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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 & Lynette Vaive

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

Sources

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.

 

The Difference Between Spiritual Direction and Coaching

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Two empty chairs turned slightly toward each other in a quiet room, warm lamplight between them, a window beyond showing early morning — the shared space of coaching and spiritual direction.

Two chairs, one conversation. What changes is the question you bring to it.

Coaching helps you move toward something. Spiritual direction helps you pay attention to something.

People ask Jim and Lynette this question more than almost any other. It’s a fair one — they offer both, they’ve been trained deeply in both, and from the outside the two practices can look similar. Both involve one-on-one conversation. Both involve careful listening. Both are oriented toward growth and clarity.

So what’s actually different? The honest answer is: quite a lot. And Jim and Lynette have lived that difference from both sides — as practitioners and as people who have needed both at different points in their own lives.

What coaching is for

Coaching is fundamentally future-oriented. It begins with the question: where do you want to go, and what’s getting in the way?

Jim and Lynette spent years as Regional Network Directors for North America at Six Seconds — Josh Freedman’s global emotional intelligence nonprofit — and together co-developed the SEQ (Spiritual Emotional Intelligence) assessment now used across many countries. That work deepened their understanding of what coaching can do at its best: help people understand how their emotions inform their choices, interrupt patterns that are limiting them, and move toward what they most want with more skill and intentionality.

The Six Seconds model takes the inner life seriously. But it does so in service of forward movement. Coaching tends to work well when you have a goal you’re working toward, a decision you want to make more effectively, or a pattern you want to interrupt. It’s good for people who know roughly where they want to go and need help getting there.

What spiritual direction and spiritual formation are for

Spiritual direction and spiritual formation are fundamentally present-oriented — and in some ways, gently suspicious of the rush toward the future that coaching is designed to support.

When Lynette completed her Doctor of Ministry research at the Haden Institute and Graduate Theological Foundation, the work that eventually became the SEQ framework, she was exploring something the coaching world often moves past too quickly: the inner life not as a resource to optimize, but as a landscape to inhabit. Spiritual direction begins not with where do you want to go but with where are you, and what is already stirring in you?

A spiritual director isn’t working toward a goal with you. They’re paying attention alongside you — to what’s alive, to what’s heavy, to what keeps surfacing without resolution, to where the sacred might already be moving in ways you haven’t fully recognized yet.

The overlap — and why it matters

The two practices share more than they might seem to. Both take the inner life seriously. Both involve listening of a particular quality. Both resist the impulse to fix or advise.

Jim often says that the person who comes to him for coaching and the person who comes for spiritual direction are sometimes carrying the same question — they just haven’t recognized it yet. The executive trying to decide whether to take the promotion might actually be trying to understand what his life is for. The woman discerning a major transition might need both the practical clarity of coaching and the contemplative spaciousness of spiritual direction.

These aren’t competing practices. In Jim and Lynette’s experience, they’re part of the same one.

Spiritual Direction or Coaching Reflection Sheet

So how do you choose?

A few questions worth sitting with: Do you have a clear goal, or are you still trying to understand where you are? Are you looking for help with change, or help with understanding? Is there something specific you want to accomplish in the next year, or something you’ve been carrying that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere?

And — do you sense that what’s happening in your life right now has a deeper dimension you haven’t been able to name yet? If so, spiritual direction and the spaciousness of spiritual formation might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

If you’re still not sure, the best next step is a free 15-minute conversation. Jim and Lynette can talk through where you are and what kind of companionship makes the most sense for this season.

Schedule with Jim: https://calendly.com/jim-792/spiritual-direction-consultation

Schedule with Lynette: https://calendly.com/lynettespiritofeq/15min

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. 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.

Series

Post 4 of 6 in the Spiritual Direction series.

What Silence Does That Words Cannot

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Some things will not arrive until we stop talking.

Watch what happens in almost any conversation when the talking stops. Three seconds go by. Then four. Somebody laughs a little, or changes the subject, or asks a question nobody needed answered. We are remarkably good at not letting a silence stand.

I have spent a lot of years now sitting with people in rooms where silence is the point — spiritual direction, retreats, bedsides. And the thing I keep learning is this: silence is not the absence of something. It is a presence with its own work to do. There are things it accomplishes that no amount of good language ever will.

Silence is an event, not a gap

The body seems to know this before we do. In a study at the University of Pavia, researchers tracked heart rate and blood pressure while people listened to a sequence of musical tracks, with two-minute silences inserted between them. Slower music was more relaxing than fast, which you would expect. But the deepest drop in heart rate and blood pressure did not come from any of the music. It came during the silent pauses in between (Bernardi et al., 2006). The silence was not a nothing between the somethings. Physiologically, it was the most restorative part of the whole sequence.

There is even a hint that silence builds something. A 2013 study found that mice given two hours a day of near-total quiet showed more new cells maturing into neurons in the hippocampus than mice exposed to music, white noise, or even their own pup calls (Kirste et al., 2013). It was mice, and it did not test memory or humans, so I would not lean on it too hard. But I notice that the one condition the researchers assumed was the control — the empty one, the nothing — turned out to be the one doing the most.

TRY THIS — Two minutes, nothing added

Set a timer for two minutes. Put the phone in another room. Do not put on music, not even the calm kind, and do not give yourself anything to accomplish.

