Happy Sunday!

This week, our resident Enneagram fangirl, Mindy, delves into this transformative tool. The Enneagram has changed her perspective and brought clarity to the murky waters of her self-perception and appreciation of others, especially her appreciation of me, David! It’s hard to believe, but she didn’t always see how great it is to be an Eight, and now she’s like: “David’s so great. I’m so glad he’s an Eight. The world is a radically better place with him in it. I wonder if he appreciates how great he is. Maybe I should tell him one more time.”

The Enneagram is not just a personality blueprint; it's a powerful lens that can help uncover the hidden depths of our motivations, fears, and desires. It's a tool that allows us to see the unseen, shedding light on why we act the way we do, often in ways we've never questioned because they feel as natural as breathing.

With her unique blend of personal anecdotes and thoughtful prose, Mindy acts as our guide through this intricate system, making the Enneagram not just accessible, but relatable. For a dose of light-heartedness and a glimpse into the fascinating and sometimes peculiar world around us, don't miss this week's NEAT section, curated by Mindy. She’s always discovering joy and wonder in the everyday.

Happy reading, and if the weather is nice where you live, get outside and drink in spring!

—David/Gonzo

Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Ram Dass talked about the “flashlight of awareness,” and how the flashlight’s beam can land on anything, except itself.  How do we become aware of that which lies outside our awareness, in our shadows? How do we see the unseen? To address a problem, we must first be aware that there is a problem. 

I know I’ve said this before, but the right framework can change your life. I’ve had the experience, repeatedly, of learning a new framework and the felt experience is truly illuminating. It’s like the flashlight of awareness is looking at a part of my psyche and worldview that was completely shrouded in shadows, but now I can see. Oh! I’ve been carrying that belief? Whoa, this perfectly describes my default response system, I had no idea.  

I think David Foster Wallace captured this so perfectly in his commencement speech back in 2005. ‘There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”’

The overwhelming majority of our personality and also our response strategies are formed during our childhood. Even though we’re unaware of the processes at play, we are constantly observing, trying things out, and making adjustments based on the feedback we receive from those around us, particularly our primary caregivers. Over the years we have thousands of chances to respond to the situations life gives us, and our most common responses and reactions become like well worn paths through a field of grass. These responses are what “feels natural,” to us, but only because we’ve walked them so many times. 

If we’ve talked over the past 6 months, there is a high likelihood that I’ve brought up the Enneagram. And a good chance that it’s come up more than once. And that’s because I am not exaggerating when I say that this framework has changed my life. The Enneagram helped me see my personality traits and behaviors more clearly, to put words to how I experience & respond to life, and gave me a framework of understanding that gave me courage to look squarely at my shadow self, by which I mean the parts of myself that I couldn’t see. The default response patterns were just “me,” as far as I was concerned. 

As if that wasn’t enough, the Enneagram has also helped me see David with so much more understanding and appreciation. Understanding our different types has helped me feel deeply that it doesn’t make any sense to look at our differences and see which way is better, but rather that they are simply two different ways of approaching, engaging, and experiencing life. It’s been fascinating to see the aspects of my personality, and those of others, that really do seem to come as a package deal. You can’t have one without the other sort of thing. 

For those of you brand new to the Enneagram, I’ll give a quick overview. The Enneagram is a personality typing system that categorizes the human psyche into nine interconnected personality types, usually referenced by their number for brevity. The Enneagram can be so beneficial and useful because it doesn’t focus on surface behavior, rather it looks at governing variables which include the beliefs, assumptions, mental models, and filters of perception that govern how we act. This page has a great overview of the nine types and a more in-depth explanation of how the Enneagram can be a useful tool for self-awareness and other-awareness. 

