Reflections on mindfulness as contemplative attention — the presence and patience it takes to actually be where you are. These posts explore where mindfulness and the contemplative life meet.

The Difference Between Spiritual Direction and Coaching

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Two empty chairs turned slightly toward each other in a quiet room, warm lamplight between them, a window beyond showing early morning — the shared space of coaching and spiritual direction.

Two chairs, one conversation. What changes is the question you bring to it.

Coaching helps you move toward something. Spiritual direction helps you pay attention to something.

People ask Jim and Lynette this question more than almost any other. It’s a fair one — they offer both, they’ve been trained deeply in both, and from the outside the two practices can look similar. Both involve one-on-one conversation. Both involve careful listening. Both are oriented toward growth and clarity.

So what’s actually different? The honest answer is: quite a lot. And Jim and Lynette have lived that difference from both sides — as practitioners and as people who have needed both at different points in their own lives.

What coaching is for

Coaching is fundamentally future-oriented. It begins with the question: where do you want to go, and what’s getting in the way?

Jim and Lynette spent years as Regional Network Directors for North America at Six Seconds — Josh Freedman’s global emotional intelligence nonprofit — and together co-developed the SEQ (Spiritual Emotional Intelligence) assessment now used across many countries. That work deepened their understanding of what coaching can do at its best: help people understand how their emotions inform their choices, interrupt patterns that are limiting them, and move toward what they most want with more skill and intentionality.

The Six Seconds model takes the inner life seriously. But it does so in service of forward movement. Coaching tends to work well when you have a goal you’re working toward, a decision you want to make more effectively, or a pattern you want to interrupt. It’s good for people who know roughly where they want to go and need help getting there.

What spiritual direction and spiritual formation are for

Spiritual direction and spiritual formation are fundamentally present-oriented — and in some ways, gently suspicious of the rush toward the future that coaching is designed to support.

When Lynette completed her Doctor of Ministry research at the Haden Institute and Graduate Theological Foundation, the work that eventually became the SEQ framework, she was exploring something the coaching world often moves past too quickly: the inner life not as a resource to optimize, but as a landscape to inhabit. Spiritual direction begins not with where do you want to go but with where are you, and what is already stirring in you?

A spiritual director isn’t working toward a goal with you. They’re paying attention alongside you — to what’s alive, to what’s heavy, to what keeps surfacing without resolution, to where the sacred might already be moving in ways you haven’t fully recognized yet.

The overlap — and why it matters

The two practices share more than they might seem to. Both take the inner life seriously. Both involve listening of a particular quality. Both resist the impulse to fix or advise.

Jim often says that the person who comes to him for coaching and the person who comes for spiritual direction are sometimes carrying the same question — they just haven’t recognized it yet. The executive trying to decide whether to take the promotion might actually be trying to understand what his life is for. The woman discerning a major transition might need both the practical clarity of coaching and the contemplative spaciousness of spiritual direction.

These aren’t competing practices. In Jim and Lynette’s experience, they’re part of the same one.

Spiritual Direction or Coaching Reflection Sheet

So how do you choose?

A few questions worth sitting with: Do you have a clear goal, or are you still trying to understand where you are? Are you looking for help with change, or help with understanding? Is there something specific you want to accomplish in the next year, or something you’ve been carrying that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere?

And — do you sense that what’s happening in your life right now has a deeper dimension you haven’t been able to name yet? If so, spiritual direction and the spaciousness of spiritual formation might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

If you’re still not sure, the best next step is a free 15-minute conversation. Jim and Lynette can talk through where you are and what kind of companionship makes the most sense for this season.

Schedule with Jim: https://calendly.com/jim-792/spiritual-direction-consultation

Schedule with Lynette: https://calendly.com/lynettespiritofeq/15min

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

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

Series

Post 4 of 6 in the Spiritual Direction series.

Ninety Trucks, Ninety Driveways, Ninety People

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The true sentence is usually the worse-sounding one.

There was a stretch of years when I would get to the Varment Guard yard before most of the crews, and what I remember is the sound more than the sight — twenty-odd trucks pulling in already running, warm from the drive, ready for the day and the hiss of a bay door going up. Most of the fleet never saw the yard in the morning. Ninety trucks and the men took them home, so at any hour of any night our trucks were scattered across Ohio in ninety driveways. Only the ones needing parts or a swap came in. But, standing there at six, what you saw was rows of black and gold, same logo, same ladder racks, same lettering on the door, men in the same uniform crossing between them with coffee.

I was proud of that lot. And, because of that pride it complicates everything I’m about to say.

We made them identical on purpose, and it cost money to keep them that way. Not for efficiency — for recognition( and maybe a little efficiency). Sending the trucks home every night was part of it. Ninety black and gold trucks sitting overnight in ninety neighborhoods is ninety people seeing us before they ever need us, so that a woman who noticed one in her neighbor’s driveway on Tuesday knew it on sight when it pulled into hers on Friday. She had already decided something about us before anyone knocked. That is how a stranger comes to trust you enough to let you into her crawlspace at ten at night. The sameness was a promise, of knowing that we had to be good enough, often enough, for the promise to be worth anything. Uniformity without a company behind it is just paint.

Which is why it took me a while to understand what bothers me about the internet now.

Because it looks like my back lot, and it shouldn’t. Scroll for ten minutes and you’ll see it — the same post, the same words, the same three-beat structure, the same gentle authority, the same closing invitation to reflect. Row after row of the same thing, parked, in the back lot. But our trucks were never supposed to be parked together. The whole design was to get them out and scattered, one to a street, each one sitting in front of a particular house belonging to particular people. What is filling the internet is the opposite: the livery piled up in one place where nobody lives, all the recognition with nothing behind it. No company. No crews. Nobody who answers the phone when it goes wrong at ten at night.

Nobody decided this, which is the strange part. At Varment Guard we chose the sameness and paid for it and could defend it in a room. What’s happening now is a lot that filled up by default, truck by truck, with no one ever choosing the colors.

