Reflections on self-discovery as an inward journey — the identity and awareness that emerge when you slow down enough to actually look. These posts explore where self-discovery and the contemplative life meet.

Moving the Lighthouse Off the Bushel, Part Three

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A CONVERSATION WITH JUDY JOSEPH MCSWEEN · PART THREE OF THREE

Moving the Lighthouse Off the Bushel

On masks, Rottweilers, circling the block, and what she wants to say to the person who is still afraid to be see

She told me about Lent.

She had made a commitment during that season to feed homeless men in her community. Some concrete contained, entirely private act of charity. And one afternoon she drove out to do it — and circled the block three times. She had the food. She knew the men were there. And she found reason after reason, loop after loop, not to stop.

In the quiet of self-examination that followed, she named what was happening: she didn’t want anyone to see her doing it.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because Judy Joseph McSween is not a timid woman. She is a woman who walked into a shop in 1978 and was singled out while every other applicant was turned away. A woman who left a secure consultancy and drained her savings to pursue a calling. A woman who facilitates emotional intelligence retreats for archbishops and clergy across the Caribbean. And here she was, circling a block in Trinidad, afraid of being seen doing something good.

“I didn’t want anybody to see me doing it.”

She names this as the central interior struggle of her life: the movement from hiding under the bushel to becoming a lighthouse. Matthew 5:14-16 — “You are the light of the world” — was the scripture she received at her very first Life in the Spirit seminar, and she has been holding it ever since as both a promise and a provocation. She knows what she is called to be. The bushel is still close.

The masks arrived during her training as an OD Facilitator. She was asked, as all the participants were, to identify the mask she was wearing. Her response — characteristically — was to draw five Rottweiler faces. She owned five Rottweilers. She turned it into a joke. The facilitator was not deterred.

When she was required to write what the mask represented, the exercise became painful and deeply personal. She looked at her dogs. She thought about what she valued in them: unconditional love, empathy, presence, the quality of being met without reservation. She realized, sitting with the exercise, that these were precisely the qualities she was giving abundantly in her marriage and not receiving. The dogs were not a distraction from the question. They were the answer.

She was giving unconditional love. She was not receiving it. She had found a way to live with the gap so long that she had learned not to see it — until a training exercise in a room full of strangers made the invisible visible.

The marriage had other textures. Her husband delivered the news of her mother’s death with a flat “Your mother died” — no preparation, no comfort, no reaching toward her in the shock of the moment. When she was excited about something — even something as simple as a new bottle — her effervescence met near-silence. A road trip to Disney World that got them lost became an adventure for her and an irritation for him. His son made her feel unwelcome in her own home, and her husband did not manage the dynamic. These were not dramatic betrayals. They were the slow accumulation of a particular kind of loneliness — being present in a marriage while being fundamentally unseen in it.

She filed for divorce. She handed her husband the papers in an envelope after a football match, having arrived in separate cars. She never saw his reaction. Her lawyer was focused on material assets. She had a single focus: freedom. “All I need to do,” she said, “is to get out of this relationship, and I’ll be happy.” She prayed that all ties would be severed in a single court hearing with no ongoing entanglement. The prayer was answered.

The divorce, she says, was filed for the right reason. She has no regrets. And it was the catalyst for the most intensive period of interior work in her life — the meditation practice, the OD training, the introspective turn that eventually led her to Maine, and then to the 22-acre retreat facility, and then to sixteen years of helping others do what she had done for herself: pause long enough to hear what truly matters.

The archbishop called her out of the blue. He was not yet an Archbishop when she met him — a former cloistered nun named Rose had asked Judy to introduce herself to the priest who said mass at her parish one weekend. Judy had no real intention of following through. God, she says with a quiet smile, has a sense of humor. Fr. Jason said the mass that weekend. She introduced herself. Years later, now serving as Archbishop and Chair of the Caribbean Archbishops, he called her to facilitate a six-day clergy retreat for sixty priests.

