We'll See

"Such bad luck," said the villagers when a farmer's horse ran away.

"We'll see," replied the farmer.

When his horse returned with three other wild horses, they exclaimed "How wonderful!"

"We'll see," he said.

Then his son was thrown while trying to ride one of the untamed horses and broke his leg, The villagers, of course, offered their sympathy.

"We'll see," said the farmer.

Because of his broken leg, the son was passed by when military officials came to draft young men into the army.

Responding to the villagers' congratulations on his good fortune, the farmer replied, "We'll see."

This Taoist tale came to mind when one of my clients expressed frustration with the lack of growth in his business. "I might have to get a job," he said. "Horrible!"

His anxieties brought to mind my own concerns early in my career. Seeking a logical solution may be helpful to some, but the failure of logic can be a cue to access your intuition. Maybe you'll only feel a nudge ("Something feels right about this, though I'm not sure why"). I've learned, even with experience that seemed at the time to be a failure, how important it is to keep your vision intact. Here are several examples from my own career: 

After completing my PhD at age 42, I quit the job that had carried me through the final years of graduate school (during a decade of post-divorce single parenting) because I got angry at my boss. I naively thought I could create my own consulting business but barely managed to squeak by for almost nine months and finally reached the point where I couldn't pay the rent. I was getting desperate when a friend called. One of his former students worked for Shillito's Department Store's HR Department, and they were looking for an internal training consultant. The salary was barely a living wage, I regretted having to bypass my vision of independent consulting, but I had no other options.

We'll see.
 
Among other duties at Shillito's, I was responsible for sales training -- a real stretch for me as I was shy and extremely self-conscious in front of a group. During my time there, I also worked on a project for the Director of Executive Development from the parent company Federated Department Stores (FDS), only a block away in downtown Cincinnati. He wanted a project quicky summarized in writing and I was confident about my writing skills so I'd volunteered.

Three years into the Shillito's job, I was offered a job by a friend for twice as much as my current salary, working as an educational consultant with a software technology firm. I left Shillito's feeling somewhat disloyal, but I was barely making ends meet and couldn't turn down the extra income.

We'll see.

Three months after that, out of the blue, the FDS Director whose writing project I'd completed offered me a corporate OD job that again doubled my income. He said internal policies were such that I would not have been a candidate for that job if I hadn't left Shillito's.

In the corporate OD role, I gained experience coaching senior executives in Federated's many retail companies who were being primed for key positions in company leadership. Again, a big stretch for me, not only to overcome my shyness, but learning to deal with the resistance of executives who resented me in my corporate role. Four years later, FDS was bought in a hostile takeover and their OD department eliminated. The severance pay was enough to live on for at least six months, but I had just turned 50 years old, and didn't see any opportunities in my future. 

We'll see.

A week later the Senior Vice President of Human Resources for CSX Corporation hired me as a private consultant for senior executive development in their subsidiary companies. I negotiated a contract with CSX that took me all over the U.S., yet left time to develop other business. I would not have known how to close that deal had I not had the sales training experience. And I'd not have been approached by the CSX HR person except for my work with Federated's executive development methodology, which he'd adopted for his corporation. Again, I would be sent from a corporate office to "help" individual company executives, but I now had the training and experience to quickly develop their trust.

In the early stages of my new career as an organization consultant, a Cincinnati client introduced me to the Enneagram, which he'd learned in a spiritual retreat with Richard Rohr. Fascinated with how this model gave me useful insights into my clients' patterns, I started asking my clients if they'd "barter" a couple of hours with me--I'd work free for two hours if they'd tell me their stories and help me learn the Enneagram in depth.  I eventually taught it to all of them and their teams, taking extensive notes. This was early in the Enneagram's development beyond a small group of seekers, and no one was yet writing about its applications in business settings.

Intrigued by a request for articles on business applications from Clarence Thompson, then editor of The Enneagram Educator, I contacted him, he was interested, and my articles began appearing in The Enneagram Educator. I was exhausted from all the travel required by my coaching business and my second marriage was sinking, so I retired, started a web site, and focused on writing.

We'll see. 

When that marriage ended, I had enough retirement income to live on and was free to move to Florida to be near my family, but I was devastated emotionally and not paying attention to my investments . . . until the high-tech market crash and no more retirement income!

We'll see.

This was a few years after Coach U had become well-known, and the word "coaching" had become part of business vocabulary. In another development that would serve me well, though no effort of my own, other coaches had made coaching by phone a popular option. The Enneagram was also becoming more popular, and now I was one of the few with experience in both coaching and the Enneagram.

Meanwhile, Clarence had not only begun publishing my articles--he'd become a dear friend and eventually my co-author of Out of the Box Coaching with the Enneagram, the first Enneagram coaching book published. On the strength of our book and riding the waves of Enneagram popularity and phone coaching as an option to extensive travel, I began to build a phone coaching business, even though I was now in my mid-sixties!

I could not have predicted or planned for the wavering trajectory of disappointments and opportunities that fulfilled my vision of having my own business, but on a scale of much greater experience and learning. Nor could I have known that path would eventually lead me into happily coaching by phone with clients all over the world until I was 82 years old.

