As an unfurlings subscriber, this post is just for you.

Relationship between humans can become very tricky. When humans get tangled up in one another in ways that aren’t generative or life giving, a name that has been used is co-dependency.

But Ive always found this quite inaccessible as a name, as its not obvious what it is.

A definition I find helpful is that co-dependency is automatic and fear-driven behaviour that shows up in our closest bonded relationships. And it doesn’t feel good.

From the outside sometimes the trickiness in relationships looks like people-pleasing. Sometimes it looks like control. Sometimes it looks like self-sacrifice, and other times it looks like emotional distance.

These are recognisible and different behaviours. But the more I learnt about both codependency and the wisdom embedded in the enneagram symbol, the more I came to see that the patterns of co-dependency might be different expressions of the same underlying struggle.

Codependency isn’t a single pattern. It is much more helpfully seen as a collection of habitual strategies we use to attempt to answer very human questions:

Am I safe?

Am I loved?

How do I know what to do in relationship in any given moment?

A framework that offers light on this is the Enneagram’s Hornevian and Harmonic triads1. Seeing these patterns help you to deepen your understanding of what your personality is up to.

And if have roles where you work with others in life-giving ways, you may find ways the mapping I’m offering here can be generative in your work there too.

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Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene; one step enough for me.

from the hymn, ‘Lead, kindly light’ by John Henry Newman (1801-1890)1

It has been a little while since we were exploring the intersection between the Twelve Steps of recovery and the healing spiral hidden in plain sight within the Enneagram symbol2.

This is another post for those who know that their personality trips them up and makes life harder than it needs to be.

Welcome back to this place of shared journeying.

These posts need time to brew. For me, here in the northern hemisphere, this season of walking towards the longest days of light and the summer solstice feels like an invitation to see more clearly. There is spiritual depth built into our seasonal turnings.

The language of Step four is the language of light and it is revelatory. A time to notice what has been living in shadow.

Step four: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”3

A searching and fearless inventory asks us to bring into consciousness what has been operating unseen. It asks us to look honestly at the habits, assumptions, reactions and defences that shape our lives. Perhaps that is why this step feels so at home in this time of the height of the light.

It is hard, maybe impossible, to tend to and care for what we do not see. This work is intimate and close at hand.

To approach Step Four, I’ve invited in the contemplative words of a Sufi mystic and two deeply humble Christians. This is not easy territory. It is good to travel in the spiritual company of those who have walked here before us.

Henry Newman wrote ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ while seriously ill, stranded far from home and uncertain whether he would survive. These are the kinds of circumstances that bring a person to their knees and beyond the reach of their usual personality strategies. Times when we find ourselves seeking a power greater than ourselves.

The night is dark, and I am far from home,

Lead Thou me on.

When I first approached Step Four, back in the early 2000s, I knew nothing of the Enneagram. I was thrashing around painfully in the aftermath of a break-up that broke me open. Curiosity took me along to a CoDA4 meeting and someone handed me a list of patterns of codependency, and I recognised myself all over the page.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that those patterns mapped remarkably closely onto the Enneagram’s fixations. Looking back, I can see that each pattern described a different strategy for securing love, safety, significance, certainty or control. The very concerns I would later come to recognise through the Enneagram lens, and especially through the harmonic and hornevian patterns.

(On Wednesday I will share a post about this with Unfurlings paid subscribers here. It is a rich place to take a deep inquiry).

Anyone undertaking an inner healing journey with the Enneagram as a companion is already at an advantage. Knowing your dominant pattern gives you clues about where to look. It offers insight into the places where your way of surviving may also have become a way of suffering.

Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad RūmīJalal (1207-17) was a Sufi mystic, poet, and founder of the Islamic brotherhood known as the Mevlevi order.

Here is Rumi:

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.5

Have you noticed some of these visitors arriving? In Sufism every experience is seen as a teaching. The guest house is your body, temporarily hosting your soul. Each emotion is sent by the divine to instruct you.

My own house is a very busy one. My enneagram tritype is 648, and these places are considered the reactive places in each centre. I notice that distracting myself from difficult feelings is often a strategy I use. (This week it was cat soduko on my phone)

Or overworking. I can really go to work on myself with a to-do list.

Once in a while I slow down enough to notice what’s going on. Often when I’m in my breathwork practice. Or on a walk in the woods leaning against a tree trunk or staring into the eye of a wildflower.

Then the hidden places show themselves.

Rumi advises:

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honourably.6

Yet some guests are harder to welcome than others. Particularly the ones that threaten the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

Most of us are deeply invested in being a certain kind of person. We carry an idealised self-image. We want to be happy, strong or helpful. Good, loving, capable, unique, insightful, or trustworthy. We build identities around these qualities.

In maintaining this image, we often overdo the very qualities we most value. Particularly in the domain of our dominant instinct7. Over time, this creates unintended consequences, both for ourselves and for those around us. For as long as we can, these get tucked out of the way, so the false self can be maintained.

Eventually life brings feedback.

Sometimes we lose something important.

Sometimes a relationship breaks down.

Sometimes suffering strips away our ability to maintain the story.

Step Four is an invitation to examine the gap between the person I imagine myself to be and the life I am actually living.

This is uncomfortable work.

It asks us to sit with shame.

Not toxic shame that tells us we are bad, but the ordinary human shame that emerges when disowned parts of ourselves return to consciousness. The very shame our personality structure was built to avoid.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.8

The personality is brilliantly designed for survival. It develops around what seemed necessary in order to belong, to feel safe, or to avoid pain. Yet survival is not the same thing as love. Nor is it the same thing as freedom.

For those, we need to be in correspondence with something larger than our personality.

We need a place within ourselves capable of holding both our gifts and our limitations with compassion.

Rumi’s invitation is radical. Welcome the guests. Learn from them.

Each Enneagram pattern comes with an idealised self-image. This becomes the raw material of our self-esteem. Because it developed as a defence against shame, it remains fragile. We become attached to receiving validation in the areas where we have learned to seek worth.

This makes us vulnerable.

Flatter a person’s idealised self-image and you gain influence over them. Salespeople know this. Politicians know this. Con artists know this.

Step Four asks a different question.

Not: “Who do I believe myself to be?”

But:

“What have I actually been up to?”

This step sits on our healing spiral at point one. In many ways it is where the journey starts in earnest, but the foundations had to be laid; we had to find our spiritual taproot first at seven, eight and nine9.

You can probably see that this step is a particularly powerful piece of healing work for an actual enneagram one, since their personality has been constructed around perfectionism and being correct. However on the other side of their particular ring of fire, lies a completely new virtue: serenity.

The journey at One is look ourselves through truthful just compassionate eyes, to let go of the idea of being perfect, and step into the possibility of being a lovable, just ordinarily flawed human being.

If Newman gives us the courage to take the next step in the dark, John Newton offers a witness to what can happen when we find the courage to look honestly at ourselves.

Newton, the author of ‘Amazing Grace’10, was once deeply involved in the Atlantic slave trade. A violent storm at sea precipitated a spiritual awakening that eventually transformed the direction of his life. He later became an Anglican minister and a committed abolitionist.

Whether or not Newton would have been an Enneagram One is impossible to know. Yet his story illustrates something of the gift associated with that point: the willingness to face uncomfortable truths and bring one’s life into greater alignment with conscience.

The virtue traditionally associated with Point One is serenity. The Serenity Prayer is perhaps one of the most familiar prayers of discernment:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.11

Step Four is, in many ways, a practice of discernment.

A sorting out.

A becoming honest.

A willingness to see what is ours and what is not.

Here is the first verse of Newton’s hymn:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

that saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now am found,

was blind, but now I see.

Seeing is a large part of this work.

Bringing things into the light.

The Enneagram symbol suggests that each fixation has two neighbouring qualities capable of helping loosen its grip. The left hand wing helps us to take our inventory. It has what we need to help us look back over our lives.

In my experience, the left wing offers additional light for our inventory. It brings resources that are not part of our core pattern but are still familiar to us. We often recognise these qualities in people we are drawn to in our relationships, and in ways of being that feel accessible to us, even if they are not our primary orientation.

One way I understand the right-hand wing is as a soul friend in need. One with the capacity to offer us a new energy to step into, a helping hand out of the murkiness of our fixations. We will return to this place soon in this series.

Many Enneagram teachers have written about these movements around the symbol. I claim no new discovery here.

What I can offer is a Soul Shed lens. An opportunity to explore these themes in community through guided breathwork, journalling and our contact with the natural world.

Step Four is not about becoming a worse person in your own eyes.

It is about becoming a truer one.

We bring into the light what has been hidden, not so that we can condemn ourselves, but so that grace has somewhere to land.

One step is enough for today.

Join us tomorrow at our online gathering?

You will be very welcome.

More here

What do you learn from that point?

The two point if you’re core one.