I know how it happens, because I know how it almost happens to me. You sit down to write. Something comes back fluent and competent and nearly right. “Nearly right” has a gravitational pull that “wrong” never had. Wrong you fight. Nearly right you accept, because fixing it feels like fussiness, and because it already sounds like something that would do well. The median is seductive precisely because it is the shape of what has already worked for everyone else. Right?

The contemplative tradition has a name for this, and it is older than any of our tools. Thomas Merton spent his life circling what he called the false self — not a liar, not a villain, but the self we assemble out of what the room is known to approve of. It is competent. It is often admired. It is also, in his reading, not anyone. The desert monastics worried about the same thing in a different space. They were forever warning young monks against copying an elder’s practice instead of finding their own, because a borrowed discipline produces a borrowed man.

Here is the part that matters for anyone who isn’t writing anything. The parking lot is not primarily a content problem. It is an interior one, and it had a head start on the technology by several thousand years.

I sit with people for a living and what I hear, more often than anything else, is pre-owned language. Someone describes their marriage in the vocabulary of a podcast they heard. Someone names a career crisis in terms borrowed whole from an article they read. Someone tells me about their grief in the precise phrasing of the last condolence card they received. None of it is dishonest. All of it is context with nothing behind it yet. My work in that room is almost never to supply a better framework or give answers — it is to keep asking until something comes out that nobody handed them. You can hear it when it happens. The sentence gets worse. It gets halting and specific and a little embarrassing, and it is the first true thing said in forty minutes.

That is the whole discipline, as far as I can tell. The true sentence is usually the worse-sounding one.

I wrote in the last blog about my father in his studio, and how he would set aside a piece that was nearly finished because a quarter inch in the slope of a cheek had gone wrong. He could not paint over wood. He had to go back to the log and start again. It took me fifty years to understand he was describing the same thing I am describing here from the other end — that the fluent, finished, nearly right version is the most dangerous thing on the table, because it is the hardest one to see a fault in.

The Enneagram makes the same case from another direction. Each type is, among other things, a strategy for being acceptable — a reliable way of getting approval, safety, or distance that worked so well, so early, that it stopped feeling like a strategy and started feeling like a personality. Nine types, nine very sophisticated paint schemes. The work is not to trade your type for a better one. It is to notice the moment you reach for the familiar move and ask whether this situation is asking for it, or whether you are just driving the truck because it is the one in the lot.

Which brings me back to the yard, and to the thing I had wrong for years.

I thought the fleet was the achievement. It wasn’t. I knew those crews. I knew Steve and Brad and Harry — what each of them was carrying into the truck at six in the morning, what was waiting when they got home, which of them was in a season that was going to hold and which of them was in one that wasn’t. The trucks were identical. Steve and Brad and Harry were never identical, not for one morning, and every night those ninety identical trucks went home to ninety different lives. The black and gold only ever went as deep as the paint.

That is also what made the brand mean anything. The uniformity was never the product. It was a way of pointing at ninety particular people who showed up and did the work. Take them out and you still have the trucks, and the trucks are worth nothing.

So the question the internet raises isn’t really about sameness. The lot is going to fill up; it already has. The question is whether there is anyone in the cab?

Ninety Trucks, Ninety Driveways Reflection Sheet

What I have come to is unglamorous. Before I publish, before I say the thing in the meeting, before I offer the observation in a session that I can tell will land well, I try to ask one question. Is this mine, or did I pick it up in the lot? Not “is it true” — the median is usually true. True and borrowed are not opposites. The question is whether it came up out of a life or came in off a shelf, and I find I can tell, if I am willing to be slow about it for ten seconds.

Most mornings I don’t like the answer. The borrowed version is better written. It is always better written. That is the problem.

But I think about standing in that cold lot at six in the morning, looking at what I believed was uniformity, when what was in front of me was ninety people I would have had to ask, one at a time, to learn anything true about. The sameness was real. It was also, every single morning, the least interesting fact about what I was looking at.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

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

AI assisted, not written.

Sources

Thomas Merton on the false self — developed across his work, most directly in New Seeds of Contemplation (1961).

The sayings of the desert fathers and mothers on not imitating another’s practice: the Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers).

Getting It Right and Back To The Log

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The work is not the writing. The work is going back to the log.

The smell I remember from my father’s studio in Detroit is sawdust and linseed oil, and under that the green, almost sweet smell of wood that hasn’t finished drying. He worked in walnut and cherry mostly, and he brought the material in himself — out to the forest, down a trunk, a log hauled back and set on end in the corner of the shop to wait its turn. Some of them waited years.

I was thirteen the year I started paying real attention, and what I kept sometimes was him starting over.

Not with failures. With work that was nearly done. A standing figure he had been at for weeks, and something in the slope of the cheek was wrong — a quarter inch, a plane that caught the light at an angle he hadn’t intended. There is no fixing that. You cannot paint over wood. He could cut deeper and let the whole head become something smaller than he had planned, or he could set it aside and go pick out another log. I watched him do both.

I questioned, the first time I understood what was happening. Not a child’s dismay — a thirteen-year-old’s wonderment which is curious, because I had reasons. Nobody would see it. It was weeks of work. He didn’t turn around. He said the figure had been telling him for some time that it wasn’t the figure, and he had finally gotten quiet enough to hear it. Hmmmm.

We had some version of that exchange a few times over the next few years. The foot placed a half inch off and the whole body going false above it. The shoulder that was technically correct and somehow dead. I always asked. He always said something close to the same thing, and I always heard it as a man talking about wood. Hmmmm. It took me five decades to understand he was describing a spiritual discipline, and I only understood it because I started writing — regularly, publicly, with my name on it — and found out that the work is not the writing. The work is going back to the log.

The process is not tidy. There is a list, sixty-some ideas now, growing, gathered from articles that snagged on something and sentences clients said in the middle of a session that opened a door I didn’t know was there. Some have been sitting a year and a half, like logs on end in the corner, not ready. Two have been drafted and set aside — not because they were bad but because they were not true yet. And every so often one comes up the moment I sit down, fully formed and insisting. Those are rarely the good ones. The urgency usually belongs to my ego rather than to the material.

