"Transformation"
- a Bit Pretentious?
(Interview with an
Enneagram One)
I'm collecting real-life
stories of the change process through these interviews so others
can see what it's like
for each of the Enneagram styles as they go through increasing
self-awareness.
It helps, I think, to imagine there will
be readers who are either younger and therefore less
experienced, or new to the Enneagram, who would have it
illuminated for them what a One might go through. And stories
tell that in a different way than theory.
I'd like to start with, in your own words, how you would define
"transformation" or "development" or "change."
For me
there's
been an evolution of consciousness. I think in my earlier years
I spent a lot more time at my Four stress point, and I'd say in
recent years I've spent more time in the direction of my
security point: Seven. I also think there's been some movement
from being more in the Nine-ish wing to being in a much stronger
Two wing. So I can there has been a shift within the One
worldview that it's important to be impeccable. My notion
of "impeccability" has shifted over the years, become a little
deeper, a little less nit-picky in terms of, "Oh, we've got to
look perfect. We've got to have every hair in place. We have to
give perfect dinner parties." It's more now the notion of, "What
is the perfect way of helping this person?" or maybe not
helping, of just getting out of the way. The notion of what is
"goodness" or "rightness" has certainly shifted in my lexicon
over the years. So in that sense there's been some
transformation. But I'm nervous about a word that to my mind
sounds a little pretentious for my own evolution.
I'm interested
in Gurdjieff's concept of shock points. There
certainly have been some shock points in my own life. My divorce
from my first husband was a shock point, a big leap into the
abyss, in Castaneda's image of jumping off a
cliff. Another was dealing with a serious accident my partner
had, and taking care of him over a long period of recovery. And
learning about the Enneagram, becoming aware of its implications for my own
life was another major shock point. Prior to
that I'd assumed everybody
thought the way I did; were aware of right
and wrong, and were not good people if they didn't do
what was clearly right. It never occurred to me that others have
a whole different focus of attention than I do, that there are
many people -- probably 8/9ths of the world -- who don't think
that way, who are focused on another thing, either
helping, or success, or power, or suffering, or knowledge, or
whatever it is. That opened up the question of "If I could
be so mistaken about the way the world is, could I not be
mistaken about a great many other things?" It was a huge, huge
shock.
I suppose the transition from my career earning a living
as an actress to my career in middle age as an editor and a
writer was also something of a shock, although more gradual. It
was a transition, certainly, into seeing myself quite
differently. Coming to have a real sense of security about
having mastered certain skills, which are a little more
difficult to pin down when you're an actress. There are
certainly skills and techniques I learned, but my security as an
editor and as a writer is a lot firmer. If I have something to
say, I have a fair amount of confidence in my ability to say it
with clarity and a certain amount of eloquence.
You've described some "shocks" that were
really life-changing. Whether they occurred like a bolt of
lightning or not doesn't really matter. Some that were more
transitional or evolutionary. Why don't you start with when you
were back in your Four period, and give me a few more full-blown
examples.
Well, I think most of my really bad sufferings
had to do with romantic fixations, as a teenager, as a college
student. Even in my adult life, I would say, up until my late
thirties, there were certain episodes that had to do with being
left by or being rejected by, or not having interest from a
person I was fixated on in one way or another. It was a
sense of the obsessional, of not being able to let go of hurt
and really flogging one's own sufferings. And a fair amount of
the poetry I wrote at this time was celebrating that kind of
suffering. I look back at it now and I think, "Boy, that person
was really in a bad way!" But I'm not there anymore, and yet I
sympathize and I remember. It was terribly painful and
obsessive.
