Many paths to God

Using different words and stories, most of the world’s religions and spiritual paths teach the same values.  Only when dogma is placed before values do they look really different.  So when I teach the Enneagram or the 12 Steps, my message is wholly in line with that of my Protestant upbringing, just as it jives with the beliefs of my Jewish friends, my Hindu friends, my Buddhist friends, and spiritual people the world over.

The bottom line for all these spiritual traditions is being fully present to a deeper reality, where true love and wisdom exist.  You don’t have to be religious or consider yourself spiritual to seek love, wisdom, and depth — one of the reasons I resonate so with the Enneagram and the 12 Steps.  They are tools for anyone who desires a richer life.

I discovered the Enneagram about ten years ago as I sought a personality theory that accounted for more than the standard theores I had learned about as I trained in and then practiced psychology; without attending to the spiritual aspect of our natures, these theories seemed flat.  Once I made the discovery, I could never look back but only go deeper and deeper into it, seeking and learning more and finding that it was like an eternal spring; it kept offering me more, and it still does.  It quenches the thirst only to reveal deeper thirst, a process which is amazing — gratifying and life-giving.  It teaches that indeed you have to lose yourself to find yourself, and through it you come to want that absolutely.

I have stayed with the Enneagram all this time and during these years was also led to rediscover the 12 Steps, to which I had been introduced when I worked as a psychologist in substance abuse treatment programs.  In these programs you meet the most courageous people, and you see how the 12 Steps, the Serenity Prayer, and other “standards” of AA, NA, and the like guide people from despair to hope and beyond.  Though it had been a few years since I worked in those programs, at a certain point recovering addicts began to be drawn to my practice, and I began working with them to strengthen their attunement to the Steps and to their inner selves.  Helping them, I began living with the Steps in my own life and finding their power in times of struggle.

The Enneagram and the 12 Steps have become entwined as guides for me in my life — and so important that I felt called to make them the linchpins of my professional life.  That’s why my therapy and coaching practice is now geared to help people via the principles of the Enneagram, the 12 Steps, and my clients’ personal spiritual directions.

(For earlier posts not shown here, go to http://www.lablanche9.wordpress.com/.)