An Epic Tale
(Interview with Mary Bast,
Enneagram Nine)
Mary, how did you became interested
in writing about transformation?
It grew from my own pain, wishing I'd had something to
show the way, and realizing many of us don't know what we're
getting into when we commit to greater self-awareness. I looked for insights about
my own depression but there weren't any Enneagram resources
available. Most descriptions I found were either the religious
"dark night of the soul" or the expression of depression
among artistic types, as in
William Styron's Darkness Visible. Finally I learned how
Dr. Richard Sweeney paralleled Jungian individuation
with the process of
spiritual discernment,
how we feel consoled as things come together and disconsolate
when we struggle. Counseling with him was so powerful that after the third session, over
one weekend, I took a sabbatical from my executive coaching business and started writing.
Suddenly I had not only the mournful "this hurts"
view, but also "wouldn't it be wonderful if people could read real-life stories of the joys and struggles of
transformation from an Enneagram perspective?" It
became a calling for me, and a gift, because the people I've
interviewed were so inspiring as they described their insights,
shock points, and emotions.
It
sounds like the
Hero's
Journey. You had this call, you knew
something was going on inside yourself, so you reached out for
information, and not just intellectual information but emotional
insight. After that you made a decision: "This is where my life is going, and I need to shut down some
things so I can do what I need to do."
Yes, although
that wasn't a conscious process. A friend said to me: "Isn't it
interesting how your body gave you a depression in order to
force you to stop everything and pay attention to what you
needed to hear?" And that's absolutely true. The other thing
that rang true was his response when I
said I was so depressed, "nothing matters." "Ah!"
he mused. "That's sort of Zen, isn't it? Nothing matters."
I
got it, the whole point of mindfulness, that at some level
life is an illusion, nothing that matters to our egos really
matters. Yes, it is a
kind of Hero's Journey. But I see more models for
the Hero's Journey than I do for translating transformation in Enneagram
terms.
I
think the way to get to transformation in Enneagram terms is to
look at your own story and to see "Did I have a call? Am I on a
quest? What are my demons? What are my dragons? What is it I
have to overcome? And what is the prize at the end?"
I've never
been drawn to the mythological terms. Instead of asking about demons and dragons I've
changed the language and asked, "How
have you resisted the change? Who or what resources have you
brought into your life to help you?"
What animals have come out to help you on your
journey?
The only animal who's
come out is my cat! You know, one of my "shock points" was
when my cat got sick. I totally merged with him, and one of
my resistances to seeing it as an opening was the tremendous
guilt I felt. I'd been on a 12-day trip and left him alone
except for someone to come in once a day to feed him. By the time I returned
he'd lost 3 pounds and wouldn't eat. I felt I'd killed him and I became
obsessed with making him well. My ego was in control. Because of my guilt I
had to make my cat well or I could never forgive myself. That went on for
almost two weeks. Then one morning I fell to my knees. "I can't do this
anymore! I can't make this happen!" I looked at my cat, and from the deepest
part of my heart said to him, "I love you and I don't want you to die, but I
can't do this anymore. You'll have to live or die, and I will accept it
either way." And from that moment he started to get better. The shock point
was seeing how my obsession to control things, and my own resistance to
taking a deep breath and being with the process, kept me from letting him
heal. I was stuffing food down his throat so much he couldn't possibly catch
up and take over himself. I was trying to make it happen. And that's a good
analogy for what we all do. Ego wants to be in control, which is the very
thing that keeps us from hearing what we need to hear. The depression
started in 1998, and vaguely I'd been thinking about transformation because
I was burned out in coaching
corporate clients, thinking "I want to take them deeper, but I don't know how."
It
sounds like you wanted to force-feed your clients in a certain
direction.
Yes! Exactly.