Then comes the part nobody warns you about. You sit down intending to write one thing and the writing informs you, around the fourth paragraph, that you have been intending the wrong thing. Not a failure of planning. A kind of exposure. You cannot write honestly about patience while impatient and expect the sentences to hold; they go brittle, they start performing, and anyone reading carefully can hear it even if they couldn’t name what they’re hearing. The page is an unsentimental instrument. It registers what is in you with a precision I have found in only two other places: a good spiritual director, and silence.

Thomas Merton spent years convinced that the writing — and he wrote beautifully — was vanity dressed as vocation and discovered again and again that the page kept handing him back the very self he had come to the monastery to leave at the door. He could not get around himself by writing. Neither can I. Neither I suspect, can you, whatever your version of the page is — the report, the sermon, the hard email, the conversation you’ve rehearsed eleven times in the car.

So, writing has become a form of daily examen for me. Not something I perform at the end of a post, but what the post performs on me while I’m making it. Some sentences cost nothing. Others ask a question I would rather not answer, and I know which is which by a tightening at the base of the throat and a sudden interest in checking email.

The most expensive paragraph I ever wrote was in a post about what it means for a man to hear a woman say no. I was writing confidently, in the voice of the man who has it worked out, and the page stopped me. If I was going to write that, I had to admit I have not always heard it — not dramatically, but in the ordinary ways that are easier to excuse. Talking past a no. Softening it on someone’s behalf. Treating it as an opening position. I sat with it for a day and wanted to publish without it. Without the admission the post would have been competent and useless, one more man explaining a standard he exempts himself from. So I wrote it in, and then had to live with having written it, and the admission turned out to be the only part that earned the rest.

That is the half inch in the foot. The piece was fine. Fine was the problem. And there is no sanding your way out of it — you go back and start at the beginning or you publish something false and hope the light never catches it at the wrong angle.

Now I should tell you how this post got made, because leaving it out would make everything above a little bit of a lie.

There is an AI in my process, surprise! I bring the material — the studio, the list, the day I sat with that paragraph — and a draft comes back, cleaned up with sentence, spelling, etc and then I go to work on it. It is a real collaborator in that it asks me questions I hadn’t thought to ask myself, and not a collaborator at all in that it has no shop in its memory and nothing at stake in what I publish. Both are true at once. And it does not write the piece for me.

The danger is not the one people warn about. It is not going to replace me. Fluency is what it does best, and fluency is exactly what I described above as the signal that something is wrong. IT helps with an acceptable version. The surface you can no longer change. Every time it hands me that version I am standing where my father stood, except the piece arrived with questions before I had done any of the work that usually earns it, and a sanded surface is the hardest thing in the world to see a fault in.

That is the easy part — sentence structure, punctuation, the rhythm of a line.

But it cannot tell me which paragraph costs me something. It has no throat to tighten. When it drafted the section above it wrote well and wrote from the outside, because the admission underneath was mine and the having-to-live-with-it was mine. That does not transfer. An examen performed by someone else is not an examen; it is a performance review.

So: I let it start a draft. I let it argue with me. Then I go looking for the half inch myself, and I do not let it do that part. The day I hand over that part is the day this stops being a practice and becomes content, and I have enough content in my life. Don’t you?

Lynette reads most things after that, which is its own discipline, because she has known me for many years and can spot the sentence where I started hiding or it is not my words and it is the sentence a machine wrote. She doesn’t argue with it. She reads it back to me, and it falls apart on contact with her voice. No machine has done that to me yet, and I notice I don’t want one to. I do not want my writing to look like all the other AI generated material out there and face it, we can all tell when AI writes this stuff.

And then there is the reader I will never meet, who finds the post eight months late on a Tuesday night at an hour that tells you something about how the day went. I used to write to an imagined audience, which is to say nobody. Now I write to one person, usually someone who sat across from me and said a thing they had never told anyone. You lose reach that way. You gain the only thing that matters — the occasional note that says: this was me, how did you know. The honest answer is that I didn’t.

Back To The Log Reflection Sheet

I have one of his pieces. It is in my house, where I see it every day without seeing it, the way you stop seeing anything you live with. It is wearing a wizard hat at the moment — a gift someone gave me that I had no use for and no heart to throw out, so I set it on his figure, and it has stayed there because it looks right. It looks like something he would have found funny. Every so often the light moves across it and I notice my dad again, and what I notice is not the skill. It is the dozen other versions of it that never existed, the ones that got set aside at the point where almost anyone else would have finished and signed it. That is what I am looking at. The restraint is the piece. And I smile. Hi, Dad.

I think about those afternoons every time a draft goes smooth and I can feel myself writing the acceptable version. Changing it is what brings the truth up — something underneath is asking for the room. Whatever I was proud of may have to go back to the woodpile. Sigh.

Then I sit in the quiet, where the sawdust was, and wait to hear what the figure has been telling me.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ, where they work at the intersection of emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and spiritual formation. Jim is a Master Certified Coach, a certified spiritual director, and a former CEO. Lynette’s doctoral research grounds their Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) framework. Together they write The Mystical Seeker. spiritofeq.com · mysticalseeker.substack.com

Sources

Thomas Merton wrestled with writing as vocation and as vanity throughout his journals, most directly in The Sign of Jonas (1953).

What Silence Does That Words Cannot

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Some things will not arrive until we stop talking.

Watch what happens in almost any conversation when the talking stops. Three seconds go by. Then four. Somebody laughs a little, or changes the subject, or asks a question nobody needed answered. We are remarkably good at not letting a silence stand.

I have spent a lot of years now sitting with people in rooms where silence is the point — spiritual direction, retreats, bedsides. And the thing I keep learning is this: silence is not the absence of something. It is a presence with its own work to do. There are things it accomplishes that no amount of good language ever will.