I first took an Enneagram assessment back in November of 2022. I’d come across some posts on Instagram, and remembered our friend Kent mentioning it, so I reached out to him and got the info for the assessment he recommended. My results included a tie for most likely type, but as I skimmed the results and saw that the vice (sometimes called the Deadly Sin) of Fours was Envy, I knew that I was definitely a Four. (Here’s an overview of the vices for the nine types.) Turns out I didn’t want to unpack any of that self-knowledge at the time, so I shelved it all until the following August, when I was on a quest for our next Bodhicitta Book Club selection. A friend was starting work with a therapist and so he had to do an Enneagram assessment, as this was part of her standard intake process. That piqued my interest. And a coffee date with another friend and book club participant (also a Four) furthered it–she shared a couple of podcast episodes with me that she’d listened to and found illuminating.  Then I reached out to one other friend and mentioned I was thinking about doing a book on the Enneagram for book club, and she said she had gotten one that she hadn’t yet gotten around to reading, and sent me a picture of the exact book they’d talked about on the podcast. Looked like the Universe gave me my book for book club, and the clear message that it was time for me to dive into the Enneagram. 

I want this piece to feel more generally relevant to more than just my fellow Fours, so hopefully that will prove to be the case. But as a Four, I have a uniquely intimate relationship with Envy and Comparison, which is what I want to explore today. 

As children, we naturally look to others to figure out what to do. It’s “Monkey see, monkey do,” for so many things. This is normal and healthy, to a point. But it can turn into judgment and comparison, especially if you have struggled to feel okay being yourself. 

A trait of Fours is a feeling that something is lacking, that we are missing some key component that would make us happy. Learning this and seeing it in myself, I was able to notice it showing up in my relationship with David. He’s an Eight, and there are a LOT of core differences between us. The Enneagram divides the nine types in various ways, and one of the ways is triads of Think/Feel/Do. Each type leads with one of those, and also has a weak area. Fours lead with Feel and are Doing repressed, and tend to get into loops of Feeling-Thinking. Eights lead with Doing and are Feeling repressed. For the entirety of our marriage, I’ve seen David move forward with what looked to me like certainty, while I felt more hesitant and wanted to spend more time feeling and thinking through things before taking action. This discrepancy so often made me view him as impulsive and reckless, or myself as indecisive and reluctant. Having the framing of the enneagram has allowed me to understand that his way is to harness his natural Doing energy and just start something, see how things play out and shift accordingly, rather than expend energy trying to think through all the particulars and contingencies.  Him choosing to act did not mean that he felt certain about something or had thought through it thoroughly.   This was such a revelation to me, as it was not my way of approaching things at all. Once I became aware of this, I could see how many problems it had created over the years for us, just because our approaches were so different.  With this insight, we’ve been able to start imagining how we might harness the good of both of our approaches for our mutual benefit, rather than feeling locked in conflict over the ways we naturally feel to engage things. 

My favorite yoga instructor Bryan Kest often says, “There's nothing more pathetic than competition unless you're intent on disrespecting yourself.” He’s specifically talking about yoga positions and the futility of comparing your body and flexibility with anyone else’s, but I think it applies to pretty much every aspect of life. 

Something I am actively in the process of learning and internalizing is that there is not a wrong or a right way to be. We just are. But accepting how we are is not an excuse to be complacent and resign ourselves to life as it is right now. Once we see clearly how we are, we can ask ourselves, “Is the way I am helping me get what I want out of life? If it is, great! If not, can I find something else to try?” Not because we were “wrong” but because something else might be a more effective strategy.

“We cannot shame ourselves into change, we can only love ourselves into evolution.” 

Married to a doer, as a feeler/thinker it has been easy to feel like I’m doing it wrong. Or that he is doing it wrong. Reminding myself that we just have different ways of engaging with and responding to the world helps so much.  

Language shapes reality and reality shapes language. Sometimes we can’t see something until we have  language to describe it. In college I had to take a plant classification and identification class. Part of the course required us to use a giant book that was a dichotomous key to “key out” 300 plants during the course of the 6 week term. (For the nonbiologists out there, a dichotomous key is basically a series of questions with yes/no responses about something, with each response leading you to another set of questions. It can take a really long time to go through the process when you don’t know anything about plants because you got into biology because you liked animals.) I remember being ABSOLUTELY FLABBERGASTED to learn that there were so many words to describe leaves. Here I’d been looking at leaves my entire life, and never noticing all of these variations. This was such a profound and memorable experience for me, really the first time I remember having my mind blown by the idea that once you know what to look for, you will see things in a whole new way. 