I think the One at Four is very different from the
Four at Four. The One at Four is combining the
obsessive-compulsive aspect with the self-pity, the
self-dramatization, a habit of melancholy, mentally playing with
the idea of suicide. I never seriously considered suicide but
there were a few times when I intellectually played with it and
thought, "Oh, if it really gets too bad I can always do that." But I never made any kind of plans, let alone an
attempt. I don't think I ever would have, but I was wretchedly
unhappy for years at a time, literally years at a time. And I think the fairly healthy One is focused very much on
tasks, on work to be done, and meaningful work. I just
really lost my grip in terms of focus on my career. I kind of coasted, did auditions, did jobs,
but didn't have any intelligent plan or a very intelligent
attitude about it. I was just fixated on all this stuff that
was going round and round in my mind. It finally got worn out. It's like you're playing a record over and over again;
eventually you wear out the grooves, like an extinction procedure as psychologists would call it. You eventually extinguish the
thing by going over and over it so many times, it wears
itself out on some level that's psychological but almost feels physiological, too.
And when
you think of yourself being different from that now, let's piece
together in what way you're different, and how might that
shift have happened?
I think there were a number of factors. The first really important factor in my growing up was to meet
my partner 33 years ago. We were on tour with a play together,
and he was married, I had just gotten divorced, and it was not a
good situation. I didn't like to think of myself as a
home-wrecker, but I fell madly in love with him and he with me,
and his marriage did break up and we have been together ever
since. I think it has been a huge factor in my
evolution, partly because I remember myself as being terribly
insecure about myself, about my value, my attractiveness, all of
it. And the fact that this absolutely wonderful man could not
only love me and leave his wife for me, but actually stay with
me and keep on loving me unconditionally for 33 years had to change
me. We're all changed by love. And I think that
relationship is far and away the most important factor. It's
not been by any means only one way. I think I have given him as
much as he's given me. It's been a very rich relationship, and
he's changed a lot, too. Not that I've had any program to
change him, but I've seen a shift in him from being much more
suspicious and negative about romance, because he'd had quite a
few of them, to really blossoming and becoming far more creative
as an artist, as I have become.
My getting involved with regular
meditation was another important factor in my own life. I took
a transcendental meditation course in '75 and have been doing
regular meditation ever since. And that has been a very huge
factor in terms of just getting a picture of my own monkey mind,
the way it just races around and goes in fifteen directions. It's not that I feel I've gotten good at meditation, but it's
given me moments of clarity where I can see what's going on, see
myself. And it's also given me a really strong sense that
there's not just an end to life with death. That's there really
is a consciousness that is fixed and goes on beyond the body,
because I've had a real sense of having the consciousness
separate. And it's not just the body. As a result of my
experience with meditation, the personality also seems to me a
garment that we put on, like the body. I came to that belief before
I ever knew the Enneagram. And the Enneagram seems to simply
reinforce it, that our personality, our fixations, our
preoccupations are also garments.
Another really
important factor in making me aware of my own process was body
work. A kind of neo-Reichian therapy I got involved with,
primarily because I thought it was going to help me press all the
right buttons as an actress. I wanted to cry on cue, and stuff
like that, which I'd always had trouble with. It did make my
emotions more accessible in professional ways, but it seems to
be now such a shallow reason for going into something that had
such a profound effect on me in many other ways. I think for a One, body work is a fabulous way of coming to look at the
anger that Ones tend to deny. Various exercises
with any kind of neo-Reichian work, with bio-energetics, etc.,
doing these exercises that involve bringing up anger. Something as simple as
pounding a pillow that brings up a lot of rage, and then brings
up a lot of pain, a lot of sadness and other stuff. I used to
think, pre-meditation, that if I ever let my anger go, ever let
it escape, it would be this volcano that would devastate the countryside for miles around! One of the great
things I learned, especially through the body work, is that
there are ways of releasing it and you don't devastate the
countryside, and no one dies, and no tragedy occurs. So you
come to allow the lid to rest a little more lightly on the pot.
You're not pushing it down so hard for fear that the contents
will explode. It's not quite such a pressure cooker.
Certainly, finding the important life work for myself has also been just a
tremendous help in focusing my energies. It's
just such a lovely thing to find the thing you were born to do.
And all the other disparate experiences that seemed so
unconnected suddenly all fit together. All my work as a writer, a teacher of
English, an actress, even things I loathed
doing at the time -- like telemarketing to make a living -- turn out
to have had an integral part in this combination of skills, and
abilities, and sensitivities I need to do the work I want to
do. And I find I've got it all there, it's all accessible, and
none of it fit together before.
