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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.

 

Not One of the Pack , Part One

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Post One:   Not One of the Pack
Formation, a fence-free neighborhood, and the 1978 store owner who recognized what was already there

There is a kind of formation that happens not in a classroom or a sanctuary but in the open air between houses, on a street where the fences have not yet been built, where the children move freely from yard to yard and the parents know each other’s children by name. Judy Joseph McSween grew up in one of those neighborhoods in Trinidad — and when she describes it, something in her voice settles, the way people’s voices settle when they are speaking about the place that made them.

“It was fun,” she said simply. And then she told me about the neighbor.

There was a Guyanese father on her street whose daughter had died. When Judy came around on Saturdays, he called her by his daughter’s name — Lizanne — and insisted she sit down and have soup with him, whether or not his own children were home. She did not correct him. She sat. She ate. She understood, even as a child, that some forms of presence are more important than precision.

The neighborhood gave her something her household could not always provide: the experience of being wanted without condition, included without explanation, held without having to earn it.

Her parents divorced when she was ten. Her mother did not socialize within the neighborhood after that — but Judy did, independently, welcomed in every home. Her siblings did not find the same footing. The communal structure of that street, the open doors and the Saturday soup, became a kind of scaffolding that held her while things at home were uncertain. She did not use that language. She didn’t need to. You could hear it in how she described the place: with the ease of someone who knows where their roots went down.

She was a tomboy. Cricket, football, climbing trees. She gathered people around her naturally — multiethnic, eclectic, unbothered by the social categories that organized everyone else. When she was in secondary school and the country was in the thick of the Black Power movement, she invited her entire class home for lunch. Her brother came home to find this group assembled in their house and has never stopped marveling at it. She has always moved toward difference rather than away from it.

That instinct traveled with her to England, where she spent five years at university and then in her first professional placement. At BP Research Centre — out in the countryside, well outside London — she was the only Black woman on the entire compound. She noticed. And then she did what she has always done: she found the people most others overlooked. She befriended the maintenance staff, learned their names, understood their rhythms. When she needed lab equipment fixed, it happened on the spot. Her colleagues marveled. She had simply treated people like people.

In the Six Seconds emotional intelligence framework, one of the foundational capacities is what they call “increasing empathy” — not as sentiment, but as the disciplined practice of genuinely entering another person’s experience before responding to it. Judy was practicing this before she had language for it, on a street in Trinidad where a man called her by his dead daughter’s name and she simply said yes.

But it was the summer of 1978, before she left for England, that the moment arrived which she would spend the next four decades unpacking.

She walked into a small store to apply for a job as a sales clerk. The room was full of women — all of them, she was certain, less qualified than she was — clutching the classified ad that had brought them there. The store owner came out, told the room the position was filled, and ushered them toward the door. Judy turned to follow. A voice stopped her.

“You. What do you want.”  She turned. The store owner — a Syrian man named Alfred Galy — was looking directly at her. She said she had come for the job, but understood it was filled. He said: “Come with me.”

She started that same day. By the end of the week she was on the cash register. The following week she was also working a midday shift at his sister’s steakhouse. By the end of the summer, he was processing foreign exchange applications and import licences with her. He told her: whenever you are home on holiday and want work, come see me.

She saw him again just recently. He is now in his nineties. He told her he follows her writing in the media.

She named that moment as the formation of something essential: the internalized conviction that she was not one of the pack, that she should never assume she would be treated according to the prevailing narrative, that the answer to any door was simply yes or no, and that the only way to find out was to walk toward it rather than away.

But here is the thing she said at the end of our conversation that reframed everything that came before it. After spending years crediting Alfred Galy with giving her that belief, she sat with the ‘Defining Moments’ document she had written in preparation for our interview — the first time in her life she had paused to look at all of it together — and something shifted.

“It was from the day I was born. And I think that stands true for us all.”

Alfred Galy did not create her uniqueness. He recognized it. He named what was already there. The neighborhood did not build her capacity for belonging — it gave her room to practice what she already carried. The five years in England did not make her comfortable with difference — they confirmed an orientation she had arrived with.

