance of ATTRACTION—that which they move towards in any given situation and AVOIDANCE—-that which they avoid in any given situation.  Here are a few thoughts about each triad.  Feel free to offer your own insights.  I am trained in the Narrative Tradition of the Enneagram which presupposes that characteristics and experiences of type can be best expressed from the types themselves:

Heart Triad (Types 2, 3, 4)

This type’s autopilot encounter with the world is through doing.  They’ve energetic tentacles which feel the environment in order to adapt to it depending on what others want from them.  There is a challenge accessing the inner space because attention is focused outward in a desire for approval, respect and/or recognition.  One’s self is seen through the eyes of other.   Acknowledging and expressing one’s authentic inner state is a challenge for this triad (emphasis on authentic..for 4s this can show up as pseudo-authentic as there is an assumption one must be unique to receive love…so authentic for a 4 may be what they consider a more ordinary emotion).  This triad tends to resist the inward turn and will find multiple rationalizations of why they do not have time or cannot go inside.  The story will differ according to type.  Their primary attraction/aversion dance is: connection to self/connection to other.  

Considerations in Contemplative Practice for Heart Types: 

People in this space may look like they have big emotions, but they are often responding to what is going on out there and are out of touch with their own emotions especially the ones they tend to reject.  Over activity in the outer world tends to create inner anxiety and/or inner dryness.   So, a writing practice, for instance, may be a free write in which they access primal anger, neediness, fear of abandonment…this brings them into actual feeling instead of pseudo feeling.  They might have an image of what an ideal practice is to people out there when what they really need is the actual, felt sense experience of their own practice.  

So, for instance, let’s suppose someone in this space is doing a yoga pose.  Much attention will be on the image of the yoga pose.  Perhaps, anger or sadness or shame shows up and they lose center.  They might beat themselves up for losing center when actually, the most authentic contemplative stance would be to drop the pose and relax into the felt sense of the emotion.  Their body then BECOMES the prayer.   Can you feel the difference?  Sam Keen (I do believe he is a 4) says we can become narcissistic naval gazers.  This space can really get this as it becomes about acting like a spiritual person in whatever form is appropriate for one’s spiritual community rather than just showing up fully with whatever is there.

Zuercher suggests that in dreamwork, they focus less on the content of the dream and more on the emotion of the dream.  I know one 2 who shared that she was blown away by her anger in her dreams…she often screamed at her sister who didn’t seem to notice all of her giving.  The great fear for a 2 is to access their own neediness so they project needs outward.  So journaling the anger often illuminates the need.   They might allow the journal to be messy as this triad IS the image triad.  They might allow themselves to tear out the embarrassing pages and burn them in a ritual.  (One 3 shared a beach burning in which he recorded his anger in a spiral notebook and then tore it into pieces and burned it on the beach).

The natural world provides a place to be without demands and expectations from others.  One heart type told me she used to say, “Nature Shmature.”  She couldn’t understand its allure until it was framed through the lens of spirituality.  Once she could recognize it as an awesome expression of Spirit made manifest, she felt a deeper connection.  The leaves waved at her without expectation to do something back.  The river flowed for her as an offering.    

Mental Triad: 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 and meaning certain there is a truth that will make sense of a messy world.  The messiness of the outer world can feel overwhelming for this triad and they can become paralyzed in the inner space with all the thoughts searching for data and analysis.  Integral Theory is oriented in this space and tends to draw many people from the mental triad.  If you consider the Integral notion of native perspectives:  3rd person (objective), 2nd person (intersubjective) and 1st person (subjective), then this triad tends to privilege the 3rd person which is why Integral articles can often have a felt quality of dryness.  The inward turn of meditation/contemplation can be an escape from the outer world rather than a truly contemplative experience.  The primary attraction/avoidance dance is: trust vs. non-trust.

