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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.

 

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

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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