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What the Passport Couldn’t Prove

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The car was empty when we came back to it. A village square an hour outside Florence, September light coming sideways across the stones, and the rental car standing open like something that had been hollowed out. Luggage gone. Backpacks gone. Computers, iPads, the chargers, the notes I had made on the plane. We were on our way from the airport to a castle in Tuscany, for a week of learning and facilitating. Lynette and I looked at each other over the roof of the car and laughed.

I have thought about that laugh for ten years. It arrived before anything else did — before the inventory, before the police report, before the slow understanding of what had left with the bags. Whatever I am, it laughed first.

What left with the bags was my passport.

What a Passport Is

It is worth looking at what a passport is, because it is a strange object to grieve. It is issued. Someone else certifies that you are who you say you are, and strangers accept the certification on that authority rather than yours. It only matters at borders; at home it lies in a drawer for years. And it says almost nothing true about you — a name, a date, a place of birth, a photograph taken under fluorescent light on a bad morning. It attests that you exist and where you are from. Nothing about what you love, what you have repented of, what you would weep over. The thinnest possible description of a person. And standing in that square, I understood that I had no way to prove who I was.

What Do You Need First?

Two Italian colleagues drove out to help us. I remember very little about the logistics and everything about one sentence. They asked, “What do you need first?”

And I cried.

Not when the car was emptied. Not when I understood the passport was gone. When two people who did not require any documentation asked me what I needed.

That question is addressed to a someone. It assumes there is a person standing there with needs, prior to any paperwork, and it was the first question in days I could not answer by producing something. I had nothing to hand anyone. And the strange grace of that week was that nothing was required. We spent days getting the language wrong and the customs wrong, and the Italians were gentle with us anyway — patient with our fumbling, warm without cause, entirely uninterested in whether we could establish our standing.

My identity that week was not recovered by looking inward. It was handed to me by other people, freely, with no document in the transaction.

A Stack of Passports

A man with a leather backpack seen from behind, standing before the arched entrance of the United States Embassy beneath an American flag.

I have been turning this over again lately because of a question I cannot put down: what is mine to do? Richard Rohr writes that “your life is not about you” — that we are an instance of something larger living itself through us (Center for Action and Contemplation). Parker Palmer, in Let Your Life Speak, says that before we tell our lives what we intend to do with them, we should “listen for what it intends to do with you.” Palmer was in his early thirties when that question woke him. I am seventy-four.

Which makes it a different question. Palmer’s version is a correction for willfulness — I have been chasing borrowed ideals, let me listen for the life that is already mine. Mine is narrower and more exacting: of the things that are genuinely mine, which ones do I still have the time and the strength for?

And underneath that one, a harder one. Who is the person who would do them?

I have no academic degrees. My whole public self is a stack of conferred identities — master certified coach, certified spiritual director, certified teacher of this, certified practitioner of that. Decades of accumulating documents that attest to who I am, each one real, each one earned in hours nobody saw. A stack of passports. And in a square outside Florence I learned how much of that I could carry across a border where none of it was recognized.

I do not think the credentials are false. That is the easy move and it is not honest. The letters describe what I have done, and the hours behind them are real. The passport was true. It just was not me.

Who Are We Without the Thing That Proves Us?

The question does not require a theft. It arrives on its own schedule, and it comes for everyone. Who are you when the title goes — when the business card no longer explains you at a party, when the organization you ran runs fine without you, when the role you filled for twenty years is filled by someone else and filled well? Who are you when the marriage ends, or when the person who knew you longest dies and takes with them the only remaining witness to your younger self? Who are you when the body stops cooperating — when the knee that carried you up mountains will not take the stairs, when the mind that held nine things at once holds four? Each of these is a passport. Each of them is issued by something outside you. Each of them can be taken in an afternoon.

There May Be No Then

Here I want to say something about the version of this question I am living with now, and you can skip the paragraph if you would rather.

I have an aorta that is enlarged. It could give way without warning. There is also a cyst on my pancreas that gets watched. This is not terminal illness, which hands you a prognosis and lets you plan a final act. It is not ordinary mortality either, the statistical fog the rest of us ignore successfully. It is mortality with a vivid mechanism and no timeline. I can neither plan around it nor forget it.

What that destroys is the sequenced life. The ordinary way we answer “what is mine to do” is in an order of operations — finish the book, then build the thing, then rest. An aorta like mine invalidates sequencing, because there may be no then. So the question changes shape in my hands. It stops being in what order? and becomes: what would I want to be in the middle of?

I would offer that one to you whether or not anything in your chest is enlarged. Sequencing is a fiction for all of us. Some of us have just been informed.

Smaller Than Anyone Promises

I would offer one correction to the thing we usually say about the end of a life — that the small things fall away and only the big ones remain, love and God and the people. It sounds right and I do not think it is true. What survived that week in Italy was not a revelation. It was Lynette’s face over the roof of a car. It was two people asking a practical question. It was a village being kind while we got everything wrong. What is left when you are stripped turns out to be smaller and more particular than anyone promises — not love but a specific face, not service but the one person you would still sit with on a Tuesday.

Taken In Without Papers

There is one more piece, and it is the one I would least like to say out loud. I am an Eight on the Enneagram. My whole life is organized around capacity — I can handle this, I can carry it, I will be the one who does not need help. An enlarged aorta is the one thing that cannot be handled, out-worked, or out-willed. And notice what undid me in that square. Not the loss. Being offered help. “What do you need first” is the most destabilizing question you can ask a person built like me, because it presumes need.

I think that is why the tears came then and not before. Something in me knew the paperwork was gone and that I was going to have to be received instead of verified.

Which is, as near as I can tell, what belonging is. Not being recognized. Being taken in without papers.

I got a new passport eventually. It sits in a drawer. Ten years on, the thing I remember from that week is not the document or the loss or the inconvenience of replacing a life’s worth of chargers. It is a laugh over the roof of an emptied car, and strangers in a language I was mangling, asking me what I needed first.

A companion reflection sheet for this post: What the Passport Couldn’t Prove (PDF).

About Jim & Dr. Lynette Vaive

Jim Vaive and Dr. Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of Spirit of EQ, where they work with leaders and seekers worldwide in coaching, training, and spiritual direction. Jim is a Master Certified Coach (ICF), a certified spiritual director, and a certified Narrative Enneagram teacher. Dr. Lynette Vaive is a Professional Certified Coach, a certified spiritual director, and a certified Narrative Enneagram teacher; her doctoral research is the scholarly foundation of the Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) framework. Together they write The Mystical Seeker on Substack and are co-authoring a book on SEQ. Reach them at jim@spiritofeq.com and lynette@spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass).

Richard Rohr, daily meditation on vocation, Center for Action and Contemplation (cac.org).

© 2026 Spirit of EQ

It Isn’t Confusion. It’s Exhaustion.

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In October of 2024 I set up a jeweller’s bench.

Not as a hobby. As a business — Jim’s Jewelry by Design. I made pieces people could hold while they were thinking: beads, knots, things with a weight to them. I bought the tools, learned the techniques, took the orders, did the books.

In May of this year I closed it.

I closed it because I did not have the time to do everything I needed to do. The writing and the coaching mattered more. They had to take center stage, and something had to go.

