Enneagram and Saving Our Lives and the Planet

Saving Our Lives and Planet

Bringing the Future into the Psychological Present through Consciousness

We live in stressful times with much conflict, greed, and violence in the world. Population growth continues as well as material growth and increases in wealth. There are current predictions that say we will eventually run out of basic resources, such as energy and water, and our rain forests. Yet, each year we create

David Daniels on Psychological & Conscious Growth through Enneagram is Necessary for Saving Environment & Natural Resources

further debt, regarding material resource utilization. These projections get ignored.

Why? Why are the projections being ignored?  This is my concern and why I’ve written this article. Resource utilization is fundamental to life. A rapidly changing world with multiple demands further limits our ability to bring a critical awareness of a challenging future into our psychological present. So how do we change this? Getting angry is a first step, but it’s not where we stop. We have got to develop a far more conscious approach to this dilemma, one human at a time.

David Daniels on Personal Growth Through Enneagram's Universal Growth Process can Protect Planet, World, & EcosystemRecall that anger comes when we have the experience of personal violation, especially when our hopes and goals are dashed and interfered with. Anger gets experienced in the present moment, we want to take action in order to prevent exploitation, and the future goes off the screen unless we have the self-observation capacity to pause, get grounded, and take time to determine what course of action is best. For more content on our experience of anger, see my blogs on (1) Understanding Anger, the Socially Acceptable Emotion and (2) Who Exactly Are the Good Guys with Guns?

Today in this new year, I present solutions for anger and the underlying, associated pain, hurt, and shame regarding our futures. We need to bring the future into the present, see what is upon us, get conscious and individually accountable for it, which is where we can take productive action. Here is how:

  • First, intellectually explore and know that anger is the subjective experience of personal violation. See how this relates to our need to bring the future into the present moment, where we can act, do something differently, choose a definitive course of action. When we work with anger and its related hurt, pain, and shame, we can and do bring the future into the present moment. Remember that the head, thinking center is as vital as the other two centers of intelligence, the heart/feeling center and the belly/instinctual centers. Any of us can simply go to the Internet to explore “climate change.” You will find, for example, that the Environmental Defense Fund’s site has a significant amount of information.
  • Since anger, like all emotions, is experienced first in the soma (experience of the body), we need to be able to notice what are, in fact, our somatic manifestations of anger. Learning to pause and breathe fully in and then down in order to get as present and as grounded as we can. It really helps to have a daily breath practice of even a few minutes, which is key to our getting centered, grounded, and into the present moment. This ability to delay ourselves — to pause — is crucial to working with all of our deeper issues and themes.
  • In the process of exploring what personal violation means to you, remember that this requires grounded, non-judgmental presence. Once grounded, all of us can determine what really matters as we bring the realities we face in the future into a conscious psychological presence.
  • At the end of your inquiry, your non-judgmental discovery of how your/our current behavior is damaging our future, not just our present moment, needs to be acknowledged. Then we can do the work of self-development that respects the unfolding future and not just pursues the gains sought and bought and absorbed in the present.

Summary

To make a difference in our world, for our planet, we need to begin by making a difference in ourselves. We so need to be able to do this simple work of getting honest, getting present, and becoming more responsibly conscious, all the while remembering that simple does not mean easy. Our hope for the future depends upon our ability to do this conscious self-development work, to care for something much greater than ourselves, each day. For example, we need to be able to ask ourselves, “What is the future going to be like if ‘I do’ verses if ‘I don’t’ do this thoughtful work on behalf of myself and all of humanity?”

I have kept this blog short and simple. Do take the time to do this reflection all the while knowing that this work on behalf of our planet is fully congruent with the rest of our personal development pursuits. Having choice is always present in us. We simply need to do this work, find our way to individual and then societal and then planetary consciousness.  And we can start here individually, by practicing the steps of the Universal Growth Process (the UGP).

Please let me know your thoughts.

What are your suggestions for doing this work, the work of bringing the future into the personal-development present, especially given your own Enneagram type structure? 
Hope for the future exists for all who do this work and the work includes the gift of personal freedom, which is what comes with personal development.