I was burned out because I'd been trying
to force their change. I knew my ego was getting in the way
but it showed up more obviously in vanity. And maybe what is
said about the Wounded Healer is true, that you can't heal until you've
been wounded yourself, that unless I went through the pain of
seeing how controlling my ego could be, I couldn't take other
people to that point. I could only work at the level of
behavioral and attitudinal change, but not transformational
change, because I'd never been there myself. I found an
image I love in
Eating the "I"
by
William Patrick Patterson, which is his story of transformation in the Fourth Way. You're constantly "eating"
ego. You're
constantly chewing on "How does it show up?" And you
have to digest it.
And
while you're eating it, you're transforming it.
Yes. That's given me a different perspective. My whole
perception
has changed. It's boiled
down to something very simple, that the only work is noticing how your ego is in control. Everything else is
camouflage. Every religious tradition says this in some form: "Center yourself and open yourself to real
connection with God or Spirit, and here's how to keep the habits
of the mind from interfering." I used to resist something
that's now part of my day -- a 20-minute meditation
or centering prayer… ego didn't want to let go. When
I do get to my center, things start to shift. So ego knows if I
do that practice, it's out of luck. Even trying
not to let monkey mind take over is ego-driven. The place to
be is not where you don't want to be, but where you ARE. In Centering Prayer it's
recommended that you use a word, and the word I've often used is "Receive." I hold my palms up,
hold the intention to "Receive," and focus
my energy on receiving.
The thoughts come in, but instead of worrying about them or pushing them away I refocus
on receiving.
In the Fourth Way they talk about
"self-remembering." Because I'm a Nine
you can understand why that touches me so much. I do forget myself. We all do. Simply
discovering where you are right now, you come into that
state of bliss. It's there all the time if you just wouldn't
worry about it. I interviewed someone who was caught up in,
"Why do I hurt all the time? Why does nothing ever change?
Don't talk to me about transformation. Nothing ever changes.
The same old mundane shit comes up over and over and over."
I reiterate for myself the Buddhist notion that wanting it
is the one thing that keeps you from having it. The
attachment to bliss makes bliss impossible. I think
mindfulness is the only way to let go of attachments.
Thinking about it doesn't work at all.
No. There's
a layer of insight for me in having said most of my life that I never felt
guilt. This was bullshit! I should know by now if I say I never do
something it's a lie I'm fighting like crazy against
admitting. I clearly felt guilt, and somehow my cat's
illness healed the part of me that was controlled by guilt. There are other experiences that stand out,
too. The
first was when I'd been in the depression for about three weeks
and thinking, "Wait a minute, this is lasting longer than usual.
Something is going on here. This is awful! Is this what people
mean by depression? Because I've been 'depressed' but it was
momentary, passing."
I was talking with a friend who's good at
helping me see things in a new way. I don't remember
what she said, but as I described my emotional pain,
something she said triggered the question, "Why am I such a
victim? Why is the other person always the bad guy?" I
remember digging my heels in and saying, "That's not it!" Then
later that night, and I swear it was at a point in time, like
8:00 on a Thursday evening, the moment was so potent for
me, like somebody picked me up and threw me down in a different
place, WHOCK!!! "I, my whole life, have made myself a victim!"
To say that awareness "came to me" doesn't convey how this
experience was beyond words. I was lifted into a different
place; even though it was horrifying to admit, I knew instantly
-- in every fiber of my being -- it was true.
That
was truly a transformational experience. A
real shift.
It was. That
moment. It was a shock point, and it was the first time
I'd experienced it quite that way.
What
is a "shock point"?
