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The Intelligence You Weren’t Taught

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She could name what she was feeling before most people in the room even knew they had feelings. She could read a tense conversation like a map, tracking the undercurrents, sensing what was unspoken. By every measure the research celebrates, her emotional intelligence was high. And yet, somewhere beneath all of that competence, something was restless. Something that didn’t have a name yet.

I think about her often. About the particular quality of her restlessness — not the kind that suggests incompleteness, but the kind that suggests there is more. A country just beyond the border of the map you’ve been given.

Emotional intelligence gave her a better map. What she was reaching for was a different kind of knowing altogether.

What EQ Gets Right — And Where It Stops

We have built our practice at spirit of EQ around the conviction that emotional intelligence changes lives. It changes how leaders show up, how teams hold conflict, how individuals navigate the interior terrain of their own experience. The research is clear, and decades of work with clients has confirmed it: people who develop their EQ are more self-aware, more empathic, more effective in their relationships, more resilient when the ground shifts beneath them.

But here is the honest edge of that map: emotional intelligence is a technology. A profound one. A necessary one. And yet a technology is only as generative as the spirit that animates it. You can have extraordinary self-awareness and still not know what your life is for. You can understand others deeply and still feel unmoored from any larger belonging. You can manage your emotions with great skill and still find, at the end of the day, that something essential is asking to be heard.

EQ maps the terrain. It does not always tell you why the terrain matters, or to what — or to whom — you ultimately belong.

That is where Lynette’s question begins.

Lynette’s Question — And the Research That Followed

Lynette Vaive has spent her career at the intersection of emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and spiritual formation. Her doctoral research — a Doctor of Ministry focused on Spiritual Emotional Intelligence — grew from a question she kept encountering in the field: what happens when emotional intelligence is not enough? What is the deeper layer that some people access and others don’t? And can it be named, taught, practiced?

The framework she developed is called Spiritual Emotional Intelligence, or SEQ. It is not a replacement for EQ — it is a deepening of it, a third dimension that EQ by itself cannot fully reach. SEQ is organized around three domains: Awareness, Belonging, and Insight.

Awareness, in the SEQ framework, is more than self-knowledge. It is the capacity to be present to your own inner life with honesty and without flinching — to notice not just what you feel, but what your feelings are pointing toward. It is the kind of attention the contemplative traditions have always cultivated, and that modern life consistently works against.

Belonging is the recognition that we are not isolated selves navigating a competitive landscape. We are embedded — in community, in creation, in something that holds us whether we attend to it or not. SEQ invites us to notice that embeddedness, to feel it, to let it shape how we move through the world. This is the domain that changes how leaders relate to their teams, how partners relate to each other, how any of us relate to the stranger across the table.

Insight is the capacity to integrate what Awareness reveals and what Belonging grounds — to let that integration become wisdom that actually changes behavior, not just understanding. Insight, in the SEQ framework, is the difference between knowing and living differently because you know.

Within these three domains, Lynette’s research maps nine tiles — specific capacities that together describe what Spiritual Emotional Intelligence looks like in practice. But the framework breathes most fully not as a model to be mastered, but as a territory to be inhabited.

What Changes When You Go Deeper

I think of the woman at the beginning of this reflection. Her EQ gave her a map of her inner landscape. What SEQ names — what her restlessness was reaching toward — was the landscape itself. The felt sense that she belonged to something larger than her own competence. The capacity to let that belonging inform not just her behavior but her becoming.

Howard Thurman, the theologian and mystic who shaped the thinking of the civil rights movement and whose work has long been an anchor for me, wrote about the inner life with a clarity that few have matched. He understood that the most significant work any person does happens not on the stage of public action, but in the quiet interior where the self is formed and reformed in relationship to what is deepest and truest. He did not use the language of emotional intelligence. But he was describing its spiritual root.

SEQ is, in some ways, a contemporary articulation of what contemplatives have always known: that the quality of our presence to others depends on the quality of our presence to ourselves, and that the quality of our presence to ourselves depends on something we did not manufacture. A ground. A source. A belonging that precedes our effort.