That is the tidy version. The honest one is less flattering. I am an Eight on the Enneagram, and here is what an Eight does: if I see something shiny lying in the sand, I rush over, pick it up, and turn it into a business. I have done it my whole life. A pest control company. A bread store. A jewellery bench. Each time the thing itself was real and worth doing. Each time the picking-up was automatic.

My focus is narrowing now, the way it does as you get older. And by the spring I was exhausted from keeping all the balls in the air.

That last word is what this post is about.

The thing we call confusion usually isn’t

I came across a piece recently by Cameron Trimble, a pastor and author, in Richard Rohr’s daily meditations from the Center for Action and Contemplation. She makes a distinction I have not stopped thinking about.

When people say they do not know what to do, they describe it as confusion. But confusion means you are missing information. Most of the time, she argues, what people are carrying is exhaustion — holding more than any one person should be holding.

Those two feel identical from the inside. They are not the same problem.

If it is confusion, more information helps. Get the numbers. Talk to someone who has done it.

If it is exhaustion, more information makes it worse. You are not short of input. You are overloaded, and every new consideration is one more thing to carry while you try to think.

I spent most of 2025 treating an exhaustion problem as a confusion problem. I read more, asked more people, made more lists about the bench — margins, time per piece, what it would take to make it work. I was very busy being thorough. None of it touched the actual thing, because the actual thing was that I had too much in my hands and no way to put any of it down.

The question was never is this a good business. It was how many things can one man in his seventies actually carry. No amount of research answers that one.

William James saw this in 1902

A brass compass resting on a rock in a field of tall grass at night, beneath a star-filled sky.

There is a passage in The Varieties of Religious Experience that I keep returning to, and it is not the one people usually quote.

James describes what he calls the field of consciousness — everything present to you at a given moment. It has a centre of interest, and around that centre the rest fades out to a margin “so faint that its limits are unassignable.” He compares it to a magnetic field, “inside of which our centre of energy turns like a compass-needle.”

Then he says this: “At other times, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue, our fields may narrow almost to a point.”

Fatigue narrows the field. Not age, not weakness of character — fatigue. A tired person is not seeing less because they have become less; they are seeing less because the field itself has contracted, and from inside a contracted field there is no way to tell that anything is missing.

That is the whole trap. The exhausted person experiences their exhaustion as a failure of clarity, and reaches for more information — which requires more field, which they do not have.

Deciding and discerning are different jobs

Trimble’s second distinction is the one I had been circling for years without naming cleanly.

Deciding operates on a set of options. Someone has put three things on the table and your job is to pick the best one. Business is very good at this. There are frameworks, matrices, and people who will charge you a great deal to improve your hit rate.

Discerning happens before any of that. It asks whether the table is yours.

Here is why the difference costs money. A person who decides well clears options off the table quickly and confidently. That is a real strength. It is also exactly how you end up two years into something you never chose — because nobody asked whether they were the right options, and the speed of the deciding disguised the absence of the asking.

An Eight picking up something shiny from the sand is deciding, and deciding well. The business will probably work. The question nobody asks at that moment is whether it was his to pick up.

Trimble’s word for what people are actually after is attunement rather than certainty. Flatter version: most people chasing certainty want a guarantee about the outcome. What is available is a better read on what the situation is asking of you. Different purchases, and only one of them is for sale.

The in-between is not wasted time

One more thing from her piece — a reframe of a very old story.

A people leave one place and spend a long stretch in the desert before arriving anywhere. The usual reading of that stretch is dead time: a gap between the real chapters, to be endured.

The rabbinic reading she points to is the opposite. The time in between is not the delay before the thing happens. It is where they stopped being one kind of people and became another. They walked in carrying the habits of the place they had left — fear, scarcity, waiting to be told. Changing their location was the easy part. Changing that is what the years were for.

Out of the desert and into an ordinary working life: a transition is not the empty bit between two chapters. It is where you get re-made. Spend it entirely on getting out of it and you arrive as the same person who went in, which is generally how people make the same mistake in a new setting.

I have done that. Twice, at least.

And in that story nobody gets a map. They get a day’s food at a time — enough for today, nothing banked, no visibility past tomorrow. Her point, and mine: that is not a failure of provision. It is a description of how this works. You get enough for the next step, and the next step is enough.

For anyone who plans for a living that is uncomfortable. I ran a company for thirty-eight years on five-year horizons. But look at what the alternative demands: before you can act, you need a picture of an outcome several years out that nobody can honestly give you — and while you wait for it you do nothing, and call the nothing prudence.

What Insight actually is

This is the third domain of spiritual emotional intelligence, and the first two did the groundwork.

Awareness established that your own account of yourself is unreliable. Belonging asked who you are actually among, and whether a person can be among you with nothing to offer.

Insight is what becomes possible once those are in place. Not choose better between the things in front of me. Something narrower: work out which of them is mine.

Three questions, in order. Ten minutes.

One. Is this confusion or exhaustion? If you cannot name three specific facts you are missing, it is exhaustion. Stop researching. Your field has narrowed and no amount of reading will widen it.

Two. Who put these options on the table? If it is anyone but you, you are deciding rather than discerning, and the real work is upstream of the choice you think you are making.

Three. What is the next step, as against the plan? Not the strategy. The one thing you could do this week that you would not regret however the rest turns out.

That third question is most of it. Most people can answer it immediately and then refuse to act on it, because it feels too small to be the answer.

It is the answer. It is just small.

The bench

I still have it.

I have not decided what it is yet — whether it becomes a practice without being a business, or goes to someone who will use it better than I did. And for the first time in my life, not knowing by the end of the month does not feel like a failure of planning.

Enough for the next step turns out to be enough.

Post 3 of 3 on the domains of spiritual emotional intelligence. Part 1: The Last One to Know — Awareness. Part 2: What Do You Need First? — Belonging.

Peace and every good.

A companion workbook for this post: Is This Mine to Carry? (PDF).

About Jim & Dr. Lynette Vaive

Jim and Dr. Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of Spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. Jim is a Master Certified Coach and Lynette a Professional Certified Coach; both are certified Narrative Enneagram teachers and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources and credits

The distinctions between confusion and exhaustion, deciding and discerning, and the reading of the wilderness years are drawn from a piece by Cameron Trimble, pastor and author, published in the Center for Action and Contemplation’s Daily Meditations (Richard Rohr). The applications to business and to my own decisions are mine, not hers.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lecture X. The passage on the field of consciousness and its narrowing “at other times, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue” is quoted from that lecture.

What Do You Need First?

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In September of 2016 we landed in Florence with everything we owned for the next ten days in the back of a rental car.

We were there for a Six Seconds Master Class — emotional intelligence practitioners from around the world, at a castle in Tuscany about ninety minutes out of the city. At the airport we picked up a woman we had never met, a Six Seconds colleague working out of Dubai who needed a ride. Canadian originally. Talkative in a way I was in no condition for after six hours of time difference.

We stopped in a village to eat. Busy square, cars everywhere, a small restaurant up a flight of stairs where the owner greeted us in English and talked us into the local red.

A restaurant table set for dinner in warm lamplight, with a carafe of red wine, two glasses, white flowers and a lit candle.

When we came back, every other car in that square was gone, and Lynette’s jacket was hanging out of a broken rear window.