To me a shock point is what some
people experience as a religious conversion. It wasn't a gradual
awakening, it wasn't an intellectual exercise, it was an
explosion. Something
went through me. I felt
drawn to writing about it. I felt drawn to
teaching. I've
experienced moments of awareness with smaller emotional
reactions, more evolutionary in nature. So if the bolt of
lightning was a 10 on a 10-point scale, here's one I'd describe more as "a minor electric shock," maybe
a 4 on the 10-point scale: In a class I was teaching I went through an
exercise on projection. I told the class to think of someone who
really irritated them. To myself I thought of the Sunday before
when I'd waited in the drive-through lane with my then-husband, having ordered Rallyburgers, and when we got up to the gate he drove off
without the food because he was so angry at having to wait that
long. Nothing
happened for me in the moment. But the next
morning I woke up feeling incredibly irritable. I did not want
to be in my body. It was terribly uncomfortable. I was grousing around in it and saying, "What
in the hell is going on?" And all of a sudden this minor
electric shock occurred and I got it that, for the
first time in my life of relative equanimity, I was feeling
almost unbearably
impatient. When my husband had been so impatient, I
couldn't identify with it -- all I could do was play victim and
blame him. So I owned it for myself, and let in awareness of my
own impatience.
There's a story about a man working for Gurdjieff who really irritated people, would just set their
teeth on edge. And they'd play tricks on the man, really
nasty tricks. Finally, they did something so nasty the guy said,
"I've had it! I'm going to leave!" And Gurdjieff said, "You
can't leave. I'll pay you twice what I was
paying you before," because he realized the irritation this man
brought to his little group was helping them to understand
themselves. When
we start revealing ourselves, things happen. New things happen
and we see parts of ourselves and experience things we've never
experienced before.
And things
shift. We're different without ever saying, "I'm going to be
different."
You stay with
what you're feeling. And you
don't do anything with it. It's just that things shift.
Gendlin's process of
Focusing is a very helpful way for me to stay with my
feelings. You exaggerate the feeling and you look for a label.
You have the felt sense, "Something's going on with me"
and you stay with it, try labels on until you say, "Ah, yes,
that's what it's like!" And it might be a word, a phrase, "I
feel like I'm being burned at the stake and the flames are
licking up," or "I'm impatient! Yeah!" And there's a felt
shift right there. I don't always feel the shift, and
Gendlin says you don't have to. It's like meditation: it's the
practice that's important, it's not about getting it
right. And the more you engage in that practice the more often
you'll feel the shift.
This
parallels the idea of exorcism, because when you're possessed by
a spirit the first thing the exorcist does is to try to find out
the name of the spirit and call it by name.
Thank you!
That brings up another event I want to tell you about, not
because the experience was singular, but because it was the
first time I experienced what
Naranjo calls "The Holy War,"
where you're really battling with your ego. My husband
and I were on the way to a boat show, unpacked in the hotel
room, and he loves saunas, he loves hot tubs, he loves excess,
he loves to get really hot, whereas I can only take so
much. I hadn't done any meditating or yoga that day and it was
around
5:30. He said "I'm going to the sauna with my book,
and you do your yoga, and then I'll come back and we'll go to
dinner." And I "knew"-- nyaa, nyaa, nyaa-- that he was going to
fall asleep and be late, and that if I really wanted to go to
dinner when we planned to I'd have to go get him. And of course
he was late, and the anger I felt toward him was heavy.
Really heavy, which is my cue that I'm projecting. So I sat
silently through dinner, not acting on the anger, just hanging
in and staying with it. And he let it go, not particularly wanting
to talk about it. I wasn't nasty, just very quiet. When we got
back to our room he fell
asleep immediately but I couldn't sleep, and thought "What do I
do?" I sat in a chair, and it felt like I was trying to
accomplish an exorcism. This anger had hold of me, and it
couldn't have been more real if I had to physically wrestle
with it. It was trying to control me, trying to own me, and I
wasn't going to let that happen. I wasn't trying to wrestle it down, I was just trying to
stay centered and not let it wrestle me down. This went on for
what seemed like hours. It may have
been minutes, but it felt like a lifetime. Then suddenly, the
anger let
go. It was as if my ego said, "Oh, she really means it." But I
was perspiring, I felt like I was coming out of a boxing ring, I was
physically exhausted the next day. As a manifestation of some
part of the process, that was the
most difficult experience I've had of staying with a feeling
until it lets go. So just as the lightning bolt became a model
for me of the other kind of revelation, this became a model for
me of, "Yeah, sometimes it's going to be really hard." It's
never been quite that difficult since then.
