Tag: Making Connections series

Posts

THE BRIDGE BETWEEN US PART TWO OF TWO

September 28, 2026/0 Comments/in Emotional Intelligence, Empathy, Enneagram /by Jim Vaive

The Bridge Between Us

What changes when you stop expecting people to meet the world the way you do.

Picture three people around a table with a hard problem in front of them. One wants to slow down and think it through — get the facts straight, see the whole picture. One keeps scanning the faces, quietly asking whether everyone is all right. The third is already halfway out of the chair, ready to do something about it. Within ten minutes all three are frustrated with each other. Each is convinced the others are missing the point.

They are not, in fact, disagreeing about the problem. They are speaking three different first languages.

In Part One we looked at the three Centers of Intelligence — Head, Heart, and Body — and at the first connection, the one within: noticing your home center and gently inviting the quieter ones to the table. This is the second connection, and in some ways the harder one. It is the bridge between us.

We mistake another center’s gift for a flaw

Here is the trouble. Each center, seen from inside, feels like plain good sense. Seen from another center, it can look like a defect. The head-led person, doing exactly what the head does best, can read as cold, detached, slow to commit. The heart-led person, doing exactly what the heart does best, can read as dramatic, over-involved, too much. The body-led person, doing exactly what the body does best, can read as blunt, impulsive, steamrolling.

None of those are character failures. They are intelligences doing their work — and being judged in a language they do not speak. An enormous amount of what we call a personality conflict is really a translation problem.

Three questions, all of them legitimate

Underneath, each center is asking a different question, and each question deserves an answer.

The Head asks: Does this make sense? The Heart asks: Are we okay? The Body asks: What are we going to do?

Most conflicts are three people answering three different questions and assuming everyone is answering theirs. And when only one question gets honored — usually the loudest, or the one belonging to whoever holds the power — somebody leaves that room unseen. Not disagreed with. Unseen. Those are different wounds, and the second one lasts longer.

The people I thought were moving too slowly

For years I got so frustrated with everyone around me. They moved so slowly. I would be three steps ahead, already seeing where this was going, already wanting to move — and the room would still be talking. I would sit there thinking, we could have done this by now.

And here is the part I have to say plainly: I was not wrong about the big picture. I did see it clearly, and I saw it fast. That was real, and it was a gift.

But being right about the big picture made me deaf to everything else in the room. While I was waiting for people to catch up, they were making points that mattered — about how a decision would land on someone, about what we had not thought through, about who would be affected. I missed them. Not because they were not said, but because I had already decided the conversation was slow rather than deep. What I called impatience was really me refusing to learn anyone else’s language.

Empathy is not agreement

This is where emotional intelligence stops being a concept and becomes a discipline. Empathy is not agreeing, and it is not being nice. It is the deliberate work of entering another person’s experience before responding to it — of asking what question they are actually asking, and answering that one first. You can do this without surrendering your own center. In fact you can only do it well from your own center, grounded enough to lean toward someone without losing your footing.

The old image for this is still the best one. Paul wrote to a fractured community that the body has many members, and that the eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you” (1 Corinthians 12). Read that with the centers in mind and it lands differently. A family, a team, a church that honors only one intelligence is a body missing limbs. It will be clever and cold, or warm and directionless, or busy and unreflective — and it will keep wondering why it cannot quite get where it wants to go.

Three-centered justice

This is a large part of why we have been drawn more and more toward restorative justice. Restorative justice does something deceptively simple: it changes the questions. Conventional justice asks what rule was broken, who broke it, and what they deserve. Restorative justice asks instead: who has been harmed, what do they need, and whose obligation is it to make things right (Howard Zehr, Changing Lenses, 1990).

Sit with those three questions for a moment. Who was harmed is a Head question — it asks for truth, clearly seen. What do they needis a Heart question — it asks us to feel our way into another’s experience. Whose obligation is it is a Body question — it asks somebody to actually move. Restorative justice, at its best, is three-centered justice. It refuses to let us settle for a truth that costs us nothing, a sympathy that changes nothing, or an action taken without understanding.

And it asks for exactly the capacity the centers teach: the ability to see a person who is not like you as fully, stubbornly real. Almost all harm begins where someone has been reduced — to a caricature, a category, a nuisance, a threat. Repair begins the moment we can finally hear the question they were asking all along.

When I was the one doing the harm

I have to tell a harder piece of this. There were times I hurt people — not by accident, and not because I meant to. I was so certain I was right that I used what I had to get traction: my size, my presence, the force of my personality. I could fill a room. And when I did, people got quiet.

I told myself I was moving things forward. I was not. I was shutting down the very forward motion that would have served the whole room instead of just me. The ideas that needed air did not get it. The objections that should have slowed me down never got said out loud. People did not change their minds; they just stopped offering them.

It took me a long time to see that clearly, and longer to sit with it without flinching. Those are the three questions I now have to ask of myself before I ask them of anyone else: Who was harmed? What do they need? And whose obligation is it to make it right? The answer to that last one, in those rooms, was mine.

The Bride Between Us Reflection Guide

Practicing the bridge

The practice is small and surprisingly hard. Before you react, translate. Notice which center you are standing in, and then ask yourself what question the other person is really asking. If they need to know the plan makes sense, give them the reasoning before the reassurance. If they need to know you are okay with them, say that before you present your logic. If they need to know something is actually going to happen, name the next step. You are not managing them. You are refusing to make them come all the way over to your side of the bridge to be understood.

Do that often enough, in a marriage or a team or a community trying to repair real harm, and something quietly changes. People stop bracing. They start telling the truth. The body gets its limbs back.

The bridge between us turns out to be built of the same material as the bridge within us: a willingness to enter a room we do not naturally live in. Practiced long enough, and with enough tenderness, that willingness has another name. We call it love. And if each center is a doorway to God, as we said in Part One, then the person sitting across from you — the one whose first language you have never quite learned — may be standing in a doorway you have never walked through.