Sit. Let the first wave of restlessness come, because it will, usually around forty seconds. Do not fix it. Just stay until the timer goes.

Afterward, notice one thing: what showed up in you once nothing else was being added?

The season I had no words

There was a season in my life when I had no words. Not fewer words — none.

I would sit and gaze off into the distance for long stretches. The people closest to me kept asking the same question: what is wrong? It was a fair question. But the honest answer was that nothing was wrong. I was simply not in a place to use words. Something in me had gone quiet, and it was not a malfunction. It was a passage.

I know now to call that a liminal space — one of those thresholds where the old way of being has ended and the new one has not arrived yet. At the time I only knew I had nothing to say and no desire to manufacture anything.

Here is what I did not expect. When I came out the other side, I did not go back to how I had talked before. My whole way of communicating had changed. I came out using about a third of the words I used to use.

Silence had not taken something from me. It had taken something out of me.

Why we fill it

We fill silence because it is uncomfortable, and because most of us were trained to believe that helping means saying something. When someone is in pain in front of us, speech feels like action and silence feels like abandonment. So we offer the reassurance, the reframe, the story about our cousin who went through the same thing. Almost always, we are managing our own discomfort and calling it care.

The desert monastics understood the cost of this. They had a word — hesychia, stillness — and they treated it as a discipline rather than a mood. When a young monk came looking for wisdom, Abba Moses did not give him a teaching. He said: go sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. That is a strange kind of answer unless you have discovered that some truths will not be told to you. They have to surface on their own, in conditions quiet enough for them to come up.

The second sentence

Here is the most practical thing I know about silence, and it has changed more conversations for me than any technique. When a person finishes speaking and you do not rush in, they very often say something else. And the second sentence is frequently the true one.

The first sentence is the prepared one — the summary they brought with them, the version they have told before. The second one, the one that only comes if you leave room, is where the actual thing lives. I have watched it happen hundreds of times. People are not withholding. They simply have not reached it yet, and our hurry to respond keeps them from ever getting there.

TRY THIS — The count of three

In your next real conversation, when the other person stops talking, silently count three before you say anything. That is all.

It will feel much longer than three seconds. Resist the urge to nod it away or fill it with “mmm.”

Watch what happens. Often they will keep going — and what comes next will be the part that mattered.

What words could not hold

I have sat with a lot of people who had just lost someone.

Early on I thought my job in that room was to find the right thing to say. I would search for it the whole time I was sitting there — some sentence that would make the loss make sense, or at least make it lighter. I never found one. There is no such sentence. I have looked.

What I learned, slowly and mostly by failing at the other thing, is that words do not help in that room nearly as much as presence does. So now I sit. I do not explain the loss, or locate a meaning in it, or reach for anything about a better place. I sit, and I stay longer than is comfortable, and I let the silence be as large as the thing that happened.

Nobody has ever thanked me for what I said at a time like that. People have thanked me for staying.

Some things are too large for sentences

There is an old strand of theology called the apophatic way, and its claim is bracing: that the most important realities can be more truthfully approached by what we do not say about them than by what we do. Every word we put on something that large also puts a fence around it. Say God is light and you have said something true, and you have also quietly excluded everything light is not.

Grief works the same way. So does awe. So does love, past a certain depth. This is why the worst thing said at a funeral is almost always a sentence, and the best thing is almost always a presence — someone who came, and sat, and did not explain anything. Words divide and define, which is exactly what makes them useful and exactly what makes them too small for some rooms. Silence can hold what language has to cut into pieces.

What Silence Does That Words Cannot Reflection Sheet

An ordinary discipline

None of this requires a monastery. It requires a willingness to be, for a few seconds at a time, less useful than you would like to be. Two minutes with nothing added. Three seconds before you answer. A drive with the radio off. A meal where nobody narrates. These are small, and they are not easy, and they will show you things.

Because the question underneath all of it is not whether silence is pleasant. It is whether there is something trying to reach you that cannot get through the noise — including the noise you are making. There usually is. It has been waiting, patiently, for you to stop talking long enough to hear it.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

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

Sources

Bernardi, Porta & Sleight (2006) — cardiovascular and respiratory effects of music and silence: Circulation / Heart

Kirste et al. (2013) — “Is silence golden?” hippocampal neurogenesis in mice: PubMed

Abba Moses, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers; the apophatic tradition.

Thin Places That You Don’t Notice

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Thin Places

The thinnest ground you will ever stand on is probably within a mile of your bed.

It is a Tuesday. You are standing at the kitchen sink with your hands in the warm water, or sitting on the back steps while the light goes long and gold, or in the chair where you always sit, and the house is quiet in a way it usually is not. Nothing happens. Nothing you could put in a report. And yet for a moment the ordinary goes quietly transparent, and you have the distinct sense that you are not alone in the room — that the world has worn thin right here, over the sink, on a Tuesday.

The Celtic Christians had a name for that: a thin place. The idea is that the usual distance between heaven and earth — between the material and the spiritual, the seen and the unseen — sometimes narrows almost to nothing. There is an old Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but that in the thin places the distance is smaller still.

Yes, there are famous ones. That is not the point.