Considerations in Contemplative Practice for Head Types: 

So, if we consider this type’s orientation towards 3rd person perspectives in a quest for meaning and truth, an antidote is often contemplative processes that take them into 2nd and 1st person experience.  This might include what Zuercher calls “dialogical prayer” which presupposes a holy Other.  So, that might include some sort of devotional prayer like body prostrations in which we bow to an image of the divine in humility.  I reside in this triad and as I do my prostrations, I see the massive white pine outside my window and I see it as a solid, elegant manifestation of Creation.  There is a quality of being humbled when standing receptively before the magnificence of the natural world.  I also do a heart prayer taught by Sally Kempton.  As I breathe, I breathe into my heart chakra and through the other side.  As I do this, I tend to first experience a felt sense of overwhelm because I begin to feel my body, my heart…emotion shows up.  My practice is to welcome the emotions trusting a more expanded Presence to hold them.   

Petitionary prayers can lift mental types from the potential dryness of the inner space.  When in earlier stages of faith, this may manifest as asking God to heal someone or grant a desired outcome.  As one matures, this may manifest as a simple holding of another in the expanded field of Presence…in the silence.  It opens the heart to another and offers a felt sense of interconnection.  Chanting does the same as it attunes one’s heart to the field of Love.  The whole body can attune to the music of the chant.  Body prayer is important.  One 5 says his tai chi practice allows him to attune to his entire body and has opened him to affective experience in surprising ways simply by practicing the forms with his whole self.

Communal prayer and devotion is helpful for head types.  The caution is that it is done not out of duty and obligation to the authority, but out of an intention/desire for connection (and to notice the ambivalence in making such connections).  I used to distribute Eucharist at Mass and often found a challenge in saying, “The Body of Christ” as I would be overwhelmed by the emotion of seeing the unique beauty of each hand: tender and young, manicured and flawless, tattooed and ringed, old and shaking, chewed fingernails, dirty and dry.  This exterior act moved Eucharist from a challenging concept to explain and understand to a felt sense of the universality of One Body.  

I’d like to share something Zuercher wrote that exquisitely articulated my experience of contemplative life in the natural world: 

Nature is ordered and planned, testifying to a providential Creator.  The vastness of sea, sky, and mountains offers consolation. While they may make a person feel small, they also make one feel safe in an ordered whole that does not overpower and where limits and boundaries are present.  Things are in their fitting and right place. Everything has such a place in the world, and there is a Limitless One who designs this.

When I’d read the above, I’d just returned from a walk with my 17 month old grandson; we had picked leaves, pointed to changing colors, hollered at the tall tower in the woods, run up the steep hill leading to the creek.  Everything fit.  Everything belonged. I felt at home in the world. 

With all of that said, because these types live in the mental realm looking for truth, it is helpful to have one constant, steady practice which allows them to drop all thoughts, feelings and sensations and relax the mental busyness.  The above practices are supplements to this core practice.  

Instinctual (Body) Triad: 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 Zuercher) to offer some insight.  

This triad often experiences life as a struggle so issues of power, control, boundaries and space tend to be themes.  There is a sort of ongoing struggle between standing in the inner world and the outer world.  Each seems to require something different. Surrender can be difficult as it implies a sense of being overwhelmed or what some in this triad say, “annihilated.”  So, there can be a tendency to judge, criticize and perfect in order to gain some sense of control and even moreso, a sense of re.  In a given situation, they have an almost instinctive, “yes, this,” “no, not that,” or sometimes, especially with the 9 space, a sense of ambivalence.  (One One tells me “Trying to come up with the best answer/response creates ambivalence).  Thus, their attraction/avoidance dance is one of obedience/defiance…I WILL/I WON’T. 

Considerations in Contemplative Practice for Body Types

Emotions are felt instinctively and can feel overwhelming so there is a sort of shutting them down almost as fast as they arise so there are a lot of unprocessed emotions carried and armored in the body.  Touching an interior place of innocence is valuable for all three types in this triad as it’s a space of vulnerability before the tendency towards an interior hardening/numbing of their life force that came with life experience.    The hardening/numbing can show up in the body as a sort of rigid stance and in the cognitive/emotional life as cynicism, numbing, complaining, negativity and a general feeling of malaise.   Anger is helpful to access as it is a useful emotion/energy that helps them know what matters and what is important.  Dancing is a useful practice as there is a letting go and allowing the body to dance itself.  I went to Baja with a body type friend of mine and in the distance, saw her dancing on the beach. She returned to tell me she was “dancing with the whales.”  