In community and organizational settings, SEQ changes the texture of everything. Teams that develop Awareness together begin to notice the emotional undercurrents they used to ignore. Communities that practice Belonging begin to hold conflict differently — not as a threat to be managed but as an invitation to go deeper. Leaders who cultivate Insight find that their decisions come from a different place, quieter and more rooted than the reactive center most of us operate from by default.

Something shifts. Not dramatically, not all at once. But truly.

The Deeper Layer Is Not Out of Reach

She is still in the room, the woman from the beginning of this reflection. And now she has a name for what she was reaching toward. Not a label that fixes it, but a language that opens it — a way of attending to the Awareness, Belonging, and Insight that were always present in her, asking to be cultivated.

That is what the SEQ framework offers. Not a program, but a practice. Not mastery, but an orientation — a way of asking better questions of your own interior life and the lives you share with others.

Spiritual Emotional Intelligence  Reflection Guide— Three Domains, Three Questions

The map was never the territory. But there is a territory. And it is worth inhabiting.

If this stirred something in you, we would be glad to have you join the ongoing conversation at spirit of EQ — on Substack, in our Mighty Networks community, or through the work we do directly with individuals and organizations.

Peace and every good.

 

“The Work of Art at the Center of Every Person We Coach”

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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

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.

 

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.

The Most Intelligent Thing You Can Do Is Slow Down

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When You Know Why You React, You Can Choose How You Respond

What the Enneagram and emotional intelligence reveal about the space between trigger and response

There is a photograph I keep coming back to in my mind — not an actual photograph, but the kind that forms over years of sitting across from people in coaching conversations. It is the image of a person mid-sentence, eyes slightly wide, voice pitched a half-step higher than usual, saying something they will probably wish they hadn’t. And in the moment before the words arrive, there is this invisible space — a fraction of a second, maybe less — where everything that matters is happening.

Viktor Frankl called it the space between stimulus and response. He wrote about it from inside a concentration camp, which means he earned the right to talk about it. That space, he said, is where our freedom lives. It is also, I’ve come to believe, where emotional intelligence and the Enneagram converge into something genuinely transformative.

The Intelligence Beneath the Surface

Emotional intelligence, as Daniel Goleman mapped it, begins with self-awareness — the capacity to notice what’s happening inside you before it moves through you and into the world. Josh Freedman of Six Seconds distills it differently, into a sequence I return to often: Know Yourself, Choose Yourself, Give Yourself. The knowing comes first. Without it, we are largely reactive — moved by currents we can’t name.

Most of us have experienced this. A colleague’s offhand comment lands wrong and we feel our jaw tighten before we understand why. A family member raises a familiar complaint and we hear ourselves responding in the old way again — the way we promised ourselves we wouldn’t. The reaction isn’t irrational exactly. It’s just faster than our awareness.

This is where the Enneagram enters the room.

A Map of the Interior

The Enneagram is a nine-type system of personality that goes deeper than behavior into motivation — into the core fears and longings that drive us. It is not a label to be worn comfortably. At its best, it is an unsettling mirror, one that shows you not only what you do but why, and what you are protecting when you do it.

A Type Eight (the Challenger) doesn’t lead aggressively because they are cruel. They lead that way because somewhere underneath the forcefulness is a terror of being controlled or betrayed — and strength feels like the only reliable protection. A Type Two (the Helper) doesn’t overextend themselves because they are foolish. They do it because their worth, in some deep and often unconscious way, feels contingent on being needed.

When you understand this about yourself — really understand it, not just intellectually but in the body — something shifts. The reaction doesn’t disappear. But there is more space around it.

The Place Where They Meet

I’ve seen this play out in workshops and in one-on-one coaching more times than I can count. A leadership team I worked with had a Type Eight and a Type Nine in constant friction. The Eight moved fast, spoke bluntly, made decisions before the Nine felt heard. The Nine withdrew, agreed on the surface, and then quietly undermined the direction — not out of malice but out of a desperate need for harmony they didn’t know how to ask for. What made it harder was that both of them were genuinely trying. The Eight believed clarity and decisiveness were acts of respect — waste no one’s time, say what’s true, move forward. The Nine believed keeping the peace was its own form of care — absorb the friction, hold the group together, avoid the rupture. Neither of them was wrong exactly. They were just operating from entirely different interior maps, and no one had ever handed them the other person’s.