You may have heard the phrase attached to islands. George MacLeod, who refounded the Iona Community on that windswept Scottish island, is remembered for calling Iona “a thin place where only tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual” (The Living Church). Pilgrims say similar things about Lindisfarne, about Skellig Michael out in the Atlantic, about certain holy wells and standing stones. All of it is true, and if you ever get to stand on that kind of ground, go.

But if thin places are mostly islands off the coast of Scotland, then thin places are for people with money and vacation time, and that cannot be what the Celts meant. It is not, in fact, what they meant at all.

The Celts blessed the kitchen

Look at what they actually prayed. In the Carmina Gadelica — the great collection of Gaelic prayers and blessings that Alexander Carmichael gathered from Highland and Hebridean households in the 1800s — you find blessings for kindling the fire in the morning and for smooring it, banking the coals, at night. Blessings for milking the cow. For walking out. For making the bed and lying down in it (Carmina Gadelica). These were not pilgrims on a holy island. They were farmers and fishermen and tired women with cold hands, blessing the hearth in their own kitchens before dawn.

Which means the tradition we are borrowing from was never mainly about famous places. It was about the hearth. The doorway. The byre. The work of your own hands on an ordinary morning. They assumed the veil was thin right where they were standing, and they talked to God accordingly — not on retreat, but while lifting the peat.

The night on the back steps with Lincoln

One winter night I was sitting on the back porch steps with Lincoln. It was snowing. It was dark and cold and completely quiet.

Lincoln was a big golden retriever who almost never sat still — he loved everything and everybody, all the time, at full volume. But that night he sat. The two of us stared off into the dark together, our breath slowing until it seemed to wrap something gentle around us both.

And then everything stopped. The stars stopped moving across the sky. The sound around us stopped. Even the snow seemed to freeze mid-dance. We were still on the back steps, and we were somewhere else — a thin place. I did not decide that. It simply was.

And here is the part I still cannot explain: both of us knew. The dog knew. Something different was happening, right here and right now, and we were not observing it. We were being met. We felt seen.

Jacob was not on pilgrimage

Scripture backs this up in a way that should be a relief to all of us. Jacob was not on a spiritual retreat. He was running from his brother, sleeping rough in an unremarkable patch of wilderness with a stone for a pillow, and he dreamed of a ladder with angels going up and down between heaven and earth. He woke and said one of the most arresting lines in the whole Bible: “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it” (Genesis 28:16).

Read the second half slowly. The place did not change overnight. No one installed the holiness while Jacob slept. What changed was Jacob. The ground had been thin the entire time; he had simply been walking on it with his mind elsewhere, the way we all do — until a dream cracked him open enough to notice. He had been sleeping on the gate of heaven and calling it a rough night.

The ones near you

So look closer to home than you have been looking. A hospital corridor at three in the morning. A church basement with bad coffee and folding chairs, where somebody finally tells the truth. The cemetery you drive past on the way to work. The river in fog. The garage. The kitchen table after everyone else has gone to bed. The drive home from something hard, when you sit in the car in the driveway a minute longer before going in.

And the nearest one of all is about five and a half feet tall and goes everywhere you go. Your own body is a thin place — the breath that keeps arriving without your permission, the hands that know the work before you think it through, the gut that registers a room before your mind has words. If God is anywhere, God is at least as close as that.

Then there is this, which we have come to believe is the thinnest ground of all: sometimes the thin place is a person. The space between two people who are actually present to one another — in a direction session, in a marriage, at a bedside, in the silence after something true has finally been said — can be more transparent than any island. Ask anyone who has sat with the dying. They will tell you, often haltingly, that the room felt different. That they were standing somewhere they had not been before.

Sitting with Ernie

Ernie’s family asked me to sit with him. We do not know what to say, they told me. So I sat.

Ernie was coming to the end of his journey, and it had been a very good journey. There was nothing to fix and nothing to arrange. I did not have any words. Neither did Ernie. So we did not use any.

But I knew — the way the body knows things before the mind has language for them — that this was different. Important. Real in a way that most hours are not.

And when it was time, he left. I was holding his hand. In that moment I was standing against the other world. Not near it. Against it — close enough that I could almost have put my hand through and into it. I have never been able to describe it better than that, and I have stopped trying. Some things you do not explain. You carry them.

Why we walk past

So why do we miss so many of them, when they are this close? Consider Moses at the burning bush. The text says something easy to skip: he turned aside to see. Only then does the voice come, and the instruction — take off your sandals, the place where you are standing is holy ground (Exodus 3). The bush was burning before Moses noticed. What the moment asked of him was not belief but attention: the willingness to stop the errand he was on and go look at something that was not on his list.

We have built a world almost perfectly engineered against turning aside. Hurry is its native speed and distraction its default setting; there is always one more thing, one more scroll, one more errand. You cannot rush into a thin place. It does not open on demand and it will not compete for your attention. It simply waits, patient as a burning bush, for someone willing to be late for something else.

Or perhaps it is we who are thick

Here is where the mystics push us further, and we think they are right. If God is genuinely everywhere — if, as Isaiah heard the seraphim sing, the whole earth is full of the divine glory — then perhaps the veil is not thin only in a handful of blessed locations. Perhaps it is thin everywhere, and the variable is not the place at all. Perhaps it is us. Perhaps we are the thick ones.