This is, I think, one of the deepest things emotional intelligence and spiritual formation have to teach us: that much of what we spend our lives discovering was never actually lost. It was present from the beginning, waiting for the right conditions to be seen. The work is not creation. It is recognition.

In the weeks ahead, we will follow Judy through the rest of her story — the career arc that took her from industrial chemistry to a 22-acre retreat facility where she arrived alone and became both the facilitator and the only participant, and into the interior life that has been shaping everything else all along. But this is where it begins: on a street without fences, at a table set with soup for a girl who was never really a stranger anywhere she went.

She was not one of the pack. She never was.

We invite you to explore how emotional intelligence and spiritual formation can help you recognize what you already carry — at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

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 pastoral care work — including his accompaniment of individuals and small groups across faith traditions 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 also serves at Linworth United Methodist Church.



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.

The Desert and What Holds Weight

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The Desert and What Holds Weight

Part Three of a Three-Part Conversation with Eric Pennington

There is a particular kind of man who can tell you, without flinching, exactly what a decade cost him — and then tell you, in the same breath, that he wouldn’t trade it. Eric Pennington is that man. I have known him for years now. I have watched him work rooms full of skeptical engineers and rooms full of grieving people and rooms full of executives who didn’t yet know they needed what he was offering. And nothing I have watched him do has prepared me for what it was like to sit across from him and ask him to open the desert back up, on camera, on purpose.

He calls it the desert. Sometimes the crucible — the older, harder word, the one that means the fire applied to ore until everything that isn’t the metal itself burns away. He doesn’t reach for that word for effect. He reaches for it because it’s accurate. The crucible doesn’t ask your permission. It doesn’t negotiate a timeline. It simply burns, for as long as burning is required, and you find out what you’re actually made of only after there’s nothing left to hide behind.

His began in 2006. It didn’t end, by his own accounting, until somewhere around 2017. Eleven years, give or take. I want you to sit with that number for a moment before we go further, because it would be easy to read past it. Eleven years is not a bad quarter. It is not a rough season. It is the better part of a man’s working life, spent not knowing, year after year, whether the ground would ever hold again.

“You can confidently say — yeah, I know I’m in the desert, but I’m sure probably next month we’ll be out of here,” he told me. “And then it’s not. And then you realize after a couple of years: yeah. You are in the desert.” He said it almost gently, the way people describe a wound long enough healed that they can finally hold it up to the light without flinching. But I watched his face while he said it, and I want to be honest with you: there was nothing easy underneath that gentleness. Eleven years of believing the end was near and being wrong, over and over, is not a small thing to survive with your faith intact. Most people don’t. Eric did.

I asked him what the desert took from him that he hadn’t expected to lose.

“A lot of that pride,” he said immediately. No hedging. No softening it into something more palatable. He traced it back through everything we’d uncovered in the two conversations before this one — a childhood where being right felt like the only available form of safety, a corporate career that rewarded the same instinct with money and promotions and the particular drug of applause, a company called Epic Living that he launched half out of genuine vision and half out of an old hunger still looking for its next hit. The desert went after all of it. “It birthed in me what I would say is authentic humility,” he said — and he meant the word authentic as a precise distinction, not a flourish. He has seen the performed version of humility up close. He knows it when he sees it, because he used to wear it himself. What the desert gave him instead was the kind you don’t get to choose. The kind that’s simply what’s left.

And then there were the mirages. I want to dwell on this, because I think it is one of the most honest things a person has ever said to me about suffering. A mirage in the desert isn’t an absence of hope — it’s hope, fully formed, arriving exactly when you need it, and then revealing itself as nothing. “You thought: I’m this close. There it is,” Eric said. “And then — gone. And another lesson to learn.” He didn’t say this with bitterness. He said it the way a man says something he has made an uneasy peace with, after enough years of practice, while still being honest that the peace was hard-won and is not the same thing as the pain having been small.