Silence is an event, not a gap

The body seems to know this before we do. In a study at the University of Pavia, researchers tracked heart rate and blood pressure while people listened to a sequence of musical tracks, with two-minute silences inserted between them. Slower music was more relaxing than fast, which you would expect. But the deepest drop in heart rate and blood pressure did not come from any of the music. It came during the silent pauses in between (Bernardi et al., 2006). The silence was not a nothing between the somethings. Physiologically, it was the most restorative part of the whole sequence.

There is even a hint that silence builds something. A 2013 study found that mice given two hours a day of near-total quiet showed more new cells maturing into neurons in the hippocampus than mice exposed to music, white noise, or even their own pup calls (Kirste et al., 2013). It was mice, and it did not test memory or humans, so I would not lean on it too hard. But I notice that the one condition the researchers assumed was the control — the empty one, the nothing — turned out to be the one doing the most.

TRY THIS — Two minutes, nothing added

Set a timer for two minutes. Put the phone in another room. Do not put on music, not even the calm kind, and do not give yourself anything to accomplish.

Sit. Let the first wave of restlessness come, because it will, usually around forty seconds. Do not fix it. Just stay until the timer goes.

Afterward, notice one thing: what showed up in you once nothing else was being added?

The season I had no words

There was a season in my life when I had no words. Not fewer words — none.

I would sit and gaze off into the distance for long stretches. The people closest to me kept asking the same question: what is wrong? It was a fair question. But the honest answer was that nothing was wrong. I was simply not in a place to use words. Something in me had gone quiet, and it was not a malfunction. It was a passage.

I know now to call that a liminal space — one of those thresholds where the old way of being has ended and the new one has not arrived yet. At the time I only knew I had nothing to say and no desire to manufacture anything.

Here is what I did not expect. When I came out the other side, I did not go back to how I had talked before. My whole way of communicating had changed. I came out using about a third of the words I used to use.

Silence had not taken something from me. It had taken something out of me.

Why we fill it

We fill silence because it is uncomfortable, and because most of us were trained to believe that helping means saying something. When someone is in pain in front of us, speech feels like action and silence feels like abandonment. So we offer the reassurance, the reframe, the story about our cousin who went through the same thing. Almost always, we are managing our own discomfort and calling it care.

The desert monastics understood the cost of this. They had a word — hesychia, stillness — and they treated it as a discipline rather than a mood. When a young monk came looking for wisdom, Abba Moses did not give him a teaching. He said: go sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. That is a strange kind of answer unless you have discovered that some truths will not be told to you. They have to surface on their own, in conditions quiet enough for them to come up.

The second sentence

Here is the most practical thing I know about silence, and it has changed more conversations for me than any technique. When a person finishes speaking and you do not rush in, they very often say something else. And the second sentence is frequently the true one.

The first sentence is the prepared one — the summary they brought with them, the version they have told before. The second one, the one that only comes if you leave room, is where the actual thing lives. I have watched it happen hundreds of times. People are not withholding. They simply have not reached it yet, and our hurry to respond keeps them from ever getting there.

TRY THIS — The count of three

In your next real conversation, when the other person stops talking, silently count three before you say anything. That is all.

It will feel much longer than three seconds. Resist the urge to nod it away or fill it with “mmm.”

Watch what happens. Often they will keep going — and what comes next will be the part that mattered.

What words could not hold

I have sat with a lot of people who had just lost someone.

Early on I thought my job in that room was to find the right thing to say. I would search for it the whole time I was sitting there — some sentence that would make the loss make sense, or at least make it lighter. I never found one. There is no such sentence. I have looked.

What I learned, slowly and mostly by failing at the other thing, is that words do not help in that room nearly as much as presence does. So now I sit. I do not explain the loss, or locate a meaning in it, or reach for anything about a better place. I sit, and I stay longer than is comfortable, and I let the silence be as large as the thing that happened.

Nobody has ever thanked me for what I said at a time like that. People have thanked me for staying.

Some things are too large for sentences

There is an old strand of theology called the apophatic way, and its claim is bracing: that the most important realities can be more truthfully approached by what we do not say about them than by what we do. Every word we put on something that large also puts a fence around it. Say God is light and you have said something true, and you have also quietly excluded everything light is not.

Grief works the same way. So does awe. So does love, past a certain depth. This is why the worst thing said at a funeral is almost always a sentence, and the best thing is almost always a presence — someone who came, and sat, and did not explain anything. Words divide and define, which is exactly what makes them useful and exactly what makes them too small for some rooms. Silence can hold what language has to cut into pieces.

What Silence Does That Words Cannot Reflection Sheet

An ordinary discipline

None of this requires a monastery. It requires a willingness to be, for a few seconds at a time, less useful than you would like to be. Two minutes with nothing added. Three seconds before you answer. A drive with the radio off. A meal where nobody narrates. These are small, and they are not easy, and they will show you things.

Because the question underneath all of it is not whether silence is pleasant. It is whether there is something trying to reach you that cannot get through the noise — including the noise you are making. There usually is. It has been waiting, patiently, for you to stop talking long enough to hear it.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

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

Sources

Bernardi, Porta & Sleight (2006) — cardiovascular and respiratory effects of music and silence: Circulation / Heart

Kirste et al. (2013) — “Is silence golden?” hippocampal neurogenesis in mice: PubMed

Abba Moses, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers; the apophatic tradition.

When Matter Becomes Prayer

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When Matter Becomes Prayer

A companion to Thin Places — because the holy ground may be in your hands.

Last time I said the thinnest ground you will ever stand on is probably within a mile of your bed. Here is the next turn of that same screw: it may be closer than that. It may be in your hands.

Most of us were handed a quiet assumption somewhere along the way — that the spiritual life is the part of life that is not physical. Prayer happens with eyes closed. Holiness happens in sanctuaries, or at least in silence. Everything else — the dishes, the commute, the sanding of a board, the chopping of an onion — is the ordinary stuff you get through in order to arrive at the real thing. It is the life we have, right? It is also, according to nearly every contemplative who ever lived, exactly backwards.

