‘Things fall apart; The centre cannot hold’

Walking a twelve step healing spiral with the enneagram, poetry and SoulCollage® Step One. Point seven.

‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer”

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’1

I am writing this piece on a flight home to London from the IEA International enneagram conference in Cairo, Egypt. This immense international constellation of hope unfolded against a backdrop of escalating global unrest and the increasing exposure of corruption in political leadership.

As a part of this conference I had the honour of sharing my recognition of a pattern hidden in plain sight in the enneagram symbol that mirrors the healing journey in the twelve steps recovery tradition. This new series will build on this exploration.

In this piece I am weaving Yeat’s vision of social collapse, the first step of recovery in the twelve step tradition, and the Enneagrams archetypal healing journey starting at point seven. SoulCollage® cards from my personal deck offer illustration.

Any healing journey starts at the bottom. At the moment when there is a recognition of how bad things have got. Western traditions mostly try to dodge this. In the time I recently spent in Cairo talking with Egyptian friends, and exposed to middle eastern culture, I was grateful for one of the 99 names of Allah being Al-Muzill - The dishonourer - He who lowers and puts one in abasement and degradation.

Because looking around me, there is plenty of that. What was hidden is now exposed for all to see.

‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’

Here is the first step in the 12 steps of recovery, common to all Twelve step programmes:

Realised I was powerless over x, that life had become unmanageable.

On the enneagram symbol, when its points are seen as an archetypal journey travelling around the circle, this place is the ring of fire of initiation at point seven. Point seven, archetypally, is the place of excess and escape, where stimulation replaces presence. Life is in full flow, impressions come from all around, life comes to feel ‘too much’ and so long as we are unconscious, we continue to reach outward rather than inward.

This piece and the one that will follow on Wedensday, hopes to shine light on this place – a kind of wasteland, but also the place that can see the first light, a first distant glimmer of the virtue of this place; sobriety, and the place that, on the other side of its rings of fire, can know its highest ideas; holy wisdom, holy plan.

What if part of the human experience is to teach us humility? To come to know that which we are powerless over? what if we each have a part of our self-discovery and self-recovery, in knowing what that is?

If you have ever heard someone in recovery from an addiction share their experience, strength and hope, you will hear a kind of rawness that is fully aware of the vast range of human capacity for extremes of behaviour, emotion and thought, and fully aware of our range of impact on our well-being and on our inner and outer worlds. A sober human in recovery has walked through many rings of fire to be able to be telling you their story.

The human at the depths of addiction may paradocically have the greatest capacity to encounter a power greater than themselves. It someone who has lost everything who most confronts their own powerlessness and the fantasy of control.

In the enneagram wisdom teachings, these areas of powerlessness show up in the passions of our hearts, the fixations in our thinking, and in our unhealed relationship to our instinctual nature, especially in the domains of our runaway dominant instinct. We will go deeper into how this maps in the next post in this series.

To offer this back to you today, reading this, do you have something in your life that pulls you into suffering and reminds you of your lack of control. A relationship, a habit, an activity…

If you dont, it is quite possible that the thing might even be control and mastery itself!

The time is ripe in this social and political unrest to learn more about our own own humaning, especially for those of us who want to figure out how to play our parts in this unfolding human story.

Step one is the scream, the inner cry for help. This cannot go on. It is a self-interruption, and may come after a series of external shocks to the system that have been your soul desperately trying to get your attention.

On the spiritual journey through life on earth, this step is when the human falls to their knees in despair

Surely some revelation is at hand

Surely the second coming is at hand.

The second coming! Hardly are those words out,

When a vast image out of spiritus mundi

Troubles my sight somewhere in sands of the desert.

-Yeats - The Second Coming.

If you have enjoyed this post, which was first published on Substack, please do hop over there to read more from this series, and to subscribe to my content there. I offer a paid subscription too, which includes an invite to a monthly gathering exploring the themes I write about experiencially.

If you enjoy connection with imagery as way of experiencing deeper levels of understanding, you might like to explore making your own intuitive collages. Here you can visit my SoulCollage® offerings at The Soul Shed.