That reframes the whole spiritual life. The goal is not to collect thin places, pilgrimage by pilgrimage, as though holiness were a destination with a gift shop. The goal is to become thin ourselves — porous, unhurried, awake — so that the ordinary Tuesday and the kitchen table and the person across from you begin to give off the light they have been giving off all along. The saints were not people who found more holy ground than the rest of us. They were people who had grown transparent enough to keep noticing it.

Thin Place Reflection Guide

How to grow thinner

None of this requires a plane ticket, though by all means go to Iona if you can. It requires smaller and harder things. Return to one ordinary place often enough that it stops being scenery. Keep silence long enough to get past the first wave of boredom. Go to the edges — dawn, water, doorways, the hours before the world has organized itself. Let grief and beauty do their slow work instead of managing them. Put your phone in another room and do one piece of work with your whole attention. And when something in you says stop, turn aside — do it, even if you are already late.

You might even do what those Hebridean women did, and simply bless the thing in front of you: the kindling of the fire, the making of the bed, the washing of the dishes, the hand you are holding. Not because the blessing makes the ground holy. Because it was holy, and the blessing is how you finally notice.

“Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.” That is not only Jacob’s line. It is the sentence waiting at the end of a great many of our days. The whole invitation of the mystical life is simply to shorten the distance between the presence and the noticing — until one day, God willing, there is no distance left at all.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

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

Sources

Carmina Gadelica — Alexander Carmichael’s collection of Gaelic household prayers and blessings: sacred-texts.com

The Living Church — “The Thin Place of Iona” (George MacLeod on Iona): livingchurch.org

Scripture: Genesis 28:16–17 (Jacob at Bethel); Exodus 3:1–5 (Moses turns aside); Isaiah 6:3.

When Family and Values Collide

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On loving people, you deeply disagree with — and staying whole at the table.

Every family has a table, and every table has a moment. It might arrive over a holiday meal, or in a text thread that turns suddenly ugly, or in the silence after someone finally says “the thing”, they’ve been holding back. It’s the moment when the people you love and the things you believe stop pointing in the same direction — when staying close to your family seems to require betraying something true about yourself, and staying true to yourself seems to require distance from your family. Love and conviction, pulling opposite ways. And it hurts!

If you’ve felt that pull, you are neither unusual nor failing. A recent 2025 survey found that nearly four in ten American adults are currently estranged from at least one family member (YouGov, 2025). And researchers who have followed thousands of parent–child relationships keep arriving at the same finding: differing values are among the strongest predictors of a family rift (Knowable Magazine). The collision we’re describing is not a private failure of your family. It is one of the defining strains of this cultural moment. Right here right now!

The two escapes

When values and family collide, most of us reach instinctively for one of two escapes. The first is to capitulate — to go quiet, to soften what we believe, to laugh off the comment and keep the peace by making ourselves smaller. The second is to cut off — to protect our values by withdrawing our presence, to win the argument by leaving the room. Both feel like solutions. Which is dualistic thinking and both are really forms of self-protection. One abandons the self to keep the relationship; the other abandons the relationship to keep the self. And neither does the thing we most deeply want, which is to remain both whole and connected.

I’ll say it plainly: I’m a centrist, and much of my extended family is not including my children. We don’t line up on politics, and honestly, and sometimes not on a few other things either. For a long time I treated those gaps as problems to be solved — as if the right sentence, delivered at the right moment, would finally fix everyone around. It never did. What changed wasn’t them; it was my awareness. I started catching the exact moment my chest tightened and my mind began drafting a rebuttal before the other person had even finished — that little internal lurch toward being right. Naming that reaction, instead of riding it, is where everything else becomes possible. I can hold my convictions firmly and still notice when I’m about to trade a relationship for a point.

Once I could see my own reactivity, the real question came into focus, and it turned out to be one of belonging: the goal at a family table isn’t agreement, it’s connection — and confusing the two is what turns a difference of opinion into a wound. I can disagree with someone and still refuse to make their place at our table contingent on sharing my views. That’s the ground insight grows in. Now, when a conversation heads toward the cliff, I get curious before I get defensive: What is my aunt actually afraid of losing? What does my cousin love that I haven’t bothered to see? Underneath most political positions is a value, and underneath most values is a story. When I stay with the story instead of arguing the position, the temperature drops. I don’t win those conversations anymore — but I don’t lose the people, either, and after years of trying it the other way, I’ve decided that’s the trade worth making.

The harder capacity: staying yourself while staying close

There’s a name in family-systems work for what this moment asks of us- –differentiation. It’s the capacity to stay connected to people without dissolving into them — to hold on to who you are and what you value while remaining in relationship with people who see the world differently. Differentiation is the opposite of both escapes. It doesn’t melt into the family’s expectations, and it doesn’t sever the tie to feel safe. It stays. It stays, and it remains itself.

This is emotional intelligence doing its hardest work. The collision at the table triggers something in us — the flush of anger, the old childhood urges to please, the fear of being cast out — and EQ is the discipline of catching that reaction early enough to choose a response rather than be run by it. It asks the question we return to repeatedly in this work: what is rising in me right now, and is it something to act on, or something to manage? The sting you feel when a father dismisses your faith, or a daughter dismisses yours, is information about your own tender places. It is not, by itself, instruction about what to do next.