You've mentioned several areas, one around
your angst about love and rejection, and a strong remedy for
that in a relationship that involves soul-work as I'd describe
it.
Absolutely. Although we've not done any kind of
program about that with each other. It's just having a really
loving friend whom you know has your interests at heart and is
truly on your side. We talk a great deal. We have wonderful
conversations. But in terms of doing "work" together, working
on the relationship, I've never been conscious of doing that.
I've been reading about the path
of individuation and how it can occur in relationship, and it
sounds as of it has been a path of individuation for
both of you. Something
inherent in who you are and how you interact that's helped
promote that.
Yes. I certainly have the feeling with
him that he's really in favor of my becoming my best self as I
conceive that, and that's completely true of the way I
feel about him. I want him to be the best self he can conceive
of being, and I want to help him be that.
So that's one really clear area with lots of illustrations. The
other area that came up was talking about your anger and how the
body work helped. I'd be curious, given that anger is the
passion for the One, if there is anything else you'd say about
shifts in yourself from being a more angry person to having the
"lid rest more easily," as you say.
I think I'm more in touch with my anger than I
was when I was younger. I'm aware when it comes up. I don't
always squash it, I sometimes at least let it be expressed one
way or another. I became more aware just a few years ago, when Don Riso and Russ
Hudson talked about imbalances of centers. The vivid insight for me is the pattern, as Don and Russ
conceive the imbalance of centers for the One, that one
conceives of the moving center or acting center as inadequate
and so flogs it with feelings, in fact uses the feeling center
to enhance, or to hype, or to push, to add wattage to the moving
center. And the thinking center is kind of off to the side and
not involved in this little drama. It made me very aware that,
indeed, this has been a pattern in my life, that I've gotten
myself into various work situations with people where I did
nothing to avoid situations in which I would have a grievance
with this person. Thus I'd an excuse to get angry with this
person, and that anger would allow me to separate from them and
go off and do creative projects on my own. I suddenly saw
it and thought, "Oh, my God, this is appalling!"
I've never doubted that I have passionate
feelings; that's not been an area where I've felt insecure. But
the fact that I've used them to get myself into motion, to
really enhance what I perceive of as inadequate will power, that
I use them to jack that up, that I had that pattern, shocked me.
I started thinking about it in terms of "Is there some other way? Do I
really need to follow this pattern? Would there be some fuel
other than anger that could get me in motion?" And I thought,
"Yes, there's love! And I love what I'm doing. Is it
not possible simply to allow that that love could carry the
day?" That was a major shift for me a year or two ago, a very major shift. I'm doing it for love, and it
feels very freeing.
Yes it's freeing. It's a conscious choice, and
it seems a more constructive choice. Before we move onto deeper exploration of areas
we've already talked about, are there other areas in which you
feel there have been major shifts in your life that you would
want to talk about?
Well, one thing is that as a child I felt
extremely inept socially. I read about the Social Four
feeling really like an outsider, and I guess that Four-ish
aspect was there. Feeling that nobody liked me. I
didn't have very many friends, although I did have a few
good friends. I didn't really know how to play the game. As a adult it's been a skill I've cultivated. I
have a good network of friends and I've made a strong
effort to help them meet each other, to help them help each
other. I organized a women's group in 1994 that's
still meeting once a month or so. I've learned how to be a friend and so, not
surprisingly, I have friends. And that's the trick: it's
not having friends but learning to be a friend. That has come partly out of watching this amazing
man I live
with, his skills with people, his empathy, and his easy
connection with people. It's not so much observing techniques. It's getting a sense of his mind set, his heart set that allows
him to make that connection, and seeing him make that connection
with me. That's been a big influence on me and a big shift,
also.
One
of my questions is what has triggered these experiences of
change, and I think that's implicit in your story. That at
times you have done things to bring them about, either through
frustration or will.
