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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 Narrative Enneagram teacher sits at the center of all of this. The Narrative 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.