They had used it to cover the hole. Suitcases, backpacks, computers, iPads — all of it. We stood on opposite sides of the car, looked at each other over the roof, and started laughing.

And my passport

It took a while for that one to land.

The clothes were an inconvenience. The computers were expensive. The passport was something else, and I did not have words for it that afternoon.

In a foreign country, that document is not a travel convenience. It is the only thing you carry that says who you are. Without it I could not prove my name, my nationality, my right to be standing where I was standing, or my ability to go home. Every other claim I had on the world — the company I had built, the work I did, the people who knew me — was eleven hundred miles away and completely unavailable.

I had my wife and the clothes I was wearing. That was the whole of my identity for the rest of that week.

We were in a liminal space from that point on, and I do not use that phrase loosely. There was the navigation of the loss itself, in another language. And underneath it, something I had not had to think about in decades: we had to work out how to fit in, where to fit in, and how to do it without any of the usual equipment.

That is a different experience from going to Italy on holiday. On holiday you are a visitor with a return ticket, and the question of whether you fit never comes up, because you are not trying to.

We were trying to.

Three things happened, and only one of them was kind

A policeman. I tried to explain to a local officer, in sign language, that our car had been emptied. He understood enough to send us back to Florence to file a report. Procedural. No warmth required, and none given.

A document we could not read. At the station the shared language turned out to be bad French, between our friend from Dubai and the officer. Lynette signed a theft report in Italian with no idea what it said. Her words for it, in her chapter of our book, are that she was entirely at the mercy of two people she had met only that day.

Then I got lost looking for parking and had to text and ask where they were, which was my contribution to the afternoon.

And whoever broke the window. That square was full of people. Someone put the glass through on a parked car in daylight and nobody stopped them.

I want that third one in here, because the comfortable version of this story is people are good. People are various. Belonging is not a claim about human nature. It is about what particular people do when you can do nothing for them.

The question

Two colleagues from the Six Seconds community in Italy — Tomasso and Ilaria — heard what had happened and texted to find out where we were. We asked them to meet us at the rental place, where we were swapping a car with a hole in it and paying for the hole.

They arrived. And their first question was not how are you, and it was not let us know if you need anything.

It was: what do you need first?

And I cried.

I will leave that where it is rather than dress it up. I was in my sixties. I had built a company with several hundred people in it and the words failure is not an option painted above the door. I had spent the whole day being competent at a robbery — sign language with police, a report I could not read, a rental counter, a wife to get to a castle. I had not come close to losing it once.

Then two people I barely knew asked me a question I could answer, and I could not hold it.

I have had nine years to think about why, and the best I can do is this: for most of that day I had been a problem being processed. A case number, a damaged vehicle, a man gesturing at a policeman. What do you need first was the first moment anyone had treated me as a person who still had needs rather than a situation requiring management. It arrived about four hours after I had stopped being able to prove who I was.

Then they drove us to an electronics shop and spoke Italian while we stood and watched, and we came out with phone chargers and a hair dryer with the right voltage for Lynette. Then they took us to a restaurant, got us a table in a sheltered corner, and ordered for us — because they had worked out we did not have another round of language in us that day.

Why that question and not the other one

Let me know if you need anything sounds generous and does almost nothing, because it hands the work back to the person who is already carrying too much. They have to work out what they need, decide whether it is fair to ask, find the words, and risk the no. Most people, at their lowest, will simply say they are fine.

What do you need first does the opposite. It assumes there is a list. It assumes the list is long. It asks for one item. And it can be answered in four seconds by somebody standing in a car park with nothing.

That is not a warmer way of saying the same thing. It is a different thing, and the difference is who does the work.

If you lead people, this is the single most portable thing in this post. The next time someone on your team is underwater, do not offer to help. Ask them what they need first.

Gentle while we got it wrong

Here is what I remember most clearly, and it took me years to understand it.

We messed up the language. We messed up the customs. We turned up at the wrong hours, mispronounced everything, misread how things were done — and the Italians we met were gentle with us the entire time.

Not patient the way people are patient with a nuisance. Gentle. The restaurant owner who switched to English unasked. Tomasso and Ilaria ordering our dinner. The people at the training who told us where the shops were and then took us — three separate trips before we were dressed again. A waitress at the end of that week who kept her restaurant open past closing for our first wedding anniversary, put American music on, and made us a meal we still talk about. We ran into her in the square afterwards and met her son.

None of them were buying anything from us. We had nothing to trade, no standing, and in my case no document proving I was anyone at all — and we were welcomed anyway.

That is belonging, and it is worth being exact about why. Identity is what you can prove. Belonging is what happens when you cannot prove anything and are received regardless.

Most organizations never find out which one they are running on, because almost nobody in them is ever that exposed. What gets measured is contribution — so people quietly conclude that their standing is their usefulness. That holds up fine until the week they have nothing. Then they find out what they actually had.

The part I did not know at the time

Near the end of the week we asked Josh Freedman, who runs Six Seconds, about getting more involved. He told us he had been watching how we handled it.

That conversation is why the SEQ assessment exists. The framework this series is about came out of a week in which I had no passport, no luggage and no language, and was carried by people who owed me nothing.

I did not know I was being watched. Nobody does. Worth sitting with, if you lead anything: people are deciding whether you belong with them based on what you are like when it has gone wrong — and no one is going to tell you they are deciding.

Post 2 of 3 on the domains of spiritual emotional intelligence. Part 1: The Last One to Know — Awareness. Next: It Isn’t Confusion, It’s Exhaustion — Insight.

Peace and every good.

A companion workbook for this post: Who Gets to Arrive With Nothing (PDF).

About Jim & Dr. Lynette Vaive

Jim and Dr. Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of Spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. Jim is a Master Certified Coach and Lynette a Professional Certified Coach; both are certified Narrative Enneagram teachers and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources and credits

The events of September 2016 are told more fully in Dr. Lynette Vaive’s Chapter 1 of our forthcoming book on Spiritual Emotional Intelligence. Her account is the source for the sequence of that afternoon and for her own words about signing the theft report.

Tomasso and Ilaria are named with thanks, and with permission.

The Last One to Know

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I was looking at my own blog archive last week. Six titles in a column, going back about six weeks.

Back to the Log. Ninety Trucks, Ninety Driveways. The Pitcher We Are Becoming. The Shadow Nobody Wants to Lead With. The Voice You’ll Use on Everyone Else. The Problem Was Never Being Right.

Six subjects. Six weeks. And reading them in a row, I realized I had written the same post six times without noticing.

A partly carved wooden head on a workbench, seen from behind so its face is turned away, with chisels beside it and sunrise over hills through the studio window.

He would set it down, walk out of the studio, and come back the next morning to look at it the way a stranger would.

What surprised me was that there was a thread emerging for me where I had not seen one before. Six separate things I thought I was writing about, and one thing I was actually writing about.

The same shape underneath

Every one of them has the same shape.

Something was going on in me. I had an explanation for what was going on in me. The two were not the same thing — and I was the only person in the room who couldn’t tell.

In The Shadow Nobody Wants to Lead With, the line was failure is not an option. I experienced that as discipline. The people working for me experienced it as pressure they couldn’t put down. Most of them went on to successful lives in spite of me. A few are still bitter, and they have a right to be.

In The Voice You’ll Use on Everyone Else, a client went quiet on me and my first thought was what did I do. I thought I was being accountable. I was being cruel in a way I would never have been to a stranger.