What grew in that soil, against every reasonable expectation, was something he attributes — without irony, in the middle of an interview about emotional intelligence — to Søren Kierkegaard. The idea of playing for an audience of one. Not performing for the room. Not measuring the work by who noticed it. Doing the work because the one true audience already knows the whole of your story, has already seen you at your most desperate and your most petty, and remains, somehow, still interested. I watched something settle in him when he said it. Like a man finally putting down something heavy he’d been carrying with both arms for over a decade.

This is the thing I most want you to understand about Eric Pennington: he refuses to simplify himself for your comfort or mine. In the span of a single answer he will move from Kierkegaard to the Enneagram to Miles Davis to a streaming television show, and somehow none of it is scattered. All of it is the same man, looking at the same wound from different angles, refusing to let any single lens claim the whole truth.

I asked him directly about the cost of being who he is — an empath, by his own naming, a self-preservation Four on the Enneagram, a man built to feel things at a depth this culture rarely makes room for, especially in men. His answer stopped me. “I’m an alien,” he said. “It feels like an alien.” Not with grief, though grief lives somewhere underneath it. With something closer to ownership. “I say that in recognition that I am here, and I’m here for a purpose.” He told me about a character on a television show he’d recently found himself drawn to — a figure who moves through the world differently than everyone around him, sees what others miss, is somehow both fully present and permanently a step outside. He used the word archetype without my prompting him toward it. He told me that the word “weird” used to land on him as wound, the way it landed on a boy who’d already survived more before age fourteen than most people survive in a lifetime. Now it lands as confirmation. “It added to my confidence and courage,” he said, “to continue to be who I know myself to be.”

I do not think most people get to that sentence. I think most people spend their whole lives running from the very thing Eric has learned to stand inside.

Then I asked him the question I had been most afraid to ask, because I suspected the answer would require more of him than any other question in three conversations: what is actually happening inside you, underneath, in the moment before you’ve found the words for something heavy?

He went quiet. Not an uncomfortable quiet — a deliberate one, the kind a musician takes before the next phrase. And then he gave me an answer I will be thinking about for a long time.

“It’s these notes,” he said. “If you’re familiar with music from a theory standpoint — you have quarter notes, you have half notes, you have whole notes, and then you have pauses that can be in between. That’s probably one of the gifts of music for me. It allowed me to process what’s happening underneath — that depth — and to be present with it. Because I can hold that note, and allow that liminal space to do what it does. And then play another note.” He brought Miles Davis back into it, the way he always eventually does — not the man’s sound, but his restraint. “It’s not how many notes. It’s what notes you choose. And the timing of them.” That, he told me, is the medicine. Not rushing toward resolution. Not explaining the ache before it’s finished teaching him something. Holding the note as long as the note needs to be held.

I have interviewed a great many people in my work. I have rarely heard anyone describe their own interior life with that much precision, or that much tenderness toward themselves.

We arrived, finally, at the question I had been saving across all three conversations — the one I think every other question had been quietly building toward. I reminded him of something he had told me himself: that his desire, underneath everything else, is to create things that will hold weight in eternity. And I asked him plainly: when you look back on this season of your life, what do you hope will have held that weight?

He answered slowly, on three levels, and I want to give you his words as close to whole as I can.

First — that he had been growing, across the whole of his life, into the person God intended him to be before he was ever formed in his mother’s womb.

Second — that his relationships would carry something real. That Jim, and Lynette, his wife, his children, the people he has walked closest to, would be able to say, without exaggeration: you did well there. We were helped. We were enriched by being near you.

Third — that the work itself, the podcasts and the articles and the coaching conversations no one ever sees the other side of, would have made a genuine difference in lives he will never personally know about. People who will never write him a message saying it mattered. He is not asking for the credit. He is asking that the giving was real, regardless of whether anyone ever tells him so.

The Desert And What Holds Weight Reflection Sheet

I have sat across from Eric Pennington enough times now to say this without exaggeration: I believe all three of those things will have been true. Not because he has learned to say the right words in the right order — he is far too honest a man for that kind of performance — but because eleven years in a desert burned away everything in him that wasn’t load-bearing, and what is left underneath is, simply, real. The boy who once watched his own life happen to him from a small distance, who found a lifeline in a hymn and a jazz record at thirteen, who carried a brother’s worst day into a school hallway where everyone already had a story about him, who chased the applause until it stopped feeding him, who walked eleven years of mirages and came out still able to play for an audience of one — that boy became, against very long odds, an extraordinary man. I am grateful to call him my friend. I think, by the time you finish reading this, you may understand why.