The perceptual (mental) filter is the buried function for this triad, so journaling is helpful to track and link events and to make connections.  I’ve found this triad amazing when working with metaphor, image and symbol for it evokes emotions and somatic responses that loosen the stuck places and help them shift the obsessive loop of inner thoughts.  I once did an object contemplation exercise with a group and a 9 and a 1 both shared powerful experiences of simply gazing at a flower from their respective gardens.   So, the journaling may simply be images, photos, drawings.  My 9 daughter used to fill her journal with things and images she’d collected; she also wrote a lot of poetry which enabled her to contact the emotional space through a medium that spoke to her.  While the heart types are challenged with going inside the inner space and the head types are challenged with going to the messiness of the exterior world, the body types struggle with both…there is a sort of sliding back and forth between the two with a tendency to get stuck in one and ignore the other.  There is an either/or, this/that quality.  This is why the image work is powerful as it seems to soften the boundary between the two. 

This can extend to work with dreams…record the dream in the present tense, highlight the images from the dream and free associate what the image might mean to the dreamer.  As connections are made, a clearer picture begins to emerge.  One woman I know has been part of a long time dream group and she says it is the one place where she really glimpses the inner meanings that can elude her conscious awareness.  She shares the dream out loud to other participants which fleshes it out more deeply.  This triad can lose perspective on the past as they may hyper focus on a few elements.  Dreamwork and image work help flesh out details and emotions that had previously eluded their awareness.

Vipassana meditation is especially meaningful in this triad for it is rooted in “seeing things as they actually are.”    Thus, they relax into the flow of what is arising in the inner space and the exterior world.  This meditation is about witnessing…noticing…not judging, evaluating and assessing.  Life is no longer a problem to tackle; rather it becomes a river on which one floats.  (Because this triad can be challenged by sleep, it can be helpful to focus attention in the third eye for it is housed in the mental center.  Focusing on the hara…belly center…is not always useful in this triad as it has the potential to induce sleep). 

Finally, the practice I’ve found most reliable in this triad is connecting to the natural world.  A walk in the woods or on the beach is not about struggling, fixing and perfecting.  Life in all its power and simple beauty simply exists as it is.  The body types often see themselves as one participant within the vastness of the cosmos.  It offers perspective without the need to judge it.

I’ve offered a taste to the depth of this study.  There is much more to say, but I wanted to give you a slight sense of the issues housed in each triad.  You’re encouraged to develop a practice that invites you more deeply into yourself.  Depending on  your type, different openings and challenges will show up.  The key is to observe, feel the emotion, feel the felt sense and stay with it.   Peace, Leslie

10 Core Characteristics of Emerging Integral Christianity

Emerging Christianity invites a fundamental shift in Christ consciousness itself and is receptive to the Holy Spirit’s action and presence within oneself and the culture. It is not happening in just one church structure.  Rather it is arising within individuals and communities across denominational lines.  There is a lively, animating energy coming from within and our invitation is to simply pay attention.

What are some significant characteristics of this movement?

1. The recovery of the contemplative tradition which invites nondual ways of seeing which take us beyond the opposition either/or categories of liberal or conservative, feminist or patriarchal, activist or contemplative, Eastern or Western practices, Catholic or Protestant or New Thought.  The nondual heart is born in a state of conscious attunement to the Spirit and requires a regular practice of contemplative prayer, which is a non-negotiable in inviting this radical shift in consciousness.  It invites deepening self-awareness of the ways in which our egoic, false self clings to habits that get in the way of clear seeing.  It’s core practice is rooted in the psalmist’s song: “Be still and know that I am God.”