She describes this as one of the moments when God pulled her from under the bushel and placed her on top — not once, but twice. She did not seek the platform. She did not engineer the relationship. She was asked to show up, and she showed up.

This is the pattern she has named across her whole life: every time she hid, she was found. Every time she circled the block, something eventually stopped the car. Every time she tried to make herself smaller, the calling found a way to make her visible. She is not naive about it — she knows the fear is real, that visibility invites judgment, that there are people who actively seek to diminish what rises. She also knows that the light is not hers to keep.

“I’m feeling the lighthouse next to the bushel — eventually it’s gonna get on top of the bushel.”

She does not claim to have arrived. She does not offer the finished version of herself as evidence that the journey is complete. She says the lighthouse is still moving — that each day may call the light to shine in a different place, that no one fully becomes a lighthouse once and for all, that the movement is ongoing. She is sixty-something years into a life of being found, and she is still learning to step into the light rather than wait to be placed there.

To the person watching who is still circling the block — who has the food, who knows where the need is, who has made the commitment and is now finding reasons not to stop — she said this:

“You’ll never find your fullest strength until you learn the power of the pause and be able to listen to the true source of strength that lies within you. In life, we must take risks. Without taking a risk, you’ll never know what you have the potential to achieve. There is always something that must be released to move to the next level. You cannot conceive what God has in store for you unless you are willing to let go.”

Three conversations with this woman. Three movements of a life that has always known more than it was willing to show — and that has spent decades learning, slowly, gracefully, with humor and honesty and the occasional Rottweiler, to let the light out anyway.

The bushel is still close. The lighthouse is closer.

If this conversation touched something in you, we invite you to explore what it means to step out from under the bushel and into your calling — at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

 

She Went to the Retreat Alone, Part Two

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A CONVERSATION WITH JUDY JOSEPH MCSWEEN · PART TWO OF THREE

She Went to the Retreat Alone

On leaving a secure life, draining your savings, and what happens when you show up even when everyone else cancel

There is a moment in most vocations — if you are paying attention — where the path you have been building and the path you are being called toward stop running parallel and begin to diverge. The question is not whether you will notice. The question is what you do when you do.

Judy Joseph McSween noticed in Maine.

She had traveled to Bethel, Maine for an introspective program — not yet sure what she was looking for, only aware that something was pulling her toward stillness. It was there that she encountered meditation for the first time. And in that stillness, a clarity arrived that she had not been able to manufacture through ambition or analysis: she was called to help people find themselves.

Not to fix them. Not to train them. Not to plan their strategies or optimize their processes — though she had done all of those things and done them well. To help them find themselves. To create the conditions in which something true and buried could surface. To ask the question that went one level deeper than the question they came with.

“My superpower is listening to my inner voice and to the other — and crafting questions that stimulate inner transformation.”

To understand how she arrived in Maine, you have to understand the arc that preceded it. Industrial Chemist. MBA. On-the-road post with the Industrial Development Corporation, meeting manufacturers, foreign investors, high commissioners, government ministers across Trinidad — a whirlwind that let her do what she loved most, which was connect with diverse people. A stint in finance that ended with retrenchment. A role in a Syrian conglomerate where the chairman gave her random projects across the business and she later said was the period of “really finding myself.” A represented role with a European technical assistance firm that required her to travel to Belgium. And eventually, the position that would bring her closest to the edge of her calling: Lead Strategic Planning Consultant at her cousin’s OD firm.

She was good at all of it. That is the thing that makes this kind of story complicated. She was not leaving failure. She was leaving competence — which is, in many ways, harder. Competence has its own gravity. It offers security, identity, the esteem of people who depend on you. Leaving competence requires a different kind of courage than leaving difficulty. It requires you to trust what you feel more than what you have built.

She noticed, in that consulting role, that clients needed something the firm was not designed to offer. They needed to pause. They needed someone to help them go inward, not just outward. The strategic plans were technically excellent. They were not producing sustainable change. And Judy knew why: because the people making the plans had not yet done the interior work that would allow them to carry the plans through.