Where this meets you: what are you building right now that you hope will still mean something in a room you will never enter?

Peace and every good.

About the Author

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, where he and his wife Lynette help individuals, leaders, and teams grow through emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and contemplative spiritual formation. He writes at The Mystical Seeker on the inward life that makes the outward work possible.

Found, Not Searching

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Part Two of a Three-Part Conversation with Eric Pennington

Eric Pennington was bored out of his mind in a conference room.

He’ll tell you that himself, with no embarrassment about it. He was sitting with a room full of division presidents, listening to the same conversation he’d already sat through three years earlier — the fiftieth replay of it, by his count — and something in him wanted to stand up and bang the table. Am I alone here? Is anyone else feeling like this is insanity?

He didn’t bang the table. But a thought arrived that wouldn’t leave: I need to live an epic life. Not because his life was in danger, exactly, but because it was the opposite of danger — it was sameness, dressed up as stability, and he could feel himself going numb inside it. He sat with that thought until it turned into a sentence: human beings should be living an epic life. Therefore — Epic Living.

That’s the company’s origin story, and it’s a good one. But Eric is quick to tell you it wasn’t as clean as it sounds. Underneath the noble language he could put around it — doing the work he loved, getting paid for it, helping people live more fully — there was older wiring still running. “I still was carrying some of that baggage,” he told me, “of, well, hey, if I write this cool little thing and people give me likes, it means there’s the applause, right?”

The applause. He named it without flinching, which is its own kind of courage. Eric grew up needing to be right, needing to get it right, carrying a private rule that failure simply wasn’t an option — and in corporate America, that wiring gets rewarded constantly. Deliver results, get the applause, get the money, get the promotion, and start quietly believing the applause is the validation, rather than just the echo of it. “What a drug,” he said. “I took it and I interpreted it as — wow, look what I did, look how they’re applauding. Therefore let me do more of that so I can get more of that.”

So when Epic Living launched, it launched half on conviction and half on that old appetite still looking for its next hit. And for a while, neither Eric nor anyone watching from outside could have told you which half was driving.

Years went by. The corporate playbook — work hard, deliver, get promoted — simply stopped working in his own business. “All of a sudden I’m, boy, I’m in a desert,” he said, “because nothing I’m trying is working. It’s not like my corporate life.” We’ll walk that desert with him fully in Part Three. For now, what matters is what was waiting on the other side of it — or, more accurately, who.

A banker named Rick Maddox kept telling Eric over coffee that he needed to meet someone. He has the same view on things you do. You two will hit it off. The someone turned out to run a pest-control company, which did not, on paper, sound like Eric’s people. He took the meeting anyway — “I’m gonna take every meeting I can, because you never know” — but he told me plainly that his guard was up. He’d been burned before by collaboration talk that turned into asking for money and then quietly going a different direction. He and Jim Vaive shared a panel at Franklin University on employee engagement, enjoyed it, and Eric still didn’t trust it. Coffee got suggested. He said sure, sure, while privately thinking maybe, I don’t know.

Then Jim said, wait — I want you to meet my wife, Lynette.

“I turned around,” Eric said. “You introduced me. I looked Lynette in the eyes. And that’s how I got found.” Not “found it.” Found. He’s specific about the word, because at the time he wasn’t thinking emotional intelligence, I see the light. It felt more like being stopped. “It was like God was saying, don’t go anywhere. Don’t go anywhere.” One conversation led to another, and somewhere in the accumulation of them, he started to understand what emotional intelligence actually was and what it could touch — not as a concept he went looking for, but as something that had apparently been looking for him.