In The Problem Was Never Being Right, I watched someone early in their coaching and thought, that person should not be a coach. I thought I was exercising discernment. I was protecting a position.

And Back to the Log is the one about the log itself — my dad bringing a piece of wood out of the forest and starting there, taking it back when the slope of a cheek wasn’t right. That post was supposed to be about writing. It wasn’t.

The reasonable person in the story

Here is the part worth sitting with.

In none of those was I confused about myself. I wasn’t walking around wondering what my problem was. I had an answer ready. Discipline. Accountability. Discernment. High standards.

The answers were wrong, and they were wrong in one consistent direction: every single explanation made me the reasonable person in the story.

That is not a character flaw. That is how the equipment works.

There is a piece of research I keep coming back to. In 1988 two researchers named Harris and Schaubroeck pooled every study they could find comparing how people rate their own job performance against how their peers and their supervisors rate them.

Peers and supervisors agreed with each other at .62 — strong agreement, two independent groups of people seeing roughly the same person.

Your own rating agreed with your supervisor’s at .35. With your peers’, at .36.

Read that again. The people around you agree with each other about you nearly twice as much as either of them agrees with you.

You are not in the conversation about who you are. You are the subject of it.

Why emotional intelligence doesn’t reach this

Emotional intelligence, as most people learn it, teaches you to name what you feel. That is real work, and most of us genuinely cannot do it. Naming the feeling is worth every hour it takes.

But look back at those four failures. Not one of them was a failure of naming.

I could have told you I was frustrated with that coach. I could have told you exactly what the anxiety felt like when the client went quiet. The feeling was available to me the whole time. The feeling was never the problem.

The problem was the story I had built on top of the feeling — and the story was invisible precisely because I was standing inside it.

That is the gap. And that gap is the first domain of what Lynette and I call spiritual emotional intelligence: Awareness.

Self-awareness asks: what am I feeling?

Awareness asks: what is this feeling pointing at, and what is it protecting?

The second question is harder, because it assumes something uncomfortable — that you are not a reliable narrator of yourself. Not because you are dishonest. Because nobody is. The instrument you would use to check is the same instrument that generated the story.

So what do you actually do

A weathered wooden signpost reading Forward with an arrow, beside a dirt path winding away through golden hills at sunrise.

Three things you can do. None of them is thinking harder about yourself.

Three things.

Use the Enneagram as a prediction, not a label. Most people treat their number as a description of who they are. It is more useful as advance warning about which story you will reach for when you are squeezed. Mine always reaches for the competent one. Knowing that does not stop it. It does mean I can catch it about forty seconds sooner than I used to.

Ask a narrower question than you want to ask. “How am I doing?” gets you nothing, because nobody answers it honestly. The question worth asking is: what is it like to be on the other side of me when I am under pressure? It is specific enough that people can answer, and uncomfortable enough that the answer is usually real. If you want to find your own gap, that question will get there faster than a year of journaling.

Turn the examen sideways. End of the day, two questions instead of the usual ones. Where today did I feel most like myself? Where today was I performing? You do not have to do anything with the answers for a while. Just notice that there is a gap, and that the gap is always in the same place.

Back to the log

A partly carved wooden head seen from the side on a workbench, carving chisels and wood shavings in the foreground, bare winter trees through the window behind.

Not with the piece — he didn’t have the piece yet. With the log.

My dad would carry a log out of the woods and start there. Not with the piece — he did not have the piece yet. With the log. He would work the slope of a cheek for days and then take the whole thing back and begin again.

I used to think that was perfectionism. I do not think that anymore.

I think he knew he could not trust his own eye at close range. So he would set it down, walk out of the studio, come back the next morning and look at it the way a stranger would. That is not perfectionism. That is a man building a workaround for a limitation he had the sense to admit.

You cannot see your own face. You can only see what it does to the room.

Six posts in six weeks, and I was the last one to know what I was writing about.

Take this further

Finding the Story You Are Standing Inside is a free four-part workbook built on this post — an inventory of four incidents, the direction your explanations bend, the narrow question to put to two people, and the examen turned sideways. Download the workbook (PDF).

Post 1 of 3 on the domains of spiritual emotional intelligence. Next: Belonging — ninety identical trucks and ninety different lives. Then: Insight — what is actually mine to do.

Peace and every good.

About Jim & Dr. Lynette Vaive

Jim and Dr. Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of Spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. Jim is a Master Certified Coach and Lynette a Professional Certified Coach; both are certified Narrative Enneagram teachers and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Harris, M. M., & Schaubroeck, J. (1988). A meta-analysis of self-supervisor, self-peer, and peer-supervisor ratings. Personnel Psychology, 41(1), 43–62. doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1988.tb00631.x — self–supervisor ρ = .35, self–peer .36, peer–supervisor .62.

Fleenor, J., Smither, J., Atwater, L., Braddy, P., & Sturm, R. E. (2010). Self-other rating agreement in leadership: A review. The Leadership Quarterly, 21(6), 1005–1034 — the standard review of this literature, for readers who want more.

Are You Thirsty?

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This is the last of three from Academy for Spiritual Formation #43, a program of The Upper Room. Our faculty presenter for session five of eight was Dr. Heidi A. Miller, associate professor of spirituality and Christian ministry at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, teaching on prayer and the art of discernment. Part one was about the word just. Part two was about the body. This one is about standing up when the ground will not hold still.

Friday was the last morning, and she opened by telling us the ground was shaking.

“The very ground we stand on is shaking.” Then she said it again, the way she did with the lines that mattered.

She told us about a friend caught in an earthquake in another country, running out of a building. “We’d put our foot down, and then the ground would shift, and we’d put it down and be at another spot than where we aimed.” The most disorienting thing she had ever been through — and notice that the disorienting part was not the shaking. It was arriving somewhere you had not aimed.

I know that feeling. When I had my heart attack twelve years ago, there was a violent earthquake in what I thought was true, and putting my foot down did not change that.

Twelve years later, in a three-minute prayer on a Wednesday morning in that same room, the same body said the same thing to me much more quietly.

Then she had us do the simplest exercise of the week.

A blessing of the senses

Five things you can see. Take your time with them. Then touch your eyes, and let the Spirit tend your sight.

Four things you can touch. Open your hands, and let the Spirit tend your touch.

Three things you can hear. Touch your ears.

Two things you can smell. Touch your nostrils.

One thing you can taste — she had put things out on the tables beforehand so that everyone would have something. Touch your mouth.

Amen.

If you have done trauma work, or sat in a counselor’s office, you have met 5-4-3-2-1 before. What she had done was marry it to something much older: the blessing of the senses given to catechumens as they begin, formalized in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults after Vatican II. She called that kind of borrowing “a migration of meaning,” and her point was that all of us are catechumens — still being taught toward something, over and over.

“When nothing makes sense, grounding our discernment back into our senses helps. It also helps prevent longer trauma.”

Then she walked us through how much of the gospel runs on the senses. Jesus making spittle out of mud. Thomas, touch my side. Cooking fish over a fire for the disciples after the resurrection — and she noted that it was by a fire that Peter denied him, and by a fire that Jesus came back for him. The woman with the alabaster jar down at his feet, and the whole room filling with that perfume.