She left impulsively. At the end of a month, she heard a presentation about taking the leap — about the moment when you stop waiting for conditions to be perfect and simply go. She turned to the woman next to her and said: “My plan is, if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it.” She handed in her notice.

She took the leap at the same moment she was sending her daughter to university in Canada. She drained her savings. She entered what she describes plainly as a financial pit. Every time the discomfort became acute enough that she considered returning to corporate life, she felt a clear inner no. Not a feeling of peace, necessarily. Just a no. Sixteen years later, she is still in this vocation.

Every time she considered going back, the inner voice said no. Not with fanfare. Not with a vision. Just: no. And she listened.

The first Time Out Retreat she scheduled, all the participants cancelled. Any reasonable person would have rescheduled. She heard an inner voice — which she now names without hesitation as the Holy Spirit — that said: go anyway. She drove to the 22-acre retreat facility alone, on a Friday evening, and arrived as the only person who had registered to be there.

She became both the facilitator and the participant. She asked herself the questions she had prepared for others. She listened. She went inward. She let the silence work on her the way she had learned to let silence work on others. And in that solitude, insights arrived that shaped every programmed design she uses to this day — the architecture of what it means to help a person pause long enough to hear what truly matters.

The second retreat brought executives, staff, and an ordained person. Within twenty-four hours, the feedback was already that the depth of her questions had surfaced more value than the cost of the retreat. She had not manufactured that depth in the intervening weeks. She had received it in an empty room in Maine, alone on a Friday evening, because she trusted a voice that told her to go even when there was no one waiting for her.

This is the pattern that the contemplative tradition names and the Enneagram illuminates and the Six Seconds EQ model grounds in research: the people who help others go inward are almost always people who have learned to go there themselves. Not once, dramatically, but repeatedly, quietly, in the ordinary discipline of listening before speaking, of pausing before acting, of trusting what arrives in stillness over what can be engineered in noise.

She describes her superpower as listening to her inner voice and to the other — and even in the middle of a facilitated session with executives or clergy, she is constantly going inward: asking herself what the stirring is, what the question beneath the question is, what the participant most needs and least expects. She frequently surprises herself with what emerges. Her clients feel it. They do not always know what to call it. She knows exactly what it is.

“Your first response,” she tells the people she works with, “is the superficial response. Let’s go a little deeper.”

She has been saying that for sixteen years, in corporate boardrooms and clergy retreats and prison ministry circles and coaching sessions with executives who have more power than peace. She says it with the calm of someone who has already gone to the depth she is inviting others toward. That is not technique. That is formation.

In our third conversation, we will go into the interior life itself — the masks she wore, the divorce she filed because of five Rottweilers, the Archbishop who called her out of the blue to lead a retreat for sixty priests, and what she wants to say to the person who is still, even now, circling the block because they are afraid of being seen doing the thing they are called to do.

But here, in this middle movement, I want to name what I see when I look at her arc whole: a woman who left competence for calling, who showed up to an empty room because a voice told her to, and who has been helping others find their inner voice ever since by first learning to trust her own.

If this reflection stirred something in you, we invite you to explore what a Time Out might open in your own life — at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

 

Not One of the Pack , Part One

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Post One:   Not One of the Pack
Formation, a fence-free neighborhood, and the 1978 store owner who recognized what was already there

There is a kind of formation that happens not in a classroom or a sanctuary but in the open air between houses, on a street where the fences have not yet been built, where the children move freely from yard to yard and the parents know each other’s children by name. Judy Joseph McSween grew up in one of those neighborhoods in Trinidad — and when she describes it, something in her voice settles, the way people’s voices settle when they are speaking about the place that made them.

“It was fun,” she said simply. And then she told me about the neighbor.

There was a Guyanese father on her street whose daughter had died. When Judy came around on Saturdays, he called her by his daughter’s name — Lizanne — and insisted she sit down and have soup with him, whether or not his own children were home. She did not correct him. She sat. She ate. She understood, even as a child, that some forms of presence are more important than precision.