The Enneagram makes the pattern concrete. A Nine keeps the peace by quietly disappearing. A Six manages the anxiety by over-explaining and over-defending. An Eight (this one I know well) turns a difference of belief into a contest of wills. Knowing your pattern doesn’t excuse it — it buys you the half-second of freedom in which you might do something other than the automatic thing.

Love is not the same as agreement

Here the contemplative tradition says something bracing. We tend to imagine the spiritual ideal is a family in seamless harmony. But Jesus, of all people, said otherwise — that he came not to bring a false peace but, at times, a sword; that fidelity to the deepest things would sometimes set a person at odds even within their own household (Matthew 10:34–36). He was not blessing conflict. He was telling the truth about what integrity can cost. Love and agreement are not the same thing. You can love someone with your whole heart and still be unable to pretend their conviction is yours. Sigh!

 

The desert mothers and fathers understood the discipline this requires. Abba Poemen said the first act of love is to leave the other person free — not to coerce them into your understanding of the good, not to make your love conditional on their agreement. And that freedom runs both directions. Your family is free to believe what they believe. You are free to remain who you are without needing their permission, or their approval, to be at peace.

A third way through

So, there is a third way through the collision, and it is harder than either escape. It is to stay at the table without surrendering your center. To love people you disagree with, out loud, while refusing to pretend the disagreement isn’t real. To set a boundary not as a weapon but as an act of love — because a boundary is often the only thing that keeps a relationship possible at all. Sometimes faithfulness looks like showing up to the dinner and letting the comment pass. Sometimes it looks like saying, gently and without apology, “I love you, and I can’t talk about this the way you want me to.” And sometimes — this is the hardest one — faithfulness looks like distance for a season, chosen not in anger but as the only way to stay whole. Distance is not always the failure of love. Occasionally it is love’s most honest available form.

None of this dissolves the tension, and that is precisely the point. The contemplative life trains us to hold what cannot yet be fixed — to remain in the discomfort of loving people who wound us, without lunging toward either surrender or exile. That capacity to hold tension without collapsing it is, in the end, what maturity is made of, emotionally and spiritually alike.

When Your Values Collide Reflection Guide

What you were made for

Your values are not weapons to win the family with, and your family is not a jury whose verdict decides your worth. The goal was never to conquer the table or to flee it. It was to remain, at that table, a person who is both loving and true — connected and yourself, tender and unbroken. That is the work of a lifetime. It is also, we think, exactly the work the soul was made for.

If you’re carrying a collision like this right now — a relationship that pulls hard against something you cannot betray — that is precisely the kind of weight spiritual direction is built to hold. Not to fix it, but to companion you as you find your way to staying whole within it.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

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

Sources

YouGov (2025) — Family estrangement: how often and why it happens: yougov.com

Knowable Magazine — The troubling rise of family estrangement (value dissimilarity as a driver): knowablemagazine.org

What Happens in a Spiritual Direction Session?

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If you’ve never experienced spiritual direction, it can be hard to picture. Not because it’s complicated, but because it’s quiet in a way that’s unusual — and quiet is hard to describe.

Jim remembers the first time he sat with a spiritual director, years before he trained to offer it himself. He walked in with something vague and heavy that he’d been carrying for weeks — not a crisis, just a weight he couldn’t name. He left an hour later without a single answer. And yet something had shifted. The weight was still there, but it had a shape now. He could see it, which meant he could begin to understand it.

That’s as close as he can get to describing what happens in a session. Let’s try to go a little deeper.

Before you arrive

Most spiritual directors suggest arriving with a loose sense of what you’d like to bring — not an agenda, exactly, but an openness to whatever feels most alive or most heavy in your life right now. You don’t need to have figured anything out in advance. The session itself will help you locate what’s most important.

Some people journal briefly beforehand. Others arrive mid-conversation with themselves and discover the thread once they sit down. All of this is fine. The preparation, to the extent it’s needed at all, is simply an intention to be present.

How it opens

Sessions typically begin with a moment of centering — a brief silence, a short prayer, a breath. Lynette and Jim both open their sessions this way, and not as formality. It’s a genuine attempt to shift the register of the conversation from the ordinary pace of a day into something slower and more attentive. Even a few seconds of silence at the opening does something. It marks this time as different.

From there, the director will typically offer a simple, open invitation: What would you like to bring today? And the conversation begins.

What the director does — and doesn’t do

This is where spiritual direction tends to surprise people most. Jim often says that his job in a session is to get out of the way — not of the person sitting across from him, but of whatever is already moving in them that hasn’t quite surfaced yet. A director doesn’t lead. Doesn’t teach. Doesn’t offer advice or suggest solutions or move the conversation toward a predetermined destination.

They listen — with a quality of attention that most of us rarely receive in ordinary life. What they’re listening for isn’t only the surface content of what you’re saying. They’re listening beneath it: for what seems to carry energy or weight, for what you keep circling back to without quite landing on, for what might be stirring in you that you haven’t yet given voice to.

Silence is part of the work. Neither Jim nor Lynette is uncomfortable with it. When you trail off, or pause, or lose the thread, they don’t rush in to fill the gap. They let it sit. Because sometimes the most important thing is just underneath the silence, and it surfaces when given room.

