Receptive Awareness
“If you would only switch on the light of awareness and observe yourself and everything around you throughout the day, if you would see yourself reflected in the mirror of awareness the way you see your face reflected in a looking glass, that is, accurately, clearly, exactly as it is without the slightest distortion or addition, and if you observed this reflection without any judgment or condemnation, you would experience all sorts of marvelous changes coming about in you. Only you will not be in control of those changes, or be able to plan them in advance, or decide how and when they are to take place. It is this nonjudgmental awareness alone that heals and changes and makes one grow. But in its own way and at its own time.”
~ Anthony DeMello, The Way to Love
In order for us to benefit from the map of our soul being revealed in this process of mindful self-inquiry, we must look up from our map and actually explore the terrain of our experience we find ourselves in.
As we learn to observe ourselves in a space of receptive awareness, we increase our capability to notice and experience our current state completely and without judgment. By paying attention to what is real and happening in this moment right now, rather than following a familiar or unconscious story we constructed at some unknown point to guard against pain, we begin to experience a shift in the sense of ourselves and the moment.
To the extent that we are fully present to whatever we find in ourselves and can let go of identifying with it being who we are, we let go of believing we are the pattern we’re locked in. We start to see the other choices and ways of being that are available to us.
As these constrictions of identifying with our personality begin to relax, our old patterns begin to fall away and our Essence -- our Enneagram type’s distinctive way of experiencing the aliveness, connection, and well-being of True Nature -- begins to manifest more fully.
When we express more fully this innate and unconditioned state of consciousness—free from the influences of the past and the defendedness of our ego structure’s perceived, conditioned self—we experience space, peace, pleasure and an exquisite sense of being connected to our full self and with the world around us.
We experience directly the splendid terrain of our soul we are revealing to ourselves, stepping further into the conscious divinity that we are, into a freedom and authenticity of expression of Beingness that’s infinitely deep, rich and nourishing.
Sounds delicious, right?
So, how do we peel away the layers of defenses and identifications that we have taken to be ourselves, that we’ve taken to be the truth of who we are?
How do we move from an intellectual recognition of spirit, to living out our truth from moment to moment such that our daily life becomes one of direct and sustained experience of our connection to Supreme Consciousness?
What does a fish know of the water in which it swims?
In order to experience life more from a place of Beingness, we must first become aware of the patterns that block us from knowing the truth of ourselves. Just as a fish simply swims without being aware of the water, we tend to operate without awareness of our ‘internal water’ -- our sensations and feelings, and the thoughts, beliefs, and unconscious reactions our ego structure creates into patterns of behavior.
Let’s explore how unmet needs and suppression of our True Nature in early childhood leads to lost connection with our Essence, with subsequent development of our type’s Basic Fear and Desire that leads us to core identification with our personality instead of who we truly are.
Unmet Childhood Needs
Just as we do now, the caretakers of our infant selves had ego structures at play with their own personal internal landscape of emotions, beliefs, and identity. They operated with their own level of self-awareness and, being human, at certain times they had difficulty coping with our needs no matter how well intentioned they were.
This was especially true of those needs that had not been adequately met in themselves. If an emotion or state of being was blocked in one of our caretakers, our infant self expressing that quality might provoke anxiety and uncomfortableness in them. For example, if our caretaker was depressed, they may not have been able to mirror the joy and delight our young self expressed at being alive. Our caretaker might react with disdain, sadness, anger, withholding of themselves, or any range of responses that our young self could only receive as non-acceptance of who we were in that moment.
(It’s important to realize that these reactions did not occur because our parents were ‘bad’ in some way, but because they could only mirror the qualities they had access to, that were not blocked within themselves.)
In response to the pain we experienced, and In order to keep our source of nurturance and security becoming upset and potentially disappearing, we began to suppress those qualities in ourselves that were not mirrored or received unconditionally.
Loss of Contact with our Essential Nature
These unmet needs and the resultant blockages to the fullness of our experience of ourselves led us to begin to feel very early in life that certain key elements in us were missing. In actuality, it isn’t that we were missing those elements, but rather that we had already began to lose contact with our True Nature, that direct experience of the Essence of ourselves in the spiritual depths of our soul.
“Essence is not one static state or experience, but may arise in our consciousness as different qualities such as compassion, peacefulness, clarity, acceptance, impeccability, spaciousness, and intelligence, to name just a few, each with a characteristic feeling tone and quality of presence.”
~ Sandra Maitri, The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram
“When we are in touch with Essence — in whatever distinctive flavor our Enneagram type experiences — we feel an all-encompassing sense of aliveness, connection, and well-being. Imagine how we feel when we are in contact with Essence—with our holy ground, our most exquisite sense of God-communion, this most amazing, sacred, and treasured experience of the Divine. Now imagine how it feels when we cannot maintain that contact, but live with only the memory of this potential, which is our birthright or True Nature. With that in mind, we can also begin to understand how traumatic it really is to lose contact with this True Nature.”
~ Katy Taylor
This loss of connection to Essence left our young self without its internal, unconditional guidance, creating deep anxiety within us. We eventually came to the conclusion that there was something fundamentally wrong with us and our type’s Basic Fear arose.