The neighborhood gave her something her household could not always provide: the experience of being wanted without condition, included without explanation, held without having to earn it.

Her parents divorced when she was ten. Her mother did not socialize within the neighborhood after that — but Judy did, independently, welcomed in every home. Her siblings did not find the same footing. The communal structure of that street, the open doors and the Saturday soup, became a kind of scaffolding that held her while things at home were uncertain. She did not use that language. She didn’t need to. You could hear it in how she described the place: with the ease of someone who knows where their roots went down.

She was a tomboy. Cricket, football, climbing trees. She gathered people around her naturally — multiethnic, eclectic, unbothered by the social categories that organized everyone else. When she was in secondary school and the country was in the thick of the Black Power movement, she invited her entire class home for lunch. Her brother came home to find this group assembled in their house and has never stopped marveling at it. She has always moved toward difference rather than away from it.

That instinct traveled with her to England, where she spent five years at university and then in her first professional placement. At BP Research Centre — out in the countryside, well outside London — she was the only Black woman on the entire compound. She noticed. And then she did what she has always done: she found the people most others overlooked. She befriended the maintenance staff, learned their names, understood their rhythms. When she needed lab equipment fixed, it happened on the spot. Her colleagues marveled. She had simply treated people like people.

In the Six Seconds emotional intelligence framework, one of the foundational capacities is what they call “increasing empathy” — not as sentiment, but as the disciplined practice of genuinely entering another person’s experience before responding to it. Judy was practicing this before she had language for it, on a street in Trinidad where a man called her by his dead daughter’s name and she simply said yes.

But it was the summer of 1978, before she left for England, that the moment arrived which she would spend the next four decades unpacking.

She walked into a small store to apply for a job as a sales clerk. The room was full of women — all of them, she was certain, less qualified than she was — clutching the classified ad that had brought them there. The store owner came out, told the room the position was filled, and ushered them toward the door. Judy turned to follow. A voice stopped her.

“You. What do you want.”  She turned. The store owner — a Syrian man named Alfred Galy — was looking directly at her. She said she had come for the job, but understood it was filled. He said: “Come with me.”

She started that same day. By the end of the week she was on the cash register. The following week she was also working a midday shift at his sister’s steakhouse. By the end of the summer, he was processing foreign exchange applications and import licences with her. He told her: whenever you are home on holiday and want work, come see me.

She saw him again just recently. He is now in his nineties. He told her he follows her writing in the media.

She named that moment as the formation of something essential: the internalized conviction that she was not one of the pack, that she should never assume she would be treated according to the prevailing narrative, that the answer to any door was simply yes or no, and that the only way to find out was to walk toward it rather than away.

But here is the thing she said at the end of our conversation that reframed everything that came before it. After spending years crediting Alfred Galy with giving her that belief, she sat with the ‘Defining Moments’ document she had written in preparation for our interview — the first time in her life she had paused to look at all of it together — and something shifted.

“It was from the day I was born. And I think that stands true for us all.”

Alfred Galy did not create her uniqueness. He recognized it. He named what was already there. The neighborhood did not build her capacity for belonging — it gave her room to practice what she already carried. The five years in England did not make her comfortable with difference — they confirmed an orientation she had arrived with.

This is, I think, one of the deepest things emotional intelligence and spiritual formation have to teach us: that much of what we spend our lives discovering was never actually lost. It was present from the beginning, waiting for the right conditions to be seen. The work is not creation. It is recognition.

In the weeks ahead, we will follow Judy through the rest of her story — the career arc that took her from industrial chemistry to a 22-acre retreat facility where she arrived alone and became both the facilitator and the only participant, and into the interior life that has been shaping everything else all along. But this is where it begins: on a street without fences, at a table set with soup for a girl who was never really a stranger anywhere she went.

She was not one of the pack. She never was.