The monk in the kitchen

In the 1600s a Carmelite lay brother named Lawrence, whom I love, was assigned to the monastery kitchen, work he did not particularly want. He spent decades there among the pots and pans, and what he discovered became one of the most beloved little books in Christian spirituality. He said he felt as close to God with his hands in the dishwater as he did kneeling at the altar. He put it with a kind of homely joy that still disarms people four hundred years later: “I turn my little omelet in the pan for the love of God” (The Practice of the Presence of God).

Notice what he is not saying. He is not saying he thought holy thoughts while cooking, using the omelet as background noise for a more important interior event. He is saying the turning of the omelet was the prayer. The egg, the pan, the wrist, the attention — all of it, offered. Matter became prayer in his hands, and he did not have to leave the kitchen to find God, because God had not left the kitchen either.

The most material faith there is

There is real theology under all of this, not just a nice sentiment. Christianity makes an almost scandalous claim about matter, that God took a body. “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14) — not became an idea, or a feeling, or a philosophy. Flesh. And ever since, the central rites of the faith have been stubbornly physical: bread, wine, water, oil, hands laid on a head. A sacrament, as the old definition has it, is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace. Which is to say the material world is not a distraction from the spiritual one. It is the way the spiritual one reaches us.

Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit who spent his life with his hands in actual dirt as a paleontologist, said it as plainly as anyone has: “By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see” (The Divine Milieu). Nothing here below. Not the sink, not the garage, not the body, not the work.

Running in the grey mist

I used to run marathons. Really — I did. I was never a world-class runner, not close, but I did all right.

I would lace up in the dark and get out on the road while the grey mist still hung over the street in the early twilight. And there were mornings when I stood there stretching and thought, I am not in a place mentally to run today. Some days I went anyway, for no better reason than that one foot could go in front of the other.

And then something would happen. A mile or two in, a rhythm would find me — breath and stride and pavement all arriving at the same time — and I would smooth out. The effort did not disappear. It changed, simple.

And then, in that rhythm, came the moment. I touched something. You know what I mean, don’t you? All was right with the world, and I was not running anymore. I was communing. I had no language for it then. I would call it prayer now.

How we learned to split them

If this is true, why does it feel so unfamiliar? Two reasons, and they come from opposite directions.

The first is old. There has always been an impulse in religion to treat spirit as high and matter as low — to assume the body is a problem to be managed and the material world a waiting room for something better. It is an ancient instinct and the church has flirted with it for centuries, but the Incarnation keeps embarrassing it. You cannot build a faith around God taking on flesh and then quietly teach that flesh does not matter.

The second reason is new, and it is the machine I have written about before. A culture organized around output does not want your attention on the onion. It wants the onion chopped fast so you can get to the next thing, ideally while listening to something that makes you more productive. Hurry makes matter mute. Not because the dishes stopped being holy, but because nobody is home while they are being washed.

Who sweeps a room

The practical tradition here is wonderfully unglamorous. George Herbert, who wrote in 1633, put it in two lines that have outlived nearly everything else he said: “Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, makes that and th’ action fine.” The Hebridean households I wrote about in the last piece blessed the kindling of the fire and the milking of the cow. Jewish practice has a blessing for bread, for wine, for the body working as it should. None of these are poetic decoration laid over ordinary life. They are claims about what ordinary life already is.

The book on my father’s kitchen island

My father died. And when my brother and I went to clean out the house, we found the book he had been reading at the end: Chop Wood, Carry Water.

My father was not a religious man. He had no use for church and did not talk about his soul. So why was he reading that? I never found out. There was no one left to ask, and I have made a kind of peace with never having the answer.

But I read the book, it changed my life. Its whole argument is that the spiritual path is not somewhere else — it is in the chopping and the carrying, in the office and the kitchen and the ordinary hours. Living here, now, is what matters most. The end of my life will take care of itself, won’t it?

I still do not know what my father found in those pages. I know what I found. And I know he handed it to me without ever meaning to.

There is one more thing I only learned later. That book, published in 1984, is sometimes credited with almost single-handedly creating the modern literature on finding the sacred in ordinary work. My father — who had no use for organized religion — died with the founding text of the thing I would spend the rest of my life trying to understand sitting on the kitchen island. I have never known what to do with that, except be grateful.

When Matter Becomes Prayer Reflection Sheet

Matter does not become prayer. We do.

I titled this blog “When Matter Becomes Prayer,” and now I want to take part of it back. Matter does not actually become prayer at some point, as though a bowl of soup were inert until the right thoughts were applied to it. In the last piece I wondered whether the veil is thin everywhere and we are the thick ones. The same correction belongs here. The onion was always the handiwork of God. The water was always water of baptism, in its way. What changes is not the matter. What changes is whether anyone is present to it.

Attention, then, is the thing we actually bring. Not belief, not feeling, not the right words — attention. Simone Weil said that absolutely unmixed attention is prayer, and anyone who has ever lost themselves in making something with their hands knows the truth of it from the inside, whether or not they would have called it prayer at the time.

Practices for hands

Do one thing at a time, with your whole self, and let that be enough. Make something with your hands this week — bread, a repair, a meal, a line of paint — and do not listen to anything while you do it. Eat one meal slowly enough to taste it. Bless the thing in front of you, out loud if you can stand it. And when words will not come, which happens to all of us eventually, let the body pray instead: walk, dig, cook, hold a hand. The body has been praying since long before you had language, and it has not forgotten how.

Brother Lawrence stayed in that kitchen the rest of his life. He is not remembered for a system or a doctrine. He is remembered because he discovered that the distance between the sink and the sanctuary was a distance he had invented, and once he stopped defending it, God was simply there — in the pan, in the water, in the hands.

Your hands are already in the water. That was never the obstacle. It was the invitation.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

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

Sources

Brother Lawrence — The Practice of the Presence of God: overview

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — The Divine Milieu, “nothing here below is profane”: Center for Action and Contemplation

Rick Fields et al. — Chop Wood, Carry Water (1984).

George Herbert, “The Elixir” (1633); John 1:14; Simone Weil on attention.

Thin Places That You Don’t Notice

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Thin Places

The thinnest ground you will ever stand on is probably within a mile of your bed.