The eight point if you’re core seven etc.

I’m asking you, here, because I know you’re a serious enneagram student.

And because I think it would be a really interesting theme for our next subscriber gathering. I have a hunch it’s a …

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I had met Julia and Nick, local agronomist and wildlife enthusiast when we were all in a pantomime of Cinderella, cross-dressing and over-acting in unconvincing accents. We had plotted our walk up Noar Hill on a New Years Day Walk soon after, while squelching through the fields around Medstead.

By the time we finally got together at the gate leading to this amazing conservation area, we were looking forward to putting on Snow White.

Nick and Julia were there already, and I had picked up Lynn, my dance teacher friend who has the kind of energy levels that make a double espresso ask for a lie down.

It was an incredible evening for orchids. Noar hill is full of sheltered chalky pockets left from a time of medieval digging, and centuries of grazing since.

Leif Bersweden, another orchid hunter has been here! :

The chalk pits form sheltered bowls that are filled with plants and insects. Ancient deciduous woodland borders the summit, encouraging a mosaic of habitats. The reserve boasts thirty-five butterfly species, including the Duke of Burgundy and brown hairstreak, and eleven different orchids’.1

Its fair to say that the incredible biodiversity here is not separate from human history; it lives with it at a complex intersection. The chalk pits made the land difficult to modernise. What once looked like damaged ground turned into a refuge habitat, and that turned into an annual orchid festival!

Gilbert white lived close to this place. He is a botanist that helped turn biology from pins and formaldehyde towards notebooks, looking around where you live, and appreciating how other life forms do their living. He was talking about habitat before there was a word for it, and in many ways he was a harbinger of ecology. Definitely a local visionary. We were more or less in his back garden.

Deep-mapping with so many layers of life present in one place.

There are fifty-two kinds of orchids that grow on these isles, give or take, and eleven that make their home here. That evening we believed we found six.

Six kinds of magic.

As we live towards the end of this month of May, in this time of seasonal shifting, there are many thresholds humans will be moving through. Here we walk towards our summer solstice – the time of the height of the light.

Orchids bloom somewhere around the world in every month of the year. The only place they cannot live is Antarctica. There are 25,000 known kinds of orchids, and May and June peak time for our orchids here on these isles.

They emerge from underground relationships. An orchid seed is a tiny dust-like speck that needs to form a relationship with fungus to survive since it contains almost no stored food. The fungus feeds it sugars, minerals and water. Later on most orchids will become photo-synthetic and self feeding, but at the beginning they are completely dependent on their host, like a mammal.

Some orchids never photosynthesise, and need the fungus their entire lives. These ones are known as ghost orchids and we have one of these forest spirits on these isles too.

Fungal networks do not erase individuality. Fungus remains fungus and orchids remain orchids. But survival becomes collective rather than isolated.

Allotments, choirs, libraries, walking groups, cafes. Seems to me that these are kinds of human mycelium feeding our orchid human parts!

I didn’t know how much I like orchids until I learnt more about them. How they can find a way to grow almost anywhere.

They felt too perfect. Remote, and connected with luxury. Poster girls and a bit narcissistic. Orchids as an imported status symbol. Their wildness removed.

That evening last June, its true to say that we walked through a golden hour that made the orchids look like they were on the red carpet. We wandered and wondered at them until nine thirty and the sun was only setting as we came down.

But by the end of our time together I believe this place had changed us all a little bit.

These days I’m not seeing orchids as solitary glamour-pusses at all. They feel more like the mushrooms that will also pop up into view. They will be announcing themselves in Autumn: visible tip of another underground conversation.

Seeing an orchid flowering feels a bit like catching a wave of emotion passing through another table in a restaurant which is celebrating. You don’t know the backstory, but you can sense the unseen networks of relationships beneath it.

All this composting and hidden life making itself visible.

Updated:

Our Soul Shed walking group, almost a year to the day of last years walk, met on the evening of Friday 12^th June with Nick and Julia and Lyn, to walk with orchids once again!

If you’re local enough, stay in touch with future Soul Shed creative walks by getting in touch here:

To The Soul Shed

If you’re further away, lets deep-map your corner of the world together.

Deep-mapping at The Soul Shed

We belong to place in our bodies as well as in our hearts and storied identities.

Here I am close to woodland and farmed fields. To the New Forest that remained over centuries of woodland clearings for Kings to hunt in and commoners to dwell. I’m surrounded by villages bisected by hedgerows and lanes, and sunken drovers’ paths.

I live in a small town in Hampshire at the end of a trainline to London. The old medieval timber-framed buildings on the high-street were overlaid with Victorian render and infilled with 1960s shop-fittings. The front of my little 1800’s workers cottage stands close onto a street where wildflowers grow in the gutters.

We’re coming to the end of a month-long local walking festival and people have come together every day to tread the fields and lanes and woods and be part of something bigger than our modern Bristish pod-life.

As the days have got longer and lighter here, the weight of carrying world news has felt easier. Not because the news is easier but because the light has lifted me.

For me this year the solstice and this time approaching the height of the light feels very real in its strengthening. Red campion and ivy-leaved toadflax meet my gaze and fill it with colour and build my resources to be part of the ways we move forward together from here, in this time of unrest and global change.

Of course, your own truest square mile of belonging may be where you currently live, or your heart might be mapping another home.

It can be hard to bring your full presence to a place when your soul lives somewhere else.

My mum moved here two years ago aged 81 after forty years, and she is still finding ways to settle; still misses her old neighbours and their dropping in for coffee or a doorstep chat that carried on all afternoon.

People belong to places and don’t always move easily.

When our community here met last weekend and explored together, at our monthly online gathering, we were sharing about this living moment of the year, in place, approaching this solstice.

We considered how we were connected in time circling the sun, but quickly moved onto our own square miles.

How, in Vermont, Spring comes late, and when there is snow falling in May, it can feel a stretch to join the world speeding up while still not fully emerged from Winter. Later Annie shared the white trillium in our chat here, an iconic regional flower that can take eight years to bloom.

Tracey shared from Long Beach, where Pacific haze buffers California May heat, but they approach the summer solstice and a long dry season with drought consciousness and fire-season awareness. As she talked a starling perched on the balcony of her appartment.

And then we heard about the approach to the opposite season, the winter solstice, in South Africa, which is in the southern hemisphere.

In Johannesburg Ingrid was deep in Autumn. The leaves are turning there. Nature is returning to itself. While I was feeling stretched up and out of myself by spring giddiness, Ingrid shared of feeling tired.

When our neters came in our SoulCollage®, there was a different kind of introspection and gravitas in Ingrid’s card.

We were inhabiting different seasons while speaking together.

It was the first time I had attempted to be affected by this polarity of experiencing.

It was not an entirely abstract thing I was witnessing: The earth was holding opposite truths simultaneously. My time was not ‘the’ time.

We shared presence together, while different seasons unfolded us, differently.

After our time together I remained full of how we were each carrying seasons in our bodies, and then I read a beautiful piece by Sushmita Mukherjee, who I follow here on Substack.

This led to the kind of correspondence that becomes possible in a community of writers writing.

Sushmita carries both America and India in her writing. She told me that India doesn’t have four seasons. It has six.

In India, the most significant time to everyone’s life and survival is the monsoon season, and in India, people are not walking towards a solstice, they are holding a tension that will be with them until the monsoons come.

As hot water hit my back in the shower next day, I allowed the idea that the world is simply orienting to the sun in four quadrants to wash away.

Then yesterday I read Sushmita’s next piece

‘Dweller on the risen lands’

about the place she writes from, and I learned much more.

About patience and surrender and dependence on nature, and what it is to wait for the rains, and what happens when they come, in a way my own body has not known.

I’m sharing a link to Sushmita’s post here.

I’m deeply grateful for this correspondence.

Dweller on the risen land

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The water of this stream is your intuitive creativity. A visit to The Soul Shed might be a time to sit on the bank and contemplate that beautiful water sparkling and dancing around rocks and reeds. You might kneel at the waters edge and have a good long drink from the water from cupped hands, or perhaps you’ll decide to paddle or bathe.

Your mind, heart and body intelligences, may already know about the goodness of this kind of self -connection; that time tending your intuitive creativity is a deep kind of self care worth seeking out.

Or, you may have found your way here quite accidentally.

Since building The Soul Shed, I have been deepening both my own soulcollage® practice, and my facilitation of intuitive spaces. Over time I have come to recognise that it is often through one of these three centres of being that each of us might chose to approach something new.

In the words of John Harper1, the heart perceives through resonance, the head centre perceives through clarity and insight, and the body perceives through immediacy.

When you correspond with an image and simply know it belongs in your collage, that knowing might come as an emotional wave, a spark of inspiration, or an instant gut response.

This post comes from my desire to circle back to SoulCollage® itself, and to remind you that it is a living practice behind this writing, and an experience available to you if you feel pulled explore it.