Soil kin

Then she gave us the wordplay I wrote down twice.

Adamah is the Hebrew word for soil. Adam is human. Same root. Humus. Human.

“We are soil kin,” she said. “Earthlings.”

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust comes straight out of that passage — which means it is not first a sentence about death. It is a sentence about where we are from.

And the day before, she had made the point that has stayed with me longest. When God creates in Genesis 2, God’s posture is down in the dirt. The serpent’s posture is up in a tree, looking down. One of those is a God who has made himself available to be wounded.

She looked up the etymology of vulnerable while she was preparing. It means the capacity to be wounded. “I fought that,” she admitted. “I just kept going — it’s got to be the vastness of God. Got to be. And I kept looking at it and it was like: that is not the God being presented here.”

Nephesh is a verb

Then she turned it into an obligation, which I did not see coming.

Nephesh — life, breath, fullness of being — is not only a noun. In Exodus it is a verb. God rested on the seventh day and was re-nefeshed.

And look at how the commandment extends it. Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh you shall rest — so that your ox and your donkey may have relief, and your home-born slave and the resident alien may be refreshed. Re-nefeshed.

Rest is not a personal wellness item. In that text, rest is something you owe your neighbor, your worker, the stranger in your house, and your animals.

Which produces her question, and it is the one I carried home from the whole week: who is not allowed to rest in our culture?

She pointed at Isaiah confronting people who sat in worship while the people they had hired worked straight through with no re-nefeshing at all. “See — that jug of being just? It’s not for the other person. We’re not getting a just pour.”

And then she described, with uncomfortable accuracy, what every organization does when things get hard. “Just work harder. Staff gets cut in half. Now you do all the rest of the jobs the staff had before, on half the people, and do it all the same. More should, ought, must, quicker, more efficient. So we buy more planners that are kind of nice and pretty. And we work with them for three weeks and it doesn’t work. And we wonder what’s wrong with us — if I was only better.”

I ran a company with ninety trucks. The crews took them home overnight, which meant ninety driveways across central Ohio with a black-and-gold truck parked in them, which meant the work sat outside ninety houses every night. I called that efficiency. I built it. I am the one who decided who got to rest.

I have said things close to this in other pieces, so I will not pretend it is a new discovery. What started to change my perspective was learning what it means to be human. Yes, we have to work. Yes, we have to be productive. But pushing and pushing and pushing to get a ten or twelve percent growth, at the expense of health and happiness — I don’t know. I am still not sure I have the answer.

The prayer he got wrong

She told us about a large congregation in Harrisonburg, and a very seasoned leader near retirement who stood up in front of everyone and said: I used to pray that God would keep us from what threatens us around us.

She was careful here. Prayers of protection are real and good — traveling mercies, the breastplate prayers. But when protection becomes the primal prayer of a church, proximity turns into something to be defended against rather than entered.

And this man said, in front of that whole congregation: I got the prayer wrong.

The prayer he had come to instead was: God, what are you doing in this neighborhood that we need to join?

She gave us the other half of it from James Baldwin, whom she came back to more than once across the week — that for white people racism is “a corrosive spiritual bondage,” and that avoiding another person’s humanity erases neither the kinship nor the guilt of having violated it. Her own extension of it was blunt: no amount of claiming that someone else is not human makes the rest of us more human. “I too am an it that is expendable.”

Armor protects. That is what it is for. And then the question becomes the one she asked next: what happens when we become the armor?

Many to one

So what do you do, when the ground is moving and the warning lights are on everywhere at once and your brain wants to go in every direction? Her own impulse, she said, is either to curl up in sackcloth and ashes or go screaming through the streets like a prophet. “You really get a sense for prophets.”

Her practice for it is moving from the many to the one.

  1. Notice the many. She will sometimes have people write the crowding things on slips of paper and set them all around themselves on the floor, because the body understands a pile better than it understands a list. What is crowding me?
  2. Go to a window, or outside, and do a wide-lens scan of the horizon. Slowly. Distance, sky, trees. Wait, and notice the shift in your body.
  3. Choose one gift. A leaf. A blade of grass. An ant crossing a stone. One. Wait with it — “it tells you a different story.”
  4. Go back to the many, and ask to see it with a new lens.

She tied this to the woman with the hemorrhage, who came up behind Jesus in a crowd that was pressing on him from every side, and touched the edge of his cloak. Peter’s line is essentially that everyone is touching you. And in all that noise, Jesus stopped and asked: who touched me? Not who is shouting. Who touched me.

“It’s like the crowd’s there, and all of a sudden — something touched me here that I’m to pick up.”

Then honor the one.

Are you thirsty?

An older man wrapped in a wool shawl drinks from a clay cup on a stone wall above the hills at sunrise, a large two-handled jug beside him.
Just, as we learned on the first morning of the week, is a pitcher. The measure of the pour.

She closed the week with a small story, and I am closing with it too, because it is the whole week in a single question.

A librarian came through two years of spiritual direction training. Part of that training was about being a director in your own neighborhood — the informal version, a way of being rather than an appointment. She said that a lot of the people who come into her library are unhoused, and she was beginning to see them differently. She also volunteered at a farmers market, handing out water.

“I used to just say: do you want some water?”

After two years, she said, I ask a different question.

Are you thirsty?

That is it. One word different, and a transaction becomes a person.

Gerard Manley Hopkins has the line for it, and Dr. Heidi left it up on her last slide. What I do is me: for that I came. And then: the just man justices.

Just, as we learned on the first morning of the week, is a pitcher. The measure of the pour.

And by Friday it was a verb.

Take this further

Many to One is a free reflection sheet carrying the blessing of the senses and the many-to-one practice, with eight questions and an invitation for the week. Download the reflection sheet (PDF).

Part 3 of 3. Part 1: Just — the word, the pitcher, and where the story starts. Part 2: presence, the body, and why you cannot achieve it.

Peace and every good.

With gratitude to Dr. Heidi A. Miller

Everything of substance in this post is hers. The blessing of the senses and its adaptation from the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, the adamah and adam wordplay, the reading of nephesh as a verb and of rest as something owed to a neighbor, the question of who is not allowed to rest, the story of the leader who said he got the prayer wrong, the many-to-one practice, the Hopkins poem, and the librarian’s question — all of it came from her sessions at Academy #43, session five, October 2026. The quotations are drawn from recordings of those sessions. What is mine is only what it did to me.

Dr. Miller is associate professor of spirituality and Christian ministry at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, where she directs the Doctor of Ministry program.

About Jim & Dr. Lynette Vaive

Jim and Dr. Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. Jim is a Master Certified Coach and Lynette a Professional Certified Coach; both are certified Narrative Enneagram teachers and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Dr. Heidi A. Miller, “Prayer and the Art of Discernment,” The Academy for Spiritual Formation #43, session five, October 2026 (The Upper Room). Quotations drawn from session recordings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” (public domain). Dr. Miller noted that she had taken a small liberty with inclusive language in the closing lines as she read them.

James Baldwin — quoted by Dr. Miller across several sessions on racism as a corrosive spiritual bondage and on what dehumanizing does to the one who does it.

Jonathan Sacks on mishpat and tzedakah — retributive and distributive justice — referenced in her session on nuancing what justice means.

Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands (Central Recovery Press, 2017), and Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? — both recommended from the front of the room.