I asked him what that reframe — emotions as a form of data, rather than a threat to manage — actually unlocked in him. His answer was simple enough to sit with for a while: “I could give my emotions the mic. I didn’t need to run the other way.” For a man who’d spent his life managing, controlling, deciding what to keep and what to give away, that was a different operating system entirely. The early going was hard, he admitted, because some of what surfaced was tied to things from a long way back. But what he found, eventually, was that none of it was trying to hurt him. “Even anger and frustration — all the ones we consider negative — they weren’t trying to hurt me. They were just trying to get my attention. To give me some good data about what was going on inside my head.”

That shift shows up now in a quieter, daily place: a practice of prayer first thing in the morning, before email, before the day gets its hooks in — asking, in his words, for the wisdom and understanding to show up in the world the way he’s meant to. He told me that in recent years the prayer has changed shape. It used to be oriented around having the answer — for his son, for his friends, here’s what I think you should do. Now it’s oriented toward something closer to surrender: I want to play the role God has intended me to play in their lives, not the role he’d assign himself if left to his own certainty.

He admitted that takes courage, because it means his ego has to sit down. He gave me an example without my having to dig for it — a moment at a coffee shop with Chamber of Commerce leaders, where Jim offered six months of free work on the spot. Eric sat next to him doing the math in his head, screaming internally: we are not in a position to be doing things for free. He didn’t say it out loud. He let it ride. Jim told him afterward, trust me, this will produce later. It turned out to be one of the best decisions the partnership made — the relationship eventually returned far more than the free months had cost. “That’s a long way of saying yeah, it did take courage,” Eric said, “because the courage is — I’m going to align myself with what God wants to accomplish in that relationship, versus my own certainty about what I thought was right.”

Before Eric became part of spirit of EQ, he’d already put two books into the world — Waking Up in Corporate Americaand The Well-Being Guide — each written from inside the decade of searching and rebuilding that preceded this partnership. They mark the distance he’d already traveled before any of us started walking together. One names the realization. The other hands someone a map. I asked him what changed in between. “I started discovering that leadership wasn’t just confined to inside the walls of corporate America,” he said. “In order to be the kind of leader people want to follow, you have to be healthy in a multitude of areas.” He’d lived that before he ever wrote it down.

And then there’s the podcast — seven seasons now, co-hosted with Jeff, conversations with corporate leaders, a police chief, an AI researcher, a sabbatical coach, even an episode where Eric talked openly about his son’s accident. I asked what a recurring, public practice of talking about emotional intelligence has done to him that private coaching never could. “I feel like I’m at home with me,” he said. “I’m closest to who I truly am when I’m doing it.” That public practice, he said, has been part of what gave him the courage to talk about harder things out loud — and it’s sharpened something else in him too: a hunger for other people’s stories, not just his own.

Found not Searching Reflection Sheet

What strikes me, sitting with all of this, is how little of it Eric went looking for on purpose. The company name arrived as a thought in a boring meeting. The marriage of emotional intelligence and faith arrived through a banker’s hunch and a held gaze across a room. Even the humility cost him something he didn’t choose to lose — it was stripped, not surrendered willingly, the way most real growth seems to be. He spent years thinking he was building a career. It turns out he was being found.

Where this meets you: somewhere in your own life, the thing you needed most probably didn’t arrive because you went searching for it — it arrived because you finally stopped running fast enough to miss it.

Next time, in Part Three: the ten-year desert Eric calls the crucible — what it stripped away, what it left behind, and what he’s discovered about the things that will hold weight in eternity.

Peace and every good.

About the Author

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, where he and his wife Lynette help individuals, leaders, and teams grow through emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and contemplative spiritual formation. He writes at The Mystical Seeker on the inward life that makes the outward work possible.

Jesus and the Gift of Music

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Part One of a Three-Part Conversation with Eric Pennington

There’s a particular kind of loneliness in watching your own life happen to you. Eric Pennington knows it from the inside. As a boy, he remembers feeling almost outside himself — like he could watch young Eric move through his days, present in his own body but somehow also a few feet to the side of it, observing. Not constantly. Not dramatically. Just enough, and just often enough, that he noticed.