Basic Fear + Basic Desire
While the nine Basic Fears are universal and we will recognize and experience all nine within ourselves in different situations and expressions of our identity, our type’s characteristic fear is a much stronger motivator of our behavior than the others.
The rising of our Basic Fear set in motion the mechanism of our personality type, as our personalities drew upon our type and inborn temperament to develop strategies, self-images and behaviors as defenses and compensations for the hurts we were experiencing.
In order to defend ourselves against our Basic Fear and continue to function in the face of the deep anxiety we were experiencing, a Basic Desire emerged.
Type 1: fear of being bad, corrupt, evil or defective → desire to have integrity
Type 2: fear of being unworthy of being loved → desire to be loved
Type 3: fear of being worthless or without inherent value → desire to be valuable
Type 4: fear of being without identity or personal significance → desire to find myself and my significance
Type 5: fear of being useless, incapable, or incompetent → desire to be competent
Type 6: fear of being without support or guidance → desire to be secure and supported
Type 7: fear of being deprived or trapped in pain → desire to be happy
Type 8: fear of being weak, hurt or controlled by others → desire to be strong and protect oneself
Type 9: fear of loss of connection, of fragmentation → desire to be at peace
Our Basic Desire is what we believed would make us okay and eliminate the pain of separation from our True Nature. It is what our ego self is always striving after, in its desire to regain contact with Essence. The entire feeling and tone of our personality emerges out of this dynamic between fear and desire.
Core Identifications and Self-Image
Of course, there is nothing wrong with our Basic Desire, for it represents a legitimate universal human need. Problems arise in that when we pursue its fulfillment unconsciously through the conditioned self and its habitual reactions to what is occurring within us in the moment, our behaviors are self-defeating in their misguided attempts to keep us from feeling the underlying fear and anxiety. When the pursuit is excessive, it causes our other legitimate human needs to begin to suffer and we become unhealthy and self-destructive in how we express ourselves.
As we continue to pursue our Basic Desire in our attempt to escape our Basic Fear, our personality identifies more and more powerfully with a certain set of qualities and coping strategies that seem to serve our pursuit to “be okay” and protect us from our childhood wounds.
But as the defenses and coping strategies our ego uses to try to connect again to Essence become more structured, we become further blocked from experiencing our true nature.
So, just as a cast that is no longer needed to protect a healing bone only serves to impede the body’s full range of motion, we must begin to dismantle this identified “cast” of personality that keeps us from the fullness of who we truly are.
Opening to Our Full and True Self
Unlike what our ego believes, it is not our role to repair or transform ourselves. Indeed, one of the major obstacles to transformation is the idea that we can "fix" ourselves. That is a lie the ego has bought into in its effort to find its way out of the pain of separation, back to the perfection and wholeness experienced as Essence.
As a child, we were programmed to believe we had to be better or different from how we actually were, so we tried harder and we discounted to varying degrees those qualities within ourselves that others didn’t approve of, resulting in a profound sense of self-abandonment.
When we deepen into this kindful self-inquiry process, the receptive awareness we bring to each moment creates an ever-safer space that allows us to reveal to ourselves those dark, tender parts that may have been hidden for quite some time. Receptive awareness and that energy of nothing within being unwelcome allows us to open to the deep levels where we are afraid to stay present and to really show up in our lives because we are scared that we will relive all of our childhood wounds. Afraid that if we dare to unveil our true nature, it might not be seen or loved. It might be rejected or humiliated; it might make us feel vulnerable or cause others to fear, betray, or abandon us. We fear that the preciousness of our souls will be disregarded or harmed again.
The irony (from the ego’s viewpoint) and magic (from the soul’s perspective) is that when we hold for ourselves the space of receptive awareness and loving kindness to be with what is underneath our ego’s protective structure, we begin to release the deep anxiety caused by our original self-abandonment. Our wounds of disconnection from Essence begin to heal through reconnecting to our depths, to the true nature of Being.
Using the Enneagram as a map on this path of awakening allows us to more clearly see the veils that keep us from directly experiencing ourselves in our true nature as Essence. By focusing receptive awareness through the lens of our Enneagram type—in this Receptive Awareness contemplative and ongoing—we can more easily discern and begin to dissolve the defenses and compensations we developed in childhood to protect against the pain of disconnection from our essence.
Our role is simply to become as present as we can and allow Presence to further reveal the parts of ourselves that are not relaxed, the parts that we have not fully occupied. The more we are able to relax ourselves, our reclaimed parts, our patterns—the more we become aware of the subtle movement of Presence filling us and surrounding us.
Before you begin the audio for the Receptive Awareness Contemplative, here are some guidelines to optimize your experience:
Let yourself be as centered and grounded in the present moment as you can.
Allow yourself to have an open, receptive, compassionate heart, beginning with yourself.
Allow yourself to have an open, receptive, and non-judging mind that is not busy forming responses and defenses.
Let yourself be curious and exploratory, as a child naturally is.
Anticipate personal gain or value regardless of the difficulty.
Be committed to making the necessary effort to change, since spiritual growth requires real change.
Audio Track Note:
During the last section of the recording—the contemplative portion of the audio, there will be a minute of time given after each question for contemplation. A chime will sound, concluding that contemplation and the next question will follow. Feel free to pause the track to give yourself more time as needed for contemplation or to journal as desired, then continue on to the next question when you’re ready.
