I heard this truth from Richard Rohr: The soul cannot be offended. It’s come up a lot recently in my conversations with clients, and it’s a huge help to us as we endeavor to live and lead with more equanimity.
I’ve been studying the psychospiritual tool of the Enneagram for 2 decades, and its core truth is this—our personalities are not the same thing as US. Our essential self, our soul, cannot be lost or harmed. Down beneath our gender, sexuality, race, education level, job title, marital status, parental status and yes, down below our personalities, there exists something else. A bedrock of divine-ness, an immutable goodness. We all have it. It’s just that some of us have lost touch with it. Or it might be more accurate to say that all of us—even the most evolved—lose touch with it several times every day! It’s our spiritual practices and being in community that bring us back to center.
When we lose touch with our essence, we become reactive. It takes nothing for our feelings to get hurt, for us to get hooked by how people respond (or not) to us, or for us to withdraw or become bitter. Everything in us gears up to defend our personality. The danger is that we think we’re defending our actual selves. I heard Glennon Doyle say recently, “It turns out that what I thought was my personality is actually a set of symptoms.” I would say that’s true for all of us. The Enneagram teaches that our personalities are a needed set of coping mechanisms that help us deal with reality and do a good job of getting us through the first half of our life. When we enter the second half, though, either chronologically or because of an epiphany or trauma, these coping mechanisms become less useful. They fall far short. What was once adaptive becomes maladaptive. If we’re tuned into Presence, we start looking around for something else to guide us.
One of the things I love about the workplace is that it holds up a mirror to who we are. If we are sitting at home alone, it’s easy to think we’re mature, enlightened people. But when we come into contact with people we didn’t choose and who might annoy us, that’s when things get real. And that’s when we really need this reminder that the soul cannot be offended. This doesn’t mean there isn’t systemic injustice in the world, or that you should stay at a harmful or ill-fitting job. But it does mean you have a lot of choice about what you give your time and energy to. If you’re busy protecting your ego, the other things you’re on this planet to do won’t get done. And you’ll end up much unhappier.
One of the things I remind myself when I get annoyed is, “This can either be a problem for me or not.” Maybe I have an unmet need that wants attention, or maybe I need to have a hard conversation with someone. Great. Can I have the courage to take care of that instead of responding from a place of reactivity, blame, or stonewalling? Can I dip below my protected, hallowed personality and find the soul underneath? The essential Sarah-ness that cannot be lost or harmed, and that, in fact, can’t be offended? Wow. That feels good.