And if you are a soul shed subscriber joining us later today, SoulCollage® will be at the heart of our time together as we explore archetypes of seasonal change and abundance. Depending on your timezone, there may still be time to book!

Book your place

Whether you’re moving through Spring or Autumn, you’ll likely be recognising something of this energy of change moving through life on earth at these times. These archetypes we spend time with, and the collages we make, will become ways of us connecting more deeply with ourselves and with one another in our shared human experience.

You may already recognise yourself as gravitating more towards one of these ways of knowing: Heart, head or gut.

I’ve written three earlier pieces, each speaking most deeply to one of our centres; to one of the ways of being with the stream. They offer different thresholds into SoulCollage® and into the deeply human practice of coming home to yourself.

A piece for your heart:

‘You, who let yourself feel’
Exploring SoulCollage® as a human way of roosting

If you enter through your heart, this piece explores SoulCollage® as a way of listening to all the tender, relational, grieving, loving parts of ourselves — the parts shaped by memory, longing, friendship, family, nature, and the aches and joys in being human.

Read here

A piece for your head:

Upholding Gentle Mirrors: The illuminating pairing of SoulCollage® and the Enneagram

If you enter through your head, this piece explores imagination, symbolism, the Enneagram, and the deep patterns through which we organise experience. They invite a gentler kind of knowing. This is not about observing or categorising the self from the outside, but rather in listening to it.

Read here

And if you’re entering through your body:

Imagination, will make a human of you.
A SoulCollage® journey through the inner realms of the suits

If you enter through your body, this piece is rooted in practice, instinct, image, breath, body, rhythm, and creative ritual. SoulCollage® becomes less of an idea and more of a lived encounter with life moving through you. A bathing in the water, with all its currents and eddies.

If any of this is bringing you an inner yes, I would love to welcome you to SoulCollage® at The Soul Shed !

SoulCollage® at The Soul Shed

Paid subscribers here get 15% discount on all one to one offerings.

I look forward to creating with you soon.

This post is like that moment on the walk.

The Soul Shed on Substack has reached its second Spring season and I’d love to pause for a moment to show you the landscape where it has arrived!

And, as we’re in the thick of our May walking festival here in Alton, Hampshire, England this metaphor feels very much alive!

This project is journeying alongside you here, offering events and places for creatives and seekers and thoughtful folk to gather. The people who enjoy it tend to be souls who want to find the deeper meanings in our lives, at a time where much is pitted against us doing that.

It is a time when our attention is often fragmented ordiffused and speed is prized over depth. where there is much to distract us and to bring anxiety about what the future holds. It’s a time when many of us seek new grounded ways of being that both hold this complexity, and resource us with the kind of relilience and lifeforce we will need to hold onto our humanity in a changing world.

Here this season I hope you’ll find practices, conversations, and ways of seeing that reconnect you with your inner and outer nature, through trees, archetypes, creativity, and the wisdom of the maps of the enneagram and recovery.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

Id like to let you know a little bit about the substance of this project and about what you can expect to find here.

Weekend Posts

This is one! They are sent to your inbox if you subscribe by email, and via the substack app if you don’t.

They include posts about:

New Wednesday Posts

Occasionally for everyone and usually for my kind paid subscribers who uphold this work financially and keep me able to produce well-researched writing. These are usually short, inspirational, and focused on going a bit deeper into your own inner journey. Often a practice or an idea worth exploring more deeply.

This recent one had a spring wildflowers practice for you to download.

To the post and practice

Unfurlings gatherings

A monthly opportunity to gather and explore a key emergent theme - seasonal or of the cultural moment. These are free for paid subscribers here, and by donation for anyone else who would like to come along.

Book onto next weekends one exploring Archetypes of change and abundance

learn more here

New subscriber chat space

If you haven’t visited yet, I hope you will. Its for all subscribers here.

2-3 times a week I’m popping in with a something that I hope will inspire you to join some inner dots between head heart and body! I will also be sharing special community offers in there.

to the chat!

Becoming a paid subscriber.

This project simply wouldn’t exist without your encouragement and participation!

Becoming a paid subscriber is not only a way of supporting this work to exist- it is also a way of creating a small, steady place in your life for reflection, creativity, recovery and soulful attention.

Subscribe now

The Substance of this offering

At the heart of The Soul Shed is a deep love of the living world, and a long soul inquiry undertaken alongside trees as teachers and guides.

My background is rooted in the arts and particularly in community arts — poetry, literature, theatre, creativity, and story. These have always been ways for me to explore meaning, imagination, and what it means to be fully human.

Alongside this, I bring training in breathwork and in SoulCollage® as subtly powerful tools for self-recovery and discovery.

I also bring fifteen years of lived experience within Twelve-Step recovery, which I found at the painful ending of a significant relationship. This continues to shape the way I understand healing, belonging, humility, and transformation.

I’m an internationally accredited Enneagram coach with a trauma-informed ethos, and the Enneagramis one of the wisdom streams at the heart of this work.

The Soul Shed is where these threads come together:

Deep-mapping in nature, intuitive creativity, archetype, recovery and soulful inquiry.

I weave them into gatherings, writings, practices, conversations, and one-to-one work, always with the hope of creating spaces that feel grounding, imaginative, restorative, and alive.

I’m very glad you’re here.

Subscribe now

How is the season changing around you?

There’s a lot going in in nature as we approach our equinoxes!

Especially on the ground. The wildflowers are talking to us. Have you noticed?

To notice something is to stream the power of your gaze towards it. to differentiate it and to foreground it in your field of awareness….

Once again I would love to draw your gaze to the wildflowers near you, in your square mile, in your corner of the world.

Wherever you are, you can always allow your gaze to wander and alight on beauty. Your gaze becomes a way to resource your being, to change your state. It is a way to be heliotropic, like a sunflower: lightseeking.

This quote from Robert MacFarlane says it all for me. I wanted to share it with you along with four of the wild woodland flowers here in my square mile, and I wish you a moment in the middle of your week to feel into its truth.

We are gathered here from around our earth and gradually approaching our spring and autunn equinoxes next month!

Who are the flowers in your own square mile this time of year? I had a little look at some of our places….maybe you will see

Narines?

Wake robins?

White trilliums?

Dogtooth violets?

Wild blue Phlox?

If you would like to get together, our next time together is on Saturday May 16th.

Archetypes of change and abundance: Celebrate your creativity this season.

Here’s where to book your free place and see your local time:

To take your place

Thank you so much for your support of my writing.

This post is part of a series drawing on the wisdom of trees and the enneagram symbol, to understand the patterns of our human survival strategies. In it I explore ways that these other living beings mirror presence to humans and are richly embedded in cultural ways we have held our own corresponding experience.

Each month I’m building on an understanding of how knowing our three centred human patterns (tritype) might help us heal, so that these patterns can become more than mere survival strategies.

Part of this exploring is spending time in nature and getting to know the habits and habitats of the trees, and another important part is talking to humans walking with the patterns, in different human landscapes around the world, to better understand what it is like from the inside.

This month is the turn of Willow and tritype 946.2

The willow is often imagined by children, poets and those needing a moment of withdrawal, as a secret sanctuary space. When we are within, the canopy of willow creates a curtain between us and the outside world, and this magical experience is often deepened by the sound of birds and running water. There is a softness and receptivity about Willow that creates a safe kind of holding environment.

Willows love to live near water, and their favourite places to live are by lakesides and river banks, in wetlands and on floodplains. It seeks out these watery pockets. and humans have sought out willows as sanctuary places, where shade and safety can be experienced, out of the harsh sun, and close to the flow of water.

The willow genus Salix is biologically adapted to liminal environments: riverbanks, floodplains, and other edge habitats where conditions are inherently unstable and ever-changing. Its flexibility and tendency to seek out water are not simply aesthetic qualities, but vital survival strategies that also serve a wider ecological function, helping to stabilise soil, prevent erosion, and create habitats for other life. In this way, the willow embodies a form of resilience that does not resist instability but rather lives in a dynamic relationship with it. This mirrors the idea of compassion not as something formed in spite of difficulty, but as a capacity that is shaped through sustained contact with it.

Around our world there are about 400 kinds of willow tree that are of the genus salix.

Each of these trees will also have had earlier local names, long before botany was a thing, given by local peoples in their respective languages.

In china, weeping willow is known as 垂柳 (chuí liǔ), the drooping willow. This is the willow that Guanyin is holding and the tree painted to her right.

The Cape willow,pictured above, native to South Africa, and other countries further north, is also known as Safsaf, an arabic name which dates back to eastern meditterenean cultural influences via old trading routes.

The Celts called willow Saille, pronounced Sal-yuh and I love how this rolls out of the mouth softly, and evokes sounds of wind and water.

