The Beauty in the
Beast
In an ongoing e-mail
correspondence with a
Seven friend, I sent a
quote from Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:
Ask yourself... "Has my understanding of death and impermanence
become so keen and so urgent that I am devoting every second to the pursuit of
enlightenment?"
"So really, I joked, anticipating
my friend's dread, "I sent this to you as a spiritually uplifting message." His
response: "Sure, that's easy for you to say. But we Sevens navigate the shoals of
life by denial. This death stuff is a bit hard to deny..." This same friend
said when he lost his job he was "depressed for about 20 minutes!"
Then he listed all the benefits of this life change.
Charming, lively, playful,
and curious, Sevens are characteristically buoyant and optimistic. Their fixation is
enthusiasm, driven by the passion of
gluttony.
They want to experience everything and to do so with joy. But their determined
cheerfulness manifests a coping strategy developed as children to blunt or cover up any
pain. Because they've avoided pain all their lives, their
pain threshold is low and they feel
it very deeply. This only
reinforces the desire to avoid pain.
We can all identify with the
urge to escape pain by doing something pleasurable. My mother at 85
fell from a ladder, broke three ribs and a shoulder blade, and her lungs nearly
collapsed. It hurt to breathe. What was her first reaction? To avoid
the pain, even at the risk of death. What was my reaction upon arrival, when I feared she might
die? "I think I'll go get some candy, buy a bottle of wine." Luckily I
heard myself and held my feet to the fire of grief. As I did so, I wept over
my
potential loss and began to let go the need to escape. I also dreamed about bereavement and about facing my own death. This was not a fun
two weeks! But I came back home feeling centered.
A Seven client
was asked to tell his team-mates how he thought his Enneagram coping strategy arose. He talked about how poor his family was and how his school mates taunted him for being
"from the wrong side of the tracks." But he hastened to gloss this over as a
"minor aspect of a really great childhood." Then a
Six team-mate described her warm relationship with her five
siblings - in league against two alcoholic parents - and the terrible grief
she felt when the sister she was closest to died of leukemia. Everyone in the
group was touched by her emotional recall, but none of us was prepared for the
Seven's reaction. He started with, "I'd like to say something here..." and then
was completely wrenched with tears. He was finally able to speak in a choked
voice: "Such pain....such pain..." Of course he was feeling his own pain he'd so casually denied.
Transformation
for the Seven lies in recognizing gluttony as an ego-trap designed to escape the
reality of life - which holds both pain and pleasure. Paralleling this path, among the
Buddhist paramita on the path to satori, is renunciation -- seeking
moderation or temperance. But temperance only opens the door to further work. When we no
longer seek escape through materialistic pleasures, we begin to
dive beneath the surface, to stay with our fullest and deepest
reality.
In a Jungian
workshop we were asked to write about
integrating
the shadow
(Jungians refer to shadow
as a buried part of self that doesn't fit an idealized
self-image). In response, I wrote
Beauty
and the Beast. The image of Beauty
in the poem is Anne Boleyn, who was
beheaded because she refused to disown her child. I described the
Beast (shadow) as "never satiated" and "longing with sad
eyes - a tender Big Foot." The integration of shadow became a "Beautiful Beast."
Because Sevens engage in
positive reframing to a fault, I close with an invitation to transformation through a
negative
reframe: an excerpt from Paul Zimmer's poem,
Zimmer
Resisting Temperance, which captures Sevens' zest and humor as well
as their longing for depth and spirituality:
Some people view life as food served
By a psychopath. They do not trust it.
But Zimmer expects always to be happy.
Puzzled by melancholy, he pours a reward
And loves this world relentlessly...
Each day he plans to end up squatting like
Mahatma Gandhi with a glass of unsweetened tea...
But who says Zimmer should not compensate himself?...
Someday he may fall face down
In the puke of his own buoyancy,
But while the world and his body
Are breaking down,
Zimmer will hold his glass up.