The
Prescriptive Solution:
How to Change
I read a tribute from one of your clients and found it
moving. At the same time, the reference did not provide a
clear symptom, problem, and solution outline – what to do to
modify my behaviors and attitudes.
Much of
my earlier work with business clients focused on
first-order
change. For example:
-
I helped a
Two
develop by teaching him how to set limits on doing others' work so he wouldn't slip
into his martyr role. He left to became CEO of his own company providing a new
service in health care, and slept soundly at night for the first time in
years.
-
I suggested a
Three learn to focus on "we" in her language and look for
opportunities to acknowledge contributions of people behind the scenes. She gained support
and was promoted to President within months.
-
A
Five
learned how to promote creativity instead of his habitual practice of
locking people into debate. His team subsequently created such a strong organization
they became millionaires when a larger company bought them out.
-
I taught a
Six
to focus his perspective first on the positive potential instead of always looking for
what could go wrong. He survived a corporate takeover unscathed while most of his peers
were demoted or forced into early retirement.
-
A
Nine
became better able to stay engaged in confrontation by using resistance as a source of
positive energy. He was lured away from a Director-level job to become second in command
of a larger organization.
But I believe I failed some of my early clients because in Enneagram
terms, I fed the habits that drove them to perceived success.
Clarence Thomson wrote, "The fundamental premise of the Enneagram
is that each of us has one dominant (not exclusive) energy that drives us in everything we
do. This dominant energy is our greatest gift so we use it too much and it becomes our
chief fault – or sin. This energy, like a prevailing wind that bends a tree permanently,
sculpts our interior geography and shapes our entire life."
Helen Palmer frames it this way: "...the
spiritual agenda is paramount, which is this conversion process. Whether we know it or
not, we're all transforming, because we're hungry for the opposite of our vice. Even if we
don't know about our vice, we suffer from lack of its opposite tendency."
From Walsh and Vaughan, editors of
Paths Beyond Ego:
"...for Abraham Maslow, our desire for such transpersonal
experience was an essential part of human nature, as real, as biologically rooted, and
ultimately as important for full human development as basic needs for food and shelter. He
argued that failure to recognize and fulfill these transpersonal desires results in
psychological distress or 'metapathology' whose true nature and origins are rarely
recognized."
Claudio Naranjo ended Character and Neurosis with "Suggestions for Further Work on Self,"
suggesting "...our collective predicament depends much on individual human transformation
and...we cannot afford not arousing the potential and motivation of individuals to work on
themselves to the extent that they can." On this path, Naranjo promised
that truth is liberating,
"the acknowledgment of the truth about
oneself and one's life in spite of the discomfort or pain this may involve."
This work requires not only a self-observational focus but the
development of a "neutrality in which the desire for change is not 'acted out' in a
precipitated and self-manipulative attempt to 'perfect oneself'... this will involve the
discipline of self-observations and also a discipline of retrospection – a
chewing up of recent experience," particularly
with regard to negative emotions ("what Gurdjieff called 'conscious suffering'
– a willingness to stay with such experiences as need to be observed and
investigated"). Most important, "the truth
about ourselves can free us, for once we have truly understood something about ourselves,
it will change without 'our' attempt to change it."
I
suspect you'll have trouble believing that last
statement. You may think, like the reader who stimulated this article, you have
to "do" something, there has to be a plan of action that will modify your
behavior. Be careful, though, because it's so easy to slip into our Enneagram fixations,
to have our "work" be driven by the same compulsion we're trying to
release. Ones, for example, can become intent on
fixing themselves, or Sixes
can be driven by the need to understand
themselves.
Rather than understanding and changing what
we're doing wrong, impartial self-observation rests on the
paradox that when we can truly embrace ourselves as we are, our compulsions
simply drop away. Naranjo recommends meditation to support this process, and I
have found What the Buddha Taught to be extremely helpful. Walpola Sri Rahula
tells us liberation of
mind, or insight into the true nature of things, may be
approached in any of four ways:
-
The mindfulness of
in-and-out
breathing, letting your mind watch and observe your breathing, forgetting all other things for 10 minutes twice daily.
-
It is also meditation to be mindful
of whatever you do during your daily routine; living
in the present moment, learning to examine how sensations
arise and how they disappear, as if observing from the outside without any subjective reaction. When you see the nature of those
sensations in such a way, your mind grows dispassionate towards them, consequently, your
attachment to them drops away, and you become free.
-
As you develop a meditative focus you become
fully aware of whether your mind is passionate or detached, whether you are
attached to anger or free of it, whether you are deluded in your beliefs or fully open to
the present. You are able to look at your own mind as you look at your face in a mirror;
with no attitude of criticizing or judging, or discriminating between right and wrong,
good or bad; simply observing, watching, examining.
-
All reading, discussion,
conversation about transformation are a form of meditation. You may study such
attachments as anger, pride, deceit, envy, hoarding, fear, gluttony, excess, or laziness.
You may also meditate on patience, humility, truthfulness, serenity, generosity, courage,
fortitude, diligence, or compassion.
