Reflections on emotional intelligence as a spiritual practice — the slow work of self-awareness, staying present to others, and growing whole from the inside out. These posts explore where EQ and the contemplative life meet

The Desert and What Holds Weight

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The Desert and What Holds Weight

Part Three of a Three-Part Conversation with Eric Pennington

There is a particular kind of man who can tell you, without flinching, exactly what a decade cost him — and then tell you, in the same breath, that he wouldn’t trade it. Eric Pennington is that man. I have known him for years now. I have watched him work rooms full of skeptical engineers and rooms full of grieving people and rooms full of executives who didn’t yet know they needed what he was offering. And nothing I have watched him do has prepared me for what it was like to sit across from him and ask him to open the desert back up, on camera, on purpose.

He calls it the desert. Sometimes the crucible — the older, harder word, the one that means the fire applied to ore until everything that isn’t the metal itself burns away. He doesn’t reach for that word for effect. He reaches for it because it’s accurate. The crucible doesn’t ask your permission. It doesn’t negotiate a timeline. It simply burns, for as long as burning is required, and you find out what you’re actually made of only after there’s nothing left to hide behind.

His began in 2006. It didn’t end, by his own accounting, until somewhere around 2017. Eleven years, give or take. I want you to sit with that number for a moment before we go further, because it would be easy to read past it. Eleven years is not a bad quarter. It is not a rough season. It is the better part of a man’s working life, spent not knowing, year after year, whether the ground would ever hold again.

“You can confidently say — yeah, I know I’m in the desert, but I’m sure probably next month we’ll be out of here,” he told me. “And then it’s not. And then you realize after a couple of years: yeah. You are in the desert.” He said it almost gently, the way people describe a wound long enough healed that they can finally hold it up to the light without flinching. But I watched his face while he said it, and I want to be honest with you: there was nothing easy underneath that gentleness. Eleven years of believing the end was near and being wrong, over and over, is not a small thing to survive with your faith intact. Most people don’t. Eric did.

I asked him what the desert took from him that he hadn’t expected to lose.

“A lot of that pride,” he said immediately. No hedging. No softening it into something more palatable. He traced it back through everything we’d uncovered in the two conversations before this one — a childhood where being right felt like the only available form of safety, a corporate career that rewarded the same instinct with money and promotions and the particular drug of applause, a company called Epic Living that he launched half out of genuine vision and half out of an old hunger still looking for its next hit. The desert went after all of it. “It birthed in me what I would say is authentic humility,” he said — and he meant the word authentic as a precise distinction, not a flourish. He has seen the performed version of humility up close. He knows it when he sees it, because he used to wear it himself. What the desert gave him instead was the kind you don’t get to choose. The kind that’s simply what’s left.

And then there were the mirages. I want to dwell on this, because I think it is one of the most honest things a person has ever said to me about suffering. A mirage in the desert isn’t an absence of hope — it’s hope, fully formed, arriving exactly when you need it, and then revealing itself as nothing. “You thought: I’m this close. There it is,” Eric said. “And then — gone. And another lesson to learn.” He didn’t say this with bitterness. He said it the way a man says something he has made an uneasy peace with, after enough years of practice, while still being honest that the peace was hard-won and is not the same thing as the pain having been small.

What grew in that soil, against every reasonable expectation, was something he attributes — without irony, in the middle of an interview about emotional intelligence — to Søren Kierkegaard. The idea of playing for an audience of one. Not performing for the room. Not measuring the work by who noticed it. Doing the work because the one true audience already knows the whole of your story, has already seen you at your most desperate and your most petty, and remains, somehow, still interested. I watched something settle in him when he said it. Like a man finally putting down something heavy he’d been carrying with both arms for over a decade.

This is the thing I most want you to understand about Eric Pennington: he refuses to simplify himself for your comfort or mine. In the span of a single answer he will move from Kierkegaard to the Enneagram to Miles Davis to a streaming television show, and somehow none of it is scattered. All of it is the same man, looking at the same wound from different angles, refusing to let any single lens claim the whole truth.

I asked him directly about the cost of being who he is — an empath, by his own naming, a self-preservation Four on the Enneagram, a man built to feel things at a depth this culture rarely makes room for, especially in men. His answer stopped me. “I’m an alien,” he said. “It feels like an alien.” Not with grief, though grief lives somewhere underneath it. With something closer to ownership. “I say that in recognition that I am here, and I’m here for a purpose.” He told me about a character on a television show he’d recently found himself drawn to — a figure who moves through the world differently than everyone around him, sees what others miss, is somehow both fully present and permanently a step outside. He used the word archetype without my prompting him toward it. He told me that the word “weird” used to land on him as wound, the way it landed on a boy who’d already survived more before age fourteen than most people survive in a lifetime. Now it lands as confirmation. “It added to my confidence and courage,” he said, “to continue to be who I know myself to be.”

I do not think most people get to that sentence. I think most people spend their whole lives running from the very thing Eric has learned to stand inside.

Then I asked him the question I had been most afraid to ask, because I suspected the answer would require more of him than any other question in three conversations: what is actually happening inside you, underneath, in the moment before you’ve found the words for something heavy?

He went quiet. Not an uncomfortable quiet — a deliberate one, the kind a musician takes before the next phrase. And then he gave me an answer I will be thinking about for a long time.

“It’s these notes,” he said. “If you’re familiar with music from a theory standpoint — you have quarter notes, you have half notes, you have whole notes, and then you have pauses that can be in between. That’s probably one of the gifts of music for me. It allowed me to process what’s happening underneath — that depth — and to be present with it. Because I can hold that note, and allow that liminal space to do what it does. And then play another note.” He brought Miles Davis back into it, the way he always eventually does — not the man’s sound, but his restraint. “It’s not how many notes. It’s what notes you choose. And the timing of them.” That, he told me, is the medicine. Not rushing toward resolution. Not explaining the ache before it’s finished teaching him something. Holding the note as long as the note needs to be held.

I have interviewed a great many people in my work. I have rarely heard anyone describe their own interior life with that much precision, or that much tenderness toward themselves.

We arrived, finally, at the question I had been saving across all three conversations — the one I think every other question had been quietly building toward. I reminded him of something he had told me himself: that his desire, underneath everything else, is to create things that will hold weight in eternity. And I asked him plainly: when you look back on this season of your life, what do you hope will have held that weight?

He answered slowly, on three levels, and I want to give you his words as close to whole as I can.

First — that he had been growing, across the whole of his life, into the person God intended him to be before he was ever formed in his mother’s womb.

Second — that his relationships would carry something real. That Jim, and Lynette, his wife, his children, the people he has walked closest to, would be able to say, without exaggeration: you did well there. We were helped. We were enriched by being near you.

Third — that the work itself, the podcasts and the articles and the coaching conversations no one ever sees the other side of, would have made a genuine difference in lives he will never personally know about. People who will never write him a message saying it mattered. He is not asking for the credit. He is asking that the giving was real, regardless of whether anyone ever tells him so.

The Desert And What Holds Weight Reflection Sheet

I have sat across from Eric Pennington enough times now to say this without exaggeration: I believe all three of those things will have been true. Not because he has learned to say the right words in the right order — he is far too honest a man for that kind of performance — but because eleven years in a desert burned away everything in him that wasn’t load-bearing, and what is left underneath is, simply, real. The boy who once watched his own life happen to him from a small distance, who found a lifeline in a hymn and a jazz record at thirteen, who carried a brother’s worst day into a school hallway where everyone already had a story about him, who chased the applause until it stopped feeding him, who walked eleven years of mirages and came out still able to play for an audience of one — that boy became, against very long odds, an extraordinary man. I am grateful to call him my friend. I think, by the time you finish reading this, you may understand why.