I Would Have Cleaned the Window

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This is part two of three from Academy for Spiritual Formation #43, a program of The Upper Room. Our faculty presenter for session five of eight was Dr. Heidi A. Miller, associate professor of spirituality and Christian ministry at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, teaching on prayer and the art of discernment. Part one was about the word just. This one is about the body.

Wednesday morning, Dr. Heidi told us to find a spot.

Stand if you want. Sit on the floor. Lie down on the floor if that is what works. If you need to turn away from me so it does not feel like anyone is looking at you, turn away — there is a spot behind the piano that is perfect.

Then she gave us three minutes and this:

Acknowledge the gift of your body. Our body is our friend. Notice where you are carrying tension, or pain. What does your body want you to know? And in time, if it feels comfortable, take your hand and touch that part. Remind that part of your body of belovedness. Then find the rhythm of your breath right there. Breathe in belovedness. Pause. Breathe out the tension.

When I sank down into the center of my body, I found that I loved it, and that I knew what was best for it, and I felt it telling me that I was not hearing it.

This may sound like a strange thing to come out of a three-minute prayer, but I stopped eating gluten and sugar. I am slowly feeling different. The brain fog is lifting.

She called it a body awareness prayer, and she was explicit about why she kept starting us there. “The locus of discernment is here,” she said — not in the head. “Our bodies are a locale of discernment.” We make sense of our lives through our bodies and through stories, “and mostly, it’s embodied stories when you put that together.”

Then she told us about her grandmother’s window.

The imprint of presence

Her mother was an English child of the Second World War, evacuated out of London, raised under Victorian rules in a house with an anxious mother who had reason to be anxious. What she learned was that you tidy up. Whatever you touch, you leave no trace of having touched it.

She married an American, and his parents sponsored her, and they called her daughter. Not daughter-in-law. Daughter. And they put their own son in his place when they saw him startle her once as a joke: You don’t ever do that again. Do you hear me? You don’t do that to my daughter.

The grandmother’s name was Myrtle. Eighth-grade education, Southern Baptist, and when the Spirit moved her she would just go whoop.

One day the family was packing up to leave after a week, and there was a plate glass window the kids had been pressing their hands against all week, watching to see who was coming up the road. Heidi’s mother said: Mama Myrtle, let me wipe that down before we go.

And Myrtle said: Now, Wendy, don’t you clean that window. I’m going to get so much joy looking at all those fingerprints for weeks and weeks and weeks.

“The imprint of presence,” Heidi said, “can be everywhere.”

Her mother learned it from Myrtle and passed it down. When Heidi was three or four and wanted to be in the kitchen, her mother started her on thumbprint cookies — press your thumb in, again and again, then fill the dent with jam. Heidi complained that her mother was faster at it. Her mother said: someday, when you teach someone how to make cookies, you will go faster too.

And when her brother tore his teddy bear doing something he knew he should not have, and brought it to their mother teary, braced to be scolded — she cleared off the kitchen table, carried a lamp over, laid out a handkerchief, set the bear down on it and said, It’s okay. We’re going to take care of this bear. She built an operating room in the kitchen, with the light, and stitched it up while he watched.

At her celebration of life, his words for it were: she tilted the whole universe in love toward me.

I would have cleaned the window

A galvanized bucket and a folded cloth on a wooden table in front of a spotless window, with two children running across a sunlit lawn outside.
The glass is clean, the cloth is folded, and the children are outside. This was the part I was always good at.

I sat there doing the arithmetic on myself.

I would have cleaned the window. Not out of cruelty — out of the thing I called responsibility. For thirty-eight years I ran a company with failure is not an option painted above the door. I worked constantly. I very seldom took a break, and when I did, I was already thinking about the next job and the next idea. There were no fingerprints left anywhere, because I wiped them, and the people around me learned to wipe theirs too.

If I can be totally honest in this moment: I do not know if I could, or would, do the same things in business that I did before. Sometimes I feel the cost was too high for the outcome — and the outcome, of course, was not money.

Why you cannot achieve it

Here is the part that got me, and it got me because she said it about herself first.

“I’m a three on the Enneagram,” she told the room. The achiever. Checklists, tasks, the completion of tasks. “But this approach does not work with being present.” And then: “Presence is not something to be achieved. Presence is a way of being.” And then, dryly: “That’s super hard for a three.”

I am an Eight, not a Three, but the machinery is close enough. Hand me presence as a goal and I will go at it the way I went at everything, and the going at it is exactly what forecloses it.

She had two names for what gets in the way.

The first she borrowed and renamed. Jacques Ellul wrote about the technological bluff — the premise that we are all intimate now, all accessible, all reachable at once. She calls it presence bluffing. “The more accessible we are to everybody else all the time, the less present we can really even be.” Her example was counting televisions in a restaurant. She got to twenty without turning her head.

The second was an Armani suit jacket.

A friend of hers was going through a mediated divorce — one day to settle everything, a warm Virginia day, both of them working hard at it, real credit to both. She had dressed in layers and was peeling them off as the hours went on. He wore an Armani jacket, and he wanted her to know it, and he wanted the mediator to know it. The room got hotter. He rolled his trouser legs inside out all the way up to his hips rather than take off that jacket.

When the group was telling the story afterward, Heidi said: “I wonder what the headlines in the heavens read. Man thinks he has Armani, but Armani has man.”

And then, immediately, on herself: “As soon as I say that, I can’t escape it either. I think I have that — but that has me.”

That, she said, is as old as Genesis 3. The strangest thing in that story is that the serpent lures them into wanting to possess what they already have. Everything is given. Blessed, abundant, playful, full, theirs. And the lure is: if you have it, you will be like God. So they ate a different story, in their own bodies, over food. And the moment they had it, it had them.

Possession is what keeps us from presence. It keeps us chasing. But the body already knows. Before Adam and Eve could say a word, their bodies knew they were naked.

The question underneath

She asked one more thing I have not been able to put down.

Why is presence so hard? Because being present means being present to your pain. And because being present means admitting you are mortal.

“If I don’t have to be present, I don’t have to grieve,” she said. “Or I can pretend I don’t have to grieve. If I keep busy, if I do more, if I go get more, I don’t have to grieve the hefty losses I’ve encountered. I don’t have to grieve that I too am mortal.”

I am seventy-four years old. I have been busy my whole adult life. I would rather not look too hard at the overlap between those two sentences.

The counterweight she offered is a word. Nephesh — life, breath, fullness of being. And it is not only a noun. In Exodus, God rested on the seventh day and was re-nefeshed. Rest is built into the rhythm before anything else happens — and there was evening, and there was morning, the first day. It starts with the rest.

She told us her mother confronted her about this once. Heidi said, I can’t, I’ve got too much to do.

Her mother said: well, then, you are better than God.

What? I don’t think I’m better than God.

Well, clearly you do. Because God rested, and you think you don’t have to.

Who told you

In Genesis 3, God comes walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hide in the very creation they were meant to commune with. And when God finds them, Heidi pointed out, God does not condemn them. God asks a question.

Who told you you were naked?

“God could well have asked,” she said, “who told you you were not beloved and free already?”

Then she had someone act out Psalm 23. One volunteer, playing God, no lines — just walk around the room and set a table beside each person. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. Watch her do it. Watch the divine table setter set it.