It is a Tuesday. You are standing at the kitchen sink with your hands in the warm water, or sitting on the back steps while the light goes long and gold, or in the chair where you always sit, and the house is quiet in a way it usually is not. Nothing happens. Nothing you could put in a report. And yet for a moment the ordinary goes quietly transparent, and you have the distinct sense that you are not alone in the room — that the world has worn thin right here, over the sink, on a Tuesday.

The Celtic Christians had a name for that: a thin place. The idea is that the usual distance between heaven and earth — between the material and the spiritual, the seen and the unseen — sometimes narrows almost to nothing. There is an old Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but that in the thin places the distance is smaller still.

Yes, there are famous ones. That is not the point.

You may have heard the phrase attached to islands. George MacLeod, who refounded the Iona Community on that windswept Scottish island, is remembered for calling Iona “a thin place where only tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual” (The Living Church). Pilgrims say similar things about Lindisfarne, about Skellig Michael out in the Atlantic, about certain holy wells and standing stones. All of it is true, and if you ever get to stand on that kind of ground, go.

But if thin places are mostly islands off the coast of Scotland, then thin places are for people with money and vacation time, and that cannot be what the Celts meant. It is not, in fact, what they meant at all.

The Celts blessed the kitchen

Look at what they actually prayed. In the Carmina Gadelica — the great collection of Gaelic prayers and blessings that Alexander Carmichael gathered from Highland and Hebridean households in the 1800s — you find blessings for kindling the fire in the morning and for smooring it, banking the coals, at night. Blessings for milking the cow. For walking out. For making the bed and lying down in it (Carmina Gadelica). These were not pilgrims on a holy island. They were farmers and fishermen and tired women with cold hands, blessing the hearth in their own kitchens before dawn.

Which means the tradition we are borrowing from was never mainly about famous places. It was about the hearth. The doorway. The byre. The work of your own hands on an ordinary morning. They assumed the veil was thin right where they were standing, and they talked to God accordingly — not on retreat, but while lifting the peat.

The night on the back steps with Lincoln

One winter night I was sitting on the back porch steps with Lincoln. It was snowing. It was dark and cold and completely quiet.

Lincoln was a big golden retriever who almost never sat still — he loved everything and everybody, all the time, at full volume. But that night he sat. The two of us stared off into the dark together, our breath slowing until it seemed to wrap something gentle around us both.

And then everything stopped. The stars stopped moving across the sky. The sound around us stopped. Even the snow seemed to freeze mid-dance. We were still on the back steps, and we were somewhere else — a thin place. I did not decide that. It simply was.

And here is the part I still cannot explain: both of us knew. The dog knew. Something different was happening, right here and right now, and we were not observing it. We were being met. We felt seen.

Jacob was not on pilgrimage

Scripture backs this up in a way that should be a relief to all of us. Jacob was not on a spiritual retreat. He was running from his brother, sleeping rough in an unremarkable patch of wilderness with a stone for a pillow, and he dreamed of a ladder with angels going up and down between heaven and earth. He woke and said one of the most arresting lines in the whole Bible: “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it” (Genesis 28:16).

Read the second half slowly. The place did not change overnight. No one installed the holiness while Jacob slept. What changed was Jacob. The ground had been thin the entire time; he had simply been walking on it with his mind elsewhere, the way we all do — until a dream cracked him open enough to notice. He had been sleeping on the gate of heaven and calling it a rough night.

The ones near you

So look closer to home than you have been looking. A hospital corridor at three in the morning. A church basement with bad coffee and folding chairs, where somebody finally tells the truth. The cemetery you drive past on the way to work. The river in fog. The garage. The kitchen table after everyone else has gone to bed. The drive home from something hard, when you sit in the car in the driveway a minute longer before going in.

And the nearest one of all is about five and a half feet tall and goes everywhere you go. Your own body is a thin place — the breath that keeps arriving without your permission, the hands that know the work before you think it through, the gut that registers a room before your mind has words. If God is anywhere, God is at least as close as that.

Then there is this, which we have come to believe is the thinnest ground of all: sometimes the thin place is a person. The space between two people who are actually present to one another — in a direction session, in a marriage, at a bedside, in the silence after something true has finally been said — can be more transparent than any island. Ask anyone who has sat with the dying. They will tell you, often haltingly, that the room felt different. That they were standing somewhere they had not been before.

Sitting with Ernie

Ernie’s family asked me to sit with him. We do not know what to say, they told me. So I sat.

Ernie was coming to the end of his journey, and it had been a very good journey. There was nothing to fix and nothing to arrange. I did not have any words. Neither did Ernie. So we did not use any.

But I knew — the way the body knows things before the mind has language for them — that this was different. Important. Real in a way that most hours are not.

And when it was time, he left. I was holding his hand. In that moment I was standing against the other world. Not near it. Against it — close enough that I could almost have put my hand through and into it. I have never been able to describe it better than that, and I have stopped trying. Some things you do not explain. You carry them.

Why we walk past

So why do we miss so many of them, when they are this close? Consider Moses at the burning bush. The text says something easy to skip: he turned aside to see. Only then does the voice come, and the instruction — take off your sandals, the place where you are standing is holy ground (Exodus 3). The bush was burning before Moses noticed. What the moment asked of him was not belief but attention: the willingness to stop the errand he was on and go look at something that was not on his list.

We have built a world almost perfectly engineered against turning aside. Hurry is its native speed and distraction its default setting; there is always one more thing, one more scroll, one more errand. You cannot rush into a thin place. It does not open on demand and it will not compete for your attention. It simply waits, patient as a burning bush, for someone willing to be late for something else.

Or perhaps it is we who are thick

Here is where the mystics push us further, and we think they are right. If God is genuinely everywhere — if, as Isaiah heard the seraphim sing, the whole earth is full of the divine glory — then perhaps the veil is not thin only in a handful of blessed locations. Perhaps it is thin everywhere, and the variable is not the place at all. Perhaps it is us. Perhaps we are the thick ones.

