I
Meet My Shadow in the Deepening Shade:
Poetry in the Workplace
In The Heart Aroused:
Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America,
David Whyte writes, "If there is one common
experience... it would be... feeling lost... in the difficulty
of a situation or in our very arrogance or nervousness over a
problem." Whyte was encouraged as a resource to business by
Peter Block -- trainer, organization consultant, and author of
Flawless Consulting and The Empowered Manager -- who
believes the powerful images available in poetry can be
liberating in the workplace.
Having been a lover (and
sometimes author) of poetry most of my life, I was delighted
when a client gave me tickets to one of Whyte's workshops. One
of the poems Whyte recited (and cites in his book) is a teaching
tale in the Native American tradition by
David Wagoner. It was thrilling to hear in Whyte's
resounding and dramatic voice this response to the question,
"What do I do when I am lost in the forest?" (shown in part
below):
Stand still, the trees ahead
and bushes beside you
are not lost...
No two trees are the same to Raven,
no two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a branch does
is lost on you, then
you are surely lost.
Stand still, the forest
knows where you are.
You must let it find you.
Observing Whyte's impact
on others in the group also gave me the courage to use poetry
with my business clients. Coaching is somewhat like therapy in
the quality and confidentiality of the relationship, but it's
not therapy in that we focus on personal and interpersonal
effectiveness. Some interesting shifts can take place by
uncovering the symbolic aspects of people's (and organizations')
growth potential. Making significant change isn't easy, and we
all dig in our heels when the going gets tough. I happen to
think of resistance to change as a normal and usually healthy
response, and consider it my job as a coach to help clients move
beyond their own so-called resistance.
In
Enneagram terms
this means helping people go beyond the behavioral
manifestations of their habitual patterns in ways that shake the
underpinnings. While my practices are fairly eclectic, I'm
fundamentally Jungian in this respect: I believe it's impossible
to access repressed and unconscious material through
intellectual understanding alone. I'm sure each of you has
experienced, as I have, the difficult journey from the first
ah-ha to experiencing significant and long-lasting change in
ourselves. Resources buried in each of us, however, show up
symbolically -- if only we know how to look for them -- in
metaphors such as poetry, or dreams, projections, and other
artistic expressions.
Thus, when I see
untapped potential in my clients, I use anything I can that
might take them to that symbolic level -- through stories,
humor, poetry, or even symbolic gifts (for example, to a CEO
criticized by her team for not giving enough praise, and also a
life-long sailor, I gave a ship in a bottle). In this article,
I'd like to show how powerful poetry can be to "arouse our
hearts." I'll start with excerpts from poems I've used with all
nine styles, then
I'll go into more detail with a few cases. Remember that none of
the drives of one style are alien to the remaining eight, so as
you read through the following quotes, let that part of you
respond as you receive the images. I won't interpret at this
point because each of you might find something unique:
For
Ones, who
struggle with the passion of anger, imagine what might be evoked
by Stanley Kunitz's poem, "The
Portrait":
My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself...
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand...
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
Or (quirky but
effective), from "Bullfrogs"
by David Allan Evans:
sipping a Schlitz
we cut off the legs...
quiet-bulging eyes nudging along
the moss's edge, looking up at us,
asking for their legs.
* * * *
* *
Working with
Two issues --
which include ambivalent feelings about caring for others --
what does Pablo Neruda's
Sumario (translation by Alastair Reid) arouse in you?
I am pleased at having taken on
so many obligations in my life
most curious elements accumulated:
gentle ghosts which undid me...
my insistent need to be always watchful,
my impulse to be only myself...
(--my life was always
singing its way between joy and obligation).
Or from Walt Whitman's "A
noiseless patient spider," which captures the Two's
sometimes overwhelming relationship needs:
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor
hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
* * * *
* *
A.E. Housman's "To
an Athlete Dying Young" addresses the
Three's passion
of vanity very directly, beginning with:
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place,
And later:
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead.