When we named what was happening through the lens of both the Enneagram and emotional intelligence, something loosened. The Eight didn’t need to become soft. The Nine didn’t need to become confrontational. They needed to understand each other’s interior logic — and then, from that understanding, choose something different than their default. What I watched happen in that room was not a personality makeover. It was something quieter and more durable: two people recognizing that the other person’s behavior had a reason, and that the reason wasn’t contempt or weakness. That recognition created enough safety for genuine conversation — maybe for the first time in years of working together.

That’s the intersection. The Enneagram names what’s underneath. Emotional intelligence gives you tools to work with it. Together, they create the conditions for what I’d call non-reactive presence — the ability to be fully in a difficult moment without being fully hijacked by it.

Some Places to Begin

If this is new territory for you, here are a few entry points worth sitting with:

  1. Get curious before you get defensive. The next time you feel a strong reaction — irritation, anxiety, the urge to withdraw or escalate — ask yourself what it’s protecting. Not in a clinical way, but genuinely. What’s at stake for me right now?
  2. Learn your Enneagram type as a spiritual practice, not a personality quiz. The Narrative Enneagram tradition invites you into the type through lived experience and community, not just a test score. There’s a difference.
  3. Practice the pause. Frankl’s space between stimulus and response can be cultivated. Centering Prayer, mindful breathing, simple body awareness — any practice that builds your capacity to notice before acting will serve you here.
  4. Make it relational. Understanding your own type is valuable. Understanding the types of the people you love and work with alongside yours is where transformation tends to happen. The framework becomes a bridge rather than a mirror.

I don’t think any of us become non-reactive all the way down. That would require not being human. But I do believe we can cultivate the capacity to meet our reactions with a little more light and a little less automatic machinery. The Enneagram helps us see ourselves clearly. Emotional intelligence gives us something to do with what we see.

That space between stimulus and response — Frankl was right. Something important lives there. And with practice, we can learn to inhabit it.

If you’re curious about exploring the Enneagram and EQ together — for yourself, your team, or your community — visit spiritofeq.com to learn more about our workshops and coaching.

Peace and every good.

— — —

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The Exquisite Risk of Letting the Dark Do Its Work

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There is a photograph I have carried in my memory for decades — not one taken on film, but one pressed into the body the way cold presses into bone. It is a winter morning in Detroit, still dark at six a.m., and I am standing at the kitchen window watching my mother mix paint in the silence before the house woke up. She wasn’t sad. She wasn’t lost. She was in that rare place artists sometimes go — a place that looks like emptiness from the outside but is, from the inside, a particular kind of waiting. A necessary hollow. I didn’t have words for it then. I do now.

The mystics called it la noche oscura — the dark night of the soul.

When the Ground Falls Away

Most of us arrive at the dark night not by choice but by collapse. Something that once held meaning — a career, a faith practice, a sense of self, a relationship — gives way beneath us. The fall is disorienting precisely because we didn’t see it coming, and because the things we reach for on the way down don’t hold.

This is not ordinary sadness. It is not burnout, though it can look like it. It is not clinical depression, though it can travel alongside it, and if it is significantly impairing your daily life or generating thoughts of self-harm, please reach out to a licensed professional — that is not weakness, it is wisdom.

What distinguishes the dark night is its spiritual texture: the loss isn’t just of energy or motivation but of meaning itself. Things that once lit you up feel hollow. Your spiritual practices go silent. You withdraw. You wonder, quietly or loudly, whether you have lost God, or whether God was ever there at all.

St. John of the Cross — a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic who wrote from inside a prison cell no larger than a closet, where he had been confined by the very religious order he was trying to reform — would say: you are exactly where you need to be.

That is hard to hear in the dark. It was for me.

 

The Poem That Knows the Way

What John wrote in that cell was not a lament. It was, against all reason, a love poem.