You
can also think of transformation in alchemical terms, as Jung
did, where you concentrate everything and it's like a chemical reaction. You were in a "vessel." And
sometimes you have to hold it and let it react, let it work with
itself until, as you said, it's gone, until it resolves itself,
it's over. So
that's another series of images for transformation; literally,
alchemy is transforming lead into gold.
Jung did what I want to do. He had the courage to write about his struggles with
his own demons as if to say, "I
have to show the way. I can't be attached to what people think of me." He's a perfect example of the Wounded Healer. His
personal experience was what made his psychology
so powerful.
Being
himself and writing about it. The reason he picked alchemy was
because he realized people had projected their own psyches into
writing about alchemy.
Isn't that
interesting. So alchemy is a metaphor for what goes on
psychologically.
Yes.
So how would you define transformation?
For
me, it's either a bolt of lightning or a minor electric
shock. In either case, I suddenly "get" something about myself.
It's not, "I was this kind of person and now I'm a better kind
of person." It's a process of remembering essence, of
seeing past ego. In Enneagram terms, I think the definition has
to do with discovering how my Enneagram style has been a
habitual, mechanistic response, and coming to freer choices. The
change is from being asleep in a trance to awakening.
What triggered
your transformational
experiences?
Depression or
dissatisfaction. Always, in my whole life, the precursor to
change is the
awareness of a deep discomfort. "Something's going on, I'm
uncomfortable, I'm dissatisfied, I'm anxious," has always moved
me to do a search, to try to change myself. And if I stay open
in that process, something happens that's beyond my efforts. I had anxiety attacks when I had to
stand in front of
the room in graduate school, so I took assertiveness training.
In an incremental way, I was changed. I was able to
get past the anxiety. It was an attitudinal shift, not what I think of as truly
transformational, but it
was part of the evolution, the beginnings of letting a
pattern go that shifted even farther when I learned about being
an Enneagram Nine. Something outside of myself gives me the
gift of awareness, and sometimes I don't even seek it, it just
arrives -- I think of this as "grace."
So
you've invited some of these experiences?
Yes. Often.
And I think it's partly because of being "self-forgetting." There's always this feeling of "What in the Hell
is going on here? Who am I?" There have been many, many
different experiences in my life of feeling discombobulated,
confused, not knowing -- because if there's no structure I've
had to find a structure. So the search might be in part due to my
fixation of seeking structure, but in the
process I learn something about myself. And I've done a huge
amount of reading, whatever shows up at the time. My
dissertation was an example of that. I learned so much about my own authority issues as I
examined the dynamics of hierarchy and authority
relations that I wrote in the foreword, "I don't know if I wrote
the dissertation or the dissertation wrote me."
What
are your resistances?
One has been not liking the teacher,
leaving situations because I didn't like the way the teacher
was teaching. For example, I went to a Jean
Houston workshop, paid for an entire week, but because I felt
uncomfortable with some of the exercises she had us do, I
left. I know other people who've had
similar responses to her, but that's not the point. I would
certainly have learned many things about myself in that week if
I hadn't let my resistance stop me from whatever there was to
learn. Another aspect of
my
resistance relates to knowing what practices will help, yet not doing them. One of the many gifts of
grace I've been given was the opportunity to coach executives and
devise techniques to help them get past their own defenses. So
I certainly know how, but my resistance
still shows up regularly, and I don't always see it. It
certainly hooks me, but I hope maybe 80% of
the time I see it and stay with it and it eventually lets go.
And how
do you get past your resistances?
The Focusing
technique I mentioned before, staying with the feeling. Staying
with my defensiveness when I feel criticized and trying to own
whatever part of it I can. Checking to see if there's some
projection going on,
bringing
that projection home, saying, "O.K., I'm seeing that person
as whatever -- pedantic or mean or controlling," and I'm having
a strong reaction to that that, so I'm going to bring that in
and say, "O.K., in what ways am I pedantic? In what ways am I
controlling?" There's always some fit. And dream work -- sometimes my dreams will get to something that nothing I've done
consciously has seemed to address.