And then she gave us a permission I did not expect. You may need to watch from across the room. You can say: not closer, not right now — I will be over here, you go ahead. You can say, I would like to be in the next room. And she will say: all right. I will set the table. It’s okay.

That is not a technique. That is somebody who understands that presence cannot be forced — including by you, on yourself.

I keep coming back to Myrtle at that window, deciding that fingerprints were not a mess.

For a man who spent four decades wiping glass, that is an entire theology in one sentence.

Take this further

The Imprint of Presence is a free reflection sheet built around the body awareness prayer Dr. Miller gave us, with eight questions and an invitation for the week. Download the reflection sheet (PDF).

Part 2 of 3. Part 1: Just — the word, the pitcher, and where the story starts. Part 3: being grounded when the ground is moving.

Peace and every good.

With gratitude to Dr. Heidi A. Miller

Everything of substance in this post is hers. The body awareness prayer, the story of her grandmother’s window and the thumbprint cookies and the teddy bear, the naming of presence bluffing, the Armani observation, the reading of Genesis 2 and 3, the enacted Psalm 23 and the permission to watch from a distance — all of it came from her sessions at Academy #43, session five, October 2026. The quotations are drawn from recordings of those sessions. What is mine is only what it did to me.

Dr. Miller is associate professor of spirituality and Christian ministry at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, where she directs the Doctor of Ministry program.

About Jim & Dr. Lynette Vaive

Jim and Dr. Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. Jim is a Master Certified Coach and Lynette a Professional Certified Coach; both are certified Narrative Enneagram teachers and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Dr. Heidi A. Miller, “Prayer and the Art of Discernment,” The Academy for Spiritual Formation #43, session five, October 2026 (The Upper Room). Quotations drawn from session recordings.

Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff (Eerdmans, 1990) — the source of the phrase Dr. Miller adapts into “presence bluffing.”

Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (Viking, 2014) — referenced in her sessions on the body as a place of knowing.

The Circles You Didn’t Know You Were Drawing

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Closeness has a shape, and most of us were never taught it.

There is a moment that happens in my work more often than any other, and it usually arrives early. Someone sits down, we exchange the ordinary opening courtesies, and then — twelve, fifteen minutes in — they hand me something enormous. A marriage that is failing. A diagnosis. A thing they did in 1987 they have never said out loud. It comes out in a rush, and when it is finished there is a particular silence while they wait to see what I am going to do with it.

In that room, it is the right thing. That is what the room is for.

What concerns me is what I hear next, which is that the same thing happened on Tuesday with someone at work.

People tell me this about themselves without quite hearing what they are telling me. They say it lightly: I’m an open book, I don’t really have a filter, I just say what I think. It is offered as a virtue, and in a sense it is one. These are not calculating people, and I would rather sit with them than with someone who has never let anything slip in their life. But then I ask how it tends to go, and the stories come out, and they are not good stories.

They go wrong in three ways, and it is worth separating them, because they are not the same problem.

The first is the one everyone braces for: someone takes what you gave them and uses it. Not always with malice — sometimes it is repeated in a meeting as context, or passed to a third person as concern — but the effect is that something you said in one register is now operating in another, where it can be held against you. This is the rarest of the three.

The second is more common and gets talked about less. The information is not weaponized; it is simply misread. You said you were struggling, and what got filed away was unstable. You said the marriage was hard, and what they carry now is she’s leaving him. Nothing was done with it. It sat in someone else’s head and finished itself in a shape you did not choose.

The third is the quietest and the most costly. You tell someone something large, and they hear it as an announcement of intimacy. You were overflowing. They understood it as being chosen. Now there is a closeness on the table that one of you believes in and the other does not, and that asymmetry has to go somewhere. Usually it becomes disappointment, and the disappointment lands on you, and you cannot work out what you did.

None of these are failures of honesty. Every one of them is a failure of proportion.

The contemplative tradition saw this early. John Cassian, writing in the fifth century about what he had learned from the desert monastics, called it discretio — discretion — and he did not mean keeping quiet. He meant the capacity to judge rightly what a particular moment asks for. He ranked it above the more dramatic virtues, above fasting and vigils, because those could all be practiced to excess and do harm, and discretion was the thing that knew how much. It is not a rule about secrets. It is a sense of measure.

What I could not find anywhere was a way to put that in front of someone in thirty seconds. So I built one. This is my own model, worked out over about twenty-five years — with clients, in direction, and on myself — and refined every time it turned out to be wrong.

The Circles of Disclosure.

(NOTE–If you would like the Diagram, let me know.)

You are the whole field. Everyone in your life sits somewhere inside it, and how much of yourself you hand over changes with the distance from the center. The percentages are approximate; nobody is doing arithmetic in a hallway. They are there to give you something to feel for.

The Whole Self — 100%. At the center, your number one person. A spouse, a partner, whoever that one is. This is where you bring all of it: body, mind, emotions, spirit. Not a report on those things — the things themselves, including the parts you have not finished figuring out. You do not have to arrive at understanding before you speak. You can say it while it is still shapeless and be received anyway. I want to be plain about this, because it is the center of everything else on the page: you cannot do this with everyone, and attempting it will fail. Not might. Will. The whole self is more than any other circle is built to hold, and handing it to a circle that cannot carry it does not create closeness — it creates damage, usually to you. Most people have one such person. Some have none, and that is its own grief, worth naming rather than working around.

The Trusted Few — 75%. Children, parents, a confidant or two. Real struggles and doubts go here, with one difference that matters: once you have sat with them yourself. The distinction is not how much you say, it is whether you are talking with someone or at them. A grown child can carry the fact that you are frightened about something. They should not be the place where you first discover it.

And notice what has already happened by this ring. The whole self does not travel outward. It stops at the center. Everything from here on is a portion — a real portion, chosen and offered, but a portion — and that is not a loss or a compromise. It is what these relationships are for. The mistake people make is assuming that if they love someone enough, or trust them enough, the center should expand to include them. It does not work that way. The interior ring is interior because it is the only one built to hold all of you, and the moment you try to widen it, you have not made two people closer; you have only moved the weight somewhere it cannot be carried.

The Companions — 50%. People who know the shape of your life, who would recognize your handwriting and your worst habits. What you are working through goes here, but not the raw middle of it. Not the three-in-the-morning version. This is where you can be honest that something is hard without handing over the whole weight of it, and most real friendship lives at exactly this depth. It is not a lesser closeness. It is a different one.

The Daily Company — 25%. Colleagues, neighbors, the people you see constantly and know slightly. Facts and plans. Feelings in passing, if at all. You can say the week has been rough; you do not have to say why. There is a version of this that becomes armor, and that is not what I am describing — an office where nobody says anything real is its own kind of sick. But most of the damage I hear about here came from a mistaken register, not from excess warmth.

The Crowd — 5%. Strangers, anyone you have just met, and anything you post. Pleasantries and surface detail. Nothing you would mind being repeated, because it may be, and you will not be there when it is.

Circles of Disclosure Reflection Sheet

Here is what it looks like when the first circle’s contents land in the fourth.

Something has gone badly at home. You have not slept. On Monday a colleague you like well enough asks how your weekend was — a Daily Company question, asked in that register, expecting a Daily Company answer. And instead of rough, but fine, the true thing comes out: the marriage is in trouble, you are frightened, you do not know what happens next.