We invite you to explore how emotional intelligence and spiritual formation can help you recognize what you already carry — at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

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 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.

 

The Mug She Couldn’t Put Down

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On the three lies we’re sold about work, and what’s true instead.

A woman sat across from me on a video call a few months ago, holding a coffee mug with her company’s logo on it up near her kitchen counter, turning it slowly between her palms the way you turn something you’re not sure you still want to hold. She had just been promoted into the title she had organized her twenties and thirties around — corner office, signing authority, her name under a slightly bigger headshot on the company website than the year before. She set the mug down on the counter next to her laptop and told me the day of her promotion had been the saddest day of her professional life. Not because anything had gone wrong. Because everything had gone exactly as promised, and she felt nothing.

I have sat across from that kind of silence more times than I can count over the years — the silence that comes after someone gets the thing they were told to want and discovers the want was never really theirs. It usually arrives with a kind of quiet bewilderment, because nobody warned them this was a possible outcome. The story they were handed, somewhere around a commencement stage in a cap and gown, did not include a chapter where the dream job arrives on schedule and turns out to be the wrong dream.

This is, I suspect, a good part of what’s behind the wave of people quietly leaving or quietly checking out of corporate life right now, the wave that gets a new headline every few months — quiet quitting, quiet burnout, whatever comes next. It is tempting to read all of that concept as a generation gone soft, unwilling to put in the hours their parents did. I don’t think that’s it, or not mostly. I think a great many people are noticing, roughly around the same time, the same gap between a promise made to them early and a result delivered to them later, and discovering they were never told the promise came with an asterisk.

That story has a traceable origin. Standing at a Stanford commencement in 2005, Steve Jobs told the graduating class, “And the only way to do great work is to love what you do,” and the line has been framed on office walls and printed on coffee mugs ever since — including, probably, some very near where my directee set hers down. The writer Miya Tokumitsu, in her 2014 Jacobin essay “In the Name of Love,” traced exactly this lineage and pointed out something uncomfortable: the people most able to afford the leap into work they love are usually the people who already had the most cushion underneath them. For everyone else, the mantra quietly does something less generous than inspire. It turns a structural problem — not enough good jobs, not enough room to take risks — into a personal one. If you don’t love your work, the story implies, you simply haven’t looked hard enough, or wanted it badly enough, or been brave enough to go get it.

The second half of that same story usually arrives a little later in the curriculum — a guest entrepreneur clicking through a slide deck in a packed lecture hall, telling the room that with enough grit, any one of them could be the next name on a building. Anyone can build something of their own, the story goes, if they just work hard enough — and here I must be careful, because for a season of my life I was the proof people pointed to. My business partner Mike and I spent eight months preparing before we opened Varment Guard, the pest and wildlife management company we built from nothing into a business that eventually employed hundreds of people. We hung a sign over our own door — Failure was not an option — and meant it the way you mean something you have staked your mortgage on. It worked. I am not interested in pretending otherwise, or in false modesty about something I am genuinely proud of. But it worked because of a long list of things that had very little to do with how hard we wanted it: the specific economy of that particular year, a partner whose strengths were exactly the inverse of mine, a tolerance for risk that is not evenly distributed across human temperaments and never has been. I don’t want to make it sound costless, either. I had small children at home through those eight months and the years right after, and I missed real time with them I can’t get back — which is its own kind of bill, one that never shows up on anyone’s balance sheet but gets paid all the same. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly half of new businesses don’t make it to their fifth year, and the ones that do are not simply the ones who wanted it most. Holding up survivors as proof that anyone can do this if they just try hard enough is a little like holding up a lottery winner as proof that anyone can get rich if they just buy a ticket.

What worries me more than the failure rate itself is what people do with it afterward. I have sat with more than one person who closed a business within those first hard years and absorbed it as a verdict on their character rather than what it mostly was — a coin flip with worse odds than anyone told them going in. The story promised something close to a meritocracy. The data describes something closer to weather.