Peace and every good.

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

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

Sources

The Narrative Enneagram — The Three Centers of Intelligence: narrativeenneagram.org

Howard Zehr — restorative justice principles and the three questions (Changing Lenses, 1990): Zehr Institute

The Three Intelligences You Already Carry

September 25, 2026/0 Comments/in Emotional Intelligence, Enneagram, Self Discovery /by Jim Vaive

PART ONE OF TWO

The Three Intelligences You Already Carry

We were made to know the world — and God — with all three centers.

Most of us move through our days meeting the world through one favorite doorway, and we rarely notice we are doing it. One person walks into a room and immediately reads the feeling in it. Another instantly begins working out what is going on. A third simply senses, in the body, whether to move toward or away. Same room, three completely different first languages. The Enneagram calls these the three Centers of Intelligence — Head, Heart, and Body — and it names something the contemplative traditions have always known: that we were made to know with all three.

What each center gives

Consider what each one offers, at its best.

The Head is the intelligence of the mind — the capacity to think, to plan, to step back and see the pattern, to imagine what is not yet here. Its gift is clarity and perspective: a quiet, steady knowing that can hold complexity without panicking. (Points Five, Six, and Seven make their home here.)

The Heart is the intelligence of feeling and connection — the capacity to sense what matters, to attune to another person, to be moved. Its gift is empathy and meaning: the warmth that makes a life more than a list of tasks. (Points Two, Three, and Four live here.)

The Body is the intelligence of instinct and action — the gut-level knowing that registers a situation before the mind has words for it, and then moves. Its gift is grounded presence and right action: the steadiness that shows up and does the next true thing. (Points Eight, Nine, and One are at home here.)

Head thinks. Heart connects. Body acts. All three are real intelligence, and every one of us carries all three.

Your home, and the rooms you rarely enter

But we each have a home base — one center we default to so automatically that it feels less like a preference and more like simply “reality.” And here is the catch: when we lean hard on our strongest center, the other two grow quiet, sometimes to the point of neglect. The heart-led person may not trust their own clear thinking. The head-led person may lose touch with what they actually feel. The body-led person may act before the heart or head has had a chance to weigh in. None of this is a flaw to be fixed. It is simply the shape of a life that has leaned one way for a long time — and the beginning of an invitation.

The center I meet the world through

I have always met the world body first. It simply makes sense to me — I feel how my body moves through the world, and I move through it with intention. For as long as I can remember, the things that drew me were the things that lived in the body: martial arts, running, painting, cooking. Each one told me I was alive. In them I could shut my mind off and give myself entirely to what I was doing in that moment — the breath, the motion, the knife on the board, the brush on the canvas. There was no analyzing it, and no performing it. There was just the doing, and the quiet knowing that came with it.

For a long time I did not have language for this. I only knew it was how I was built. It never made me wrong — it was simply who I was: a person who comes home to himself through the body, and who trusts what the body knows.

Three doorways to God

From a spiritual standpoint, this is not personality trivia. Each center is a different doorway to God. The head meets God as truth and light — the mind grown quiet enough to receive. The heart meets God as love — the felt sense of being known and cherished. The body meets God as presence — a nearness that arrives not as an idea but as a settling in the bones. “God is closer than our very breath,” as one teacher puts it, and can be found in each of our centers, each offering a different way of experiencing the loving presence and voice of God (Center for Action and Contemplation). To lead only from one center, then, is to keep meeting God through a single door while two others stand open.

The old teachers had a phrase for the goal: to become “three-centered” — a whole human being who can think, feel, and act in concert, rather than being run by whichever center happens to shout loudest. That wholeness has a simpler name in the contemplative life. It is called presence.

A tender word about the growth edges

There is a softer truth underneath each center, too, and it is worth naming gently — because it is where grace most wants to meet us. The head, for all its clarity, tends to carry a low hum of worry, and reaches for certainty to soothe it. The heart, for all its warmth, tends to carry a quiet question about worth, and reaches for approval or image to ease it. The body, for all its strength, tends to carry an underground current of frustration, and reaches for control. These are not labels or verdicts. They are simply the growth edges — the places where each center is invited to stop clenching and to trust.

When a quieter center woke up

And then, somewhere along the way, came the whoa — the realization that there was more out there than just my body, that I was not only an instrument of motion and action. Things began to rise in me that I did not know what to do with. My heart had something to say, and I had no idea how to embody that. How do you “do” a feeling? How do you act your way through grief, or longing, or love?

For the first time I sensed that huge parts of my life had been sitting in the dark — whole rooms I had never entered, because I did not have the language or the courage for them. So I set out to find the missing pieces. And I will be honest: I went with a great deal of trepidation. Leaving the center you have always trusted, to go looking for the ones you have neglected, is not comfortable work. But it was the beginning of becoming whole.

The Three Intelligences you Already Carry Reflection Sheet

The first connection is within

Which brings us to the practice, and to why we called this series Making Connections. The first connection is the one within — learning to notice which center you are operating from, and then deliberately inviting the others to the table. Before a decision, the head-led person might pause to ask, “What am I feeling about this, and what does my gut say?” The heart-led person might ask, “What do I actually think, apart from how everyone will feel?” The body-led person might slow the impulse to act just long enough to let the heart and head catch up. Small moves — but over time they weave the three intelligences into one, and a fuller, steadier self begins to emerge.

You already carry all three. You always have. The spiritual journey is not acquiring a center you lack; it is making the connection between the ones you were given — and discovering that God has been waiting at every door.

In Part Two, we will turn from the connections within to the connections between: how understanding the centers can transform the way we love the people whose home base is nothing like our own.