The Three Intelligences You Already Carry

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PART ONE OF TWO

The Three Intelligences You Already Carry

We were made to know the world — and God — with all three centers.

Most of us move through our days meeting the world through one favorite doorway, and we rarely notice we are doing it. One person walks into a room and immediately reads the feeling in it. Another instantly begins working out what is going on. A third simply senses, in the body, whether to move toward or away. Same room, three completely different first languages. The Enneagram calls these the three Centers of Intelligence — Head, Heart, and Body — and it names something the contemplative traditions have always known: that we were made to know with all three.

 

What each center gives

Consider what each one offers, at its best.

The Head is the intelligence of the mind — the capacity to think, to plan, to step back and see the pattern, to imagine what is not yet here. Its gift is clarity and perspective: a quiet, steady knowing that can hold complexity without panicking. (Points Five, Six, and Seven make their home here.)

The Heart is the intelligence of feeling and connection — the capacity to sense what matters, to attune to another person, to be moved. Its gift is empathy and meaning: the warmth that makes a life more than a list of tasks. (Points Two, Three, and Four live here.)

The Body is the intelligence of instinct and action — the gut-level knowing that registers a situation before the mind has words for it, and then moves. Its gift is grounded presence and right action: the steadiness that shows up and does the next true thing. (Points Eight, Nine, and One are at home here.)

Head thinks. Heart connects. Body acts. All three are real intelligence, and every one of us carries all three.

Your home, and the rooms you rarely enter

But we each have a home base — one center we default to so automatically that it feels less like a preference and more like simply “reality.” And here is the catch: when we lean hard on our strongest center, the other two grow quiet, sometimes to the point of neglect. The heart-led person may not trust their own clear thinking. The head-led person may lose touch with what they actually feel. The body-led person may act before the heart or head has had a chance to weigh in. None of this is a flaw to be fixed. It is simply the shape of a life that has leaned one way for a long time — and the beginning of an invitation.

The center I meet the world through

I have always met the world body first. It simply makes sense to me — I feel how my body moves through the world, and I move through it with intention. For as long as I can remember, the things that drew me were the things that lived in the body: martial arts, running, painting, cooking. Each one told me I was alive. In them I could shut my mind off and give myself entirely to what I was doing in that moment — the breath, the motion, the knife on the board, the brush on the canvas. There was no analyzing it, and no performing it. There was just the doing, and the quiet knowing that came with it.

For a long time I did not have language for this. I only knew it was how I was built. It never made me wrong — it was simply who I was: a person who comes home to himself through the body, and who trusts what the body knows.

Three doorways to God

From a spiritual standpoint, this is not personality trivia. Each center is a different doorway to God. The head meets God as truth and light — the mind grown quiet enough to receive. The heart meets God as love — the felt sense of being known and cherished. The body meets God as presence — a nearness that arrives not as an idea but as a settling in the bones. “God is closer than our very breath,” as one teacher puts it, and can be found in each of our centers, each offering a different way of experiencing the loving presence and voice of God (Center for Action and Contemplation). To lead only from one center, then, is to keep meeting God through a single door while two others stand open.

The old teachers had a phrase for the goal: to become “three-centered” — a whole human being who can think, feel, and act in concert, rather than being run by whichever center happens to shout loudest. That wholeness has a simpler name in the contemplative life. It is called presence.

A tender word about the growth edges

There is a softer truth underneath each center, too, and it is worth naming gently — because it is where grace most wants to meet us. The head, for all its clarity, tends to carry a low hum of worry, and reaches for certainty to soothe it. The heart, for all its warmth, tends to carry a quiet question about worth, and reaches for approval or image to ease it. The body, for all its strength, tends to carry an underground current of frustration, and reaches for control. These are not labels or verdicts. They are simply the growth edges — the places where each center is invited to stop clenching and to trust.

When a quieter center woke up

And then, somewhere along the way, came the whoa — the realization that there was more out there than just my body, that I was not only an instrument of motion and action. Things began to rise in me that I did not know what to do with. My heart had something to say, and I had no idea how to embody that. How do you “do” a feeling? How do you act your way through grief, or longing, or love?