* * * *
* *
The
Four, of course,
seem naturally drawn to poetry, and many poems reflect their
mournful, romantic quality. I particularly like e.e. cummings' "Sonnets--Unrealities,
III":
it is at moments after i have dreamed
of the rare entertainment of your eyes,
when (being fool to fancy) i have deemed
with your peculiar mouth my heart made wise...
one pierced moment whiter than the rest
--turning from the tremendous lie of sleep
i watch the roses of the day grow deep
A theme that may be less obvious for Fours is their sense of
being on the outside, looking in.
Look for this in Robert
Frost's "Mending
Wall:"
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast...
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again...
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors...
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors?"
* * * *
* *
Naomi Replansky's
Housing Shortage
captures the
Five's
reductionism and desire for personal space as she moves from:
I tried to live small.
I took a narrow bed.
I held my elbows to my sides.
to:
Given inches, I take yards,
Taking yards, dream of miles,
And a landscape, unbounded
And vast in abandon.
On a lighter note, I've
found amused reactions from Fives to
W.H. Auden's "I
Have No Gun, But I Can Spit":
Some thirty inches from my nose
The frontier of my Person goes...
Beware of rudely crossing it.
* * * *
* *
As with all Enneagram
styles, there are many directions one could take with a
Six (and I'll go
into more detail below about the poem I used with a particular
client). I recommend Theodore Roethke's
In a Dark Time, a
powerful poem for all of us. For example:
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade,
But I especially
appreciate such Six-ish images as:
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall...
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
William Stafford
captures the transformation of a Six through courage in
With Kit, Age Seven, At the
Beach:
Waves leapfrogged and came
straight out of the storm.
What should our gaze mean?
Kit waited for me to decide...
"How far could you swim, Daddy,
in such a storm?"
"As far as was needed," I said,
and as I talked, I swam.
* * * *
* *
Most of us would
recognize the
Seven in Philip
Davey's lovely poem, "Prisms
(Althea)":
It was a rainbow impossibly
beautiful, straddling the town
with one foot poised lightly on the sea.
You might be surprised,
however, to see what happens when a Seven hears the beginning of
Stevie Smith's poem, "Not
Waving But Drowning":
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
* * * *
* *
Sharon Thomson's "Pigeons"
is a more subtle poem for
Eights than might
first appear:
when I was a girl
a sultry sunday
about 3pm in mid-august
was the best time to hunt pigeons...
I aimed straight for the eyeball.
I'm somewhat partial to
Eights, and perhaps they sense that. We're told their
transformation is found in the quality of
innocence, reflected so well in Theodore Roethke's "The
Meadow Mouse:"
In
a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking
Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow
Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick
Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in
Cradled in my hand.
...Do I imagine he no longer trembles when I come close to him?
...I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway
The paralytic stunned in the tub and the water rising
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.
* * * *
* *
As a
Nine I am perhaps
a bit tough on this style, but I like Roger Woddis' "Down
With Fanatics!" because it depicts our
passive-aggressive quality:
I'd like to tie them to a board
And let them taste the cat,
While giving praise, oh thank the Lord,
That I am not like that.
Wordsworth is a
wonderful poet for evoking Nine issues, as in "A
slumber did my spirit seal" (the title says it all)
or from "Composed
upon Westminster Bridge":
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
However, one poem that
speaks so eloquently of what's possible for Nines is Denise
Levertov's
Variation on a Theme by
Rilke:
A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me--a sky, air, light:
a being...
...The day's blow
rang out, metallic--or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it new: I can.