You've
done a lot of work on yourself.
But I was 30
years old the first time I became the least bit self-aware. I
went into a t-group because my first husband and several of our
friends had been in one, and I didn't know what they were. My
first day there I was being
passive-aggressive and someone pointed out that I was angry. I thought, "Who me? No. I've never
been angry in my life!
I'm a good girl." We worked with my anger, and I had dreams about hitting people with frying
pans. That was my first experience of looking inward. I didn't
know the
Enneagram until almost 20 years later, but until this t-group
experience I'd been totally within my Nine trance.
Who
are others who provided help? And how?
I'm pretty
forthcoming about what's going on with me, and I discover
myself as I talk. So I've learned to go to therapists, to
friends. And I'm selective. I pick really good friends. The
year I was to become fifty years old I made a New Year's
resolution to surround myself with spiritual people. I've been to a therapist who used a combination of
Gestalt and Jungian techniques. Another Jungian therapist was
very helpful. Years ago I went to a more traditional, Freudian
therapist. I'm not at all ashamed, if I find myself in a really
stuck place, to pay somebody to help me walk through it. I could
never be in therapy for years. I need
closure: "O.K., I've worked on some stuff, I've gotten some
tools; now I need to be on my own for a while and try it out."
But every few years I'll go through a
period of several months of counseling with a professional
resource. Other than that it's been friends and books. I have moments with books that are like
falling in love. Something comes over me, a kind of knowing:
"This is an important thing for you on your path." It goes
beyond intellectual input, it's an emotional engagement with
what I'm reading, a moment of joy, of blissful
awareness that I'm on the right track. Certain books are teachers. Some books on Jungian
psychology have helped. Books become guides for me, they help me
integrate. And then being in relationship is a resource, of
course.
I think you've answered
what has changed for you, but I
want to encapsulate it. What have you let go of? How are you
different?
In a Naranjo workshop
someone asked, "How are people different as they become
transformed?" and he said, "On the outside they may look
very much the same." I think that's true. The difference is
in what happens internally when my patterns come up. I sort
differently. I experience differently. I'm more open to
myself and my foibles. I'm much more loving and forgiving of
myself. For as long as I live, my stuff may keep showing up.
I am coming to love myself anyway. My ego patterns are not showing up as much,
they're not
showing up as harshly, the struggles aren't as difficult, and
I'm hooked less often. There
are some specific ways in I'm different. I
love to teach. I may be a little nervous but not in the way that I would have been
twenty years ago. I look forward to it, I'm exhilarated by
it. I'm
much better able to be present and enjoy life as it shows up. I'm more accepting of
relationships and peoples' foibles, less judgmental. I may
not look any different on the outside, but people don't know the
judgments I used to carry on internally. As I become less judgmental of myself, it very
naturally flows outward.
How do
you relate these experiences to your Enneagram style?
As an
introverted Nine, my experiences of being present socially and
engaging with other people, I pray is a form of "active
engagement," which is path for the
Nine. But all the struggles, all the resistances, of course, are
very Nine-like. To be so unaware of myself until I was in my
thirties, and how my idealized image that "I'm the good girl
and he's the bad guy" fed my victimhood all those years. A lot of what's
shown up for me is what I'm really feeling, and making
choices. And I haven't even talked about the awareness of other
ego-traps. Just becoming aware, for example, of how
distractibility keeps me from my own focus. The most important and visible manifestation is
finding my voice: having opinions, writing, and being a teacher
to people about the Enneagram; also telling people who I am
without fear of how they'll judge me. The more I write, the freer I
become of "What will people think?"
That
certainly is transformational for a Nine. To realize who you
really are, and to be able to tell people about it.