Well, my taking up meditation was triggered by
the fact that I was beginning to have symptoms of an ulcer. I'd
read a book about transcendental meditation and there was quite a bit of well-founded scientific
evidence that this technique had effects on certain
physiological patterns like high blood pressure, ulcers, and I
thought, "My God! I am really going in a bad direction here. I've got to find a way out of it and here's a technique. I'm going to do it!" It was a wonderful thing, but
what triggered it was that I was physically in trouble.
Yes. And
I often find, that
people -- out of either physical or emotional pain -- will do
something where even they have no clue how much of a shift is
going to occur. Because obviously some other huge benefits came
from the meditation for you.
Oh, huge! Absolutely. It's like the body work,
which I started for an equally limited reason. It was going to
help me professionally learn to pull up emotions out of some
technique that I was going to learn.
And that gives credence that there's either some greater
force out there attracting us, or some wise part of ourselves
that somehow knows what we really need.
Absolutely. It was fortuitous, but I had no idea of the
implications when I got into it. Nor did I have any idea of the
implications when I got very interested in my partner. I just
thought he was fascinating, and we got to know each other as we
spent eight performances a week on stage, and didn't actually
become romantically involved for a few months, which was
amazing. But once we did it was very, very rich because he
really had become a friend first. Everybody in the company
regarded it as one of those romances that take place on the
road. It's well known in theater lore and happens all the time. To have it be the love of your life, nobody
expected, least of all him and, to some extent, me. When it
looked to me as though he would go back to his wife and
it was going to be over, I had a sense that the universe
was screwed up somehow, that the stars were off of their
courses. There was something deeply wrong with it and it
was not just my pain, it was, "This is meant to happen,
don't you understand you fool?"
I've
heard someone else describe that as a "crime against nature."
Yes, exactly, that puts it very accurately. The
universe could not hold if that happened. And, again, a series
of coincidences after we had stopped seeing each other: I had
said, "I will not continue seeing you if you continue to be
married. You do not need to marry me, but until you are
divorced I'm not going to have anything to do with you again." And we ran into each other by coincidence at the Museum of
Modern Art one day when we both had had a strong sense we needed
to go there. No sense of seeing each other, but "I've got to go
there today, it's important." We ran into each other and it's
like the passageway opened up, the Red Sea parted and we could
walk right through. He said, "I'm going to get a divorce," and
he did. But I was a wreck! I was very much in
my Four phase at that point, feeling terribly sorry for myself,
feeling just grim and deeply depressed. I learned later that
friends were worried about me. I didn't even think it showed
because I thought I was going on with my life in a very
practical way and doing what I needed to do, but people who knew
me well could see I was just floundering. I couldn’t stand the suffering if he continued to
be married to someone else. I was suffering already but it was
a different kind of suffering. I knew it would not be
possible. It was a kind of ultimatum, I guess.
Have you been aware, in your life, of any particular resistances
on your part, any ways that maybe you saw some promise of some
development and found yourself working against yourself in any
way?
Well, falling into romantic
obsessions with people was not a very useful pattern. And I
didn't even have perspective on that while I was doing it. It's
only now from the perspective of a somewhat calmer hormonal
balance that I look back and say, "Oh, my God, I really did
that, over and over again." That was such a pattern. And I can
look at it now and see I don't need to do that anymore. I
don't know that I can take too much credit for it. I think part
of the shift is simply physiological. Not that I'm not deeply
emotionally involved and sexually active with my partner, but
not in the sense of that kind of obsessive-compulsive
situation.
No longer
proving that you're O.K. somehow.
Yes. It's really quite, quite different. There's
more joy and less anguish over the whole emotional spectrum.
Has there
been a particular aspect of yourself that you set as a goal to
work on and found yourself avoiding?
For me it's not been so much an
idea of "working" on myself as that I have been blessed to have situations where there was
insight, usually through a fair amount of pain, of the patterns. I think of workshop where
I went through all the rejection and the insecurity,
re-living all I had dealt with in my
childhood and my youth. It all came back, and I was just
wretched, and then there was a wonderful sense of clarity
about that pattern. But it's not been a sense of, "Oh, I'm
going to fix X in my personality." It's more a sense that
if I can just remain aware, if I can allow the insights to come
in when they're available and then act on them, how could you
not act on something that becomes very clear to you? I don't
see it as a program of work, a schedule of something I'm going
to accomplish by date X. I've never worked on myself in that
way.