He doesn’t call it an out-of-body experience, exactly, though he understands why that’s the word people reach for. It’s closer to a kind of early vigilance — the watchfulness of a kid trying to make sense of a house that didn’t explain itself.

 

His parents, he suspects — though neither ever sat for a formal assessment — were both Nines on the Enneagram. The Peacemakers. Which meant, in practice, a house full of quiet. Not unkind quiet. Just unexplained quiet. “They’re just not talking,” he told me, “and you’re kind of left with — as a kid, I felt like I was left with question marks.” There was dysfunction underneath that silence, but a child doesn’t have the architecture yet to name it. He just keeps moving. Survives the day. Doesn’t ask why.

Then he turned twelve, then thirteen, and the questions he didn’t have language for started arriving anyway. Something cracked open in his family that year — the kind of rupture that becomes public in a way a kid never asked for, the kind that follows you into a new school year whether you’re ready or not. What matters for where we’re going today is what happened underneath it, at the same time, almost on top of it.

Eric gave his life to Christ in that window.

And within the same season — maybe eight months, maybe a year on either side — music became something more than background noise. “Jesus and the music was like a lifeline,” he told me. “The hope. The belief that I could navigate life in a way where I wouldn’t necessarily fall into the traps of a lot of my family — drugs, alcohol, prison. That’s kind of how I anchored myself. In those two things.”

Not one. Two. Faith and music, arriving together, doing something neither could have done alone.

I asked him about an archetype he’s mentioned to me more than once — Miles Davis. Not as a musician he simply admired, but as something closer to a mirror. His answer surprised me a little. “I really found Miles Davis’s music to be rather boring,” he said. It wasn’t the sound that hooked him. It was the shape of the career underneath it. Davis spent years doing it one way, then reinvented the whole thing and spent the next stretch doing it completely differently. A chameleon. Restless. Unwilling to stay put in a style just because it had worked.

“I think my attractiveness to that was just my hyper-creativity,” Eric said. “My desire to find things that were unique and different.” But there was something more functional happening too, something that only makes sense once you know what twelve-and-thirteen-year-old Eric was living through. “I think some of that connected to the trauma that was happening — like protection. If I could find something that set me apart, that would be sort of a protective barrier from just going along with the herd.” Because the herd, as he put it, was the thing pointing. Whispering. Making him the kid everyone already had a story about.

Difference, for Eric, wasn’t a personality trait he discovered later in a workshop. It was armor he built at thirteen, tuned to the rhythm of a man who refused to keep playing the same five years on repeat.

“Jesus and the Gift of Music”Reflection Sheet

I think about that often — how the things that save us early rarely look like salvation at the time. Music didn’t feel like a rescue plan to a thirteen-year-old. It felt like the only thing that made sense to do with his hands and his attention while everything else in his house was unreadable. Faith didn’t feel like doctrine. It felt like the only voice in the room that wasn’t asking him to pretend he understood something he didn’t.

What I find myself sitting with now, decades later, talking to the man that boy became, is how much of Eric’s whole posture toward emotional intelligence — the listening, the curiosity, the refusal to let people stay invisible to him — traces back to a kid who learned to watch closely because nobody was explaining anything out loud. He learned to read a room before he could read a textbook. He learned that silence isn’t the absence of information; it’s information you have to go looking for. And he learned, at thirteen, that you can be carried by two things showing up at once that have no business needing each other — a hope you can’t see and a sound you can hold in your hands.

He doesn’t watch himself from the outside anymore. Not the way he used to. But I’d guess some of that boy is still in there, still paying close attention, still listening for the note that doesn’t sound like everyone else’s.

Where this meets you: somewhere in your own story, two unlikely things probably arrived together and held you up when you couldn’t yet name what either one was doing.

Next time: how a bored afternoon in a corporate conference room turned into a company called Epic Living — and how emotional intelligence found Eric before he ever went looking for it.

Peace and every good.

About the Author

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, where he and his wife Lynette help individuals, leaders, and teams grow through emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and contemplative spiritual formation. He writes at The Mystical Seeker on the inward life that makes the outward work possible.

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.

 

What Is Actually Mine to Do?