Where this meets you: what are you building right now that you hope will still mean something in a room you will never enter?

Peace and every good.

About the Author

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, where he and his wife Lynette help individuals, leaders, and teams grow through emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and contemplative spiritual formation. He writes at The Mystical Seeker on the inward life that makes the outward work possible.

Found, Not Searching

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Part Two of a Three-Part Conversation with Eric Pennington

Eric Pennington was bored out of his mind in a conference room.

He’ll tell you that himself, with no embarrassment about it. He was sitting with a room full of division presidents, listening to the same conversation he’d already sat through three years earlier — the fiftieth replay of it, by his count — and something in him wanted to stand up and bang the table. Am I alone here? Is anyone else feeling like this is insanity?

He didn’t bang the table. But a thought arrived that wouldn’t leave: I need to live an epic life. Not because his life was in danger, exactly, but because it was the opposite of danger — it was sameness, dressed up as stability, and he could feel himself going numb inside it. He sat with that thought until it turned into a sentence: human beings should be living an epic life. Therefore — Epic Living.

That’s the company’s origin story, and it’s a good one. But Eric is quick to tell you it wasn’t as clean as it sounds. Underneath the noble language he could put around it — doing the work he loved, getting paid for it, helping people live more fully — there was older wiring still running. “I still was carrying some of that baggage,” he told me, “of, well, hey, if I write this cool little thing and people give me likes, it means there’s the applause, right?”

The applause. He named it without flinching, which is its own kind of courage. Eric grew up needing to be right, needing to get it right, carrying a private rule that failure simply wasn’t an option — and in corporate America, that wiring gets rewarded constantly. Deliver results, get the applause, get the money, get the promotion, and start quietly believing the applause is the validation, rather than just the echo of it. “What a drug,” he said. “I took it and I interpreted it as — wow, look what I did, look how they’re applauding. Therefore let me do more of that so I can get more of that.”

So when Epic Living launched, it launched half on conviction and half on that old appetite still looking for its next hit. And for a while, neither Eric nor anyone watching from outside could have told you which half was driving.

Years went by. The corporate playbook — work hard, deliver, get promoted — simply stopped working in his own business. “All of a sudden I’m, boy, I’m in a desert,” he said, “because nothing I’m trying is working. It’s not like my corporate life.” We’ll walk that desert with him fully in Part Three. For now, what matters is what was waiting on the other side of it — or, more accurately, who.

A banker named Rick Maddox kept telling Eric over coffee that he needed to meet someone. He has the same view on things you do. You two will hit it off. The someone turned out to run a pest-control company, which did not, on paper, sound like Eric’s people. He took the meeting anyway — “I’m gonna take every meeting I can, because you never know” — but he told me plainly that his guard was up. He’d been burned before by collaboration talk that turned into asking for money and then quietly going a different direction. He and Jim Vaive shared a panel at Franklin University on employee engagement, enjoyed it, and Eric still didn’t trust it. Coffee got suggested. He said sure, sure, while privately thinking maybe, I don’t know.

Then Jim said, wait — I want you to meet my wife, Lynette.

“I turned around,” Eric said. “You introduced me. I looked Lynette in the eyes. And that’s how I got found.” Not “found it.” Found. He’s specific about the word, because at the time he wasn’t thinking emotional intelligence, I see the light. It felt more like being stopped. “It was like God was saying, don’t go anywhere. Don’t go anywhere.” One conversation led to another, and somewhere in the accumulation of them, he started to understand what emotional intelligence actually was and what it could touch — not as a concept he went looking for, but as something that had apparently been looking for him.

I asked him what that reframe — emotions as a form of data, rather than a threat to manage — actually unlocked in him. His answer was simple enough to sit with for a while: “I could give my emotions the mic. I didn’t need to run the other way.” For a man who’d spent his life managing, controlling, deciding what to keep and what to give away, that was a different operating system entirely. The early going was hard, he admitted, because some of what surfaced was tied to things from a long way back. But what he found, eventually, was that none of it was trying to hurt him. “Even anger and frustration — all the ones we consider negative — they weren’t trying to hurt me. They were just trying to get my attention. To give me some good data about what was going on inside my head.”

That shift shows up now in a quieter, daily place: a practice of prayer first thing in the morning, before email, before the day gets its hooks in — asking, in his words, for the wisdom and understanding to show up in the world the way he’s meant to. He told me that in recent years the prayer has changed shape. It used to be oriented around having the answer — for his son, for his friends, here’s what I think you should do. Now it’s oriented toward something closer to surrender: I want to play the role God has intended me to play in their lives, not the role he’d assign himself if left to his own certainty.

He admitted that takes courage, because it means his ego has to sit down. He gave me an example without my having to dig for it — a moment at a coffee shop with Chamber of Commerce leaders, where Jim offered six months of free work on the spot. Eric sat next to him doing the math in his head, screaming internally: we are not in a position to be doing things for free. He didn’t say it out loud. He let it ride. Jim told him afterward, trust me, this will produce later. It turned out to be one of the best decisions the partnership made — the relationship eventually returned far more than the free months had cost. “That’s a long way of saying yeah, it did take courage,” Eric said, “because the courage is — I’m going to align myself with what God wants to accomplish in that relationship, versus my own certainty about what I thought was right.”

Before Eric became part of spirit of EQ, he’d already put two books into the world — Waking Up in Corporate Americaand The Well-Being Guide — each written from inside the decade of searching and rebuilding that preceded this partnership. They mark the distance he’d already traveled before any of us started walking together. One names the realization. The other hands someone a map. I asked him what changed in between. “I started discovering that leadership wasn’t just confined to inside the walls of corporate America,” he said. “In order to be the kind of leader people want to follow, you have to be healthy in a multitude of areas.” He’d lived that before he ever wrote it down.

And then there’s the podcast — seven seasons now, co-hosted with Jeff, conversations with corporate leaders, a police chief, an AI researcher, a sabbatical coach, even an episode where Eric talked openly about his son’s accident. I asked what a recurring, public practice of talking about emotional intelligence has done to him that private coaching never could. “I feel like I’m at home with me,” he said. “I’m closest to who I truly am when I’m doing it.” That public practice, he said, has been part of what gave him the courage to talk about harder things out loud — and it’s sharpened something else in him too: a hunger for other people’s stories, not just his own.

Found not Searching Reflection Sheet

What strikes me, sitting with all of this, is how little of it Eric went looking for on purpose. The company name arrived as a thought in a boring meeting. The marriage of emotional intelligence and faith arrived through a banker’s hunch and a held gaze across a room. Even the humility cost him something he didn’t choose to lose — it was stripped, not surrendered willingly, the way most real growth seems to be. He spent years thinking he was building a career. It turns out he was being found.

Where this meets you: somewhere in your own life, the thing you needed most probably didn’t arrive because you went searching for it — it arrived because you finally stopped running fast enough to miss it.

Next time, in Part Three: the ten-year desert Eric calls the crucible — what it stripped away, what it left behind, and what he’s discovered about the things that will hold weight in eternity.

Peace and every good.

About the Author

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, where he and his wife Lynette help individuals, leaders, and teams grow through emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and contemplative spiritual formation. He writes at The Mystical Seeker on the inward life that makes the outward work possible.

What Is Actually Mine to Do?

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In 1206, a young cloth merchant’s heir stood in the public square of his hometown, took off every piece of clothing he owned, and handed it back to his father along with his inheritance. By any reasonable business measure, Francis di Bernardone had everything: a thriving trade business waiting for him, the kind of security most founders spend a lifetime building toward. He walked away from all of it — not impulsively, but after years of watching the family business clarify, with increasing precision, exactly what it would never let him become. What’s left of that decision eight hundred years later isn’t a religious footnote. It’s a case study in founder clarity, and it still has something to say to anyone running an organization, a team, or a life.

The part of the story that gets skipped is what came after the dramatic exit: an organization Francis built from nothing grew faster than he could govern it. Within a couple of decades, what had started as a handful of men with no property and no plan had become a sprawling order with thousands of members, regional factions, and a leadership structure that increasingly made decisions Francis himself disagreed with. He spent his final years watching his own creation drift toward exactly the kind of institution he’d founded it to not be — more land, more rules, more permanence, less of the original bare-bones mission. Every founder who’s watched a board vote to “professionalize” something that was supposed to stay small and sharp will recognize the feeling. Mission drift doesn’t usually arrive as a hostile takeover. It arrives as a series of individually reasonable decisions, made by good people, that add up to a different company than the one you started.

Clare of Assisi fought a longer and more deliberate version of that same battle. She founded a parallel order of women and spent the better part of four decades resisting pressure — repeated, well-intentioned, coming from the highest levels of church leadership — to accept property and guaranteed income for her community’s protection. Multiple popes encouraged her to take it. The logic was sound by any normal organizational standard: own assets, secure your future, reduce your risk. She refused, on the grounds that owning nothing on purpose was the entire point, the thing that kept the mission honest. She got special permission to keep her order poor by choice rather than poor by accident, and the fight took most of her adult life. She won it two days before she died. It’s hard to think of a cleaner example of a founder protecting the model against the very investors trying to help her scale it.

Underneath both of their decisions was a single repeated question, asked daily rather than settled once: what is actually mine to do. Not what’s available. Not what an opportunity is dressed up as. Not what the next well-funded offer implies you should want. I learned a version of that discipline running Varment Guard, and it didn’t look like anything monastic — it looked like sitting alone in the office after everyone else had gone home, going back through the day’s decisions one at a time with a legal pad in front of me. Why this, why not that. Which calls moved the actual mission forward, and which ones were just someone else’s urgency that I’d picked up and carried as if it were mine. It wasn’t elegant. It was closer to triage. But it kept a clear line between what belonged to me and what I’d absorbed because it was loud.

The same discipline mattered later at a board level, where the pulls are quieter and harder to name. A good opportunity. A generous donor’s pet project. A direction that would genuinely grow the organization while bending it slowly away from the reason it existed in the first place. Going back to the mission statement — the org’s, and my own — became the way to test whether a pull toward something new was real strategy or a distraction dressed up as one. It rarely felt efficient in the moment. More than once it meant saying no to something that was, on its own terms, genuinely good.

None of this requires believing anything in particular. It requires the same operating discipline Francis and Clare practiced under far higher stakes: ask the question regularly instead of once, and have the nerve to act on the answer even when the answer costs you something real — a piece of the inheritance, a comfortable expansion, a donor’s good opinion. Most founders never face a square full of people watching them strip down to nothing. Most of us just face a Tuesday, a meeting, a decision nobody else will notice, where the same question is quietly on the table: is this actually mine to do, or did I just pick it up because it was there.

If you’ve got a version of that end-of-day question you run on yourself, I’d be curious to hear what it sounds like.

If you don’t have one yet, start with mine. I built the legal-pad practice from this post into a short downloadable guide — six questions, fifteen minutes, end of day.

Download: What Is Mine to Do? — An End-of-Day Examen

Peace and every good.

 

AUTHOR BIO

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, a Master Certified Coach (MCC), Certified Spiritual Director, and certified Narrative Enneagram teacher. He writes about emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and the contemplative life at The Mystical Seeker on substack, where he and his wife Lynette explore the inward journey alongside the work of leadership and formation.

The Intelligence You Weren’t Taught

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She could name what she was feeling before most people in the room even knew they had feelings. She could read a tense conversation like a map, tracking the undercurrents, sensing what was unspoken. By every measure the research celebrates, her emotional intelligence was high. And yet, somewhere beneath all of that competence, something was restless. Something that didn’t have a name yet.

I think about her often. About the particular quality of her restlessness — not the kind that suggests incompleteness, but the kind that suggests there is more. A country just beyond the border of the map you’ve been given.

Emotional intelligence gave her a better map. What she was reaching for was a different kind of knowing altogether.

What EQ Gets Right — And Where It Stops

We have built our practice at spirit of EQ around the conviction that emotional intelligence changes lives. It changes how leaders show up, how teams hold conflict, how individuals navigate the interior terrain of their own experience. The research is clear, and decades of work with clients has confirmed it: people who develop their EQ are more self-aware, more empathic, more effective in their relationships, more resilient when the ground shifts beneath them.

But here is the honest edge of that map: emotional intelligence is a technology. A profound one. A necessary one. And yet a technology is only as generative as the spirit that animates it. You can have extraordinary self-awareness and still not know what your life is for. You can understand others deeply and still feel unmoored from any larger belonging. You can manage your emotions with great skill and still find, at the end of the day, that something essential is asking to be heard.

EQ maps the terrain. It does not always tell you why the terrain matters, or to what — or to whom — you ultimately belong.

That is where Lynette’s question begins.

Lynette’s Question — And the Research That Followed

Lynette Vaive has spent her career at the intersection of emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and spiritual formation. Her doctoral research — a Doctor of Ministry focused on Spiritual Emotional Intelligence — grew from a question she kept encountering in the field: what happens when emotional intelligence is not enough? What is the deeper layer that some people access and others don’t? And can it be named, taught, practiced?

The framework she developed is called Spiritual Emotional Intelligence, or SEQ. It is not a replacement for EQ — it is a deepening of it, a third dimension that EQ by itself cannot fully reach. SEQ is organized around three domains: Awareness, Belonging, and Insight.

Awareness, in the SEQ framework, is more than self-knowledge. It is the capacity to be present to your own inner life with honesty and without flinching — to notice not just what you feel, but what your feelings are pointing toward. It is the kind of attention the contemplative traditions have always cultivated, and that modern life consistently works against.

Belonging is the recognition that we are not isolated selves navigating a competitive landscape. We are embedded — in community, in creation, in something that holds us whether we attend to it or not. SEQ invites us to notice that embeddedness, to feel it, to let it shape how we move through the world. This is the domain that changes how leaders relate to their teams, how partners relate to each other, how any of us relate to the stranger across the table.

Insight is the capacity to integrate what Awareness reveals and what Belonging grounds — to let that integration become wisdom that actually changes behavior, not just understanding. Insight, in the SEQ framework, is the difference between knowing and living differently because you know.

Within these three domains, Lynette’s research maps nine tiles — specific capacities that together describe what Spiritual Emotional Intelligence looks like in practice. But the framework breathes most fully not as a model to be mastered, but as a territory to be inhabited.

What Changes When You Go Deeper

I think of the woman at the beginning of this reflection. Her EQ gave her a map of her inner landscape. What SEQ names — what her restlessness was reaching toward — was the landscape itself. The felt sense that she belonged to something larger than her own competence. The capacity to let that belonging inform not just her behavior but her becoming.

Howard Thurman, the theologian and mystic who shaped the thinking of the civil rights movement and whose work has long been an anchor for me, wrote about the inner life with a clarity that few have matched. He understood that the most significant work any person does happens not on the stage of public action, but in the quiet interior where the self is formed and reformed in relationship to what is deepest and truest. He did not use the language of emotional intelligence. But he was describing its spiritual root.

SEQ is, in some ways, a contemporary articulation of what contemplatives have always known: that the quality of our presence to others depends on the quality of our presence to ourselves, and that the quality of our presence to ourselves depends on something we did not manufacture. A ground. A source. A belonging that precedes our effort.

In community and organizational settings, SEQ changes the texture of everything. Teams that develop Awareness together begin to notice the emotional undercurrents they used to ignore. Communities that practice Belonging begin to hold conflict differently — not as a threat to be managed but as an invitation to go deeper. Leaders who cultivate Insight find that their decisions come from a different place, quieter and more rooted than the reactive center most of us operate from by default.

Something shifts. Not dramatically, not all at once. But truly.

The Deeper Layer Is Not Out of Reach

She is still in the room, the woman from the beginning of this reflection. And now she has a name for what she was reaching toward. Not a label that fixes it, but a language that opens it — a way of attending to the Awareness, Belonging, and Insight that were always present in her, asking to be cultivated.

That is what the SEQ framework offers. Not a program, but a practice. Not mastery, but an orientation — a way of asking better questions of your own interior life and the lives you share with others.

Spiritual Emotional Intelligence  Reflection Guide— Three Domains, Three Questions

The map was never the territory. But there is a territory. And it is worth inhabiting.

If this stirred something in you, we would be glad to have you join the ongoing conversation at spirit of EQ — on Substack, in our Mighty Networks community, or through the work we do directly with individuals and organizations.

Peace and every good.

 

“The Work of Art at the Center of Every Person”

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There were two easels in our house growing up, set at angles in the same room so neither parent blocked the other’s light. My mother worked in oils, slow and layered, sometimes returning to the same canvas for weeks until a shadow finally sat right. My father moved faster, looser, more willing to ruin a piece chasing something better. I grew up in the smell of turpentine and the quiet of two people absorbed in work that had no deadline attached to it, only a standard only they could see. I didn’t understand, as a kid, that I was watching two different theologies of creation. I just knew that in our house, “finished” was a word my parents used carefully, almost reluctantly, the way some families talk about money.

 

I tell you this because I’ve spent the better part of three decades since then assuming the lesson I took from that house was about art itself — about craft, attention, the discipline of starting over. It took my friend and colleague Jeff to show me I’d had it slightly wrong the whole time.

Jeff and I go back further than spirit of EQ. Long before either of us thought about emotional intelligence as a vocation, Jeff was part of the Varment Guard years — one of the people who helped build something out of almost nothing, back when “failure was not an option” was a motto we meant literally because the alternative wasn’t survivable. He’s the kind of person you want next to you in a startup’s early days: steady under pressure, unbothered by long hours, the sort of teammate who shows up and does the unglamorous work without needing credit for it. He was a member of New Albany UMC for years, and he still gives his weekends — actual weekends, the kind most people guard fiercely — to Kairos Prison Ministry, sitting in rooms with incarcerated men who have no platform, no audience, and in many cases no expectation that anyone outside those walls is thinking about them at all. Ask him about it and he doesn’t describe it as a sacrifice; he lights up. Being of service is, by his own account, what energizes him most.

 

When Jeff talks about coaching now, he uses a phrase that stopped me the first time I heard it. His own way of putting it: “I believe that each person has a unique and amazing work of art at their core. Not art like painting, but their essence.” Not a metaphor for potential, exactly — closer to a literal claim. Somewhere underneath the job title, the defense mechanisms, the years of doing what was expected instead of what was true, there is something formed and specific and already complete, waiting less to be built than to be uncovered. His own Noble Goal, the thing he organizes his working life around, is to help people find that art in themselves.

I used to think that was a generous overstatement — the kind of thing you say to encourage someone, true in spirit more than in fact. Then I watched what Jeff does with men inside a prison who have nothing left to perform for, no résumé to protect, no boss to impress. There’s no career upside to a Kairos weekend. No referral pipeline, no testimonial, no audience beyond the man across the table. Jeff describes what he brings into that room plainly: “These men have been beaten down for so much of their life that no one has told them that they have worth or value. I believe that is the most important thing that I take into the prison.” That’s the same claim as the work of art, said in a different register — not a creative impulse waiting to be unlocked, but a worth that was never actually in question, only buried under years of being told otherwise. And it’s precisely there, where every external reason to fake it has been stripped away, that Jeff says he sees people most clearly — not the art they wish they’d made, but the art that was always there, scarred over, hidden, waiting on someone steady enough to notice it without flinching.

This reframes the question I’d been asking wrong for years. I’d absorbed from my parents’ easels that art was something you produced — a discipline you practiced, a skill you built, a thing that either existed on the canvas or didn’t exist at all. So, when people tell me, in coaching sessions or over coffee, that they don’t have a creative bone in their body, that the art conversation isn’t for them, I understand exactly what they mean, because I used to measure it the same way. But Jeff’s version of the Noble Goal isn’t asking anyone to make more. It’s suggesting that most of us are sitting on something we’ve already made — a way of loving people, a particular kind of patience, a capacity to stay present in rooms other people flee — and we’ve spent so long hiding it, smoothing it over, calling it ordinary, that we’ve forgotten it was art at all.

This is where emotional intelligence stops being a corporate competency and starts being something closer to excavation. The tools Jeff uses — the same EQ frameworks we teach leaders and teams — aren’t really about performance optimization when you trace them back far enough. They’re instruments for noticing: what someone feels underneath what they’re saying, what’s been buried so long it reads as personality rather than choice, what got hidden because revealing it once cost too much. Jeff’s years in prison ministry didn’t happen alongside his coaching work by coincidence. They’re the same practice in two different rooms — one with stakes most people will never know, one with a quarterly review attached, both asking the identical question: what is the work of art this person has been hiding, and what would it take for them to trust it back into the light.

The Art You’ve Been Hiding Reflection Sheet

I think about those two easels differently now. My parents weren’t only teaching me about craft. They were teaching me, without either of them saying it outright, that the thing worth making was never separate from the person making it — that the canvas was just where it became visible. Jeff would say the canvas isn’t required at all. The art is already there. The work, his work, our work, is helping people stop believing they have to make something new before they’re allowed to call what’s already inside them by its true name.

You don’t need to make more art. You need to stop hiding the one you already are.

Peace and Every Good

If this stirred something, you can find more reflections like it on The Mystical Seeker.

mysticalseeker.substack.com & spiritofeq.com/blog

About the Author

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, where he and his wife Lynette help individuals, leaders, and teams grow through emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and contemplative spiritual formation. He writes at The Mystical Seeker on the inward life that makes the outward work possible.

 

Leaving the Family You Love: A Six Seconds Story

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What Is Ours to Do: Six Years Inside the World’s EQ Family

We were sitting at Josh Freedman’s table in California, there to do actual work on an idea that had started with us and Josh after a night in Italy when everything was stolen.

That loss wasn’t metaphorical — it was the kind that strips a trip down to its studs and leaves you standing on a street in a foreign country with nothing but each other and whatever faith you came with. Sitting with that loss, Lynette and I began talking about something we couldn’t quite let go of afterward: a conviction that emotional intelligence, as powerful as it is, might be missing a layer. It could help you understand your feelings. It could not, on its own, help you understand your soul. We started calling that missing layer SQ, and while we were in Italy we told Josh we would like to be more involved with Six Seconds. He suggested an assessment built around spiritual intelligence, which eventually brought the concept to Josh’s table to evolve further, because Six Seconds had been the architecture of our own EQ formation for years, and he was the person we trusted most in that moment to talk it through with.

Josh listened the way he always does — fully, without performing his attention — and then he made suggestions that were smaller than what we’d imagined and, in their own way, wiser. Rather than reworking the SEI, the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment that sat at the center of everything Six Seconds did, he proposed adding a spiritual assessment alongside it — one more tool in the library he’d already built, not a replacement for the organization’s core focus. Out of that suggestion came the SEQ — Spiritual Emotional Intelligence — a framework Lynette would spend years refining, eventually carrying it into her doctoral research with the Haden Institute. But that’s a different post. This one is about what happened next, at that same table.

While we were sitting there, we noticed Six Seconds was advertising for Regional Network Directors for North America. We asked Josh, somewhat sheepishly, if we should apply. “Sure,” he said. “Go ahead.” So we did, and the interview process began. Somewhere in the middle of it, we made an unusual request: we would take the role only if we could job-share it, together, at the salary of one person. It was a strange thing to ask for, and a stranger thing for an organization to say yes to. But Six Seconds said yes. And in one of those interviews, when they asked what we’d do with the region if we got it, Lynette and I gave an answer that had nothing to do with metrics or growth targets. We said we wanted to wrap North America in a warm blanket of love and understanding. That was the whole strategy. They hired us anyway.

The six years that followed were not what either of us expected, and they were more than either of us could have asked for.

We traveled to countries we’d never have reason to visit otherwise, and because we were there to work, not to vacation, we didn’t stay in hotels so much as we stayed in people’s lives. We sat at their tables. We learned their rhythms. We met people who would become genuinely dear to us, not contacts but family, and we got to see up close what it means for emotional intelligence to take root in a culture — not as a training module but as a way communities choose to treat each other. We came home from those trips different every time, fuller, more convinced that the work mattered.

We also got a front-row seat to something we hadn’t expected to witness so directly: the architecture of Josh’s mind. Calling him a genius might be generous or it might be exactly right — we’ve never been entirely sure which, and we suspect he isn’t either — but what we saw, year after year, was someone with an almost uncanny capacity to pull threads from neuroscience, education, business, and human development and weave them into something coherent enough to hand to a stranger and say, here, this will help you. None of that happened in isolation. Six Seconds is the work of many hands before us, beside us and ahead of us, people whose names don’t appear in the history pages, but whose fingerprints are all over the organization Six Seconds is today. We were grateful to be among them, even for a season.

Then the pandemic arrived, and everything we thought we knew about resilience got tested against something none of us had a training module for.

There were stretches of those years that asked more of our communication, our patience, and our nervous systems than almost anything we’d faced before — including the years building Varment Guard from nothing. There were moments of real friction inside the Six Seconds family, the kind that surfaces when an entire global community is trying to hold itself together through grief and uncertainty at the same time. We loved that family through all of it: the smiles, the frowns, the hard and honest conversations that emotional intelligence doesn’t exempt you from but requires of you. EQ was never a tool for avoiding conflict in that season. It was the only thing that made the conflict survivable, and occasionally, even generative. There were successes in the middle of it that made us cry — not from relief, but from something closer to awe, the sense of watching people choose connection when isolation would have been so much easier.

Through all six years, Lynette and I kept coming back to the same question, the one that has quietly governed most of the major decisions of our lives together: what is ours to do?

For that season, the answer was Six Seconds. We had a structure to help build for North America, and we built it — a structure that worked exactly as it needed to, for exactly as long as it needed to, until the world changed again and a different structure became necessary for an age of AI and rapidly shifting communities. We weren’t building something meant to outlast us unchanged. We were building something meant to serve, and then to be replaced by whatever served better. That’s not failure. That’s stewardship.

When the time came to leave, we left — not because the work stopped mattering, but because our hearts had never stopped belonging to the spiritual journey of the seekers in our own world, the ones who came looking for spirit of EQ specifically because they wanted the spiritual layer Six Seconds had helped us name but couldn’t, by its own scope and mission, fully carry. So, we said a true and grateful goodbye to a family we loved, and we came home to the work we were always going to return to.

What we keep coming back to, looking at those six years now, is this: none of it would have happened if we hadn’t been willing to ask an honest question out loud at someone else’s table, and none of it would have ended well if we hadn’t been willing to leave when leaving was the truer thing to do. Honoring the deepest truth in yourself sometimes looks like raising your hand for an opportunity you’re not sure you deserve. Sometimes it looks like walking away from a family you love because another part of your life is calling you home. Both are the same practice, really — the practice of taking your own soul seriously enough to follow it, even into the unknown, even when the unknown costs you something real.

Companion Work Book

We are endlessly thankful for Six Seconds, for Josh’s strange and generous brilliance, for the people who walked beside us before we arrived and the ones who are still walking that road now, building whatever comes next for a world that badly needs more emotional intelligence, not less. And we are thankful, too, for the courage it took to come home.

Peace and every good.

 

I Damaged Someone & The Truth It Taught Me

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There is a picture my mother drew of my father in his studio. He is standing at the canvas with a brush in his hand, but he is not painting. He is looking. Just looking. My mother told me once that the hardest thing about being an artist is not the making — it is the seeing. Seeing what is there, not what you hoped would be there. Seeing clearly enough to know when something is wrong, even when the wrong thing is something you made.

I have thought about that picture a lot over the years. Especially in relation to leadership. Because leadership, at its most honest, requires the same thing my father was doing in that studio: the willingness to stand before what is real and see it — not manage it, not spin it, not quietly maneuver around it — but see it. And the hardest version of that seeing is always the one that turns inward.

When Lynette and I were building the spirit of EQ framework, we kept returning to a question that came up repeatedly in our coaching and spiritual direction work: why do so many gifted leaders struggle with self-awareness? Not because they lack intelligence. Not because they are unkind or unserious. But because the very qualities that made them effective — decisiveness, energy, forward momentum, the ability to hold a vision and drive toward it — can become the walls of a room they eventually cannot see out of.

The Enneagram has a word for this. It calls them fixations — the grooved, automatic patterns we operate from when we are running on autopilot rather than on presence. Each type has its own shape of forgetting. And the forgetting is not dramatic. It is quiet. It accumulates. It happens in the ordinary press of days, under the ordinary pressure of responsibility, until one morning you look up and realize the wake you have been leaving behind is wider and more damaging than you ever intended.

I know this from my own life. When I co-founded Varment Guard, my business partners were good people — steady, quiet, deeply competent in their domains. But one stands out for me, he did not move fast. He did not think fast. He processed carefully, methodically, and he was almost always right. I am a classic Enneagram Eight. I move fast. I decide fast. I push hard. I burned through rooms in those early years the way a locomotive burns through a tunnel — arriving on the other side with energy to spare, rarely pausing to consider what the air felt like for everyone else inside.

In the beginning, this particular partner and I worked well together. His steadiness balanced my fire. My drive opened doors his caution would have approached more slowly. But as the business grew and the pressure intensified, I lost access to that balance. I stopped seeing my partner clearly. I started seeing only the pace I needed us to keep, and I began — unconsciously, relentlessly — forcing this gentle soul into a shape that was not his. I pushed him beyond the edges of who he was. I did not mean to damage him. But I did. And eventually, he left. Not loudly. Not in conflict. He simply found a way out, and the relationship went with him. It was a wound I have carried for a long time.

What I could not see then — and what took years of coaching, spiritual direction, and a lot of sitting still to begin to understand — was that the truth I needed to face was not about the business. It was about me. The Eight’s deep gift is strength. The Eight’s deep shadow is the refusal to acknowledge the harm that strength can do. I had confused impact with intention. I believed that because I did not mean harm, I had not caused it. That is not how it works. That is not how it has ever worked.

The contemplative tradition is clear about this. Howard Thurman wrote that we are responsible not only for our intentions but for the world we create around us — the quality of the field we generate for those in our care. Julian of Norwich, writing from her anchorite cell in fourteenth-century Norwich, described the interior life as a dwelling place — something that requires tending, requires honest inspection, requires the willingness to see what is there rather than what we prefer to believe is there. “All shall be well,” she wrote — but the path to that wellbeing runs directly through the truth, not around it (Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love).

The research on emotional intelligence affirms what the mystics knew intuitively. Six Seconds, the global EQ nonprofit where Lynette and I served for many years, identifies self-awareness as foundational to every other capacity in the emotional intelligence model. You cannot regulate what you cannot see. You cannot choose your response when you are unconscious of your pattern. You cannot lead others toward wholeness from a place of unexamined wounding. The data bears this out across industries, cultures, and leadership contexts. Self-awareness is not a soft skill. It is the load-bearing wall.

But here is the thing about truth: it requires courage, not just curiosity. Many leaders are curious about themselves in a managed way — they take the assessments, they read the books, they sit in the leadership retreats. What is rarer is the willingness to let the truth land. To let it cost something. To sit with it long enough that it changes not just your language but your behavior, your relationships, the shape of the wake you leave. The contemplative teacher Thomas Keating called this the dismantling of the false self — the slow, sometimes painful process of releasing the persona we have constructed to protect ourselves and facing what is underneath (Thomas Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart). Most of us will do almost anything to avoid that process. Leaders perhaps most of all, because the stakes feel so high and the exposure feels so total.

John O’Donohue, the Irish poet and philosopher, wrote that “the longest journey you will ever make is from your head to your heart” (John O’Donohue, Anam Cara). I think of that line often when I am sitting with a leader in a coaching session, watching them circle a truth they cannot quite bring themselves to name. The truth is right there. They can feel it. But the distance between knowing it in the mind and letting it descend into the heart — into lived acknowledgment, into genuine accountability — can feel enormous. That journey is the work. And no amount of strategy, no quarterly planning cycle, no leadership competency framework can do it for you.

What helps? In our experience at spirit of EQ, several things. The practice of silence — not productivity, not journaling as output, but genuine quiet that creates the interior space for truth to surface. The practice of honest relationship — at least one person in your life who is not dependent on you, not intimidated by you, and will tell you what they see. The Enneagram, used not as a typology to explain yourself but as a mirror to face yourself. And prayer — whatever form that takes for you — as an act of opening, of consenting to be seen more fully than you can see yourself.

I did not get a chance to repair things with my partner. That is a grief I live with. But what his departure gave me — painfully, slowly, over years — was the beginning of something more honest in myself. A willingness to slow down long enough to feel the field I was generating. A willingness to ask not just “Did we hit the goal?” but “What did it cost the people in the room?” That shift did not diminish my leadership. It deepened it. It made me someone I am still, imperfectly, trying to become.

The Truth Leaders Don’t Want to Face

My father’s picture still lives in my mind. The brush in his hand. The stillness of his looking. The courage required to see clearly enough to know what is true and what is wish. That is the invitation for every leader who is willing — not to be perfect, not to have it all resolved, but to stand before the canvas of your own life and look.

The truth will not destroy you. It will, in time, free you.

If this reflection stirred something in you, we’d love to have you join us at mysticalseeker.substack.com — where we explore the inner journey of leadership, EQ, and spiritual formation.

Peace and every good.

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The Most Intelligent Thing You Can Do Is Slow Down

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When You Know Why You React, You Can Choose How You Respond

What the Enneagram and emotional intelligence reveal about the space between trigger and response

There is a photograph I keep coming back to in my mind — not an actual photograph, but the kind that forms over years of sitting across from people in coaching conversations. It is the image of a person mid-sentence, eyes slightly wide, voice pitched a half-step higher than usual, saying something they will probably wish they hadn’t. And in the moment before the words arrive, there is this invisible space — a fraction of a second, maybe less — where everything that matters is happening.

Viktor Frankl called it the space between stimulus and response. He wrote about it from inside a concentration camp, which means he earned the right to talk about it. That space, he said, is where our freedom lives. It is also, I’ve come to believe, where emotional intelligence and the Enneagram converge into something genuinely transformative.

The Intelligence Beneath the Surface

Emotional intelligence, as Daniel Goleman mapped it, begins with self-awareness — the capacity to notice what’s happening inside you before it moves through you and into the world. Josh Freedman of Six Seconds distills it differently, into a sequence I return to often: Know Yourself, Choose Yourself, Give Yourself. The knowing comes first. Without it, we are largely reactive — moved by currents we can’t name.

Most of us have experienced this. A colleague’s offhand comment lands wrong and we feel our jaw tighten before we understand why. A family member raises a familiar complaint and we hear ourselves responding in the old way again — the way we promised ourselves we wouldn’t. The reaction isn’t irrational exactly. It’s just faster than our awareness.

This is where the Enneagram enters the room.

A Map of the Interior

The Enneagram is a nine-type system of personality that goes deeper than behavior into motivation — into the core fears and longings that drive us. It is not a label to be worn comfortably. At its best, it is an unsettling mirror, one that shows you not only what you do but why, and what you are protecting when you do it.

A Type Eight (the Challenger) doesn’t lead aggressively because they are cruel. They lead that way because somewhere underneath the forcefulness is a terror of being controlled or betrayed — and strength feels like the only reliable protection. A Type Two (the Helper) doesn’t overextend themselves because they are foolish. They do it because their worth, in some deep and often unconscious way, feels contingent on being needed.

When you understand this about yourself — really understand it, not just intellectually but in the body — something shifts. The reaction doesn’t disappear. But there is more space around it.

The Place Where They Meet

I’ve seen this play out in workshops and in one-on-one coaching more times than I can count. A leadership team I worked with had a Type Eight and a Type Nine in constant friction. The Eight moved fast, spoke bluntly, made decisions before the Nine felt heard. The Nine withdrew, agreed on the surface, and then quietly undermined the direction — not out of malice but out of a desperate need for harmony they didn’t know how to ask for. What made it harder was that both of them were genuinely trying. The Eight believed clarity and decisiveness were acts of respect — waste no one’s time, say what’s true, move forward. The Nine believed keeping the peace was its own form of care — absorb the friction, hold the group together, avoid the rupture. Neither of them was wrong exactly. They were just operating from entirely different interior maps, and no one had ever handed them the other person’s.

When we named what was happening through the lens of both the Enneagram and emotional intelligence, something loosened. The Eight didn’t need to become soft. The Nine didn’t need to become confrontational. They needed to understand each other’s interior logic — and then, from that understanding, choose something different than their default. What I watched happen in that room was not a personality makeover. It was something quieter and more durable: two people recognizing that the other person’s behavior had a reason, and that the reason wasn’t contempt or weakness. That recognition created enough safety for genuine conversation — maybe for the first time in years of working together.

That’s the intersection. The Enneagram names what’s underneath. Emotional intelligence gives you tools to work with it. Together, they create the conditions for what I’d call non-reactive presence — the ability to be fully in a difficult moment without being fully hijacked by it.

Some Places to Begin

If this is new territory for you, here are a few entry points worth sitting with:

  1. Get curious before you get defensive. The next time you feel a strong reaction — irritation, anxiety, the urge to withdraw or escalate — ask yourself what it’s protecting. Not in a clinical way, but genuinely. What’s at stake for me right now?
  2. Learn your Enneagram type as a spiritual practice, not a personality quiz. The Narrative Enneagram tradition invites you into the type through lived experience and community, not just a test score. There’s a difference.
  3. Practice the pause. Frankl’s space between stimulus and response can be cultivated. Centering Prayer, mindful breathing, simple body awareness — any practice that builds your capacity to notice before acting will serve you here.
  4. Make it relational. Understanding your own type is valuable. Understanding the types of the people you love and work with alongside yours is where transformation tends to happen. The framework becomes a bridge rather than a mirror.

I don’t think any of us become non-reactive all the way down. That would require not being human. But I do believe we can cultivate the capacity to meet our reactions with a little more light and a little less automatic machinery. The Enneagram helps us see ourselves clearly. Emotional intelligence gives us something to do with what we see.

That space between stimulus and response — Frankl was right. Something important lives there. And with practice, we can learn to inhabit it.

If you’re curious about exploring the Enneagram and EQ together — for yourself, your team, or your community — visit spiritofeq.com to learn more about our workshops and coaching.

Peace and every good.

— — —

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The Exquisite Risk of Letting the Dark Do Its Work

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There is a photograph I have carried in my memory for decades — not one taken on film, but one pressed into the body the way cold presses into bone. It is a winter morning in Detroit, still dark at six a.m., and I am standing at the kitchen window watching my mother mix paint in the silence before the house woke up. She wasn’t sad. She wasn’t lost. She was in that rare place artists sometimes go — a place that looks like emptiness from the outside but is, from the inside, a particular kind of waiting. A necessary hollow. I didn’t have words for it then. I do now.

The mystics called it la noche oscura — the dark night of the soul.

When the Ground Falls Away

Most of us arrive at the dark night not by choice but by collapse. Something that once held meaning — a career, a faith practice, a sense of self, a relationship — gives way beneath us. The fall is disorienting precisely because we didn’t see it coming, and because the things we reach for on the way down don’t hold.

This is not ordinary sadness. It is not burnout, though it can look like it. It is not clinical depression, though it can travel alongside it, and if it is significantly impairing your daily life or generating thoughts of self-harm, please reach out to a licensed professional — that is not weakness, it is wisdom.

What distinguishes the dark night is its spiritual texture: the loss isn’t just of energy or motivation but of meaning itself. Things that once lit you up feel hollow. Your spiritual practices go silent. You withdraw. You wonder, quietly or loudly, whether you have lost God, or whether God was ever there at all.

St. John of the Cross — a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic who wrote from inside a prison cell no larger than a closet, where he had been confined by the very religious order he was trying to reform — would say: you are exactly where you need to be.

That is hard to hear in the dark. It was for me.

 

The Poem That Knows the Way

What John wrote in that cell was not a lament. It was, against all reason, a love poem.

“Dark Night of the Soul” — in Mirabai Starr’s luminous translation opens not in despair but in secret motion. The soul slips out of the house while everything is still. She travels in darkness, not despite the darkness but through it, guided not by any external lamp but by something burning in her own chest.

No other light, no other guide Than the one burning in my heart. — St. John of the Cross, trans. Mirabai Starr

This is the paradox the dark night holds: what feels like abandonment is, in John’s vision, a form of being led. The stripping away of every consolation — every spiritual feeling, every certainty, every framework that once made sense — is not punishment. It is preparation. The soul is being emptied so that something truer can fill it.

The poem ends not in the darkness but in a garden. In rest. In transformation. Lover transformed in Beloved.

John doesn’t promise the journey will be short. He doesn’t promise it won’t hurt. He promises it goes somewhere.

What Emotional Intelligence Has to Do with It

Here is where the contemplative tradition and emotional intelligence meet in a way I find profound: both ask us to stay present with what is, rather than immediately managing it away.

One of the core competencies in the Six Seconds model of EQ is what we call Feel Your Feelings — the capacity to move toward your inner experience rather than away from it. Not to be consumed by it. Not to perform it. But to let it be what it is, without premature resolution.

The dark night, spiritually understood, asks for the same posture. It resists the fixes we reach for — the productivity systems, the five-step frameworks, the urgent need to locate the lesson and extract it. Those impulses are understandable. They are also, in the dark night, exactly what is being dismantled.

What the dark night wants from you is not your solutions. It wants your surrender.

And surrender — in the contemplative sense — is not passivity. It is a particular kind of courage: the willingness to stop managing the mystery and begin inhabiting it.

 

Five Things to Do When You Are in the Dark

I want to offer not a ladder out but a way of being in. These are not performance targets. They are invitations.

Stay close to your body.  The dark night is disorienting in the mind, but the body often knows more than we credit it with. Walk. Sit with your back against something solid. Pay attention to what you can smell, hear, feel. The Incarnation — God taking on a body — is itself a theological argument that matter matters. You are allowed to be a creature.

Release the spiritual performance.  If your prayer feels empty, don’t force it into the shape it used to have. John wrote from inside a prison cell with nothing but scraps of cloth and the words forming in him in the dark. The form of devotion may need to change entirely. Let it.

Find one trustworthy companion.  Not someone who will rush you to resolution, but someone who can sit in the not-knowing with you. A spiritual director. A therapist. A friend formed in contemplative patience. The dark night is not meant to be survived alone, even when it demands solitude.

Practice lectio divina with the darkness itself.  What if you read the darkness the way monastics read scripture — slowly, with openness, asking not what does this mean but what is this forming in me? The dark night, John insists, is doing something. You may not be able to name it yet. That is alright.

Trust the heart that burns inside.  Even when you cannot feel it. Even when the candle seems to have gone out. John’s soul travels the whole dark journey guided by what is burning inside her chest — not what she can see, not what makes rational sense, but what is alive in her. There is something in you that has not gone out. It may be very quiet. Tend it like an ember.

What the Darkness Already Knows Reflection Guide

 

What the Darkness Already Knows

My mother would finish her mixing before the sun came up, and then she would begin. I used to think the dark hours were the waiting. I understand now they were the work.

The dark night of the soul is not a detour from the spiritual life. For John of the Cross, for Meister Eckhart, for Howard Thurman writing from the underside of suffering, for Julian of Norwich holding her visions in the midst of plague — the darkness has always been the passage. Not the destination. But not the obstacle either.

It is, to borrow Mirabai Starr’s phrase, an exquisite risk.

And if you are in it right now — if the house has gone still and everything you reached for is no longer where you left it — you are not broken. You are, perhaps, being made.

The night that joins the lover with the Beloved does not announce itself. It simply comes. And it leads.

St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, translated by Mirabai Starr, Riverhead Books, 2002 —

If this found you in a threshold season, we’d be honored to walk alongside you — explore spirit of EQ’s community on Substack or join us in our Mighty Networks space for ongoing conversation.

Peace and every good.

Let Me Listen: Shared Humanity Love

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Let Me Listen: A Love Letter to Shared Humanity (and What It Asks of Us

There’s a particular kind of courage in saying: let me listen. Not “let me fix.” Not “let me respond.” Not even “let me impress you with my empathy.” Just… listen.

In a poem by Charles Anthony Silvestri (2022), that invitation becomes the heart of a relationship—between two people, yes, but also between any two humans who have crossed paths and recognized the sacred value of another person’s inner world. I have learned that we do not need to rush to claim space; we ask permission to walk alongside someone for a while, to hear their story, to respect their silence, and to be present long enough that loneliness can loosen its grip.

If you’ve ever felt overlooked, talked over, or trapped in a conversation where you were really just waiting to be heard—this poem may land with surprising force. Because listening is not merely a skill; it’s a form of emotional attention. And emotional attention changes people.

A Brief History of Listening (That Isn’t Just “Being Quiet”)

Listening has been discussed for centuries, but what’s powerful about Silvestri’s poem is how it modernizes the idea: not listening as passive silence but listening as a relational commitment.

  • In many traditions, listening is treated as a spiritual discipline. Ancient teachings often place “attentive listening” at the center of wisdom—because wisdom requires receptivity.
  • In philosophy and ethics, listening becomes a way of acknowledging another person’s reality rather than dismissing it as irrelevant.
  • In psychology, listening is central to connection and mental health. Therapists and counselors often emphasize that feeling truly heard can reduce stress and shame while increasing emotional safety.
  • In communication research, we’ve learned that “active listening” involves behaviors—reflecting feelings, asking clarifying questions, and validating experiences—rather than simply keeping quiet. What we do in Spiritual Direction.

But Silvestri’s poem goes a step further. It frames listening as presence with boundaries: if the other person’s silence is their choice, the listener doesn’t break it. They honor it. That is both an emotional intelligence skill and a relational ethics practice: letting someone control their pacing and their vulnerability.

“We Come from Different Places” Why Listening Begins Before Speech

The poem opens with difference: “We come from different places… on different paths we journey.” This matters. Many of us approach conversation as though common ground is required before empathy can begin. Silvestri suggests the opposite: you can begin connection precisely because people are different. You can honor a person’s path without needing it to match your own.

That’s a subtle shift and a powerful one….

  • Instead of asking, “Does your story make sense to me?” we start with, “What is true for you?”
  • Instead of asking, “What can I say to show I understand?” we ask, “What do you need from me right now?”
  • Instead of rushing to similarity, we slow down to curiosity.

Emotional intelligence begins with awareness—of self, of emotion, of impact. If you’re carrying your own anxiety into the conversation, your listening will become a performance. But if you arrive grounded, you can stay open long enough to see what’s there.

Loneliness Ends When Someone Learns Your Song

Silvestri writes about convergence: “So briefly do our lonely paths converge… Yours and mine, along this human journey.” That line hits me because loneliness isn’t always about being alone. Sometimes it’s about being misread. It’s about feeling like your story doesn’t get recognized.

Then comes one of the most striking phrases in the poem: “what hollow loss to never hear your song.” The metaphor of a “song” is more than romantic language. It implies identity—each person has a unique rhythm, a pattern of hopes and griefs, strengths and wounds. If we never listen deeply enough, we don’t just miss information. We miss meaning.

In real life, this looks like

  • Someone repeating the same emotional truth because nobody responded to it the first time.
  • Someone choosing silence because every previous attempt to share was met with judgment or speed.
  • Someone shrinking themselves to fit the conversation, only to become quieter over time.

Listening restores dignity. It tells a person: You matter enough for me to slow down.

“Let Me Listen” The Emotional Intelligence of Being With

The poem’s repeated refrain— “Let me listen”—isn’t only a request. It’s a method. Listening here includes

  1. Allowing the story to be theirs.

The speaker says: “Your story never has been mine to tell—so let me listen.” This is emotional intelligence at work. Some of us accidentally steal someone’s narrative by translating it into our experiences (“That happened to me too…”). Others appropriate by concluding how the person must feel or what they must have meant. Silvestri’s speaker refuses that impulse. They don’t take over the narrative; they honor the ownership of the voice.

  1. Valuing the whole range of emotion.

“Your triumphs and your tears / Your trials and your fears.” Many people are comfortable with success stories but stumble with pain. Yet real listening includes joy and sorrow. It also means you don’t treat sadness as an inconvenience or “overreaction.” You recognize emotion as information.

  1. Staying present without forcing resolution.

Listening doesn’t always lead to solutions. Sometimes the “help” a person needs is not action but witnessing. Emotional safety often comes from being allowed to feel without being rushed to fix.

  1. Respecting silence as a choice.

“And if a silence is your choice to keep, then I will keep it with you.” This is especially rare. Many conversations become uncomfortable when someone stops talking, and that discomfort pushes the other person to fill space or pressure them for more. But Silvestri suggests something gentler: you can stay in the quiet and still communicate care.

If you’ve ever felt pressured to “say something” while your heart was still assembling its words, you’ll understand why that line matters. Silence is sometimes where grief breathes. Silence can also be where a person regains control after overwhelming.

“Too Long You’ve Waited” Listening Is Also an Act of Repair

The poem concludes with urgency: “Too long you’ve waited, too long, to share your journey, your song—so let me listen.” That “too long” is a mirror. It asks: how many people around us have been waiting—patiently or desperately—for someone to hear them?

Waiting may show up as

  • Being consistently the “strong one,” while everyone else forgets they also need care.
  • Staying agreeable, because honesty has not led to safety in the past.
  • Sharing gradually, as if testing whether the listener will punish vulnerability.

When you truly listen, you don’t just respond to words—you signal that waiting is no longer necessary.

Practice Listening Like You Mean It

So, what can we do with this poem right now—today—with real emotional intelligence, not just inspiration?

Here are three practical actions you can take, whether with a partner, friend, coworker, parent, or even yourself

  1. Choose a listening posture for 10 minutes.

Put your phone away. Don’t plan your reply. Ask one open question: “What part of your story feels most important for me to understand?” Then reflect what you heard: “It sounds like…” and “What I’m noticing is…” Keep going until they say you got it.

  1. Validate the emotion before evaluating the facts.

Try phrases like,

  • “That sounds painful.”
  • “I can see why you’d feel that way.”
  • “Your fear makes sense given what you’ve been through.”

Validation doesn’t mean you agree—it means you respect the person’s internal experience.

  1. Honor silence without panic.

If they go quiet, don’t rush to fill it. Let the quiet exist. You can say: “I’m here. Take your time.” That sentence alone can create safety.

And if you want a simple daily prompt: Listen for the “song.” Ask yourself: What unique rhythm is this person carrying—what are they trying to express that words can’t fully capture?

Make Listening a Way of Loving

Charles Anthony Silvestri’s poem is ultimately a vow. It says: I will not rush you. I will not take your story. I will walk beside you. And if you cannot speak yet, I will stay with your silence.

If we take that seriously, relationships change. Communities change. Even workplaces change—because listening is one of the fastest pathways to trust.

So, here’s your invitation, in the spirit of the poem:

Who in your life has waited too long to be heard?

Choose one person. Give them ten minutes of honest listening this week. Let your presence be the response. And when they share—triumphs, tears, trials, fears—remember, you don’t need to become their hero. You only need to be a safe witness.

Let me listen. Now—go do it.

Peace and every good

We come from different places,
You and I,
on different paths we journey;
let me walk beside you for a while –
let me listen.

So briefly do our lonely paths converge,
Yours and mine,
along this human journey;
what hollow loss to never hear your song –
let me listen.

Let me listen,
let me listen as you tell your story:
Your triumphs and your tears,
Your trials and your fears.
Your story never has been mine to tell –
so let me listen.

And if a silence is your choice to keep,
then I will keep it with you;
as long as we walk together,
You and I,
I will listen.

Too long you’ve waited, too long,
to share your journey, your song –
so let me listen.

             – Charles Anthony Silvestri, 2022