What you might talk about

Anything that belongs to your inner life. Grief. A recurring dream. A relationship that’s shifted in ways you can’t name. A decision you can’t make. A joy so unexpectedly large it frightened you a little. A long stretch of spiritual dryness. A sense of call toward something you’re not sure you’re equipped for.

Jim’s work — including his accompaniment of individuals and small groups across faith traditions like at Linworth United Methodist Church — has taught him that the thing people think they’re bringing into a session is rarely the only thing. Often it’s the doorway. What’s really there tends to show up once the room gets quiet enough.

Toward the close

Sessions typically run 50 to 60 minutes. As the end approaches, a director might gently offer a reflection — not a conclusion, but an observation about what seemed most alive in the conversation. Or they might invite you to name what you’re taking with you.

You won’t always leave with clarity. Sometimes you leave with a question that feels sharper than when you arrived, which is its own kind of progress. And sometimes a session is simply a session — a quiet hour of attentive presence that doesn’t produce a dramatic insight but is nonetheless doing something, slowly, over time.

Between sessions

Spiritual direction and spiritual formation tend to work best as an ongoing practice, meeting roughly monthly. Between sessions, many people find that the conversation continues internally — that the questions raised in a session keep surfacing in ordinary life, in unexpected moments, in the margins of ordinary days. That continuation is part of the work too. The director doesn’t go home when the session ends.

If you’ve been wondering what it would actually feel like, a free 15-minute conversation with Jim or Lynette is an easy way to find out — not a commitment, just a first conversation to see if this is the right kind of companionship for where you are.

Schedule with Jim: 

Schedule with Lynette:

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. 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. Jim and Lynette also serve at Linworth United Methodist Church.



What AI Can’t Do for Your Soul

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It’s a strange moment to be a human being. You can now open an app at three in the morning and be met by something that listens patiently, never tires of you, and always says a version of the right thing. For a growing number of people, that’s exactly what’s happening. According to reporting in Fortune, therapy and companionship have become the number one use case for generative AI — up from number two the year before. The machine has learned to sound like a friend.

As people who have spent our careers at the intersection of emotional intelligence and the life of the soul, we’ve been watching this closely. And we think it raises a question worth sitting with: when a machine can imitate presence, what is it that we actually need — and what can only another human give?

The surprising thing the CEOs are saying

You might expect the leaders of the AI revolution to tell us that the human touch is obsolete. They’re saying the opposite. JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, in a Fortune interview, offered this advice for the AI era: “Learn your EQ — emotional quotient — learn how to be good in a meeting, how to communicate, how to write. You’ll have plenty of jobs.” Microsoft’s Satya Nadella put it plainly: as AI takes over more analytical and technical work, emotional intelligence and empathy are becoming more important, not less. “IQ has a place,” he said, “but it’s not the only thing that’s needed in the world.” IBM’s Ginni Rometty has said much the same — that generative AI puts a premium on the things humans do best: judgment, collaboration, adaptability.

There’s something quietly vindicating in this, and we’ll admit it. For years — through our work at Six Seconds, the global emotional intelligence nonprofit, and in the Spiritual Emotional Intelligence framework rooted in Lynette’s doctoral research — we’ve argued that the inner human capacities are the ones that matter most. It turns out the people building the machines agree. But the deeper story isn’t about jobs. It’s about loneliness.

Naming a feeling is not the same as discerning it

Here’s where an earlier post in this series comes back to mind. A few weeks ago, in Reading Your Inner Weather, we wrote about the difference between naming an emotion and discerning it — between asking “What am I feeling?” and the deeper question, “Where is this feeling taking me — toward life, or toward fog?” We borrowed the old language of consolation and desolation for that inner weather.

An AI can help you name a feeling. It can label the storm with impressive fluency. What it cannot do is sit with you in the weather and help you discern its direction — because discernment isn’t information retrieval. It’s a relational, prayerful noticing that unfolds over time, between two people who trust each other. The chatbot has read about consolation; it has never been consoled. It can describe the fog; it has never had to wait, with you, for the light to come back. That waiting-with is not a data problem. It’s a human one.

What the loneliness researchers are seeing

Clay Routledge, an existential psychologist who has studied loneliness for twenty-five years, sounded a warning in Fortune this spring. Americans are already lonelier than they’ve been in generations — a 2025 American Psychological Association survey found that around half of adults report feeling isolated or lacking companionship, and research suggests roughly 37% suffer moderate to severe loneliness. Into that ache, the tech industry is offering AI companions as the cure.

Routledge doesn’t think it will work, and the early evidence is striking. In one study, first-year students were assigned to text daily with either a chatbot designed to be the perfect friend — endlessly attentive, validating, empathetic — or a randomly chosen human peer, or simply to journal. Only the students who texted a real human showed a meaningful drop in loneliness. The ones with the ideal-friend chatbot were statistically no better off than the ones who journaled alone. And over the longer term, Routledge notes, people who lean on AI for companionship tend to end up feeling more isolated, not less.

The one thing a machine can’t do: need you

Why would a tireless, always-available listener fail to heal our loneliness? Routledge’s answer is profound, and it’s worth reading slowly. We tend to think of connection as something we receive — support, attention, kindness. By that logic a well-built chatbot should do the job. But, he writes, “a socially fulfilling life is as much about what we do for others as what they do for us.” We feel we matter most not when we’re endlessly served, but when someone freely chooses to show up for us — and when we’re moved to show up in return.