2. Critical biblical scholarship which challenges old ways of understanding the life of Jesus.  This means that no one Truth is THE right Truth  because every religion is shaped and informed by the culture of its time. The narratives change because we change with each encounter and our interpretation of sacred texts will change.  There is no airtight system of faith for we will always be in conversation with the story of God as revealed through Christ made manifest through you and me and the cultures in which we live.  Thus, it includes the Nag Hammadi texts found in the Egyptian desert in 1945 which have a greater nondual focus and also place Mary Magdalene in the center of the gospel story.  It invites us into conversation with the wisdom of other sacred traditions.

3. It is global and recognizes that diversity in expressions is simply a part of our humanness.  Whether we accept it or not, we are encountering other cultures every day in what we read, watch, and eat and in with whom we converse, love, pray, and play.   In this movement, the historical battles around how someone else eats, looks, prays or loves are “either resolved, boring or inessential” to the larger conversation which recognizes the underlying unity of all things throughout history and culture. (R. Rohr)

4. A shift in our location of authority from the hierarchy of church to  authority within ourselves and the communities in which we practice our faith.  This very shift invites a growing ability to separate wheat from chaff: to be able to distinguish between what is essential (how we live and love) and inessential (how we walk and stand on the altar and how we genuflect and bow and hold our hands during Eucharist).  Our growing spiritual maturity is respected and there is faith in the unfolding of Spirit made manifest. Thus, effective authorities invite us into a deepening of our own individual and communal interior discernment, compassion and wisdom.

5. It is praxis oriented in which we are identifying with the life of Jesus as one whose life offered a template for spiritual transformation.  It less concerned with doctrines about what to believe and more concerned with how we live.   Precious time and energy is not squandered on one singular, doctrinal perspective. Rather, it is channeled into living the gospel of Love which includes a life of non-violence, love of Creation, welcoming of the stranger, living simply, serving with generosity, peacemaking and offering a social critique to systems of domination and power.

6. It is experiential in its communal gatherings and invites creativity and sensory awareness: scents, art, music across cultures, chanting and bodily movement are sacramental.  It is not wooden and rote and void of life.  It opens us to deeper levels of mystical prayer and lived Trinitarian theology of Creator pouring its Love into the Creation and animated by the Spirit of Love.

7. A growing spirituality of non-violence and “third way” theology that takes us beyond dualisms of us/them, fight/flight, either/or.   A deepening capacity for third way seeing is born in contemplative prayer which births compassionate action. (Much appreciation to Richard Rohr for fleshing out “third way” theology).

8. There are new structures of community beyond the parish and the church for it recognizes the typical parish/church cannot answer our great diversity of needs and gifts.  These communities include contemplative prayer groups, recovery groups, Catholic Worker houses, spiritual direction groups, New Monasticism communities, online communities, Enneagram communities, yoga and meditation groups,  lectio divina,  mission groups, peace and justice communities most of which are lay led.  It is not anti-church or local parish, but it understands the limits of these institutions.

9. It recognizes and appreciates the multiplicity of our gifts and does not concentrate its power on top tier levels of leadership which are often concerned about power and gender.  Rather, it lives and breathes the recognition that we are Christ made manifest through our unique and precious incarnation. Our uniqueness is valued, nurtured, expressed and offered in service and love.   

10. It is evolutionary and recognizes we develop through stages of faith and consciousness which means change is a constant.  There is an honoring of the past even as we step into an evolving future so there is a recognition that we are constantly learning new things about the world which shape our understanding of our place within it.  Insights about science, nature, gender and sex are included and not ignored simply because it isn’t congruent with literal interpretations of sacred texts which were written within the context of their tim. It transcends and includes: thus, it includes literalism as an important stage of faith while allowing a movement that transcends old ways of thinking.  It conserves the past even as it progresses into the evolving future.  It recognizes that evolution does not only have an order within in it, but also has chaos and change.  (Grace loves chaos!).

The emerging spirituality movement must be nondual or it will fall apart in an evolving world.  Christianity will not survive in coming centuries if it continues to divide and subdivide into old categories.  It must recognize that what is required is a fundamental shift in consciousness which births a contemplative way of stepping into the joys and suffering of the world with profound gratitude for every moment which continually reveals the nature of the gift of Life itself.