It's part of the gift of the One, I think, that when the ideal
shows itself, it's "Well, what else is there? Why wouldn't one
want to know oneself regardless of the pain that might be
involved?" So there's a kind of purity of purpose. It's the right thing in the best sense, that one would be
open to discovering oneself in that way.
Well, I wouldn't quite put it in those
terms but I'm not opposed to them. It feels different from the inside than it may
look to people from the outside. I don't have a sense of so
much purity about it. "Impeccability" is a word that means a
lot to me. I remember my mother saying, "If a thing is worth
doing it's worth doing well," and that always seemed to me to be
true. It drives me crazy if my partner just throws together
making his bed and it's all messy. I just take the time and the
care to do it right. He'll wash the dishes and there will be
grease all over the dishes. When I wash the dishes, they're
washed. I try not to get on his case about this, I try to
let that be who he is. But then I sneak in and do the bed
right. Things that trouble me I figure I need to take care of
and not expect him to take care of them, because he doesn't
value them.
And
I have the sense it's an organic process for you. It's not that you
slam the dishes together, thinking "Damn it!"
No, and this is an interesting vignette of the
way things have shifted. As a child my sister and I were
expected after dinner to wash the dishes. My mother had cooked
dinner and it was not an unreasonable thing to expect, but I
absolutely hated it and felt oppressed. I did it all right, I suppose. I
wasn't conscious of particularly taking care with it. But now I
almost enjoy washing the dishes. There's a meditative quality of doing the task in an efficient way and a simple way. I think of Feldenkrais awareness through movement, which is another thing
that has given me a lot of insight into, in effect. the exact
right amount of energy for the task. It is a great aesthetic
pleasure for me to know that when you open a door you don't need
to turn the knob so hard. You need to have confidence of
exactly the right amount of effort. And washing dishes has
become something like that. It's become an odd kind of practice and an odd kind of pleasure. When I look at it as a change of attitude from my childhood it's
a very huge shift, about 180 degrees. And there are a
lot of things in my life that have made that shift but are
harder to talk about. I'm willing to talk about that. It's just that I
can't think of instances, it's hard to show a
precise little miniature, the microcosm that also has its
macrocosmic aspects.
And is there a way of
saying how that shift occurred, or is it all of the above?
The Feldenkrais work was very important to me,
in terms of coming to understand my physical capabilities.
As a child I was given a lot of dancing lessons because I was
fairly awkward. I never was any good at dancing, but
I was given a lot of lessons in ballet and tap and acrobatics. I don't mean to suggest I was disabled, just a bit awkward. I think I get this from my father, who was
physically a very awkward man. The Feldenkrais
work gave me a consciousness, an "awareness through movement." And you
become aware of effortfulness in a lot of spheres that are not
even physical when you do this work. In writing, for example, it
doesn't work when you try. I think relationship in some way doesn't work when you try. It works when you clear things away and allow the goodness in
you and him to be there. My partner and I have had
fights, God knows, but the trying thing has been a real
bane of my life. Stopping effortfulness is like stopping
flogging the will with emotion. It's stopping the overkill, and
the overkill only takes place because of the insecurity. So all
of these things, these little pieces, have come in and said,
"See, there is a different way to do this." And I've allowed
myself to experience the different ways and see they are
indeed more impeccable. It's hard to talk about because I don't
have words, it's emotional for me. I remember at the end of
a workshop when we were talking about a mantra for the One to
improve the possibility of illumination or growth, what I came
up with was, "Let it be." Just let it be, let the process work
through you, don't try to work it
but let its possibilities inhabit you. I think this is a very
important lesson for Ones and a very hard thing for Ones to
learn. It's taken me more than sixty years to learn it.
You've mentioned
many ways you've helped the
process of self-realization move: people in your life and practices you've
undertaken. Is there anything else you would say about
other practice or other influences in your life that might be
illuminating for other people, particularly Ones?