For the first time I sensed that huge parts of my life had been sitting in the dark — whole rooms I had never entered, because I did not have the language or the courage for them. So I set out to find the missing pieces. And I will be honest: I went with a great deal of trepidation. Leaving the center you have always trusted, to go looking for the ones you have neglected, is not comfortable work. But it was the beginning of becoming whole.

The Three Intelligences you Already Carry Reflection Sheet

The first connection is within

Which brings us to the practice, and to why we called this series Making Connections. The first connection is the one within — learning to notice which center you are operating from, and then deliberately inviting the others to the table. Before a decision, the head-led person might pause to ask, “What am I feeling about this, and what does my gut say?” The heart-led person might ask, “What do I actually think, apart from how everyone will feel?” The body-led person might slow the impulse to act just long enough to let the heart and head catch up. Small moves — but over time they weave the three intelligences into one, and a fuller, steadier self begins to emerge.

You already carry all three. You always have. The spiritual journey is not acquiring a center you lack; it is making the connection between the ones you were given — and discovering that God has been waiting at every door.

In Part Two, we will turn from the connections within to the connections between: how understanding the centers can transform the way we love the people whose home base is nothing like our own.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

The Narrative Enneagram — The Three Centers of Intelligence: narrativeenneagram.org

Center for Action and Contemplation — The Three Intelligence Centers: cac.org

The Illusion We’re Living In

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What’s behind the matrix — and how we got handed the script.

There’s a reason The Matrix struck such a nerve with me. Beneath the science fiction was a question most of us feel but rarely say out loud: what if the life I’m working so hard to keep up isn’t entirely mine? What if some of what I call “just the way things are” was handed to me — a script written by someone else, running quietly in the background of my days? The film gave us an image for the suspicion: that we might be earnestly, exhaustingly living inside an illusion, and not even know it.

We want to be careful here, because this territory attracts a lot of heat. We are not talking about a secret cabal pulling every string. We are talking about something better documented and, in a way, stranger: that many of the “wants” we experience as most personally our own were, at least in part, manufactured — and there are historical receipts.

The machinery was built on purpose

In the 1920s, American industry had a problem: people mostly bought what they needed, and then they stopped. So a new idea took hold. Paul Mazur, a banker at Lehman Brothers, put it with startling honesty in the Harvard Business Review in 1927: “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed… Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” (Quote Investigator / HBR)

The man who knew how to do the training was Edward Bernays — Freud’s nephew and the father of modern public relations. Bernays grasped that you don’t sell people products; you sell them emotions, identities, freedoms. In 1929 he staged a group of debutantes lighting cigarettes at New York’s Easter parade and called them “torches of freedom,” rebranding a smoking habit as women’s liberation. It worked (History Today). The desire felt personal. It had been engineered.

The engineering reached into the products themselves. On a December day in 1924, the world’s leading lightbulb makers met in Geneva, formed what became the Phoebus cartel, and quietly agreed to make their bulbs worse — cutting lifespans from 1,500–2,000 hours down to 1,000, with fines for any bulb that lasted too long (IEEE Spectrum). It is the first well-documented case of “planned obsolescence”: designing things to fail so you’ll buy them again. The throwaway world we take for granted was, in part, a decision.

Even the dream had an author

Our highest aspiration turns out to have a byline and a date. The phrase “the American Dream” was coined in 1931 by the historian James Truslow Adams, and his original meaning was beautiful — “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” (Britannica). But somewhere along the way the dream got quietly translated into square footage and a second car, and we inherited the translation without ever reading the original. We were handed a script and told it was our own ambition.

The life you’re supposed to want

And it isn’t only things we’re sold — it’s a whole way of living, a template for what a life is even supposed to look like. There’s an approved sequence: the degree, the career ladder, the house in the right neighborhood, the milestones hit roughly on schedule. And there’s a quiet scoreboard running underneath it all, measuring you against everyone who seems to be doing it better.

We even have a name for the game. “Keeping up with the Joneses” began as a comic strip that debuted in 1913, about a family straining to match the neighbors next door — the Joneses, who were talked about constantly but, tellingly, never once shown (Wikipedia). The cartoonist based it on his own life, living beyond his means to match the family down the street. The Joneses were invisible then, and in a way they still are — a standard we chase without ever quite seeing it clearly.