That reframes the whole spiritual life. The goal is not to collect thin places, pilgrimage by pilgrimage, as though holiness were a destination with a gift shop. The goal is to become thin ourselves — porous, unhurried, awake — so that the ordinary Tuesday and the kitchen table and the person across from you begin to give off the light they have been giving off all along. The saints were not people who found more holy ground than the rest of us. They were people who had grown transparent enough to keep noticing it.

Thin Place Reflection Guide

How to grow thinner

None of this requires a plane ticket, though by all means go to Iona if you can. It requires smaller and harder things. Return to one ordinary place often enough that it stops being scenery. Keep silence long enough to get past the first wave of boredom. Go to the edges — dawn, water, doorways, the hours before the world has organized itself. Let grief and beauty do their slow work instead of managing them. Put your phone in another room and do one piece of work with your whole attention. And when something in you says stop, turn aside — do it, even if you are already late.

You might even do what those Hebridean women did, and simply bless the thing in front of you: the kindling of the fire, the making of the bed, the washing of the dishes, the hand you are holding. Not because the blessing makes the ground holy. Because it was holy, and the blessing is how you finally notice.

“Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.” That is not only Jacob’s line. It is the sentence waiting at the end of a great many of our days. The whole invitation of the mystical life is simply to shorten the distance between the presence and the noticing — until one day, God willing, there is no distance left at all.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

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

Sources

Carmina Gadelica — Alexander Carmichael’s collection of Gaelic household prayers and blessings: sacred-texts.com

The Living Church — “The Thin Place of Iona” (George MacLeod on Iona): livingchurch.org

Scripture: Genesis 28:16–17 (Jacob at Bethel); Exodus 3:1–5 (Moses turns aside); Isaiah 6:3.

How Do I Want to Meet You

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I have taken to musing with a machine.

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

It started with a headline.

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

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

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

Then the conversation turned on me.

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

I have not stopped turning that over since.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meeting The Unknown Reflection Sheet

Where the musing left me.

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

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

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

Peace and every good.

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

Staying in the Boat: A Practice for Hard Seasons

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Hope Takes Practice

The meeting room was quiet in a way that didn’t feel like reverence. It felt like dread. We’d borrowed the space from the church, a place to meet, nothing more, but everyone was there, all of us together in one room, and that fact alone told people something was coming before I said a word. Outside, the parking lot was full of company trucks and company cars parked in uneven rows, engines off, everyone already inside and waiting. It was early 2008. People sat there that morning the way you sit when you already suspect the news isn’t good — still, watchful, bracing.

They were right to brace. The housing bubble burst that winter, and in the space of three months, Varment Guard lost half its residential customer base. Half. We’d built the company on people buying houses, selling houses, refinancing houses, renovating houses, and on the ongoing maintenance that kept those houses sealed up and pest-free year-round — the kind of steady contract work that depends entirely on people owning and caring for property in the first place. When nobody’s buying or selling or refinancing or renovating anything, that maintenance work doesn’t slow down gradually. It disappears.

So we had the real conversation, right there in that room. Not the version where you reassure everyone and hope it blows over, but the one where you say out loud that benefits are getting reduced, paychecks might be late some weeks, every expense that isn’t keeping a truck on the road or a roof over someone’s head is getting cut, and the only way through is together. What I didn’t say out loud that day was that my wife at the time and I had already maxed out our personal credit cards and tapped our line of credit to keep things afloat — that part of the story was mine to carry, not theirs. We went through what could go and what couldn’t, who we’d call personally to try to win back, what it would take to make the phone ring again. It was painful, and it stayed painful longer than any of us wanted, mostly because none of it was business as usual. People who’d been with us for years were taking real hits, and I felt every one of those hits land. But something happened in that room I didn’t fully understand until years later: people stopped pulling against each other and started pulling toward one thing, which was survival, plain and simple. That shared pull carried more weight than any incentive plan ever had.

Here’s what I learned that week and have never unlearned. People don’t follow your plan first, they follow your face. Tell a room of frightened people that everything’s fine while your hands are shaking, and the room will be more frightened in five minutes than it was when you walked in. But stand up and say plainly, here’s where we’re going and we’re going there together, and mean it, and the people who trust you will get in the boat with you. There’s an old image about who reaches for the lifevest first when the ship is taking on water. If the leader grabs theirs before anyone else’s, the room reads that faster than it reads any memo, and panic spreads quicker than the actual bad news ever could. Hope, it turns out, is contagious in exactly the same way fear is. Somebody in the room has to carry it first, whether they feel ready for the job or not.

I found language for this just last week, reading the daily post from the Center for Action and Contemplation, where the Grammy-winning musician Jon Batiste was asked how we lean into joy as an act of resistance when the world around us feels dehumanizing. His answer has stayed with me. He talked about finding a rooting that’s true for you before anything else, because authentic joy doesn’t show up first — it comes from pain that’s already been transmuted into something that holds, even when the circumstances haven’t changed at all. He said the questions worth asking are who your hope is actually for, who’s in control of it, and what it’s rooted in, because hope that’s tied to outcomes you can’t control will collapse the moment the outcome looks uncertain. We were asking versions of those same questions in that room without knowing it: what are we actually hoping for here, is it the old normal coming back, or is it something we can hold onto either way. And then Batiste said the line that’s been sitting with me ever since — hope is like a contact sport. You work on it. You get better at it.

What Is My Hope Rooted In? Reflection Sheet

That’s exactly what happened in that room, except none of us knew it at the time. We thought we were cutting expenses and rebuilding a customer list. What we were really doing, underneath all of it, was practicing hope in the most unglamorous way possible — one hard conversation, one late paycheck, one returning customer at a time. By the time we came out the other side, the company had survived, but something more had shifted than the balance sheet. I’d started locating my faith somewhere other than the quarterly numbers. I’d watched grown men who fix raccoon problems for a living choose to keep showing up for each other when the easier thing would have been to walk. And I’d learned that hope, the kind that survives a flooded house and a roof on fire, isn’t something you wait around for. It’s something you build, the same way you build a muscle, under load, in rooms that don’t feel hopeful at all while you’re standing in them.