Here is chuí liǔ again, on the popular 18th century willow pattern pottery that helped to make the weeping willow such an iconic tree :

The compassion of willow can also be seen as embedded in its chemical make-up which relieves suffering. On each continent, humans discovered the healing properties in their respective willow trees. Willow bark contains compunds including Salycin with effects similar to aspirin, and for thousands of years, before botany and empirical science, willow-bark and leaves wereb being used to make compresses and infusions for local wound care, for calming fevers, and for reducing inflammation.

Humans in a healing role have been using willow to tend one another’s physical wounds for a very long time. The picture of Guanyin predates the birth of Christ by around 850 years.

Compassion is not a single trait but a kind of braided set of capacities that offers another human an experience of being met, seen and understood on a deep level.

The English word compassion comes from the Latin term compassio, built from ‘com’ (meaning with, together) and passio (meaning suffering, from the word pati, to suffer).

So, its original sense is literally “to suffer with.”

Compassion is at the heart of 946 space because each of these survival strategies has developed a particular set of capacities that in combination, make it (in my view) the archetype most capable of suffering with another.

I am indebted in all of these correspondence between tritype and trees, to the research of Katherine Fauvre3. She calls this 946 archetypal pattern ‘the seeker’.

I have got into the habit of beginning with the body type, followed by the heart type, and followed by the head. since i belive that the trees correspond with us in that order: first meeting us in the solidity of their presence, and then connecting with us through our hearts if we are open, and finally offering inspiration through our minds.

I see the human walking with this tritype as a seeker of something specific: compassion, and the willow tree as a mirror for this : a compassionate witness. It is as though the tree is embodying a capacity to mirror back the virtues and the holy ideas of the 946:

This month I was fortunate to meet with Goodnews, an executive coach living in Pretoria, South Africa and a serious student of the enneagram doing his own inner work at 694. Compassion is something that Goodnews has given a lot of thought, as someone who has lived through political struggle of apartheid in South Africa and the impact it has had on peoples’ humanity. He has Tonga heritage, from Malawi, from Usisya village in Nkhata Bay. As we explore the archetype of the seeker of compassion, I will share some of his thoughts.

To get to a place of being able to treat oneself and other human beings with compassion the journey of the 946 is one of self-remembering, learning equanimity, and taking courage.

The enneagram nine embodies acceptance of others. This is a trait that often draws others to them. However, it can be a costly stance because to accept others the nine often forgets themselves.

With the nine style comes a deep abiding aspiration towards unity. In naming the heart wounds, Russ Hudson described the nine hearts as ‘shattered’, and my friend Rob shares that there is a foundational sense in nine of being born being a profoundly disturbing experience. To tolerate this nones often numb out to their own immediate experience. The nine imagines this pain of existence itself is something others carry too, meaning that the nine have a particularly strong capacity for tolerating others struggling, understanding that life is difficult.

Additionally, like all three attachment types, nines are very focused on the other. According to Sandra Maitri, with the nine this comes from a sense of the other being more real:

‘The other for Nines appears to have what they don’t: others arrived with all their parts intact and are inherently lovable and valuable. Compared to others, Nines feel acutely inferior: not as good, complete, or worthy.’

The nine has a journey that is about self-remembering.

The Enneagram four understands that there is no true depth of experience without including suffering. Here is Maitri on the four:

The main inner mood of Fours is a sad and heavy sense of lack, a feeling of being cast away, and an inconsolable and insatiable longing, as though they are in perpetual mourning for the connection that has been lost.

So, the four is oriented to compassion in the sense of a kind of commiseration. If another person is expressing their own suffering, the four feels less alone.

However for the four in us to become truly compassionate toward others, the four must also accept the ordinary and surface level of life, where common ground is discovered and contact with others can begin.

The four has a journey that is about finding the equanimityto hold both light and shadow.

The six carries anxiety, stemming from a lack of trust in our inner ground, and Sandra Maitri writes that ‘much of their energy is directed towards coping with their anxiety’.

The sixes own deeper work is in finding courage to trust our own inner authority.

However, what energy is available to the six , is often used seeking camaraderie and solidarity with others: the six is curious and enquiring, about others experiences, stemming from a sense of egalitarianism; intuiting and testing what is suspected - that we are all at heart, the same.

The six combined with four and nine in a human personality makes a sensitive person that needs to make sense of who they are, and to do this in relation to others.

Here is Goodnews talking about having these three points alive in his work as a coach:

“It’s easy to align towards intimacy. Even though the six can be at times clinical and detached about the engagement, the six is actually also creating the network that makes us to be in unity. The nine is going to help me do it, so I will be at peace when I have done it, and the four and nine help me to mellow and engage with openness “.

A human journey involves walking through some rings of fire, where we have to face these particular sets of challenges connected with these survival strategies, and that on the other side of these rings of fire are more mature virtues of ourselves, with greater capacities for the virtues of each point on the enneagram. The willow, in its own way, seems to model this passage: rooted in water, shaped by the elements, bending without breaking. It does not resist the conditions of its life, but nor does it disappear within them. Instead, it becomes a place where others can rest, be held, and recover. In the same way, the 946 pattern invites a movement from unconscious endurance of suffering into a conscious capacity to accompany it — in ourselves and in others, without losing our own centre.

Here is Goodnews on the way that his experiences have shaped his life and his purpose:

“There is no profound knowing of the self without experiencing and embracing the trauma that takes you there.

It’s about saying, how do you use the awareness of the self that comes from a different place, that doesn’t come from a good experience, that comes from pain?

It comes from trauma, and then it magnifies the purpose that you have derived from that.

My personal purpose as a seeker that is compassionate, comes from realisation of or recognition of the trauma that I have suffered, which then calls upon me to offer compassion at the forefront of my practice, of my work”.

To “suffer with” is not to be overwhelmed, nor to be sucked into another’s experience, but to remain present at the threshold where self and other meet. This is the deeper invitation held within both the willow and this tritype: to allow the sensitivity of the nine, the depth of the four, and the awareness of the six to mature into something steady, relational, and life-giving. When these qualities are integrated, compassion becomes less a reaction and akin to the way way of being Goodnews was describing. It is something that can offer shelter, like the willow’s canopy, while still rooted in the ground of one’s own experience. The image of Guanyin returns to us with new meaning: the willow branch not only as a symbol of healing, but as a reminder that true compassion is both resilient and responsive, shaped through the fires we have been willing and able to walk through.

I have recently opened the chat here for all my subscribers. I hope you will feel welcome to visit any time and join the conversation.

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Heather and Roz have walked as Oak and Willow many times on our Soul Shed walks.

Recently, I invited them to imagine into their trees’ conversation and this short film is a glimpse of what emerged.1

I hope you enjoy it.

There was something very deeply rooted and connecting for them in this, in their way of seeing: in humans embodying the spirit of trees, and stepping into relationship with the more-than-human world.

It’s ancient, archetypal ground.

You can feel it in myth, in story, and in traditions like The Green Man returning each spring as a symbol of renewal, vitality, and the wild intelligence of life moving through us.

(You can catch a glimpse of him here, very much alive in the body of my friend Gary last spring in Burley, Hampshire.)2

I would love to hear what you make of it, and of your own experiences of connecting with nature.

Please save the date. If you’re not a subscriber yet, this is a really generative time to join in more!

Dear you!

I’m just opening up new a connecting space for this publication—a place for shorter updates and ideas, and for links and resources. Space to reflect on content too if you would like to.

If you mostly read via email, you won’t see the full chat here—but you can hop over anytime by clicking below:

join in here!

No app required - it works right in your browser.

(Although if you have the substack app on your app, its there too.)

It’s a bit more like an ongoing conversation than a newsletter, so you can reply, react, and connect with other readers too.

If you prefer to just read along, that’s completely fine as well.

Hope to see you there if its for you.

Big love

Sam

PS. My plan is to post new things on Tuesday, Friday and Sundays….

Also - an announcement:

I’m going to start my Substack subscriber chat on Wednesday!

I’m aiming for a gently reflective pocket out of the swirl…

A place for us to stay in touch a bit more directly and for you to pop in and respond to anything that meets you in good ways.

If you would like to be part of this, you can join here in advance.

I’ll send the link again on Wednesday when it opens…

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My heart led me to pick this book off my shelf again at the weekend and told me to look again.

I stumbled on the ideas of Morris Berman in a book shop in 1993. I have to admit it was its cover that found me first.

His ideas opened a portal for me that was life-changing. I would say that Morris Berman’s mind kept me sane through my university years, where most of the thought I met was was abstract and completely disembodied. Post-modernism was swirling round everywhere, and I was doing a theatre degree requiring me to deconstruct my identity at every turn!

In ‘Coming to Our Senses’ he took me on a journey that showed me how modern Western culture became psychologically and spiritually fragmented through its embrace of a detached, analytical way of knowing.