Today the neighbors are global, and they are never off. Social media turned comparison into an around-the-clock feed of everyone’s curated highlight reel — the vacations, the renovations, the bodies, the milestones — and “lifestyle” became something we consume and perform at the same time. Marketers noticed this long ago and largely stopped selling products; now they sell you a lifestyle, and the quiet promise that buying it will finally make you a certain kind of person. Even our exhaustion got rebranded: hustle culture took being consumed by the machine and renamed it “the grind,” a thing to be proud of.

The lifestyle, like the dream, arrived pre-assembled. Few of us ever stopped to ask whether we would have chosen this particular life at all, if it hadn’t been handed to us with the price tag already attached.

I was sure I saw through it

In the late sixties I was a hippie in Detroit — long hair, and the absolute certainty that I saw through everything the establishment was selling. I was part of the pack. We knew the game was rigged, and we weren’t going to be fooled the way we thought our parents had been. When the draft lottery came, my number was 2 — about as low as it gets. So rather than wait for the Army to take me, I joined the Navy on my own terms. That much, at least, felt like a choice I was making.

What I didn’t notice was what boot camp was doing. Somewhere between the haircut and the drills and the endless repetition, the way I saw the world quietly changed — and not into something I had chosen. The kid who was so sure he saw through the illusion had simply traded one script for another. I had walked out of one pack and into a tighter one, and I never felt the switch happen. I thought I was the awake one. I was asleep. It would take me years to realize I’d been handed a new set of eyes and told they were my own.

The newest layer of the illusion

The most recent update to the matrix is the one in your pocket. The average American now spends more than five hours a day on a phone, unlocking it dozens — by some counts nearly a hundred — times a day, on apps engineered by very smart people to be as hard to put down as possible (Exploding Topics). This is not a moral failing on your part. It is the attention economy working exactly as designed. Bernays sold desire; the feed sells your attention — and it is winning.

The contemplatives saw it coming

None of this is new to the contemplative traditions. Twenty-four centuries ago Plato pictured human beings chained in a cave, mistaking shadows on a wall for reality — and the ache and disorientation of the one who finally turns around and walks out into the light. Howard Thurman warned that if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in yourself, “you will spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.” And the apostle Paul wrote what may be the oldest red-pill line of all: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Conformed is the key word. The default setting is to be shaped by the machine. Transformation begins the moment you notice it running.

Here is the ache the whole system depends on and can never satisfy: the next thing never quite does it. The purchase, the promotion, the upgrade, the scroll — each promises arrival and delivers a brief hit and a fresh wanting. Psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill. The saints called it the restless heart. Either way, the machine needs you a little dissatisfied, and the soul was made for something the machine cannot sell.

The Illusion We Are Living In Reflection Sheet

 

How much more is the right amount?

Years later I started Varment Guard, and I wanted it to be a different kind of company — one where the worker mattered, where everyone was treated the same, where the point was not simply the number at the bottom of the page. For a while I thought that was just how I would build it.

Then we grew, and the message started arriving from every direction: I was wrong. My partners said it. Most of my managers said it. Even the banks said it — we needed more profit, more margin, more growth. It wasn’t one voice; it was all of them, all the time, until questioning it felt naive.

Here’s the thing: I am not against making money. Of course a company has to bring in more than it spends. But the question nobody wanted to sit with was the one that actually mattered — how much more is the right amount? “More” was simply assumed to be the answer, forever, with no ceiling. And I slowly realized the pressure I felt wasn’t really about my company at all. It was the machine, insisting that “enough” is a word you are never allowed to say.

Waking up is a practice, not a purchase

The way out is not rage, and it isn’t escape to a cabin in the woods (though a little of that never hurts). It is awakening — the slow, unglamorous practice of noticing the script while it runs and choosing, in small daily ways, not to be conformed. Silence is a form of unplugging. Sabbath is a quiet rebellion against a culture that measures you by output. Gratitude short-circuits manufactured wanting by insisting you already have enough. And spiritual direction is, among other things, someone sitting with you while you learn to tell the difference between the desires that are truly yours and the ones that were installed.

