Enneagram type 9: all things Nine

[suedehead]

Sloth is a vice. I'm ambivalent about the idea of being pleasant or acting like I don't have boundaries, and I don't think that facade represents anything that I feel internally. People that you caricaturize in that way based on a surface impression might not even like you.

[Aylen]

There are times when you look up into the sky and are convinced that there really is something more than love that matters. Things are falling apart, all the old beliefs and dreams are dying, and you can’t find any sort of reference point around which you can organize it all. What you were so convinced of only days ago has lost its meaning. You are being reassembled from the inside by the unrelenting activity of love, but in ways the mind will never understand.

Falling apart and then coming back together. Only to fall apart yet again. While it may be tempting to conclude that grace has abandoned you, look closer. For the partial must always die in order for wholeness to be revealed. While you may have a preference for flow, for clarity, and for certainty, the beloved does not share this bias, and will use whatever she must to reach you, and to unleash her allies of transmutation within.

If you remain too identified with the ‘falling apart,’ you drop into the trance of disembodiment. You lose contact with the gooey, muddy earth and with the radiance of immediate experience, becoming mistattuned to the wisdom buried inside somatic pathways. You forget how intelligent and creative it is inside you, and that you are never, ever in need of fixing. You forget that the darkness, when provided sanctuary, is brighter than a thousand suns.

But if you remain too identified with ‘holding it all together,’ you disconnect from your essence-vulnerability, from untamed aliveness and spontaneity, and you turn from the wild reality that your heart could break at any moment. You forget that it is through your brokenness that you will emerge, and that the cracks in your heart are the portals through which the poetry of your life will flow. The aliveness you are longing for will only be found in the risk of unbearable intimacy with all things.

Right in the middle of falling apart and holding it together is the secret place, the alchemical holding field of the dark and the light. The creativity here is outrageous and is the end of your world as you have come to know it. But yet here you are, called to organize your life around love, and to give your heart to others – to do whatever you can to help beings everywhere, to know how rare and sacred it is here. Somehow, you have returned home.

Matt Licata

947