Meanwhile I studied theatre and performance and deconstucted a self that was on shaky foundations to begin with since this culture was the water I was swimming in.

Berman argued that earlier human societies experienced the world through a “participating consciousness,” in which mind, body, and environment were deeply interconnected, but this was gradually replaced by a mechanistic worldview that split subject from object and reduced reality to something to be observed and controlled.

Drawing on anthropology, philosophy, and psychology, Morris, who by now felt like an old friend, traced this shift from hunter-gatherer societies to modern industrial life, suggesting that the cost of scientific and technological progress has been a profound sense of alienation and disembodiment.

I agreed. I was personally pickled evidence of this.

The book calls for a recovery of embodied awareness and holistic perceptionn, by reintegrating it with lived, sensory experience.

So here’s a a little tin-pot history of how the knowledge streams that have resourced The Soul Shed project arived for me:

After university manglings, I thrashed about further for years in this tension between knowing there were powerful things happening at my contact boundary and regularly being floored by my internal reactivity, and having no way of understanding it. My relationships were confusing and troubled. My mind continued to search frantically.

In 2014 I discovered the wisdom teachings of the enneagram and suddenly humans began to make more sense. It was all still very heady though. It was years before I landed on point six as an archetypal space to explore from. ( Looking back now - Of course it was heady! Six is plumb in the middle of the head centre and seeking guidence externally. Of course it was fearful).

In 2016 I discovered SoulCollage® and my own soul-retrieval began in earnest. I made this card on the first workshop i went too (a nothing happy stumbling on something crucial!) , and it’s still one of my favourites:

In 2019 I came across David Stone on a creative writing course and he reintroduced me to my body via my breath.

In 2020 trees started showing me who they are and how they’re trying to help us self-remember.My contact with the trees deepened. The Soul Shed was born.

In 2022 I wrote ‘Take it to the Trees’.

Other writers like Tim Ingold, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, have made my life better, are at the heart of everything I understand to be most true about life.

But I don’t believe any of any of it would have happened without me stumbling on that book by Morris Berman.

Anyway, it turns out he’s been writing more too. In 2006 he wrote a book called ‘Dark ages America.’ Im going to read it.

And he has a blog ‘Dark Ages Americs’, which has recently arrived on substack: Mauricio Berman. I’ve just joined it. He is an elder now for sure.

Thirty years on I have stumbled on Morris again. How these things happen is a mystery. But my heart is there in it for sure.

Somehow you arrived at The Soul Shed.

I’m very happy you are here.

See you on Wednesday?

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From this time of the new Pink moon, right in the middle of April, I would like to consider this month as a portal into living in impermanence.

April feels like a month in an internal argument with herself. The weather here in the south of England is all over the place! Sometimes it has felt like four seasons in one day. Just getting dressed has turned into a game of roulette.

This is a wild and windswept time to be humaning on this planet as the known world feels increasingly impacted by the dramtics of mad men. Winter has been hard for anyone with an international orientation and for reasons compatible with our complex history, many Brits are sharped by this outward-facing sense of place.

Nature, however, is always here as a teacher alongside. Spring calls us outward into the more-than-human world, in our immediate place of belonging, and maybe your heart is being opened up a little too, along with with the spring buds? And being opened up isnt always easy.

In the spirit of offering something human into your April, while we live in a world on fire, I hope you will spend a few minutes with me here. I’ll move between layers of reflection as we go. April invites this kind of shifting attention.

April, the fool and cultural instability

April 1st arrived with its traditional wonkiness and permission to misstep.

The April fool shows us an edgy side of April. In 1582 Pope Gregory introduced the Gregorian calendar to Europe, and gradually celebrations t5rrrr moved New Years day to January 1^st. Before this people were celebrating the New year around the Spring Equinox. People who still celebrated the new year around April 1^st were mocked, and called April fools. This would have tied in with other springtime prank traditions, and seasonal celebrations linked to renewal and unpredictability in spring. It is a good example of social pressure being applied to make people conform with a pretty radical change - from a seasonal atunement to the land and its renewal defining a sense of time, to an abstract imposed calendar.

In medieval Europe, the “Fool” was both a figure of ridicule and of insight. Fools were miscreants: entertaining tricksters and destabilisers —they stood outside order to reveal its fragility. The fools ‘motley’ marks this liminal status:someone who stands outside the rules in order to expose them.

This tradition appears in multiple forms of celebration and performance : In the zanni characters in the italian comedia del Arte, such as Pulcinella, and on the Bristish Isles, in the anarchic slapstick character of Mr Punch in the seaside puppet shows of Punch and Judy, itself derived from olded trickster figures.

The Fool also appears in Shakespeare’s plays as the licensedcourt jester, as a mixture of satirist and sage, often twisting language and talking in riddles.

In ‘King Lear’, a tragedy about a foolish King who loses everything, the Fool’s simple words become philosophical pressure points:

“Nothing will come of nothing.”

and

“Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”

There’s humour in the bluntness of the phrasing, but also a cutting truth: age and wisdom haven’t arrived in the right order for Lear, and that mismatch drives the tragedy.

A fool is an archetype that in the ordinary course of events, lives in the margins, for obvious reasons. The fool is a disruptor. Unwittingly, or intentionally, naming and causing upheaval.

The Fool as archetype

Yet the fool is also a breath of fresh air, signifying renewal and emergence. In tarot, The image of Fool steps forward from solid ground off the edge of a cliff into the air. Risk without guarantee, beginning without certainty. It holds the kind of learning that can only come with experience.Its number, zero, holds both origin and completion.

The fool also apeears in the enneagram, as the seven point. This archetypal pattern and survival strategy learns experientially, disrespecting existing forms, and even form itself. Leaning always into experiment and impulse, this is the superpower of the seven , and also its undoing. At its best, this energy is pioneering, creative and bold; at its most ungrounded it risks dispersion or destructive excess Coming to recognise something of the harm this approach to life can do to others and themselves, sevens wise to themselves have journeyed through the rings of fire on this journey, and have gained self-knowledge. The virtue of the seven is sobriety.

Spring itself is wise-foolish in this way, risking everything on learning through emergence.

Easter time - two waves of Easter renewal

along with seasonal inclemence, and cultural misrule, April brings spiritual renewal.

The Roman time-management project I mentioned earlier was not entirely successful. The Orthodox christian churches retain the Julian calendar. This year the western and Orthodox christian calendars placed Easter on different Sundays. First it was celebrated on Sunday April 5^th by western Christians, and then on Sunday April 12^th by orthodox Christians, celebrating across eastern Europe and in parts of the middle east and north Africa.

Both traditions follow a formula established at the First council of Nicaea,.Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox in the northern hemisphere. However they use a different clendar framework to get there.

The two Easters most often fall in April, sometimes even converging on the same date (as they did last year in 2025). This year they were a week apart, and other times they are wildly divergent – next year both Easters miss April altogether.

This year, two April waves of Christian renewal moved through the world.

These waves of renewal brings with them the possibility of experiencing inner death and rebirth. Have you felt it? Are there some things that have fallen away for you this month? some things that felt impossibly hurtful or complex, that you have now let go? Was there a moment to surrender where you allowed this wave to take you, beyond the swirling, to a deeper calmer stillness?

Rebirth as April’s announcement

Resurrection is seeing differently. After grief comes a new kind of life. each Christian touches into this mystery each year, through the Eater story, seeing the meaning of the death and then the risen christ as a symbol of ‘the inexhaustible source of life that triumphed over death for ever’1

Maybe none of us are immune to the effects of this, christian and non-christian alike. Maybe this invitation is also built into Spring.

This necessity of living with death and rebirth is something that spiritually we will all have to find ways to encounter, if we are not to go crazy from grief. Anyone who has lost a loved one, their home, or any cornerstone of their world as they knew it, knows something about this. The heart has to somehow become bigger each time it finds a way to live with loss.

After a deep wintering of the soul, the coming of these springtime energies of hope and renewal can be painful as well as deeply necessary.

Let Julian of Norwich talk to us across the centuries and offer us a message of hope here:

Spring, land, and older reckonings of time.

On Friday, April 17th, we reached the new moon while still in firey Aries.

Being in firey Aries, as befits April, it is considered the first new moon in the western astrological year, This echoes older seasonal reckonings of time, when the meaning of the year was m ore closely tied to ecological cycles than fixed abstract calendars.

In early medieval times, the month of April was known as Ēosturmōnaþ, and writing in the 8th century, Bede talks about feasts celebrating her, likely along with spring festivals and fertility rites, whose details are lost in the mists of time, and guessed at from fragments of known history.

As christianity gradually moved through these isles and replaced earlier nature-based spiritual traditions, Ēosturmōnaþ was gradually replaced with the Roman name of April (Aprillis in Latin). In French it is Avril, which is often traced to the Latin aperire, meaning “to open.”