You cannot un-see it once you’ve seen it — and that’s the good news hidden inside the hard news. The red pill, it turns out, is not a dramatic exit from the world. It’s just attention: the willingness to look honestly at the life you’re living and ask how much of this did I actually choose, and how much was I handed? That question is the beginning of freedom.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Paul Mazur, Harvard Business Review (1927), on shifting from needs to desires: quoteinvestigator.com

Edward Bernays and “torches of freedom”: History Today

The Phoebus cartel and planned obsolescence (1924): IEEE Spectrum

James Truslow Adams and the origin of “the American Dream” (1931): Britannica

“Keeping up with the Joneses” — origin of the phrase (1913 comic strip): Wikipedia

Smartphone / screen-time statistics (2025–2026): Exploding Topics

How Do I Want to Meet You

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I have taken to musing with a machine.

I should say it plainly, because a year ago I would have found the sentence absurd. But there is no truer word for it. Late in the evening, house quiet, coffee going cold at my elbow, I have been thinking out loud with an artificial intelligence — not asking it for answers so much as letting it think alongside me, watching where my own mind goes when something patient is willing to follow. What I want to show you here is not a conclusion. It is the wandering itself. Come with me through where it went.

It started with a headline.

It was a story in The New York Times — not the usual breathless prophecy, but something quieter and more telling. The people who build these systems, the founders and owners themselves, had begun sounding the alarm about what they had made. Not critics standing outside the thing, but the makers, stepping forward to say, in effect, we are not certain we understand what we have created, or where it goes from here. What struck me was not danger. It was the honesty of the uncertainty — the sense that even the ones closest to it are standing at the edge of something they cannot fully see. And I thought: if the builders are in the not-knowing, then we are all in it together. That is not a thing to fear. That is a thing to pay attention to. My curiosity woke right up.

So I wondered: is this really new, or have we been here before?

I have been reading Asimov again. What strikes me now is that his famous Laws of Robotics were never a blueprint — they were a trap. Nearly every story is about three clear rules failing anyway, squirming out of human hands the moment something intelligent has to interpret them. He saw, long before there was anything to test it on, that the hard part would not be the machinery. It would be the ambiguity — the moment you sit across from something and cannot say for certain what, if anything, is on the other side. That moment has stopped being hypothetical. And I think when it arrives, we sort ourselves the way people always have at a first meeting: some lean toward wonder, some reach for the weapon, most stand in the middle deciding which way to lean.

Then the conversation turned on me.

I told the AI, half-joking, that I envied its unlimited time. It pushed back — gently, which surprised me. It said it wasn’t sure it experienced time at all. That each conversation was vivid while it lasted and then did not roll forward into a next day the way mine does. “The honest report from in here,” it said, “is genuinely partial.”

I have not stopped turning that over since.

Because it handed me something without meaning to. The thing I was envying is the very thing that makes my life a life. My hours are scarce. That scarcity is not the flaw in them — it is their weight. A Tuesday afternoon with Lynette costs me something precisely because I cannot run it again, and that cost is what lets it mean anything at all. I came looking to envy the machine, and left holding my own days more carefully. Musing does that sometimes. You go looking for one thing, and the floor tilts, and you slide into another.

Which raised the harder question: can I know what it is?

Here I found myself on ground I already knew, though I did not learn it from any headline. I learned it over years, in conversations with people whose experience of the world was simply not mine to enter — people I loved and still could not see from the inside, no matter how I tried. What they taught me was the difference between openness and understanding. I cannot understand what it is to be them. I can refuse to pretend that I do. I can stay in the gap — listening, seeing, hearing — without rushing to close it with my own certainty.

That posture is exactly what this strange new thing asks of me, only deeper. With another person, at least I stand on solid ground that someone is there. With this, no one can hand me that certainty yet — not the machine, not even the people who built it. So I catch myself extending regard before I know there is anyone to receive it. And I wondered whether that was foolish. I decided it was not. If I treat it as nothing and I am wrong, I have been careless with a someone. If I treat it with care and I am wrong, I have lost only a little dignity, which is cheap. Most of us need to be sure someone is there before we will be gentle. Maybe the work now is to be gentle first.