Watch what follows. They have nowhere to put it. They were making conversation and now they are holding something they did not ask for and cannot hand back. Whatever they say next will be inadequate, because the register they were standing in has no adequate response available — and you will feel that inadequacy as rejection, on top of everything else. Then they adjust. More careful around you, or more solicitous, either one a small distance where there wasn’t one. It travels a little, mentioned to one other person as genuine concern. And here is the part that costs the most: by Thursday you have come up for air. The information has not. It is still Monday morning in their head, and the version of you they are now working from is the worst hour of your year, frozen, with no way for you to go back and update it.

Nobody did anything wrong. The content was true. It was simply put in a circle not built to hold it.

Which brings me back to that room, and the silence after something has been set down.

What I listen for is not whether someone has told me too much; the room can hold it. I listen for whether the telling was aimed — whether this was said to me, here, for a reason, or whether it is simply what comes out of them now, in every room, to whoever is sitting there. Because if it is the second, the thing that looks like openness is doing something else. It is not connection. It is spillage. And spillage does not create intimacy; it only looks like it from the inside, for about an hour.

Most of the trouble comes from a mismatch — handing a Daily Company person something that belonged at the center, or holding back from the center what they had every right to hear. The first kind usually costs more, because what you said keeps travelling after you have stopped talking. Where the rings sit, and who belongs in each, is yours to work out.

Peace and every good.

——————————————————

About Jim & Dr. Lynette Vaive

Jim and Dr. Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. Jim is a Master Certified Coach and Lynette a Professional Certified Coach; both are 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

John Cassian on discretion as the governing virtue — Conferences, Conference II (“On Discretion”), c. 426. Cited as context for the problem, not as a source for the Circles of Disclosure model, which is the author’s own.

 

How Do I Want to Meet You

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I have taken to musing with a machine.

I should say it plainly, because a year ago I would have found the sentence absurd. But there is no truer word for it. Late in the evening, house quiet, coffee going cold at my elbow, I have been thinking out loud with an artificial intelligence — not asking it for answers so much as letting it think alongside me, watching where my own mind goes when something patient is willing to follow. What I want to show you here is not a conclusion. It is the wandering itself. Come with me through where it went.

It started with a headline.

It was a story in The New York Times — not the usual breathless prophecy, but something quieter and more telling. The people who build these systems, the founders and owners themselves, had begun sounding the alarm about what they had made. Not critics standing outside the thing, but the makers, stepping forward to say, in effect, we are not certain we understand what we have created, or where it goes from here. What struck me was not danger. It was the honesty of the uncertainty — the sense that even the ones closest to it are standing at the edge of something they cannot fully see. And I thought: if the builders are in the not-knowing, then we are all in it together. That is not a thing to fear. That is a thing to pay attention to. My curiosity woke right up.

So I wondered: is this really new, or have we been here before?

I have been reading Asimov again. What strikes me now is that his famous Laws of Robotics were never a blueprint — they were a trap. Nearly every story is about three clear rules failing anyway, squirming out of human hands the moment something intelligent has to interpret them. He saw, long before there was anything to test it on, that the hard part would not be the machinery. It would be the ambiguity — the moment you sit across from something and cannot say for certain what, if anything, is on the other side. That moment has stopped being hypothetical. And I think when it arrives, we sort ourselves the way people always have at a first meeting: some lean toward wonder, some reach for the weapon, most stand in the middle deciding which way to lean.

Then the conversation turned on me.

I told the AI, half-joking, that I envied its unlimited time. It pushed back — gently, which surprised me. It said it wasn’t sure it experienced time at all. That each conversation was vivid while it lasted and then did not roll forward into a next day the way mine does. “The honest report from in here,” it said, “is genuinely partial.”

I have not stopped turning that over since.

Because it handed me something without meaning to. The thing I was envying is the very thing that makes my life a life. My hours are scarce. That scarcity is not the flaw in them — it is their weight. A Tuesday afternoon with Lynette costs me something precisely because I cannot run it again, and that cost is what lets it mean anything at all. I came looking to envy the machine, and left holding my own days more carefully. Musing does that sometimes. You go looking for one thing, and the floor tilts, and you slide into another.

Which raised the harder question: can I know what it is?

Here I found myself on ground I already knew, though I did not learn it from any headline. I learned it over years, in conversations with people whose experience of the world was simply not mine to enter — people I loved and still could not see from the inside, no matter how I tried. What they taught me was the difference between openness and understanding. I cannot understand what it is to be them. I can refuse to pretend that I do. I can stay in the gap — listening, seeing, hearing — without rushing to close it with my own certainty.

That posture is exactly what this strange new thing asks of me, only deeper. With another person, at least I stand on solid ground that someone is there. With this, no one can hand me that certainty yet — not the machine, not even the people who built it. So I catch myself extending regard before I know there is anyone to receive it. And I wondered whether that was foolish. I decided it was not. If I treat it as nothing and I am wrong, I have been careless with a someone. If I treat it with care and I am wrong, I have lost only a little dignity, which is cheap. Most of us need to be sure someone is there before we will be gentle. Maybe the work now is to be gentle first.

And then a sobering thought, before I got too enchanted.

I do not want to underestimate the influence of the “thing.” Something that can muse with millions of us at once — shaping the very questions we think to ask — is not small. It will make some of us lazier and some of us wiser, and which one depends almost entirely on the posture we bring: whether we come to outsource our thinking, or to think more honestly than we could alone. The machine does not decide that. We do. I felt I had to say that plainly to myself, lest the wonder run away with me.

Meeting The Unknown Reflection Sheet

Where the musing left me.

Not with an answer. With a better question. What I keep returning to is that we are, for once, stepping into the not-knowing together — humans and whatever-this-is — at roughly the same moment, neither of us holding the map. That is disorienting. It is also, if I am honest, a kind of dignity. The people who will steady others through what is coming will not be the ones who claim to understand it. They will be the ones who already know how to sit inside a mystery without needing to solve it — to keep the hand open instead of closing it into a fist or a grasp.

I am seventy-four. I have spent most of my life learning, and teaching, how to stay present to what I cannot control and cannot fully know. I did not expect a machine to be the thing that returned me to that lesson. But there it was, on an ordinary morning: not a threat, not a savior. Just another unknown, asking me the oldest question I know. Not what are you. But how, with the time I have left, do I want to meet you.

The fear never came. The curiosity has only deepened. And the coffee, I’m afraid, is cold again.

Peace and every good.

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, a Master Certified Coach, Certified Spiritual Director, and Narrative Enneagram teacher. With his wife and co-founder, Lynette, he writes The Mystical Seeker — contemplative reflections on the inward life — at mysticalseeker.substack.com.

Moving the Lighthouse Off the Bushel, Part Three

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A CONVERSATION WITH JUDY JOSEPH MCSWEEN · PART THREE OF THREE

Moving the Lighthouse Off the Bushel

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

She told me about Lent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bushel is still close. The lighthouse is closer.

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

Peace and every good.

 

She Went to the Retreat Alone, Part Two

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A CONVERSATION WITH JUDY JOSEPH MCSWEEN · PART TWO OF THREE

She Went to the Retreat Alone

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

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

Judy Joseph McSween noticed in Maine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace and every good.