I'm now in my second year of a diagnosis of autoimmune disease that's attacked my lungs, and living quietly tethered to an oxygen tank, not knowing how long I have to live or what my quality of life will be. 

We'll see.

Open Will, Open Heart, Open Mind

In his book Keys to the Enneagram: How to Unlock the Highest Potential of Every Personality Type, A.H. Almaas writes about "a Fourth Way approach of bringing the full intelligence of the centers to whatever phenomenon [arises] in our consciousness." 

Inviting awakening from the gut, heart, and head centers entails "grounded presence, openheartedness, and a willingness to experience with an open, receptive quality of mind." 

This is ancient knowledge that Enneagram enthusiasts too often miss in focusing overmuch on the nine "types" or ego ideals.

Otto Scharmer has shown a parallel between opening the will, heart, and mind with seven sacred teachings from an aboriginal community — bravery/courage, respect/love, humility/honesty/truth:

• bravery/courage (open will: relaxing into the unknown vs. fear),
  
• respect and love (open heart: compassion vs. cynicism),
• humility/honesty/truth (open mind: curiosity vs. judgment).

When Intuition Becomes Psychic

I’d been thinking about how to teach a method for heightening intuition, struggled for two hours, reviewing books and articles, choosing quotes, feeling blocked, decided to take a walk, let my mind wander and suddenly thought, “You’re trying to explain it rationally. Use your intuition.” Duh!

We’re all trained to some degree to be analytical, and consequently to doubt intuition that isn’t tied to direct knowing or experience. In her introduction to Inner Knowing: Consciousness, Creativity, Insight, and Intuition, Helen Palmer admitted that her “anchor in intellectualism made it difficult to accept even profoundly convincing intuition as being meaningful and real.” Palmer was referring to several incidents of her own inner knowing, the first of which occurred when she was deeply involved in the East Coast movement of resistance to the Vietnam War: “my imagination became as believable and solid as the furniture in my room.” She knew, for example, that a friend must take a different route across the Canadian border than the one planned and later found that others who’d taken the original route were stopped and arrested.

Many people describe intuition as a hunch based on experience. A New York Times review by David Brooks (1/16/05) of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking summarizes the author’s opening story. The Getty Museum in California was going to purchase a supposedly ancient Greek statue for almost $10 million. A team of experts with state-of-the-art measurement tools took more than a year to assure its authenticity. Then several art experts looked at the statue and knew instantly it was a fake. When asked to explain how they knew, one said he “heard” the word fresh, which seemed odd to him – on further examination he realized the statue was too “fresh” to be that ancient. Another felt a wave of intuitive repulsion. The outcome? “The teams of analysts who did 14 months of research turned out to be wrong. The historians who relied on their initial hunches were right.”

Well, certainly I encourage you to develop trust in your experience-based hunches. But the intuition that has served me so well is the kind Palmer experienced, the kind that led her to found the Center for the Investigation and Training of Intuition. Here’s what happened to me (a version of this was published in Charles Tart's "TASTE: The Archives of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences"):

More than thirty years ago, I attended a Silva course in mind training. Over several weeks we were taught relaxation and visualization techniques, including the development of a mental laboratory complete with desk, calendar, files, visual screen, a door beside the screen, and healing medications.

We were also told we would have an experience of extrasensory perception on the last day of the training, which I found intriguing but presumed impossible for me. For the final session we were instructed to bring in slips of paper, each with the name of an individual who had an illness or physical problem.

We first practiced on our own by placing the body of someone we knew on our mental screen and scanning for problems of any sort. I was mechanically following instructions when suddenly I saw a car colliding with a motorcycle at an intersection. I couldn't see the person's face, but because the friend I was scanning owned a motorcycle, I was alarmed. The instructor suggested I visualize the date of the accident and, if it had not yet happened, to send healing, white light to my friend. I pictured the calendar in my mental laboratory and was surprised to see the pages turning rapidly until they stopped at June 8^th. I assumed this to be in the future, as the session took place in February.

After a break we were assigned a partner. As instructed, my partner – whom I’d never met – handed me a piece of paper that bore only a man’s name and the city where he lived. I closed my eyes, visualized a man on my mental screen, and saw that his whole left side appeared darker than his right. Using one of the techniques we'd been taught, I imagined putting on his head, and was immediately torn by depression, sorrow, and resentment. I could feel that my left side was crippled, that I had no hearing in my left ear and no sight in my left eye. I knew that hearing was intact in my right ear, but vision in my right eye was limited in some way, though I couldn't describe exactly how.

Then my partner told me this man was the son of a dear friend; he was only 21 years old and very bitter because he'd been crippled on his left side in a motorcycle accident at a four-way stop where a car had failed to stop. He had no hearing in his left ear and no sight in his left eye; his hearing was normal in his right ear, but he had tunnel vision in his right eye.

I was spooked by this, almost afraid to ask when the accident had occurred. My partner named the same date I’d seen on my mental calendar: June 8^th. The accident I had pictured earlier that morning, before being assigned to her as my partner, had occurred the previous year!

Like Palmer I found this hard to believe, but the accident I “saw” was as real as the flash of an ad when watching TV. It was visible on my mental screen and in Technicolor, with sound effects.

See also, Spiritual Emergency: When 911 Can't Help, Reframing Spiritual Emergency as Positive Change