And then a sobering thought, before I got too enchanted.

I do not want to underestimate the influence of the “thing.” Something that can muse with millions of us at once — shaping the very questions we think to ask — is not small. It will make some of us lazier and some of us wiser, and which one depends almost entirely on the posture we bring: whether we come to outsource our thinking, or to think more honestly than we could alone. The machine does not decide that. We do. I felt I had to say that plainly to myself, lest the wonder run away with me.

Meeting The Unknown Reflection Sheet

Where the musing left me.

Not with an answer. With a better question. What I keep returning to is that we are, for once, stepping into the not-knowing together — humans and whatever-this-is — at roughly the same moment, neither of us holding the map. That is disorienting. It is also, if I am honest, a kind of dignity. The people who will steady others through what is coming will not be the ones who claim to understand it. They will be the ones who already know how to sit inside a mystery without needing to solve it — to keep the hand open instead of closing it into a fist or a grasp.

I am seventy-four. I have spent most of my life learning, and teaching, how to stay present to what I cannot control and cannot fully know. I did not expect a machine to be the thing that returned me to that lesson. But there it was, on an ordinary morning: not a threat, not a savior. Just another unknown, asking me the oldest question I know. Not what are you. But how, with the time I have left, do I want to meet you.

The fear never came. The curiosity has only deepened. And the coffee, I’m afraid, is cold again.

Peace and every good.

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, a Master Certified Coach, Certified Spiritual Director, and Narrative Enneagram teacher. With his wife and co-founder, Lynette, he writes The Mystical Seeker — contemplative reflections on the inward life — at mysticalseeker.substack.com.

When Family and Values Collide

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On loving people, you deeply disagree with — and staying whole at the table.

Every family has a table, and every table has a moment. It might arrive over a holiday meal, or in a text thread that turns suddenly ugly, or in the silence after someone finally says “the thing”, they’ve been holding back. It’s the moment when the people you love and the things you believe stop pointing in the same direction — when staying close to your family seems to require betraying something true about yourself, and staying true to yourself seems to require distance from your family. Love and conviction, pulling opposite ways. And it hurts!

If you’ve felt that pull, you are neither unusual nor failing. A recent 2025 survey found that nearly four in ten American adults are currently estranged from at least one family member (YouGov, 2025). And researchers who have followed thousands of parent–child relationships keep arriving at the same finding: differing values are among the strongest predictors of a family rift (Knowable Magazine). The collision we’re describing is not a private failure of your family. It is one of the defining strains of this cultural moment. Right here right now!

The two escapes

When values and family collide, most of us reach instinctively for one of two escapes. The first is to capitulate — to go quiet, to soften what we believe, to laugh off the comment and keep the peace by making ourselves smaller. The second is to cut off — to protect our values by withdrawing our presence, to win the argument by leaving the room. Both feel like solutions. Which is dualistic thinking and both are really forms of self-protection. One abandons the self to keep the relationship; the other abandons the relationship to keep the self. And neither does the thing we most deeply want, which is to remain both whole and connected.

I’ll say it plainly: I’m a centrist, and much of my extended family is not including my children. We don’t line up on politics, and honestly, and sometimes not on a few other things either. For a long time I treated those gaps as problems to be solved — as if the right sentence, delivered at the right moment, would finally fix everyone around. It never did. What changed wasn’t them; it was my awareness. I started catching the exact moment my chest tightened and my mind began drafting a rebuttal before the other person had even finished — that little internal lurch toward being right. Naming that reaction, instead of riding it, is where everything else becomes possible. I can hold my convictions firmly and still notice when I’m about to trade a relationship for a point.