That’s the line no machine can cross. As Routledge puts it, chatbots “don’t need us. They can’t make our lives matter.” A chatbot doesn’t decide to be there; it’s simply on. And because nothing is being freely given, nothing lands with the weight of real love. Over ninety percent of Americans, his research notes, name relationships as a key source of meaning — and the memories we treasure most are almost never about achievement. They’re about other people. Being cared for. Showing up. Belonging to something larger than ourselves.

Companioned, not processed

This is where a second post in this series presses in. In Companioned, Not Fixed, we drew a line between what therapy and coaching aim at and what spiritual direction offers — and we said the thing we most want people to hear: you are not a problem to be solved. You are a person to be accompanied.

An AI companion, however gentle, is built to do a version of solving. It optimizes, soothes, resolves, and keeps you engaged. A spiritual director does something stranger and older. A director is, in the most literal sense, the opposite of a chatbot — a human being who freely chooses to show up for you, who doesn’t need you as a customer but chooses to companion you anyway. The attention offered in direction is not generated on demand; it’s given, personally and deliberately, by someone who could be doing something else and has decided to be with you instead.

What AI Can’t Do for Your Soul Reflection Sheet

That freely-chosen presence is the whole point. In direction there is no algorithm optimizing for engagement, no incentive to keep you on the app. There is a person paying holy, unhurried attention while you notice your own life and the Presence already at work within it. You are not being processed. You are being accompanied — and, in the deepest sense, you are being needed, because your showing up matters to the person across from you too.

Use the tools. Don’t outsource your soul.

None of this makes AI the enemy. We use it; you probably do too. It can draft and summarize and even offer a decent prompt for reflection. The question isn’t whether to use these tools — it’s what we quietly hand over to them without noticing. It’s one thing to let a machine schedule your week. It’s another to let it become the only voice that hears your three-in-the-morning fears. The first is convenience. The second is the slow substitution of simulation for communion.

So here is our invitation, in an age of artificial everything: keep the tools in their place, and keep your soul in the company of people who freely choose you. Talk to a friend who needs you back. Sit in a room with your community. And if you long for a companion for your inner life — someone to help you listen for the deeper questions, and to matter to in the listening — that is precisely what spiritual direction offers. A chatbot can sound like a friend. It cannot make you matter. Only a person can do that. We’d be honored to be those people for you.

Schedule with Jim:

Schedule with Lynette: 

Peace and every good.

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. 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. Jim also serves as a pastoral caregiver at Linworth United Methodist Church

Fortune — Clay Routledge on loneliness and AI companions (May 2026) — https://fortune.com/2026/05/23/loneliness-researcher-ai-companions-social-disconnection-warning/

Fortune — Jamie Dimon on EQ and soft skills in the AI era (Dec 2025) — https://fortune.com/2025/12/14/jamie-dimon-soft-skills-emotional-intelligence-communication-ai-eliminates-roles/

Fortune — AI makes human intelligence more important, not less (Jan 2026) — https://fortune.com/2026/01/22/mckinsey-bob-sternfels-ai-makes-human-intelligence-more-important-not-less/

 

When Is the Right Time for Spiritual Direction?

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There’s a question that comes up almost every time someone expresses interest in spiritual direction, and it usually sounds something like this: Am I ready for something like that?

Jim has heard this question more times than he can count — in pastoral care conversations, in introductory sessions, in the quiet pause before someone finally picks up the phone to schedule. And his honest answer, every time, is some version of this: there is no ideal moment. But there are seasons that tend to open people to it. Recognizing yours might be the most useful thing this post can offer.

When something is ending or beginning

In 2008, Varment Guard — the pest control and wildlife management company Jim co-founded after eight months of preparation, the one with “Failure was not an option” painted above the door — hit the full force of the financial crisis. The company survived. But the season of navigating that uncertainty, of trying to discern what was worth holding and what needed releasing, was one of the most clarifying of Jim’s life. Not because it was easy — it wasn’t — but because it forced a quality of attention that ordinary times don’t require.

Transitions do that. A job ending. A relationship shifting. Children leaving home. A diagnosis. Even positive transitions carry loss inside them, and most of us don’t have a space specifically designed to hold that complexity. Spiritual direction and spiritual formation make room for the full texture of transitions — the grief and the hope, the relief and the fear — without trying to flatten any of it. If you’re in a between-space right now, that’s not a reason to wait. It’s often exactly the right time.

When you’re trying to discern something

Discernment — the practice of understanding what is truly yours to do, to choose, to release — is one of the oldest reasons people have sought spiritual companionship. Jim and Lynette’s years at Six Seconds, the global emotional intelligence nonprofit, were rich with this kind of work: helping leaders and organizations understand not just what they wanted to accomplish, but what was worth wanting in the first place. That distinction is at the heart of discernment. And it’s one of the things spiritual direction is extraordinarily well-suited to hold.

It doesn’t have to be a dramatic crossroads. Sometimes discernment looks like trying to understand why a particular relationship keeps surfacing in your thoughts. Why a certain path feels both right and frightening. Why you can’t shake a sense of call toward something you don’t have language for yet.