I think about that room often now, the borrowed space, the trucks and cars sitting still in the lot. None of us had any evidence yet that we’d make it. What we had was each other, and a decision, made out loud, to stay in the boat. That turned out to be enough.

If you’re in a season that doesn’t look hopeful right now, I’d love to hear where you’re finding your footing.

Peace and every good

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ alongside his wife and co-founder, Lynette Vaive. A Master Certified Coach (MCC), Certified Spiritual Director, and certified Narrative Enneagram teacher, Jim writes at The Mystical Seeker on contemplative practice, emotional intelligence, and the inward life. He and Lynette also co-host the spirit of EQ podcast.

 

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.

 

To Everyone Standing at the Edge of the Room

/in , /by

A CONVERSATION WITH DR. DON AJENÉ WILCOXSON · PART THREE OF THREE

When the Whisper Is Louder Than the Fear

On racial injustice, the cost of standing up, and what he wants to say to everyone at the edge of the room

There is a particular kind of courage that does not announce itself. It does not look like charging a hill. It looks, more often, like a young man walking to the principal’s office to report something dangerous, knowing full well that the danger will follow him home.

Dr. Don Ajené Wilcoxson was in high school when he discovered that the Ku Klux Klan was recruiting on his campus. He reported it. Threats followed. He did not stop. When I asked him about it in our conversation, sitting with decades of distance from that moment, he said something I have turned over many times since: speaking out felt natural. It would have been uncomfortable not to speak out.

That sentence says a great deal about who he is. It also says something about the world he grew up in — a world where a young Black man could not afford the luxury of looking away from what was happening around him, where naming the danger was not bravery so much as clarity.

Speaking out felt natural. It would have been uncomfortable not to speak out.

He carried that clarity with him into his professional life. When he was hired at Riverside City College, someone told him directly that he had been selected because he was Black — even though he was more qualified than other candidates. He did not walk away from that institution. He went on to become one of only three or four people in the college’s history to earn the rank of Distinguished Professor and was recognized nationally as one of twenty faculty nationwide to receive the ACBSP Teaching Excellence Award.

He outlasted the smallness of that moment by becoming larger than it. But becoming larger than a moment does not mean the moment didn’t happen. And it does not mean the moments have stopped coming.

I asked him plainly, as his friend, to name what is breaking his heart right now. He did not flinch.

“A minority has influenced America to turn its back on its own ideology, on decency itself. That grieves me deeply.”

He is a Nine on the Enneagram — the Peacemaker — and Nines are not typically the ones who reach for the prophetic register. They are wired for harmony, for holding multiple perspectives, for reducing tension rather than naming it. And yet Ajené carries a grief about racial injustice that he does not minimize or set aside. The two things coexist in him: the genuine desire for peace, and the refusal to purchase that peace at the cost of silence.

He told me that he struggles. That he experiences depression at times. That watching the erosion of spaces where people on the margins were beginning to find room — watching that happen in real time, in a country whose stated ideals he has spent his life embodying — presses on him in ways that are not always easy to carry. He said this without drama, without performance, with the same steadiness he brings to everything. Which, I think, made it land harder.

In the Six Seconds emotional intelligence framework, one of the deepest competencies is what they call “increasing empathy” — the capacity to genuinely enter another person’s experience, not just understand it intellectually. Ajené has developed this to a rare degree. He extends it even toward those causing harm, drawing on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s concept of “sincere ignorance” — the idea that some people do harm not from malice but from the limits of what they have been willing to see. He holds space for that distinction without surrendering his clarity about the harm itself.

That is a sophisticated and costly kind of empathy. It requires you to stay open without becoming numb. It requires you to show grace without pretending things are fine. Howard Thurman, who walked closely with the grief of his people and still wrote about the luminous possibility of human encounter across difference, described something similar: the discipline of seeing the person inside the ideology without excusing the ideology. Ajené practices this. It costs him something every time.

“The good people in my life who are trying to live reflectively and do important work — they are what keeps the pilot light lit.”

He does not sustain that kind of openness alone. He draws on the people around him — friends, collaborators, the daily presence of those who are choosing, in their own lives, to do the harder thing. He draws on what he calls ancestral energies — the sense that he is held by something larger and older than his present circumstances, a living connection to those who walked this road before him. He draws on rest: not collapse but the intentional return to breath, to presence, to the moment that is here.

And he draws on the conviction that the work of justice is necessary even when it does not produce visible results. “Even if it only changes one person’s perspective,” he said. There is no calculation of return in that sentence. There is only the clarity of calling — the same clarity that walked a teenager to a principal’s office in the face of threats, the same clarity that stayed at a college that had diminished him and built something remarkable there anyway.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked him what he would say to someone watching who wonders whether there is a place for them — someone standing at the edge of a room, uncertain whether they are welcome, uncertain whether their presence matters. His answer was quiet and unhurried and direct.

“Fear wants you to hold back. But if you are called to live your purpose, have faith that the calling knows your direction. The call, even as a whisper, is more powerful than the fear you are experiencing.”

I have heard a lot of encouragement in my years of work in the EQ and formation space. Most of it is well-meant but lands lightly. This did not land lightly. It landed the way things land when the person speaking to them has earned the right to say them — when the words come not from aspiration but from having stood in that place, in that fear, and taken the next step anyway.

He is in his winter season now — spacious, steady, deep. He hopes for more presence over productivity, more wisdom than certainty, more love over fear, more accompaniment over expertise. He is done, he said, trying to become more. He is learning to become enough.

Three conversations with this man. Three movements of a life still very much in motion. The formation that made him. The work that holds him. And the fire that, even in winter, has not gone out.

If you are doing hard work in difficult conditions — work for justice, work for belonging, work that nobody may be watching — he is speaking to you. The whisper is louder than the fear. He would know. To get in touch with Ajene use this link. ajene@donajene.com

If this conversation touched something in you, we invite you to explore how emotional intelligence and spiritual formation can deepen your own capacity for courage and presence at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

spiritofeq.com/blog & mystical seeker.substack.com