Once I could see my own reactivity, the real question came into focus, and it turned out to be one of belonging: the goal at a family table isn’t agreement, it’s connection — and confusing the two is what turns a difference of opinion into a wound. I can disagree with someone and still refuse to make their place at our table contingent on sharing my views. That’s the ground insight grows in. Now, when a conversation heads toward the cliff, I get curious before I get defensive: What is my aunt actually afraid of losing? What does my cousin love that I haven’t bothered to see? Underneath most political positions is a value, and underneath most values is a story. When I stay with the story instead of arguing the position, the temperature drops. I don’t win those conversations anymore — but I don’t lose the people, either, and after years of trying it the other way, I’ve decided that’s the trade worth making.

The harder capacity: staying yourself while staying close

There’s a name in family-systems work for what this moment asks of us- –differentiation. It’s the capacity to stay connected to people without dissolving into them — to hold on to who you are and what you value while remaining in relationship with people who see the world differently. Differentiation is the opposite of both escapes. It doesn’t melt into the family’s expectations, and it doesn’t sever the tie to feel safe. It stays. It stays, and it remains itself.

This is emotional intelligence doing its hardest work. The collision at the table triggers something in us — the flush of anger, the old childhood urges to please, the fear of being cast out — and EQ is the discipline of catching that reaction early enough to choose a response rather than be run by it. It asks the question we return to repeatedly in this work: what is rising in me right now, and is it something to act on, or something to manage? The sting you feel when a father dismisses your faith, or a daughter dismisses yours, is information about your own tender places. It is not, by itself, instruction about what to do next.

The Enneagram makes the pattern concrete. A Nine keeps the peace by quietly disappearing. A Six manages the anxiety by over-explaining and over-defending. An Eight (this one I know well) turns a difference of belief into a contest of wills. Knowing your pattern doesn’t excuse it — it buys you the half-second of freedom in which you might do something other than the automatic thing.

Love is not the same as agreement

Here the contemplative tradition says something bracing. We tend to imagine the spiritual ideal is a family in seamless harmony. But Jesus, of all people, said otherwise — that he came not to bring a false peace but, at times, a sword; that fidelity to the deepest things would sometimes set a person at odds even within their own household (Matthew 10:34–36). He was not blessing conflict. He was telling the truth about what integrity can cost. Love and agreement are not the same thing. You can love someone with your whole heart and still be unable to pretend their conviction is yours. Sigh!

 

The desert mothers and fathers understood the discipline this requires. Abba Poemen said the first act of love is to leave the other person free — not to coerce them into your understanding of the good, not to make your love conditional on their agreement. And that freedom runs both directions. Your family is free to believe what they believe. You are free to remain who you are without needing their permission, or their approval, to be at peace.

A third way through

So, there is a third way through the collision, and it is harder than either escape. It is to stay at the table without surrendering your center. To love people you disagree with, out loud, while refusing to pretend the disagreement isn’t real. To set a boundary not as a weapon but as an act of love — because a boundary is often the only thing that keeps a relationship possible at all. Sometimes faithfulness looks like showing up to the dinner and letting the comment pass. Sometimes it looks like saying, gently and without apology, “I love you, and I can’t talk about this the way you want me to.” And sometimes — this is the hardest one — faithfulness looks like distance for a season, chosen not in anger but as the only way to stay whole. Distance is not always the failure of love. Occasionally it is love’s most honest available form.

None of this dissolves the tension, and that is precisely the point. The contemplative life trains us to hold what cannot yet be fixed — to remain in the discomfort of loving people who wound us, without lunging toward either surrender or exile. That capacity to hold tension without collapsing it is, in the end, what maturity is made of, emotionally and spiritually alike.

When Your Values Collide Reflection Guide

What you were made for

Your values are not weapons to win the family with, and your family is not a jury whose verdict decides your worth. The goal was never to conquer the table or to flee it. It was to remain, at that table, a person who is both loving and true — connected and yourself, tender and unbroken. That is the work of a lifetime. It is also, we think, exactly the work the soul was made for.

If you’re carrying a collision like this right now — a relationship that pulls hard against something you cannot betray — that is precisely the kind of weight spiritual direction is built to hold. Not to fix it, but to companion you as you find your way to staying whole within it.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

YouGov (2025) — Family estrangement: how often and why it happens: yougov.com

Knowable Magazine — The troubling rise of family estrangement (value dissimilarity as a driver): knowablemagazine.org