Underneath both of those lies sits a third, quieter one: that money and position are the correct measure of a life well spent, and that everyone, deep down, wants more of both. Some people do, and there is nothing wrong with that — ambition is not a character flaw, and plenty of people are genuinely called toward building, leading, and accumulating in ways that serve others well. But plenty of other people are wired toward something else entirely: depth over breadth, the same craft practiced quietly for thirty years, a small life held close rather than a large one held loosely. I think of the kind of person who has spent three decades fixing pipe organs in the same three counties, with no interest in a bigger territory or a louder reputation, who is, by every measure I trust, thoroughly fulfilled. Emotional intelligence, at its most basic, includes the unglamorous skill of knowing accurately which one of those people you are, rather than which one you were told to become. The Enneagram, in its better uses, exists for exactly this kind of clarity — not to sort people into better and worse categories, but to help each of us recognize the shape of aliveness we were built for, which is rarely identical to our neighbor’s. Mistaking the second kind of person for a failed version of the first kind is not a small error. It is the engine behind an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering, including, I suspect, the kind my directee was sitting in when she set down her mug.

Was It Ever Yours To Want Reflection Sheet

I didn’t ask her what she wanted to do next. I asked her something slower: whether the job she’d just arrived at had ever been hers to want, or whether she had simply been collecting, for twenty years, on a promise someone else made on her behalf at a podium she barely remembers. She picked the mug back up while she thought about it, turned it over once more, and read her own company’s name on the side of it like she was seeing it for the first time. She didn’t have an answer that day. But she left the call holding the mug instead of setting it back down on the counter, which felt, to both of us, like the truer ending to that sentence.

If this stirred something up, I made a short reflection sheet to go with it — you can find it, along with more like it, at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

mysticalseeker.substack.com & spiritofeq.com/blog

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

To Everyone Standing at the Edge of the Room

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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

The Work That Holds Everything Together

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

A Man Who Stands in the Room

On teaching, spiritual direction, and what it means to carry many callings at once

There is a question I have wanted to ask Ajené for years, and as we continue our 3 part conversation I finally asked it when we sat down together: what is the connective tissue across everything you do? Because from where I sit, the list is remarkable. Distinguished Professor at Riverside City College — recently elevated to Professor Emeritus after more than three decades. Spiritual director. Six Seconds EQ faculty. Enneagram teacher. Minister. Business consultant. Dream worker trained in the Jungian mystical tradition at the Haden Institute. Scuba diver, salsa dancer, Lego builder, student of classical guitar.

He smiled at the question. Then he said something I have been turning over ever since.

“Emotional intelligence is intertwined with who I am at a soul level. One moves the other. From this perspective, I am passionate about living and teaching how to experience a soul-centered emotionally intelligent life.”

That is the connective tissue. Not a set of skills or roles, but a way of being — the conviction that what we feel and what we believe and how we treat the people in front of us are not separate compartments but a single integrated life. Everything Ajené does flows from that integration.

The classroom is where I have seen him described most often by others, and the descriptions are strikingly consistent. His dean at RCC said he has a natural ability to connect with his students — that he “allows students to find solace in his presence when they are struggling.” The Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs recognized him with their Teaching Excellence Award; he was one of only twenty faculty nationwide to receive it that year. But when you ask Ajené what he is doing in the classroom, he does not talk about pedagogy. He talks about presence.

“The classroom is the students’ space, not mine,” he told me. “I enter their space with respect. I leave my own baggage outside the door so I can meet them where they are.” His approach is rooted in listening rather than answers — in the recognition that every person arriving in that room is carrying something, and that learning cannot happen until the person feels held.

This is, at its core, an emotional intelligence practice. In the Six Seconds model, the capacity to “increase empathy” — to genuinely enter another person’s experience before responding to it — is one of the deepest and most difficult competencies to develop. Ajené has built a classroom around it. And notably, he has done this in a business and entrepreneurship department, which is not the first place most people would look for this kind of formation work. That gap between where it is expected and where he practices it is, I think, part of the point.