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In 1206, a young cloth merchant’s heir stood in the public square of his hometown, took off every piece of clothing he owned, and handed it back to his father along with his inheritance. By any reasonable business measure, Francis di Bernardone had everything: a thriving trade business waiting for him, the kind of security most founders spend a lifetime building toward. He walked away from all of it — not impulsively, but after years of watching the family business clarify, with increasing precision, exactly what it would never let him become. What’s left of that decision eight hundred years later isn’t a religious footnote. It’s a case study in founder clarity, and it still has something to say to anyone running an organization, a team, or a life.

The part of the story that gets skipped is what came after the dramatic exit: an organization Francis built from nothing grew faster than he could govern it. Within a couple of decades, what had started as a handful of men with no property and no plan had become a sprawling order with thousands of members, regional factions, and a leadership structure that increasingly made decisions Francis himself disagreed with. He spent his final years watching his own creation drift toward exactly the kind of institution he’d founded it to not be — more land, more rules, more permanence, less of the original bare-bones mission. Every founder who’s watched a board vote to “professionalize” something that was supposed to stay small and sharp will recognize the feeling. Mission drift doesn’t usually arrive as a hostile takeover. It arrives as a series of individually reasonable decisions, made by good people, that add up to a different company than the one you started.

Clare of Assisi fought a longer and more deliberate version of that same battle. She founded a parallel order of women and spent the better part of four decades resisting pressure — repeated, well-intentioned, coming from the highest levels of church leadership — to accept property and guaranteed income for her community’s protection. Multiple popes encouraged her to take it. The logic was sound by any normal organizational standard: own assets, secure your future, reduce your risk. She refused, on the grounds that owning nothing on purpose was the entire point, the thing that kept the mission honest. She got special permission to keep her order poor by choice rather than poor by accident, and the fight took most of her adult life. She won it two days before she died. It’s hard to think of a cleaner example of a founder protecting the model against the very investors trying to help her scale it.

Underneath both of their decisions was a single repeated question, asked daily rather than settled once: what is actually mine to do. Not what’s available. Not what an opportunity is dressed up as. Not what the next well-funded offer implies you should want. I learned a version of that discipline running Varment Guard, and it didn’t look like anything monastic — it looked like sitting alone in the office after everyone else had gone home, going back through the day’s decisions one at a time with a legal pad in front of me. Why this, why not that. Which calls moved the actual mission forward, and which ones were just someone else’s urgency that I’d picked up and carried as if it were mine. It wasn’t elegant. It was closer to triage. But it kept a clear line between what belonged to me and what I’d absorbed because it was loud.

The same discipline mattered later at a board level, where the pulls are quieter and harder to name. A good opportunity. A generous donor’s pet project. A direction that would genuinely grow the organization while bending it slowly away from the reason it existed in the first place. Going back to the mission statement — the org’s, and my own — became the way to test whether a pull toward something new was real strategy or a distraction dressed up as one. It rarely felt efficient in the moment. More than once it meant saying no to something that was, on its own terms, genuinely good.

None of this requires believing anything in particular. It requires the same operating discipline Francis and Clare practiced under far higher stakes: ask the question regularly instead of once, and have the nerve to act on the answer even when the answer costs you something real — a piece of the inheritance, a comfortable expansion, a donor’s good opinion. Most founders never face a square full of people watching them strip down to nothing. Most of us just face a Tuesday, a meeting, a decision nobody else will notice, where the same question is quietly on the table: is this actually mine to do, or did I just pick it up because it was there.

If you’ve got a version of that end-of-day question you run on yourself, I’d be curious to hear what it sounds like.

If you don’t have one yet, start with mine. I built the legal-pad practice from this post into a short downloadable guide — six questions, fifteen minutes, end of day.

Download: What Is Mine to Do? — An End-of-Day Examen

Peace and every good.

 

AUTHOR BIO

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, a Master Certified Coach (MCC), Certified Spiritual Director, and certified Narrative Enneagram teacher. He writes about emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and the contemplative life at The Mystical Seeker on substack, where he and his wife Lynette explore the inward journey alongside the work of leadership and formation.