A very good experience for me was Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way," a 12-week program in exploring your own pleasure and joy in
creativity, not just in art, but an artist's view of
the world. There was a certain One discipline and
follow-through. I did all 12 weeks, did all she said
to do, and it was a wonderful exploration of my own joy
in creativity. It was a real melding of the Four and the Seven
barriers. So I would say that for a One that would be a great
thing to do. I do think body work, meditation, if you
can get into a relationship. I'm a Sexual One and one-to-one
relationship is particularly important for me, but I think friendships are important
for any One, where you are accepted
not because you're perfect but just because you're a valuable
person, and you come to accept other people not just because
they're perfect but because they are whoever they are.
That can also be very useful for Ones who are very much in their
fixation, rigid with themselves and rigid in their expectations
of others.
The image
you've created is very clear, about letting the process work
through you as opposed to working the process.
Yes, I think that's right. There's a sense that
if we don't flog it and work really hard at it, it won't be
enough. Trusting the "enough-ness" of our own gifts and
respecting them is very hard for Ones. There are exercises that
Ones can do. I was in a point group in a Palmer workshop on
defense mechanisms, and we talked about exercises we might
devise for ourselves to help us become aware when we are in our
fixation. One I devised was if you're in a group and someone
asks a question and you know the answer, to to do
anything, not to say anything, to sit with your own right-ness
without needing to advertise it. At the end of one of
Naranjo's workshops he asked us what exercise we could
set for ourselves that would be in the
direction of virtue, in the One's case serenity. I devised
for myself to take one day a week, and on that day to give
no one any unsolicited advice. That's useful for a One to try
on. It's rather difficult, actually. (laughter)
O.K., my final area of
questioning. Based on your experiences do you envision some kind
of a path of transformation? Some sort of a life-long
process, or something that cycles, with beginning and end, or
stages?
I think we're put here to learn certain
lessons. My own vision of the larger process is just
speculation. Who knows whether this is true, but my hypothesis
is that we undergo a number of lifetimes, life
experiences, and in the course of these lives we get to be
different Enneagram styles, different genders, and probably a lot
of other things that are different: the physical bodies we get
to live in, different kinds of vocations. And we're put
here to learn whatever it is we're meant to learn in that
cycle. I'm not sure we even
necessarily need to know what it is, or know that we've learned
it, but that's what the life process is meant to be. If we
don't learn it this time around we'll be brought back in at
least as challenging a situation that will force us to learn the
same thing. And we'll have to keep going around until we learn
it. Then there gets to be some peace, some serenity, you are
the drop in the ocean and you dissolve and become the ocean. So
I see that there is for each of us a path. The Enneagram is, I
think, an amazing tool for coming to understand the terrain. It's like a map of the battlefield. You've
got to go out and do this struggle with yourself, struggle against your
circumstances, your environment, everything that you come into
this world to be in the middle of, and if you have this map of
the terrain it can make it a little bit easier to fight the
battles you have to fight. I wouldn't
really be able to lay out my own path for you. It's
extremely complex. In a sense the task for all of us is
learning to love unconditionally, in our different ways and with
our different barriers to that. The One says, "Unless I'm right
and good I cannot either love or be loved," and this is not
true, of course. The One says, "I'm going to perfect the
world," and the little voice inside says, "Wait a minute, maybe
it's perfect as it is." Big question here. We don't exactly know where
our paths
lead until we get there. I think trying to lay out a program
for one's own path is arrogant, pretentious,
self-important. I don't think we basically have a clue until
maybe the end when we get there, or don't. There are moments,
perhaps, of awareness. I don't know. I have a sense
I've been given many gifts to help me learn things I'm
glad to have learned. Whether any of those was the
thing, I don't know. I do think if I try to put out a
program for myself it is to be able to be more kind to people.
And kindness, maybe, means something different than I would have
seen it as meaning in the past. It doesn't necessarily mean
helping them to persist in their follies. It may just mean
backing away and offering love without trying to get in their
way.