So even as these cultural overlays happened, replacing our received knowledge of the oral spiritual tradions with the writings of the early historians, we can still find an intimacy with this spirit of renewal. The profane tradition of the fool, and the sacred christian feast of Easter both invite spiritual openings, as buds open into flowers, the soil opens to new seeds, and the land opens into new life.

Closing: Emergence and fragility

If ever there was a symbol of April it is blossom! In this brief arrangement between branch and sky we get pink and white convergences of utter spectacle.

Blossom, like the fool, goes all out! It appears fully knowing it will not stay.

Cherry blossom especially holds this paradox: a celebration in fragility that already contains its ending.

I wish you a peaceful new pink moon.

Keep breathing!

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We’re gathering from so many different landscapes, peoplescapes and flowerscapes! I love that about this thoughtful community…that when we gather we get to feel a little of what it is like to live in other corners of the world.

Despite everything else being on its head around the world, springtime turned up again here in the south of England.

Today I want to invite the wild flowers to help us celebrate this immense and fragile opportunity: The lifetime that we get to live on this incredible planet, alongside all the other beings.

I want to express my appreciation to you bringing your presence and attention here to these words, depsite all the distractions and disruptions that life brings, and for continuing to support my Soul Shed project here.

I want to say a huge thank you to my paid subscribers and to people who have joined in with your comments and by sharing my posts. This means a lot to me as it is helping me to grow this project, and its important to me that you know that.

I’ve created a resourcing practice for tending to our inner worlds, with flowers. I hope you enjoy it. Its beneath the yellow cowslips!!

Sending big love to you, and I hope to share soul time with you again soon.

Thank you to the springtime flowers that have met me and joined me up.
The bluebells, celandine, and herb Robert,
the buttercups, speedwell, and cowslips.
Thank you to wild garlic, bluebell, and purple deadnettle,
to violet, dandelion and to stitchwort.

To the Flowers!

Over four recent pieces, I’ve been tracing a thread that is deeply personal and unmistakably collective. I began writing this series on a flight home from the IEA Enneagram conference in Cairo in early February. I was held in a strange tension between an international gathering of hope and a world that, in many ways, felt like it was already fraying at the edges. It was in that space that I shared about a pattern hidden in plain sight within the enneagram, which mirrors the healing journey of the twelve steps. And I brought my SoulCollage® cards along for good company.

Tomorrow is Orthodox Easter, based on the Julian calander that predates the Gregorian. In many countries that follow more ancient Christian traditions, there will be a wave of light and celebration involving some 300 million humans around the world.

This will include people who have made their homes in Egypt, Ethiopia, Greece, Lebanon, Serbia and Russia.

My own faith in nature, which includes human nature, means that it feels fitting to pause today in some possibilities of healing and renewal. To take stock and to sit in the humility it seems we need to recover as a species, faced anew with our capacity for self-destruction.

What has unfolded since that plane flight , is an exploration on here of the beginning of that recovery journey, the first three steps, where all real change starts. This isn’t in clarity or control, but in collapse. In the moment where something in us recognises: this cannot go on. This first piece was called: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” and you might recognise the poetry of WB Yeats in there.

Step one names this threshold humans arrive at when we realise we are powerless over something we we believed we had under our control, and that life has become unmanageable. Far from being a failure, this is a profound perceptual shift. It is the moment we begin to see our agency in a saner, more reality-based way. It is the moment we step out of compulsion, out of spinning or avoidance or thrashing about, and out of the exhausting attempt to control what is not ours to control. It is the birthplace of a clear-sighted inner witness.

This is also the work we each most want to avoid. The place that our whole personality is set up to dodge. The place of the “hungry ghosts” in my second piece, may be expressing in active addictions and compulsions, or it may be the personality patterns in us that seek relief through distraction, excess, or numbing. Whether subtle or extreme, they keep us moving, reaching outward, trying to outrun something named or unnamed. Eventually, something breaks through. There is a shock, or a loss that is impossible to manage in the old ways. There comes an undeniable knowing that this way of living no longer works.

Do you recognise this moment?

It is from here, if we pay attention to life around us opening up in new ways, or surround ourselves with those who have been here before us, that step two becomes something real . We come to believe that a power greater than ourselves might restore us to sanity. This does not necessarily arrive easily or all at once, because it asks new things of us that are not familiar: to loosen our grip on the architecture of our sense of self. To question deeply held assumptions around who we are, and how we maintain a sense of control. To allow a softening, an opening up, or an unclenching. The beginning of a different relationship to life.

In my third piece piece ‘Being Right-sized,’ I pair this inner work with Mary Olivers poem, ‘The Journey’. Because that is what is being offered. If you are following this pathway, that is what you are on.

And then, step three. The threshold that changes everything. A decision to turn our will and our lives over to this power greater than ourselves. ‘God’ as we understand God. This surrendering is a mark of strength and courage. There comes a time when we see clearly that we cannot think, fix, or perform our way out of suffering. And this is not something we give. We ourselves become the offering.

This fourth Piece is called ‘How the Light gets in’ and it includes lyrics from Leonard Cohen and Poetry from Rumi. It is journeying that for some can touch into the mystical traditions which know faith as listening to guidance from deep within.

Taken together, these first three steps reorient us entirely. They bring us to a kind of ground zero, but also to the edge of something new: a way of living that is less driven, less defended, and experienced as embodied and more deeply real. In the language of the enneagram, this is the movement through the rings of fire at points seven, eight, and nine, when understood as archetypal places we must all pass through.

If you’ve been reading along with the series, you may already feel where this touches your own life. The places that feel unmanageable. The patterns that no longer hold. The invitation, however it arrives, to let go of what you cannot carry alone.

I would love to explore this together in community.

Next Saturday I’ll be hosting a gathering online, where we can step into these themes together in a gentle and three centred way. This will be through guided breathwork, reflection, shared inquiry, and the support of being in a room with others who are walking their own version of this path. A space to pause, to listen, and perhaps to recognise something true and current in yourself that has been waiting for your attention.

If this speaks to you, you are very welcome to join us. It’s a free event for paid subscribers here, and others can donate an amount that feels good.

Heres the link to learn more and to book your place:

to the event page

I look forward to meeting you and sharing soul time.

These amazing little yellow ground-stars appear in The lion the witch and the wardrobe when Aslan returns and the wood turns from winter to spring. Edmund betrayed his three brothers and sisters when the evil queen offered him power and irresistible enchanted sweets. Since then he has been through an ordeal. After a quarrel with his youngest sister Lucy, he left them and sought out the queen in resentment. The witch takes him prisoner. When he realises he has aided her in casting her curse on Narnia, he feels great regret. Aslan rescues him and he reconciles with his siblings, and together they help Aslan defeat the evil queen and lift the curse.

The evil queen brought eternal Winter to Narnia, and after the children break the curse, there is a thawing. Spring is recovered, bringing renewal to the land. Nature meets Edmund (his name means ‘Noble Defender’) at the end of their epic adventure, in gentle reverence, in the shape of these tiny stoic springtime flowers!

Celandine is bringing her renewal closer to home too, carpeting the edges of real life woodland paths this month. They bravely mark the emergence of spring here in Hampshire, England, even when the weather is still intermittently cold and harsh.

Howard and I were recceing our forthcoming walk for Alton Walking festival in May, earlier this week , and we stumbled on a lovely patch of these flowers, covering the ground on the side of Hussey’s lane in Hampshire.

This beautiful medieval lane runs from Lower Froyle down to Well. We found the celandine just as the lane becomes sunken, and this is perfect: The well-drained soil is chalky with pockets of topsoil, and the sheltered lane offers a micro-climate that supports Celandine’s early growth and the pollination it makes possible. Visitors include hoverflies, honey bees, bumble bees, and other small solitary bees.

I look to nature for meaning and correspondence and these flowers are inspiring. My sense of these flowers is that they are offering all of us inspiration and courage at time that can feel lacking in hope. Celandine is a member of the sunny buttercup family, and they also have a wonderful capacity to open and close their beautiful golden yellow petals. Celandine has this light-sensitive response when the light fades or the weather turns. It helps the plant to protect its pollen from rain and cold; conserving its reproductive effort for when conditions are right.

William Wordsworth wrote of this in his poem, ‘The Lesser Celandine’:

There is a Flower, the Lesser Celandine,
That shrinks, like many more, from cold and rain;
And, the first moment that the sun may shine,
Bright as the sun himself, ‘tis out again!

When hailstones have been falling, swarm on swarm,
Or blasts the green field and the trees distressed,
Oft have I seen it muffled up from harm,
In close self-shelter, like a Thing at rest.

Here’s to the Lesser Celandine and its ‘close self-shelter’; a wise capacity to find self-containment and conserve energy when the world feels too much, along with its desire to stop shrinking when the sun comes out again!