The spiritual direction practice carries the same posture into a different room. Ajené works with people across Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, and no-tradition backgrounds — a range that reflects his own formation. He grew up with a mother who was Jehovah’s Witness, a father who was Buddhist, a grandmother who was Baptist, an uncle who was Muslim, and a Catholic school. His doctorate from New York Theological Seminary was in interfaith, inter-spiritual, and intercultural theology — not because he chose a specialty, but because he was already living at that intersection and needed language for it.

He describes his approach to spiritual diversity through a Baha’i image: the most beautiful garden is a mixture of flowers. He is not interested in resolving difference into uniformity. He is interested in what each tradition offers to the whole — and in holding space wide enough that a person from any background can find their own ground.

“The most beautiful gardens are a mixture of flowers. I see my own spiritual life that way — enriched by every stream, not threatened by any of them.”

His work as a Enneagram coach sits at the center of all of this. The Enneagram tradition is distinctive in that it asks real people to speak from their own lived experience of a type — not to have a type explained to them, but to hear from those who inhabit it. Ajené is a Nine, the Peacemaker, and he brings to that work a rare self-awareness about both the gift and the cost of his type. Nines tend to minimize their own needs and giftedness in service of harmony. They absorb the priorities of others. They can mistake self-erasure for humility.

When I asked him where his Nine-ness serves him most and where it costs him most, he was characteristically honest. The gift: the capacity to enter any room and genuinely see every person in it, to hold multiple realities at once without needing to collapse them into a winner. The cost: the temptation to smooth over things that need to be said, to defer his own voice when it is exactly his voice that is required. He is aware of both. That awareness is itself the work.

He describes his current life season as winter — and he is careful to define what he means. Not decline. Not retreat. Spaciousness. The steadiness that comes from having built something over decades and knowing now what matters. He hopes, he told me, for more presence over productivity, more wisdom than certainty, more accompaniment over expertise. And the phrase that has stayed with me: not trying to become more but learning to become enough.

That phrase does a particular kind of work on me, because it runs counter to almost everything our culture tells us about professional life. Enough is not a word our productivity-saturated age handles well. But for a man who has earned Distinguished Professor status and a national teaching award and a doctorate and a spiritual direction practice and three decades of student relationships — for that man to say he is learning to become enough — that is not resignation. That is a different kind of ambition entirely.

There is a thread in the contemplative tradition — I am thinking of Thomas Merton, of Howard Thurman, of the desert fathers and mothers — about the movement from doing to being, from accumulation to presence. Ajené is living that transition with his eyes open. He knows what season he is in. And he is choosing to inhabit it rather than fight it.

In our next conversation, we will go to the harder places. The grief he carries about racial injustice. The threats he faced in high school for speaking up. The discrimination he encountered at the institution where he would go on to build one of the most distinguished careers in its history. And his word — direct and unhurried — to the people standing at the edge of the room, wondering whether there is a place for them.

But here, in this middle movement, I want to simply name what I see when I look at his life whole: a man who has refused, across decades and contexts, to let his work be less than his faith. That refusal is its own kind of witness.

To get in touch with Ajene use this link. mailto:ajene@donajene.com

If you are curious about how emotional intelligence and the Enneagram can deepen your own integration of work, faith, and presence, we would love to continue the conversation at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

 

The Garden He Grew from Honest Contradiction

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Post One:   The Garden He Grew From

Formation, the village of mentors, and the name given by a king

Post Two:   A Man Who Stands in the Room

Teaching, spiritual direction, EQ practice, and the soul-centered integrated life

Post Three:  When the Whisper Is Louder Than the Fear

Racial injustice, the cost of speaking, grief, and the word for those at the edge of the room

 

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

The Garden He Grew From

What hard soil and an unlikely village made of one remarkable man

There is a photograph I keep returning to in my mind — not a real one, but the kind your imagination makes when someone tells you a story about a boy walking to school alone, afraid, and arriving anyway. I have known Dr. Don Ajené Wilcoxson for years. I know the man he became. But it was only when we sat down together for a long conversation that I began to understand the terrain that formed him.

