We can't do the Inner Work alone
Books vs. Blood and Bones and Heart.
Lets’ test the claim…
Where you have you personally learned your greatest lessons? Alone with a book? Or in relationships with teachers, fellow-students, and people close to you?
Noble Companions
Time in solitude and silence is crucial, but we also need a community of Noble friends to exhort us to the truth and to remind us through their sincerity and dedication that the wisdom path is the most fulfilling path available to us.
Sincere others are reference points that remind us and offer us reassurance and hope: It is worth it. This Enneagram path is a path of grace. We are blessed to be on it. Others are how we keep remembering this in a true, in our hearts. Books can’t do this.
We need such people to show us, through their “station”, the fruits of their inner work, and their lived presence, that the Vice-driven path of mindless suffering, the one offered by our confused Type fixation, offers nothing but more suffering. The examined life is the only life worth living. The inner observer abiding in the Ground of Being is the only kind home to ourself, and only better things flow from this home.
We also learn a lot about ourselves through our reactivity and triggering. Maybe the people who trigger us most offer us the most important lessons.
“Look at what is being unveiled in me about my prejudice, defences, aversions, quickness to judge, envy, self-doubt, arrogance, fear…”. Not easy, but crucial.
Being with others helps us to realise how limited and distorted our map of reality is.
They are seeing things that we didn’t know existed.
Their Type, TriType® and Instinctual sequence literally see a different reality. A salience landscape that has features that are not on our map. Our maps of the world are as far apart as Google satellite view and street view.
We NEED to encounter and experience their view to loosen the grip of our narrow view and to see reality more objectively.
We also get to experience what Richard Rohr describes:
“When we see the world through [the Holy Ideas of] all Nine lenses we see with the eyes of God”
We also develop compassion for the distortions and stop thinking we are right.
Connection and belonging
I am not talking about a spiritual club we can identify with and turn into an ego identity.
A health and real Community of like-hearted companions is a refuge. It normalises and unshames our struggle with universal human issues that we are scared to share, and which we hide from the light of day.
Existential fear, anxiety and disorientation.
Identity trauma, shame, and all our efforting and striving to be good enough.
Agency, autonomy, rage, how to find Right Action in an insane world.
It is healing to be able to share about these things and share resources and insights about how to be human. What is wisdom? What is the good life? What are the pitfalls and snares? How do we bring our highest self into our world and relationships more fully? How do we overcome our Type temptations and derailers?
Also, it is natural, and we long for it, and it is possible.
That’s why.
Go to this page to join and download resources:
You will be able to
Diarise the free events
Watch Session recordings
Download a wealth of posters nd Enneagram resources when you join the free Takdīr Learnworld Wisdom Community
You can also stay current on our Facebook group and email renate@thelearningcurve.co.za & Ingrid@takdir.co.za to receive monthly emails and announcements.
With love,
Ingrid
🪷
“I am grateful for this new day.
I embrace impermanence.
I cultivate compassion for myself and others.
I walk the path of Wisdom.
I am at peace with myself.”
🪷