If you would like to get out and about in Hampshire and deepen your correspondence with nature this Spring, I would love to let you know about Alton Walking Festival. It is taking place across May, featuring 88 walks all led by local volunteers. The Soul Shed is offering three walks again this year, including this one around Well and Lower Froyle:

‘Hampshire’s lanes, hedgerows and badgers’.

This walk is on Monday 25th May and number 70 on the list.

Alton Walking Festival

Check out walks number 7 and 24 too!

In case you cant make it here this May, I’m going to leave you with an acrostic for Celandine, made up of quotes about hope and courage. I hope this little yellow springtime flower inspires you too, and I would love to hear about which wildflowers are joining you in your corner of the world.

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries. – James A Michener.

Effort and courage are not enough without purpose and direction. – John F Kennedy

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage – Anais Nin

Anyone can hide. Facing up to things, working through them, that’s what makes you strong – Sarah Dessen, The truth about forever.

Never be afraid to do what is right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. – Martin Luther King

Don’t play for safety – It’s the most dangerous thing in the world – Hugh Walpole

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. - Albert Camus

Not to fear is much, but truly brave is he who can subdue that fear – Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron.

Everything that is done in the world is done by hope. - Martin Luther

Dear You

I am grateful for your presence while there was no unfurlings gathering this month. March has been a tricky month for me with unexpected travel demands.

I’m going to offer two gatherings in April, and they will both be two distinct but linked opportunities to explore the healing spiral in the Enneagram with the 12 steps, which i have been writ…

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Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in1

These words feel like the best invitation I know to take the third step in a recovery journey.

Here it is:

“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to God as we understood God”.

Taken one by one, steps one to three re-orient a soul-sick human from an old way of life of hustling and striving, to a threshold, opening into a new path, where there is the possibility of living very differently. Steps four to twelve offer a way to chart this new territory.

Exploring with the enneagram symbol and its wisdom teachings about human personality offers a seeker another map. From this map we can each learn with great precision, the particular ways that our personality strategy navigates survival and trips us up.

When these two profoundly sacred maps meet each other, their correspondence further illuminates them both.

To recap on this series of posts so far: Each step on a twelve step journey corresponds to a ring of fire for the defensive strategy of an enneagram type.

Step One corresponds to archetypal lessons at Point seven. Link to post

Step Two corresponds to archetypal lessons at Point eight. Link to post.

Step Three (You Are here!) corresponds to archetypal lessons at Point nine:

And so on.

This offers us the enneagram as a twelve step healing spiral.

In this piece, I explore how step three of recovery mirrors the ego pattern of point nine on the enneagram and what that asks from all of us as we do our versions of self-remembering, whatever our survival strategy. For good company, I’m inviting the lyrics of Leonard Cohen and the poetry of Rumi to join us, and some cards from my SoulCollage® deck as illustrations2

This journeying is of course no abstract thing. You are likely to have your own embodied response when you consider this step: a set of sensations, feelings, resistance, or even nothing at all. Indeed, if you feel nothing in the face of surrendering control of your life, it might be that the idea feels so threatening or ridiculous that you’ve dissociated altogether!

I began sitting with the immensity of the task of writing about this step at this historical moment. Certain situations and sets of circumstances take individual humans to a kind of ground zero that rattles life as we know it to the extent that very little makes sense any more. There is an addiction, or unwanted and compulsive behaviour, or a particular set of painful relational patterns that brings a person to recovery community. In the case of the enneagram, often people arrive with some kind of identity wounding, bringing with it a longing to find answers to deep psycho-spiritual questions around what it means to be a human being.

This is when, where, and why, steps one to three become meaningful.

However, whole collectives and countries are going through this at the moment and it seems as though our social fabric is fraying, with disordered leaders in the world impacting the whole field and generating war and turmoil. It is my sense that both the enneagram and the twelve steps become culturally important in new ways at this time.

An individual recovery journey with the twelve steps or the enneagram becomes a kind of fractal within the whole gestalt.

For me this step lands very personally. I’m a female social enneagram six. A big part of my unmanageability arises when I imagine I’m a kind of sentry looking out and seeing things coming, and holding things together for my family and friends and community. And it becomes increasingly obvious that I am not. That this is not my job. But who am I if I’m not responsible? If what I am offering isn’t making anything better? What if no one asked me for my problem solving help, and that’s not even what my value is?

Because this is a well-worn theme, and my life often gets unmanageable and I have come to recognise the insanity of my ego strategy, step one and two are welcome relief for me.

It’s my sense that step three however is hard for all of us, and hardest of all for type nine, (which I’ll come onto shortly)

The movement towards step three today is constellating for me in this writing process :

A kind of social anxiety: I’m writing this at a time when the world is burning. There is less and less that feels coherent to orient to. I’m aware of a loss of innocence and of growing witness to extremes of humanity: I’m writing as each day brings news that rattles and undoes my sense of what humans are and what we are capable of.

I’m writing as someone that who has been anchored in faith, and also undone by spiritual community. I have had to learn to trust myself. That has felt like deep work for me at six.

I’m also writing as one who turns to words to hold meaning, and it seems to me that at this time words are being stretched to breaking point. Words are being used to distract us, manipulate us and frighten us.

So, if I’m going to trust an idea, it needs to stand scrutiny - I’m a questioning six after all,. And I return to the steps over and over, whenever I know I need to be held in my broken humanness.

And so here I am at step three. With my fear-seized heart.

Step two is the moment of realising we are not actually running the show, and we can unfold into living step three when we stop trying to control or avoid our lives, and allow our hearts to begin to heal.

Your way of approaching this step is likely to be different. Step three is an invitation to surrender, and so it will take us close to the places we most protect. In the enneagram, each type pattern carries a heart wound of its own, a core place of rupture that gives rise to its particular survival strategy.

Looking at your own heart-wound can be a powerful place to journal here. Please do feel welcome to share any of your reflections on this piece.

The heart wound of point nine on the enneagram has been described by Russ Hudson as a shattered heart. A heart broken into many pieces:

‘It’s a feeling of absolute devastation that my heart is not just broken but shattered into little pieces. That I’m broken beyond repair, I’m just a scattered massive shards, that the world too, the unity of the world somehow has been broken, that we’re all stuck in these little prison cells of our psyches and we can’t meet and everything’s broken apart’

But this comes at a high cost. For a person living from the nine pattern, there is a deep identification with unity itself. Maintaining that sense of unity becomes the task. And to be able to hold this imagined unity, self is set aside. There is no clear sense of will to surrender, because there is no clear sense of self to surrender from.

Cicci describes this beautifully in in her writing on the heart wounds:

‘The self-narcotization that Nines are famous for is partly a result of this permanent, energy-draining resistance. Another way that Nines “disappear” themselves is by blending into the environment, as it were; assuming others’ preferences as a default, lest they find theirs is actually different and might also realise they want to state as much. The more I cater to my environment — in the form of adopting the seeming consensus around me — the harder it is for me to be aware of my own true opinions, wishes and needs. After all, if I don’t intend to heed them, why bother with finding out in the first place?’3

So, step three asks something profound of someone living at nine, which is why this task is their particular ring of fire:

Not just surrendering an idealised image of unity that they have to ignore themselves to maintain, but the healing task of self-remembering.

And because nine archetypally represents unity, and the law of one, this task belongs to all of us.

Perhaps this is a good moment for is Rumi:

“Sorrow prepares you for joy.

It violently sweeps everything out of your house,

so that new joy can find space to enter.

It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart,

so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place.”4

If you have come into contact with your own torn places, caught up in the excesses and deadening habits of your own patterns and survival strategies, then you may already sense this: You are not the one holding everything together.

You may have also begun to open into the possibility that relationship with a power greater than yourself , the God of your understanding, might be a route back to sanity.

Step two was about this messy moment. It’s not a put your armour back on and get out there moment. It’s a moment of realising that your usual ways of coping - your personalities best efforts, are no longer working. And you cannot go back to them.

You can add up the parts
But you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march
There is no drum5

There is no way to get out of this by doubling down on your usual tricks.

Once you have seen that you can’t fix things or figure things out or express things in such a way that all will be well, there comes a moment of realising tht the offering is no longer something that you give, You yourself must become the offering.

Every heart, every heart
To love will come
But like a refugee6

That is step three.

It sits at the top of the enneagram at point nine, the point that represents the circle, and the law of one – the law of indivisible unity.

It is the enneagram point nine in all of us that has lost touch with who we truly are, and it is in passing through the ring of fire from self-forgetting to self-remembering, that we come to live in the truth of this step. To hand over our life to something greater than ourself is the beginning of true self-remembering.

You really don’t have much to offer from here. It is not a proud place, but one of deep honesty. A place where you know that your human self has caused harm to yourself and to others. That your impact exceeds your understanding.

That is what you have to offer. Your life.