I'd been brewing
the writing since I was in my twenties. I've always written poetry, I wrote
some articles in graduate school, and I wrote a professional book with two
other people. But I never really came to the point of saying, "I
want to be a writer." Those wishes were underground until
Dick Sweeney said, "Do you hear
yourself?" And I thought, "Oh, yeah, there I am!"
And
you quickly took the right action. OK.
How do you tune in to your own spiritual direction?
My body
requires some of my practices. If I don't do yoga I get
arthritic. Too much alcohol or coffee stresses my system and I
get acid reflux. If I don't meditate, I get tense. I'm very
physically reactive and my body will not let me get
off the physical practices I need to do. So I do roughly twenty
minutes of yoga most days. The slow breathing with yoga begins
taking me into a meditative state, and some days I chant a
mantra or some other centering word during yoga. For many years
I've practiced various ways to tap into
my intuition. I've used Tarot cards, the I Ching, and
active imagination, especially with dreams. These are especially
helpful when I'm intellectually stuck. The images and metaphors
in dreams and the I Ching and Tarot free me up to go with
my unconscious. A number of experiences have helped me be able
to do that. I've taken Silva Mind Control, I've had creativity
training, I've been to body/mind workshops. Writing poems helps.
Almost invariably what shows up is something I didn't know and
need to
know about myself.
Getting in touch with your unconscious in
a
non-intellectual way. Your body tells you what to do or
you use one of these projection devices -- the I Ching, the
Tarot, or your dreams speak to you directly, or you reach into your unconscious to complete
a poem.
Right. And I
use a
bodywork practice from Arnold Mindell because I
do have a lot of aches and pains. The first time I used one of Mindell's exercises was amazing because I weaned myself from a
drug I'd been using for seven years for neck pain. The practice
is to exaggerate the physical pain and then ask the pain, "If I
could see you, what would you look like? If I could hear you,
what would you say?" and using active imagination to write down
the conversation. I've
had arthritis since my twenties. My body tells me things. That
may be somewhat peculiar to a Nine. I've had stomach aches, acid
reflux, neck pain. And occasionally I've been taken over by
arthritis. When I was thirty I was told by two different doctors
I'd be crippled by the time I was forty. Luckily, shortly
after that I discovered my anger and the arthritis went away
immediately. But it comes back periodically when I'm tamping
down emotions.
Based
on your experiences how would you describe the process of
transformation? Does it have stages? A shape? An end point?
For me the
process of transformation recycles.
Karen
Horney's ideas, Jung's, and
Buddhism all flow together for me in that you develop awareness about yourself, of a given aspect of your
ego or your set of illusions, your habits of attention, and then
you observe. And usually the first thing you observe is how
annoyed you are at what you're observing, not wanting to accept
it. And then you observe yourself accepting it. Sometimes you can use techniques that will help get to
the learning, then something will shift. Sometimes it will shift
on its own. But a shift occurs. And it may be a tiny shift, it
may just be a new awareness of self, or it may be a really big
one. And then you recycle, and the recycling isn't always new stuff. It may be the same
issues at a different level
or with another relationship or in another situation. So it's a
constant cycling of "ah-ha's." Some thunderbolts, some minor
shocks, some "Oh, isn't that interesting?" insights. And
I don't see it as the same old things coming up over and over. I
see it as the same old things coming up in a different form or
at a different level. Much in the way that we learn about the
Enneagram. You think, "Oh, I really understand that now," and
then you go to a whole different level and you think, "I know
nothing!" Then you work at that level for awhile, and then
you think, "Now I really understand it!" And then
suddenly, again, you're at another level. That's true of all learning, and it's true of our learning about ourselves.
O.K.,
let's talk about where you think you are in the process of
transformation.
I feel really good about where I am, in
that the cycling is occurring, I'm much less judgmental
towards myself, more and more accepting of myself and others.
You go around once, see the big picture, then there's
some more learning, and some more learning.
It's a spiral inward. And it's infinite. An infinite inward
spiral. It never
stops. And your Self is a point inside
the spiral.