He described his childhood plainly, without self-pity, in the way that people speak about hard things they have long since made peace with. Physical abuse. A biological father he never met. The daily threat of being beaten walking to school. He called it “really challenging.” What stayed with me was not the weight of those words but the steadiness with which he carried them — the way a man speaks about weather he has already walked through.

“I was blessed,” he said, and meant it. Because running alongside those hardships was something else: a community of people who saw him and chose to stay.

His adoptive father became, in his words, “the best thing that could ever happen” to his life — a man who taught him about all cultures, all music, all the beautiful width of what it means to be human.

There was also Dell Roberts, a friend who showed him what it looks like for a young Black man to move through the world with dignity. His mother, who helped him find stillness. His godmother, who taught him ethics — not as rules, but as a way of being. And his nana, who pressed into him the twin practices of listening and caring. He didn’t point to a single turning point the way we often hope people will. He pointed instead to a village.

There is a concept in the Enneagram — and Ajené is a deeply self-aware Nine — about the way the Peacemaker absorbs the world around them, becoming, in some sense, an amalgam of the people they love. What he described from his childhood is not just biography. It is the formation of a man who would go on to hold space for people from every tradition, every background, every wound — and do it with the naturalness of someone who learned to navigate difference before he could name it.

He was the darkest member of his family. Extended family and outsiders noticed. He noticed. And rather than letting that experience narrow him, it became a doorway. “It taught me to navigate that difference,” he said, “and that helped me work across cultures and faiths later.” What looked, from the outside, like a wound had quietly become a gift.

This is the movement that the Six Seconds emotional intelligence framework calls “exercising optimism” — not the naive insistence that things are fine, but the practiced discipline of asking what is generative alongside what is broken. Ajené did not learn this from a book. He learned it the way most lasting things are learned: by living through something hard and refusing to let it be the last word.

The name Ajené arrived later. He was in his mid-twenties, teaching, when an African king whose daughter had been moved by his work gave him the name. It means, roughly, “a businessman who truths” — which Ajené himself acknowledged is something of an oxymoron, a contradiction held together by purpose. He carries that name now not as an identity to perform but as a reminder. Something higher, he said, is always calling him in everything he does.

“The name is a constant reminder that I have something higher that is calling me in everything I do.”

That sense of calling runs through everything that follows: the classroom, the sanctuary, the spiritual direction session, the emotional intelligence coaching circle. But it began here, in the soil of a childhood that was genuinely difficult and genuinely held — held by a father who taught him wonder, a friend who modeled dignity, a grandmother who modeled listening, a godmother who modeled integrity.

There is a phrase from the Celtic tradition that has long moved me: the idea that what we are is not something we construct alone, but something we receive — from the land, from the ancestors, from the people who pray over us before we know we need praying over. Ajené did not use that language, but he described that reality. He is, in a deep sense, a man made by his village.

And the village made something extraordinary. A man who enters rooms prepared to meet whoever is already inside. A man who learned, before he had words for it, that difference is not a problem to be solved but a garden to be tended. A man who was given a name that named him more truly than he could have named himself — and who has spent the decades since trying to live worthy of it.

On Wednesday and Thursday, we will follow Ajené into the classroom and the sanctuary, into his work at the intersection of emotional intelligence and spiritual formation, and into the harder places — the grief he carries about racial injustice, the cost of speaking when silence would be easier, and what keeps the pilot light lit even now. But this is where we begin: with the boy, and the village, and the soil that made him.

The boy walked to school afraid and arrived anyway. That was, perhaps, the first lesson.

To get in touch with Ajene use this link.ajene@donajene.com

If this reflection stirred something in you, we invite you to explore the work of emotional intelligence and spiritual formation at spiritofeq.com and mystical seeker.substack.com

Peace and every good.