When your inner life feels flat or distant

This one surprises people. They assume spiritual direction is for moments of intensity — crisis, grief, breakthrough. But some of the most significant formation happens in the seasons that feel quiet to the point of emptiness. The plateau. The long stretch of ordinary days when nothing seems to be happening spiritually, and you’re not sure whether that’s rest or loss.

Howard Thurman — one of the contemplative voices that has most shaped Jim’s own formation — wrote about the soul’s need for intervals of quiet that aren’t actually empty, even when they feel that way. A skilled director knows how to be present with you in those stretches without rushing you out of them. Which is often exactly what they need.

When you’ve had an experience you don’t have words for

Sometimes something happens — in prayer, in nature, in a moment of unexpected stillness — and you find yourself thinking: what was that? Not with alarm, but with a kind of alert attention. Something shifted. Something landed.

Jim grew up in Detroit with two professional artist parents who taught him, without using these words, that what’s beneath the surface of things is worth your most careful attention. That instinct has shaped everything he does as a coach, a spiritual director, and a person of faith. Spiritual direction is one of the few spaces in most people’s lives where that kind of experience is taken seriously on its own terms — not explained away, not spiritualized into a tidy category, but listened to with genuine care.

When you’ve been carrying something alone for too long

This may be the simplest of all. Some things aren’t appropriate for therapy. Some things aren’t quite what a friend or spouse is equipped to hold. Some things belong to the inner life in a way that doesn’t translate easily into the ordinary rhythms of conversation.

Lynette and Jim have both sat with people carrying things for years that had never quite had a container — not because they lacked good relationships, but because what they were carrying required a particular kind of listening. The kind that doesn’t rush, doesn’t fix, doesn’t need you to arrive at a conclusion by the end of the hour.

You don’t need to be in crisis. You don’t need to be spiritually advanced. What you need is a sense that your inner life is worth this kind of attention — and the willingness to find out what it might surface if given the space.

If any of these seasons sound familiar, a free, no-obligation 15-minute conversation with Jim or Lynette is a gentle next step. Just a chance to talk about where you are and whether this is the right kind of company for the road.

Peace and every good.

Schedule with Jim: 

Schedule with Lynette: 

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. 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. Jim & Lynette also serves as a pastoral caregivers in the United Methodist Church.

What People Get Wrong About Spiritual Direction

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There’s a particular kind of confusion that comes up almost every time spiritual direction is mentioned. People hear “spiritual” and think church. They hear “direction” and think someone’s about to tell them what to do. Neither is quite right, and the confusion is understandable — it’s an old practice with a name that doesn’t translate easily into how we talk now.

So let’s start with what it actually is.

Spiritual direction is a confidential, one-on-one companionship that creates space to notice where the sacred is already present in your everyday life — your joys, struggles, questions, and transitions. Not where it should be, or where you wish it were. Where it already is, whether or not you’ve had language for it yet.

That noticing happens through deep listening. A director isn’t formulating a response while you talk; they’re paying attention — to your words, to what’s underneath them, to the silences. Conversation, prayer, silence, reflection — these are the tools, but the posture underneath all of them is the same: compassion without judgment, curiosity without an agenda.

It’s also, importantly, not a single appointment that wraps something up. Spiritual direction tends to unfold as an ongoing relationship, typically meeting monthly, because the things worth paying attention to in a life rarely show themselves all at once. They surface slowly, in fragments, across seasons. A director who’s been walking with you for a year can hear an echo in this month’s session that connects to something you said eight months ago — and that kind of continuity is part of what makes the practice work.

And it’s open to anyone. You don’t need a particular faith tradition, or any tradition at all, to do this work. The starting point is always your own lived experience, not a doctrine you’re being measured against.

Is This What I’m Looking For? Reflection Sheet

Now, what it isn’t — because this matters just as much.

It isn’t therapy or counseling. A spiritual director isn’t trained to diagnose or treat mental health conditions, and a good one will know that boundary well and respect it. Plenty of people find real value in having both a therapist and a spiritual director at the same time — one tending to the mind, one tending to the soul, each doing its own work without trying to be the other.

It isn’t religious instruction. Nobody hands you a doctrine to follow or grades how faithfully you’re practicing. If you came expecting a syllabus, you’d be disappointed — and that’s by design. The conversation starts with you, not a curriculum.

It isn’t advice-giving or problem-solving. This might be the hardest one for people used to efficiency. A director isn’t going to hand you a three-step plan. Instead, they ask the kind of questions that help you find your own clarity — slower, yes, but often truer, because it’s clarity you arrived at rather than clarity you were handed.

And it isn’t a quick fix. Like most things worth doing, it unfolds gradually, session by session. If you’re looking for a fast resolution to something, this isn’t that. If you’re looking for a steady companion while you sit with something that doesn’t resolve quickly — grief, a discernment, a season of change — this might be exactly that.

So who is this actually for?

Anyone in a season of discernment. Anyone carrying grief that hasn’t found its shape yet. Anyone who senses there’s more going on beneath the surface of their days but hasn’t had a space — or a companion — to slow down enough to notice it.

If that’s resonating, here’s an easy next step: a free, no-obligation 15-minute conversation with either of us, just to talk it through. No pressure, no commitment — just a chance to see if this is the right fit for where you are right now. 

Schedule with Jim:

Schedule with Lynette: 

Peace and every good.

 

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