* * * *
* *
Poetic images are
powerful in and of themselves. Imagine, then, the effect within
a particular personality style. Such was the case with Richard
P., a
Six who was
particularly interested in the Enneagram because he desperately
wanted to understand the intensity of his emotional response to
perceived slights. He suffered from what I call the "Patrick
Henry" syndrome (and often see in Sixes): a strong desire to
"speak up for what is right" even if it meant shooting himself
in the foot. But he'd agonize for days on end before acting. For
example, Richard felt he should have been included in a planning
conference one of his co-workers had conducted without informing
him. This person, according to Richard, was "running his own
show, as usual, without any concern for the importance of
others' participation!" He did eventually talk to his colleague,
who was actually quite responsive; but prior to the meeting
Richard said he spent the entire weekend "eating myself up
inside."
Richard and I worked on
many issues. Here I'll note only what was unique to the use of
poetry. He always insisted he'd had no need to rebel against his
wonderful parents (he almost idolized them for being so caring
and supportive), yet he felt there must be some basis in his
background for his self-doubt and emotional stresses. At one of
our sessions I read to him Nina Bogin's
Initiation, II,
which includes the lines:
I...entered
the house as calm and ephemeral
as my own certainty:
this is my house, my key,
my hand with its new lines.
I am as old as I will ever be.
As I finished the last
lines, Richard sat stunned as his eyes welled up with tears.
When he was able to speak he said, "My parents have always
treated me like a child--they still do. I never realized before
how much I want to prove to them I'm a man."
Emily D. was the
Executive Director of a highly efficient, results-oriented
mental health service agency who placed the highest priority on
client advocacy. Described by her team as highly interpersonally
oriented and very genuine with her feelings "vs. a cool,
rational approach," she hired people who shared her values and
coached them well. This Style
Two executive
called me when she was relatively new in her role because she
had a lot of creative ideas but found it difficult to influence
her peers. Our coaching work centered on clarifying the
boundaries between her own self-image and the opinions of
others. "My biggest insight," she said, "was in realizing I'd
been judging myself by others' standards." Part of Emily's
emotional health arose from having recognized how she'd grown up
being expected to take care of others and the toll this
eventually took on her. She was so enamored of Mary Oliver's
poem, "The
Journey," she kept a framed copy in her office (an
excerpt appears below):
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice...
"Mend my life!"
I especially want to
include an
Eight example
because in my experience they're usually given a bad rap. Of
course it's not easy in the early stages of awareness for Eights
to let down their guard, and they can be difficult to work with,
but they really are soft-hearted. Vern F., for example, was a
very concrete, logical individual (an
ISTJ for
MBTI-thirsty
readers), out of touch with his feelings and his fear of
vulnerability. He was also a very strong and responsible leader
who was grappling with depression when we first started
coaching. He called me because someone who worked for him had
complained there was no excuse for his profanity. His response?
"If you can't say 'F___' in your own office, where
can you say it?"
I coached Vern on some
techniques for developing his staff, delegating more, and being
less controlling so that he wouldn't have to work such long
hours, and I encouraged him to seek therapy for his depression.
(As an aside, we developed a very interesting desensitization
procedure for profanity, which did
not involve electric prods.) In addition, we did
some planning and problem solving about his personal situation,
because the most obvious situational component to his depression
was the lack of intimacy in his life. He had two life-long
buddies he could rely on to go camping or drinking. However, he
saw little likelihood he could show enough trust in anyone to
sustain a successful marriage, and he'd reached a stage in his
career when he was tired of burying himself in work. I knew Vern
had written poetry when he was in college, so I asked him to
express his feelings poetically. He came to our next session
with a somber poem about Fall that ended with the phrase:
Soon
today the tree is bare,
naked and alone in the long dark of winter.
In discussing the images
his own poem evoked, Vern said "I've always looked at the dark
as a friend because it hides you, protects you. I pride myself
on the fact that I can navigate around my house in total
darkness, and I love to be alone at night in the woods. But
lately, when I walk out of work the sun is setting and I think,
'F___! I have to drive home in the dark!'" This conversation led
him to a deep awareness of his fear of intimacy and dedication
to being alone. I lost track of Vern for a couple of years after
we completed our work, but I heard later he'd married and
changed jobs. I like to think these are signs of transformation.
