Sometimes the Spiritual Learning Curve is Too Steep

During the learning process, students may become overwhelmed with too much information. The brain, like a sponge, reaches a saturation point at which it can’t take in any more. There’s actually a term for it: cognitive overload. This describes me right now, in the spiritual sense.

That’s because I have a house guest who is too generous a teacher. I’ll call him Joe. He’s someone I’ve only known a little for about 20 years, and when he called to ask if he could stay with us for a week while passing through, I said yes.

Well, it turns out that Joe is the human version of an invasive plant species. He seems to lack the standard understanding of both physical and personal boundaries. He follows oppressively closely when you’re walking. He asks questions that most other humans understand are not appropriate. Instead of staying downstairs, where there is a fully equipped kitchen and sitting area—and where most guests stay—he comes upstairs with his food and his personal belongings and spends most of his time there. He is human kudzu.

The hardest part, though, is that Joe asks a LOT of questions – about everything. As if he were planning to write my biography (unauthorized, of course). “Why are you eating that?” “Why don’t you have children?” “Why do you eat dinner so late?” These questions are almost always phrased in a way that denotes disapproval.

And that is how he is my teacher. His incessant questioning of every action and comment teaches me about how much of me I still feel needs to be defended. If I had no personality structure to defend, these questions wouldn’t bother me at all. But I do, and they do, and it is all part of the spiritual growth curve.

He’s an extrovert, in the MBTI sense, and I am that extremely rare introvert Seven. He wants as much human interaction as possible and I, as little. My dominant instinct is Self-Preservation, so I want to sit alone or with just my husband in my nicely feathered nest. Joe’s dominant instinct is Social; he wants to sit smack-dab in the middle of my nest and dissect it.

At first, I felt guilty. He means well; he has a big heart; he has lived alone for a long time and is lonely. Have compassion, Heath. Be more charitable. He is beloved of God; think about what Jesus would do. Well, number one, Jesus would look him right in the eye with that intense love gaze of his and say one sentence that would blow Joe’s mind and change his life. Number two, all those “guilty” thoughts are the voice of my Inner Critic.

So, I have learned important things during this week:

• I still feel the need to defend my false self from attacks by others’ false selves, more than I thought I did.
• The Inner Critic misses no opportunity to pound you for not measuring up to its impossible and false standards.
• It’s beautiful to have compassion for all Types, for all of God’s precious beloveds – including yourself.
• Sometimes there’s just too much learning going on, and it’s okay to recognize that you just can’t learn any more at that particular time.

One of the great blessings of the Enneagram is the ability to let yourself be who you are in any given moment. Not the idealized self that you’d like to be or that your Inner Critic keeps harping on you to be. It enables you to clearly see your patterns but also to recognize that you are not those patterns. It enables you to say, “I can’t learn any more right now” and eventually not feel ashamed about that.

So, I sincerely thank Joe for being my unwitting teacher, and I bid him a fond farewell. School’s out for a while. Time to take in what I’ve learned; then I can absorb the next lesson.