A practice for me the past year has been to see if I can notice where I’m at without judgment. How am I feeling? What am I thinking? What is the story I’m telling myself, either about myself or another person? What belief is behind the story or feelings? Something I realized recently is just how my religious upbringing shaped my judgment around feeling bad. In Mormonism, there’s this idea of the Plan of Happiness, and an understanding that Satan is responsible for bad feelings. Which means it’s pretty easy to make the connection between feeling bad and being bad. If I was more righteous, I wouldn’t be feeling XYZ, I’d be feeling good. This just isn’t realistic. Our feelings are better understood as a complex set of feedback mechanisms that help us survive in the world as a socially dependent organism. Getting bogged down by feeling like I’m bad (shame) when I feel bad is not only miserable but it’s also a huge energetic drain. (I didn’t mention that Fours are also in the Shame Triad of the enneagram.) Just yesterday David helped me see that I was stuck in this place of feeling like I’m bad, and he gently encouraged me to identify the feelings that I was actually feeling (sadness, regret, fear) as a path to get out of the shame space.  

I’ll be completely honest and say that sometimes learning from the enneagram has been pretty rough. It’s definitely shone light onto areas that my protective instincts really would have preferred to keep hidden. But the more I’ve engaged with the reality of my responses to life, my underlying beliefs and fears, the more capable I feel of evolving into a better version of myself. I have found so many helpful resources by googling “Enneagram Four and ______” (fill in the blank with whatever emotional or behavioral challenge I’m dealing with at the time). It’s so empowering to have understanding and tools that can free me from the holds of the unconscious, that can give me a window through which to see more clearly the motivations and desires of those closest to me.  Additionally, it’s been lovely to feel like I can see better some of the unique gifts that my personality type has and to figure out ways that I can use those to benefit those around me. As someone who struggles with envy and a sense of lack, it’s nice to be reminded that my way of being has a lot of goodness to it, too. 

NEAT!

This week’s NEAT is brought to you by Mindy 😁 ✨

• Honeybody has a great upbeat spring day vibe. 🎶

• I do not recall learning prior to this week that Saturn has a hexagonal cloud pattern around its north pole. (Thanks Max for sharing this fact with me. He’s got such a good brain for remembering things we call him Max with the Facts. 😁)

• We saw Brian Regan on our flight to Mexico last week. He was definitely not making eye contact with people as they boarded. 😆

• Loving this song that reminds me of the Kings of Leon album we listened to a lot in grad school. 🎶

• If you’re a fan of Saturday Night Live and Colin Jost, you might enjoy listening to his autobiography as much as I did. A Very Punchable Face. 📖

• I went and saw Monkey Man with our oldest daughter this week. It’s really really well done. 👏🏻 (Though be aware that it is really violent. Like so much violence.) 🎥

SOMETHING TO TRY

A practice I like to do when I am trying to be more present is Noticing. I heard noticing described as having the butterfly of your awareness landing on things so lightly and without judgment and I love that. You can notice things inside (look at the font choice on that box of cereal), outside (I see the unique curves of those branches), in the car (I never noticed that little subtle rhythm in this song before), on a walk (the sound of my shoes on the pavement), while cooking (sniffing an ingredient before adding it, noticing the different sounds), or even sitting doing nothing (is my breathing shallow or deep, what’s the sense of pressure I feel where my body contacts the sofa). Try Noticing a couple times a day and see if it helps you feel more present and calm. I find that it often gives me a delightful tickle of calm delight.

Happy noticing!

—Mindy

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That’s all for this week! If you’re into this, share this newsletter with all your friends. Connecting with new subscribers is magical! 🧚🏻‍♀️

DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice.