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

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.

mystical seeker.substack.com

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

 

 

The Light That Holds Back Darkness 2

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First Comes Justice: The Light That Holds Back the Darkness

This is one story I feel strongly about.

I will not soon forget the first time I walked through the heavy steel doors of a state prison with Kairos Prison Ministries. The Sally port has a clang when it shuts behind you that feels final, like the world I knew had been sealed off, and what lay ahead of me in the eyes of forty plus men whose lives most of society had quietly written off was unknown. And what I did not know when I went in is that you cannot get out of the prison until they let you out, period. And I was dead tired that day. I had convinced myself on the drive over that nothing I said would matter. Surely there were better people, more eloquent people, more useful people for this work. I almost turned around in the parking lot. I never told anyone that feeling until today.

But something made me go in. And in the back row sat a man I will call Marcus (not his name) He had not spoken a word the entire first morning, his arms crossed, his eyes anywhere but on us. No trust, none, by the afternoon, he had shifted. By the second day, he raised his hand, and no one made fun of the question. And on the third day, with tears in his eyes, he told me, “Nobody has visited me in fourteen years. Nobody. Until you.” I cried.

That is when I understood something I had read a hundred times but never felt in my bones. Justice is not a verdict handed down from a bench. Justice is a face in a doorway. Justice is the willingness to walk through the gate when every instinct says RUN the other direction. Justice is showing up, especially for the people the world has decided do not count.

Marcus did not need me to fix his life; in fact, he would have run the other way if I had tried. He needed someone to say, by their presence, that his life still mattered. That is the smallest unit of justice, and it is also the largest. Every policy, every program, every reform is built on that single brick. Just a quick note here for those of you maybe thinking this, No I do not think he needed to be let of prison because we from Kairos came to visit. Some statistics put it this way, 10% are innocent, 80% are doing their time for things they have done, and 10% should never see the light of day.

A Little History for Background

The word justice is older than any nation that claims it. In ancient Hebrew, the concept came in two intertwined words. Mishpat described justice in its sharp, courtroom sense, the kind that punishes wrongdoing and protects the innocent. Tzedakah described justice as right relationship, the kind that restores what has been broken between people. The ancients understood that you cannot have one without the other. Punishment without restoration is cruelty. Restoration without accountability is sentimentality. We learned this in Kairos.

Greek philosophers gave us the idea of justice as a virtue, the fair distribution of what is owed. The Romans codified it into law. The framers of Magna Carta in 1215 forced a king to admit that even he stood under it. Centuries later, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman risked their lives to insist that justice could not coexist with chains. Suffragists marched for it. Workers organized for it. Dr. King wrote about it from a Birmingham jail, reminding a comfortable nation that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Every generation has had to learn the same lesson the hard way. Justice is not inherited. It is not automatic. It is not the natural state of human affairs. We live with it and it is built, defended, and rebuilt by ordinary people who decide that the world as it is cannot be the world as it should be. Again, Kairos helped me here.

Justice Today, Justice Here

We live, right now, in a moment that tests whether we have learned anything at all.

Roughly two million of our neighbors are behind bars in this country, more than in any other nation on earth. And truly if you added up the next few largest countries together, we still have more in our prisons then they in theirs. Tens of millions go to bed hungry in a land of plenty. Healthcare remains a privilege rather than a right for far too many families. When we had our mission, Everyday People Ministries, we gave out 30 tons of food a month. I saw veterans sleep on sidewalks within sight of the monuments built to honor them. Children grow up in zip codes that determine, with frightening accuracy, what their futures will hold. Like the one I grew up in, in Detroit.

These are not natural disasters. They are choices. Our choices. And choices can be unmade.

The good news is that justice still wears a human face. It looks like the nurse who stays an extra hour with the patient who has no visitors. It looks like the teacher who buys school supplies out of her own paycheck. It looks like the volunteer who delivers a meal, the lawyer who takes a case without payment, the neighbor who pays attention. It looks like Lynette and me sitting at tables in countries far from home, learning that loneliness and hunger speak every language. It looks like a Kairos weekend, where men who have done terrible things and men who have had terrible things done to them sit in the same circle and discover that grace is bigger than any of us deserve.

You do not have to fix the whole system to be part of the answer. You only have to refuse the lie that this is somebody else’s problem. Volunteer for one organization. Mentor one young person. Advocate for one policy. Write one letter. Sit with one person in the hospital. The work is never finished, but the work is never wasted either.

The darkness is loud right now. It tells us we are too small to matter, too tired to try, too divided to agree on anything. It wants us to scroll past, to look away, to whisper “not my problem.” Every time we refuse that whisper, we hold the line. Every time we show up, we push the darkness back by an inch. Inches add up.

Linking Arms

I think often about Marcus, and about the hundreds of others I have met inside those walls. They taught me that I nearly missed the gift by almost “not walking through the gate”. How many gates do the rest of us almost not walk through? How many people are waiting on the other side, not for our money or our expertise or our opinions, but simply for our presence?

We began with a question. What is justice in a world teetering on the edge of chaos? It is fairness, yes. It is accountability, yes. It is law, yes. But underneath all of that, justice is love with its sleeves rolled up. All the way up. It is compassion that has stopped talking and started walking. It is the moment when the comfortable decide that the comfort of the comfortable is not the point.

So here we are, you and I. The need has not gotten smaller since you started reading. Somewhere a child is going to bed afraid tonight. Somewhere a sick person is waiting for someone who will not come. Somewhere a person behind bars is wondering if anyone remembers their name. And somewhere, a gate is waiting for someone to walk through it.

Let us be the ones who walk through. Let us be the ones who link arms across our differences and hold back the darkness together. Let us be known not by what we accumulated or what we argued about, but by who we visited, who we lifted, and who we refused to forget. Let us be the fillers of the breach, the lighters of small candles, the keepers of one another.

The world is not going to save itself. Neither is the person across the street, the person across the country, or the person across the wall. They are waiting on us, and we are waiting on each other, and somewhere in the middle of all that waiting, justice is asking whether we will finally say yes.

First comes justice. Everything else, everything good, everything lasting, everything worth handing down, follows.

Peace and every good.

Sources

  1. Hugh Whelchel, “Understanding Tzedakah & Mishpat (Righteousness & Justice),” Institute for Faith, Work & Economics. https://tifwe.org/tzedakah-mishpat-righteousness-justice/ — for the paired meanings of mishpat(rectifying/retributive justice) and tzedakah (right relationship), and the way the two words function together in the Hebrew Scriptures.
  2. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963. Full text hosted by the University of Pennsylvania African Studies Center: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html — source of the line “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Seven Pillars: Practical Skills for Soul & Emotion

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I’m starting today with a simple promise: to take the ancient tools people have used for millennia and translate them into everyday skills—what I call the seven pillars of spiritual emotional intelligence. This isn’t theory; it’s a practical way to blend inner awareness and soulful purpose with the concrete abilities we use to navigate relationships and stress. Think of it as learning a craft: quiet attention, clear intention, and steady practice that change how you move through life.

A quick map before the walk:

These pillars are Presence, Compassion, Boundary Wisdom, Shadow Integration, Purpose Alignment, Emotional Literacy, and Ritualization. They come from many lineages—Buddhist attention training, Stoic pauses, Sufi heart-work, Vedantic inquiry, Christian examen, and Indigenous rites. Those traditions taught two consistent things: growth is embodied (it needs habits, witness, and teachers) and real spirituality meets suffering with tenderness, not avoidance. Below I tell their story as a single journey and then give two short examples of how people actually use these pillars in life.

A journey through the pillars

You begin with presence. Presence is the steady place you return to—simple breath, noticing, naming—so you aren’t carried by reactivity. Try this as a starting ritual: three minutes sitting with the breath twice a day, or a quick one-question check-in before a meeting (“What do I most need to bring right now?”). These tiny acts expand your capacity to choose how you respond.

Once you can show up, compassion becomes practical. Compassion is not fixing; it’s holding—your own pain and another’s—without collapsing. In practice it looks like RAIN for yourself (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture), or one conversation a day where you listen for three minutes before offering advice. Compassion softens the edges so honesty can land.

Honest relating requires boundary wisdom. Boundaries are not walls but wise edges: clear scripts you’ve rehearsed, gentle no’s in low-stakes scenarios, and an end-of-day energy audit to notice where you gave too much. Boundaries preserve the space you need to practice the rest of the work.

When you notice repeated reactivity—jealousy, sudden anger, compulsive pleasing—you’re at the door of shadow integration. This is an area where I needed to do the most work. Shadow work is not easy folks and is naming what you hide, writing (or speaking) the truth into light, and making one small corrective action each month (an apology, a request, a boundary) to integrate that energy instead of letting it run you.

Purpose alignment pulls those pieces together. It’s the ongoing question: “Who do I want to be in three years?” and then testing one weekly action that aligns with that answer. Keep your top three values where you can see them and make a tiny wager—a public commitment—to move closer to that north star.

Emotional literacy supplies the vocabulary for the inner weather. Move from “I’m upset” to a more exact word—wistful, resentful, anxious—and map where it lives in the body. Naming reduces escalation and creates choice: label it, breathe into it, let it pass.

Finally, ritualization anchors everything. Rituals mark transitions and make meaning—lighting a candle when you come home, three breaths before you answer email, a brief weekly review of one lesson learned. Rituals transform intention into habit.

Two brief examples

Example 1 —

Maya, (name changed) the elementary school teacher was near burnout: long days, little margin, and a constant pull to fix everyone’s problems. She started with presence—three minutes sitting twice daily and the one-question check-in before parent meetings. That small habit made it possible to notice when she was reacting from anxiety and to do RAIN for herself in the staff bathroom before a hard conversation.

She added two boundary practices: she wrote three short scripts (“I can’t take that on right now,” “I need 24 hours to think about this”) and used them aloud in low-stakes situations once a day. By tracking how often she used scripts each week (target: three difficult interactions), she noticed her energy improved. For shadow work, she journaled once a week about what she judged in others and recognized it in herself—this led to a single integration action: she asked for help setting limits on committee work.

Maya’s result after four weeks: fewer evenings spent feeling depleted, clearer conversations with colleagues, and a small weekly ritual (lighting a candle when she arrives home) that signaled real rest. Her metric: practiced presence 12+ times weekly and used boundary scripts in three tough moments.

Example 2 —

 Alex, a startup founder operated from urgency and a heroic “do it all” posture. He used purpose alignment first: he wrote a 2–3 sentence vision of who he wanted to be in three years and committed publicly to one weekly action that honored that vision (mentoring a junior colleague). That tiny wager nudged decisions toward long-term value.

Because he’d learned to name his emotions more precisely, Alex replaced “stressed” with “overwhelmed and disappointed,” this is called also “reframing” and helped to map the feelings in his chest and used a two-minute loving-kindness micro-meditation to steady himself before tough meetings. When anger arose around an investor conversation, he paused and asked, “What need is unmet?”—an emotional-literacy move that revealed a need for respect and led to a clear boundary script: “I want to continue, but we need reciprocity in feedback.”

Alex’s shadow work, remember above, this work is hard, looked like safe disclosure: he told a trusted friend about his fear of failure and noticed relief rather than collapse. He tracked value-aligned actions per week (3–5 target) and used a weekly meaning review on Sundays to adjust the next week’s intention. Over a month he reported better team trust, fewer blowups, and decisions that matched his long-term goals. It was not easy but worth the effort.

How to begin (simple and honest)

  • Pick two pillars to start this week—one inward (Presence, Emotional Literacy, or Shadow) and one outward (Compassion, Boundary Wisdom, or Ritualization).
  • Use one simple practice for each pillar and set a small tracking metric (e.g., 10 three-minute anchors per week; use boundary scripts in 3 difficult interactions).
  • After four weeks, review what changed and choose the next two pillars.

A short safety note: some practices, especially shadow work and grief processing, can surface intense material. If you or someone you care for experiences persistent distress or decline in functioning, seek professional support.

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Safety one-page: quick steps if deep work brings intense material

Immediate crisis steps

  • If someone is in immediate danger or there is a risk of suicide or violence, call emergency services now (e.g., 911 in the U.S.) or go to the nearest ER.
  • U.S. crisis lines: call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline); text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line). Outside the U.S., look up your country’s crisis line via local health services or the WHO directory.
  • If not immediately dangerous but overwhelmed: use grounding (5–4–3–2–1 senses), slow box-breathing, splash cold water on your face, hold an ice cube, and contact a trusted person to stay connected.

Finding professional help

  • Primary care: start here for medical assessment and referrals.
  • Therapist directories: Psychology Today, Zencare, Open Path Collective, or local professional boards—filter by specialty (trauma, grief) and telehealth availability.
  • Low-cost options: community mental health centers, university or training clinics, sliding-scale services.
  • Workplace resources: Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) often provide short-term counseling and referrals.
  • Spiritual/community supports trusted clergy, elders, or peer groups can help bridge to clinical care—use them for support, not as the sole resource if risk is present.

What to ask a therapist

  • Credentials and license (LPC, LCSW, PsyD, PhD, MD)
  • Experience with grief, trauma, or the issue you’re facing.
  • Therapeutic approaches used and crisis policy between sessions.
  • Telehealth options, fees, sliding-scale availability, and cancellation policies.
  • Can we try a brief initial session to assess fit?

Create a simple safety plan (keep it visible)

  • Warning signs: list thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that show worsening.
  • Coping strategies: 3–5 things you can try alone (grounding, walk, phone a friend).
  • Contacts: 3 people you can call/text (include one who can be present).
  • Professional contacts: therapist, doctor, crisis line, emergency number.
  • Means reduction: plan to secure or remove anything that could be used for self-harm.

For friends and caregivers

  • Listen nonjudgmentally and validate feelings. Ask directly about suicidal thoughts if concerned.
  • Offer practical help—stay with them, help call a provider, remove access to means if safe.
  • Encourage professional evaluation and call emergency services if danger is imminent.
  • Seek support for yourself; helping someone in crisis is demanding.

Follow-up and documentation

  • Keep a short resource list in the workbook: numbers, clinics, referrals.
  • Note provider name, contact, appointment date, and safety instructions.
  • Revisit and update your safety plan weekly while doing deep inner work.

Final note

 This post supports practice but is not a substitute for clinical care. If distress increases or functioning declines, seek professional help now. Reaching out is a strong and necessary step.

Peace and Everygood