“Dark Night of the Soul” — in Mirabai Starr’s luminous translation opens not in despair but in secret motion. The soul slips out of the house while everything is still. She travels in darkness, not despite the darkness but through it, guided not by any external lamp but by something burning in her own chest.

No other light, no other guide Than the one burning in my heart. — St. John of the Cross, trans. Mirabai Starr

This is the paradox the dark night holds: what feels like abandonment is, in John’s vision, a form of being led. The stripping away of every consolation — every spiritual feeling, every certainty, every framework that once made sense — is not punishment. It is preparation. The soul is being emptied so that something truer can fill it.

The poem ends not in the darkness but in a garden. In rest. In transformation. Lover transformed in Beloved.

John doesn’t promise the journey will be short. He doesn’t promise it won’t hurt. He promises it goes somewhere.

What Emotional Intelligence Has to Do with It

Here is where the contemplative tradition and emotional intelligence meet in a way I find profound: both ask us to stay present with what is, rather than immediately managing it away.

One of the core competencies in the Six Seconds model of EQ is what we call Feel Your Feelings — the capacity to move toward your inner experience rather than away from it. Not to be consumed by it. Not to perform it. But to let it be what it is, without premature resolution.

The dark night, spiritually understood, asks for the same posture. It resists the fixes we reach for — the productivity systems, the five-step frameworks, the urgent need to locate the lesson and extract it. Those impulses are understandable. They are also, in the dark night, exactly what is being dismantled.

What the dark night wants from you is not your solutions. It wants your surrender.

And surrender — in the contemplative sense — is not passivity. It is a particular kind of courage: the willingness to stop managing the mystery and begin inhabiting it.

 

Five Things to Do When You Are in the Dark

I want to offer not a ladder out but a way of being in. These are not performance targets. They are invitations.

Stay close to your body.  The dark night is disorienting in the mind, but the body often knows more than we credit it with. Walk. Sit with your back against something solid. Pay attention to what you can smell, hear, feel. The Incarnation — God taking on a body — is itself a theological argument that matter matters. You are allowed to be a creature.

Release the spiritual performance.  If your prayer feels empty, don’t force it into the shape it used to have. John wrote from inside a prison cell with nothing but scraps of cloth and the words forming in him in the dark. The form of devotion may need to change entirely. Let it.

Find one trustworthy companion.  Not someone who will rush you to resolution, but someone who can sit in the not-knowing with you. A spiritual director. A therapist. A friend formed in contemplative patience. The dark night is not meant to be survived alone, even when it demands solitude.

Practice lectio divina with the darkness itself.  What if you read the darkness the way monastics read scripture — slowly, with openness, asking not what does this mean but what is this forming in me? The dark night, John insists, is doing something. You may not be able to name it yet. That is alright.

Trust the heart that burns inside.  Even when you cannot feel it. Even when the candle seems to have gone out. John’s soul travels the whole dark journey guided by what is burning inside her chest — not what she can see, not what makes rational sense, but what is alive in her. There is something in you that has not gone out. It may be very quiet. Tend it like an ember.

What the Darkness Already Knows Reflection Guide

 

What the Darkness Already Knows

My mother would finish her mixing before the sun came up, and then she would begin. I used to think the dark hours were the waiting. I understand now they were the work.

The dark night of the soul is not a detour from the spiritual life. For John of the Cross, for Meister Eckhart, for Howard Thurman writing from the underside of suffering, for Julian of Norwich holding her visions in the midst of plague — the darkness has always been the passage. Not the destination. But not the obstacle either.

It is, to borrow Mirabai Starr’s phrase, an exquisite risk.

And if you are in it right now — if the house has gone still and everything you reached for is no longer where you left it — you are not broken. You are, perhaps, being made.

The night that joins the lover with the Beloved does not announce itself. It simply comes. And it leads.

St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, translated by Mirabai Starr, Riverhead Books, 2002 —

If this found you in a threshold season, we’d be honored to walk alongside you — explore spirit of EQ’s community on Substack or join us in our Mighty Networks space for ongoing conversation.

Peace and every good.