‘Be like a melting snow

wash yourself of yourself’7

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

This step is something that everyone comes to in their own way, and if you arrive here, it will be a step you take again and again. Each time we remember that on our own, our will cannot carry us.

Each time we become willing, once more, to let something greater hold what we cannot.

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Tree: Oak

Moon: Egg Moon, Pink Moon. (new moon on Wednesday 8th March)

Archetype: Enneagram 846 – ‘The Truth Teller’, (Katherine Fauvre). ‘Encounter’. Also 864, 468, 486, 648, 684

Virtues: Innocence (8), Equanimity (4) Courage (6)

Holy ideas: holy Truth (8) holy Origin (4) holy faith (6)

Some rings of fire: tolerating vulnerability, being ordinary, fear itself.

When I started exploring trees with the enneagram, there was no question that Oak trees were mirroring enneagram point eight archetypally to me.

Oak takes its place as a keystone species in its habitat, whether that be in deciduous woodland, at the edge of a field, on a savannah, in a river valley or a flood plain, or in a planted landscape. A single tree can be protecting and supporting up to 2,300 other kinds of organisms, which is more than any other tree in North America or Europe. Their wood is hard and strong, and lends itself to making boats and buildings that stand the test of time. Spiritually, Oak is venerated for its strength and endurance – some species living many hundreds of years. To stand in the presence of an Oak tree is to experience something of its solidity, gravity and presence.

These qualities mirror the archetypal energy of the eight. An oak shapes the ecology around it, offering shelter, food and stability. In a human ecosystem, eight energy often takes on the role of protector and generating force. Eights embody strength and often become people that others look to for direction. At its healthiest this energy is connected to the heart, and creates a kind of locus where others can flourish, by stepping into their own self-empowerment; at its most reactive it can become defensive or controlling. Oak mirrors this pattern of grounded enduring power.

This post is the latest in a series exploring enneagram tritype as archetypal human patterning mirrored in nature, and it feels like a beautiful piece of timing to be walking with Oak at the same time as exploring eight as step two on a healing recovery spiral. (Link here to the piece).

If there is a tree that is both upholding our human journeying and agency, and helping us to stay sane, grounded and real, it is Oak.

To help us to scope out this space, here is a clip of Seraphima P. Clarke, civil rights activist, talking about the Angel Oak tree near Charleston South Carolina. Known as the “Mother of the Movement,” she revered the historic Angel Oak on Johns Island, SC, as a nurturing space for education and building racial unity. She held classes and field trips there for African American children, recognising the inspiration of the tree to offer an integrated, tranquil setting to foster hope and resilience.

As my journey with trees and the enneagram unfolded into tritype, the character of Oak became more nuanced for me in the ways that it can offer its correspondence in our three centres. Eight became the 846; the oak is giving witness to emotional depth and sensitivity to location as well as to strength and power.

For readers less familiar with tritype®1 and which is now used more widely in the enneagram coaching community) the enneagram describes three centres of intelligence - the gut the heart and the head. In this three-centred approach to understanding our humaning, each person has a dominant type in each centre. In the pattern 846, eight represents the gut centre (agency and instinctive power) four represents the heart centre (emotional depth and a longing for authenticity) and six represents the head centre (vigilance, questioning and truth-testing.

When considering a three centred enneagram pattern, it is as though within our core pattern we contain two further patterns, a little like a Russian stacking doll. The first number in our tritype is the dominant strategy we rely on most strongly, while the second and third express themselves as supporting ways of navigating emotion and perception. And together these patterns help to describe our relationship to each of our centres and how we relate instinctively, emotionally and intuitively to the world. So, a 648 human and an 864 human, will have much in common, but the emphasis their personality places on their centres will be different. And sometimes the pattern is coherent and aligned, like the stacked doll, and at others the parts are dancing about seperately, and clearly visible as distinct!

Through this lens, Oak began to appear as a living companion to the personality pattern, known as ‘triple reactivity’ and named ‘the truth speaker’ by Katherine Fauvre. My name for this pattern is ‘encounter’, for the ways that these three enneagram point each attempt to navigate and engage with what is at the contact boundary interfacing each centre of intelligence and the outside world.

Trees model being present in time and place in the world. And their presence is such that as our evolutionary companions, humasn can experience them as both inspiring mirror and regulating witness. Their steady presence can help regulate the nervous system. We can correspond with their nature with our own. Standing beneath a large tree, sensing its rootedness and scale, can naturally slow breathing, bring awareness back into the body, and create a feeling of grounded perspective. A human exploring the intelligences of gut, heart and mind can find correspondence with a tree in all three. There can be an emotional connection, a visceral embodied connection, and inspiration to be found in spending time with trees.

It is as though a tree that mirrors a tritype offers us the evolved version of the personality pattern, so that the reactivity and complexity of our humaning is offered back to us healed and regulated. Where the human 468 pattern may express itself through defensiveness, intensity or inner conflict, the tree demonstrates the same essential qualities in their mature and balanced form - strength without domination, depth without overwhelm, sensitivity without anxiety. In this way the tree becomes a living teacher of what the integrated version of the pattern might feel like.

The last tree we explored with was Holly, and I wrote that

[I]n the mists of Celtic mythology, the crown of king of the forest is fought for between the Holly King and the Oak King. The story goes that the kings battle twice a year -at the summer and winter solstice, for the forest. The Holly takes the crown for the wintering months, the Oak as light returns.

This means we are coming into Oaks high season! We are approaching the Spring equinox, which happens when the sun crosses the celestial equator, so that there are nearly equal amounts of daylight and darkness across the globe. This marks the beginning of astronomical Spring in the Northern hemisphere, and this year it will come on Friday March 20^th one day and a half after the new moon that marks the end of Ramadan. This year, Lent on the Christian calendar and Ramadan on the Muslim calendar have coincided, making this a deeply spiritual time globally, with people in both traditions practicing abstinence and fasting. Oak is finding its way into Spring in many lands, and is witness to humans of many faiths and none.

At this turning of the year, the symbolism of Oak as the returning king of the light half of the year speaks to renewal of strength, clarity and life force after the dormancy of winter. As this wave of Spring comes around the world, it feels natural to widen the lens from this moment to the global life of Oak.

There are over 600 species of Oak worldwide, living in north America, Europe, Asia and parts of north Africa. Countries where Oak live tend to have moderate temperatures, distinct seasons, and cold enough winters for dormancy but not extreme polar cold. They also need moderate rainfall, distributed through most of the year, and no extremes of wet and dry (like a desert or a rainforest).

Oak trees thrive in well-drained soils, rolling hills, plateaus and open woodlands, and can live happily in mixed forest-grassland landscapes. These conditions allow oak to live hundreds of years.

Oak may still look very wintery; in March the trees are still in their dormant phase, but as temperatures begin to rise, buds are starting to appear and swell in preparation for Spring growth. However, not all Oak trees lost their leaves over winter!

I’m writing from South Carolina, a region where both deciduous and evergreen Oak live. The Southern Live Oak is an Iconic tree of the coastal south and you can see the Angel Oak earlier in this piece, including its role in the civil rights movement. However, there are also plenty of deciduous Oak here too, such as the water oak, the willow oak (with willow shaped leaves!) and the white oak, which feels quite similar to the pedunculate and sessile Oaks I’m used to in England.

Let’s explore more about how Oak lives within personal experience.

It was with a lot of excitement that I arrived at a zoom call with Anna, who identifies at 684 with a sx subtypes , to talk about her experience of living with this pattern. I identify as 648 with a social subtype, so I had a sense that between us, with Oak as our companion, we could discover more about our similarities and our differences. working with these three part enneagram patterns becomes most meaningful when we can begin to see how they express in the texture of our lives.

After I had told Anna a bit about the tree types project, our conversation unfolded around imagery, and the similarities and differences in living with the same three part enneagram pattern:

An area that we were able to explore was the order in our stacking and the relationship we have to these parts of ourselves. It is my sense that the third part in tritype is the least mature in the three and the one we have least mastery of. Anna reflated on her parts as operating in a kind of rotation. At times the emotional intensity of the four revealing itself, at other moments the questioning vigilance of six, and at others the instinctive power of eight stepping forward.

Spending time with trees, and particularly a tree that feels like a good mirror, can be a powerful way to slow down these intrapsychic dynamics enough to be with present with them. In the quiet company of an Oak tree, the inner rotation of my 648 reactivity can soften, allowing a sense of steadiness, inner truth and even emotional equilibrium to emerge,

If you have Oak trees in your corner of the world, it would be wonderful to hear more about them, and if these qualities of Oak speak to you too, to hear something of your human witness to this tree.

I hope to see you for the next post in this series - when the fig tree will be joining us.

If you would like to take a look at Soul Shed offerings that support you on an inner journey with trees, take a look here:

The Soul Shed