Episode 191 Forgiveness and the Shadow: Insights from Drexel Rayford

In this episode of The Real Enneagram, we welcomed back our own Reverend Dr. Drexel Rayford, a senior faculty member at the Institute for Conscious Being. Our conversation centered around the discipline of silence and its profound role in contemplation, as well as the tenacity of the ego and its resistance to what it perceives as its diminishment.

Drexel shared a poignant story from his graduate school days that highlighted the essence of spiritual maturity, emphasizing the importance of humility and the acknowledgment of not knowing. We explored how silence can create space for the soul to flourish, allowing us to listen to a deeper presence beyond our constant thoughts and ego-driven chatter.

We also delved into the complexities of self-forgiveness, discussing how the ego often struggles to see itself as part of the problem in interpersonal conflicts. Drexel reflected on his own journey of understanding and forgiving himself for past actions, recognizing that we are all shaped by our experiences and the systems around us.

Throughout the episode, we highlighted the contrast between the ego's judgment and the soul's curiosity, encouraging listeners to embrace their shadows and the interconnectedness of our human experiences. Drexel's insights reminded us that true spiritual growth comes from surrendering control and allowing our souls to guide us toward healing and authenticity.

We hope you find this conversation as enriching as we did, and we invite you to join us in exploring these themes further in your own lives. Thank you for listening!

To hear Drexel's music, including "Nine Prayers of the Soul" and "The Seeking Soul," visit: vagrantschapel.com

To learn more about the Institute for Conscious Being, visit: theicb.info

Transcript

Scott:
You are now listening to The Real Enneagram, a podcast by the Institute for Conscious Being. To learn more about the Institute and its offerings, visit theicb.info. That's T-H-E I-C-B dot I-N-F-O.

Nanette: Well, welcome back to The Real Enneagram, a podcast brought to you by the Institute for Conscious Being. I'm Nanette Mudiam and I'm here with Scott Smith and Dr. Joseph Howell. Hi, you guys.

Scott: Hey, how are you?

Nanette: Good, I'm very, very good. It's a beautiful day outside and it's a beautiful day indoors because here we are recording another podcast and we have an especially special guest with us here today. We have senior faculty member of the ICB, Dr. Drexel Rayford. Reverend Dr. Drexel Rayford.

Drexel: Reverend is unearned.

Nanette: So you don't do surgery, is what I'm trying to say. No, no, no. So Drexel is on the faculty and serves many roles. You do the newsletter for us. Yeah, that's true. You've led worship and music and we have, you've recorded a, I don't know, is it called album in English? Yeah, it's still called an album. It's still called an album. Okay. Songs of the Enneagram, which the album is called?

Drexel: It's Nine Prayers of the Soul. Nine Prayers of the Soul. Based on the prayers that Joe wrote that are in Becoming Conscious. Yes, it's beautiful.

Nanette: And we've had you on the show talking about it. And so please check that out. I'm sure we'll have a link for that in the podcast notes. But Scott, help us know what we're going to talk about today.

Scott: Well, I believe some of the things on the roster, so to speak, are the discipline of silence and its role in contemplation. We're going to talk about how the ego can be a tenacious thing. It does not like what it perceives as its diminishment. We're going to talk about the subject of self-forgiveness and how different the ego's approach to self-forgiveness or lack therefore differs from the soul's. And just this idea that the soul perceives the connection to that which the ego refuses to see, like our shadow.

Nanette: Well, I guess let's start there. Let's talk about the discipline of silence.

Drexel: Yeah, well, when we talk about knowing your soul, when we talk about being able to flourish in one's soul, I think of a story when I was in graduate school. One of the supervisors I had was a chaplain at the local psychiatric hospital. His name was Clarence Barton. And we were all sitting around talking about spiritual maturity. We were all graduate students in the psychology of religion, and we all really knew all the details. We had it all sewed up. We knew that there was a cognitive answer. These are the criteria that you pile up that you earn as you work your way through spiritual maturity. And once you've earned all these credits, once you've done all these things, then you can deem yourself to be spiritually mature. We knew it was out there, we just didn't know what all the steps were. We knew we had covered several of them because we knew we were superior to so many other people, particularly those who had not studied as we had.

Nanette: I'm just curious, can you tell me how old you were at this time?

Drexel: I was in my mid to late 30s.

Nanette: Okay, oh yeah, super mature.

Drexel: Oh yeah, super mature. I had, oh gosh, I had A tailwind, man, I was moving fast. Anyway, we were sitting around talking about that and Clarence was just sitting there. He was a supervisor. He had been years at Central State Hospital and chaplain among the some of the most challenging psychiatric cases that you can ever come across in practice. He was sitting there listening to us. He was a little man. and baldhead and bucktooth and was sitting there and he was watching us and he was listening to us. And finally, one of the graduate students, Wes Eads, who remains a friend to this day, said, Clarence, what do you think about this spiritual maturity? So when do you think you can call yourself spiritually mature? And Clarence leaned back and he said, well, if I ever do become spiritually mature, I think I'll be the last one to know. And that basically silenced us. I was sitting there and I was feeling like, good night. We've been talking about all this stuff and lining up all kinds of reasons and answers. And he comes up with this tremendously humble thing, this person to us who, from our perspective was, he's dead now, just such a mature, collected presence. and so insightful whenever he would ask us questions and how he ushered us, we thought that he had the criteria lined up in his mind. But here's this guy who we perceived as being so together saying, I don't know. I don't know. And somehow I sense saying I don't know was one of the most spiritually mature soulful things anybody could ever say. And the fact that I, as you point out, as a 30-year-old, very ambitious PhD student, ready to be called Dr. Rafer, you know, that part of me just really leapt when you introduced me that way. I knew that somehow I heard the truth from him and that what I was dealing with had been very superfluous.

Nanette: So connect that for me, if you will, to the discipline of silence. Is it silence in response? Is that where we're learning?

Drexel: That's a good question. Because at that point, I didn't know anything about centering prayer. Okay. I was raised Southern Baptist. And of course, the best prayer you could pray was, Lord, I'm a sinner. I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and now I can go to heaven, right?

Nanette: Right.

Drexel: That was the prayer. That was the sinner's prayer. And I prayed the sinner's prayer as a nine-year-old. After all that nine years of sin, I was six, so I get it. Yeah, okay. You gave up six years. Yes. But what hit me, what hits me now is that I was always taught prayers to say. Baptists are very verbal, a lot of evangelicals are very verbal, you know, the truth is something, the word is something that you read, you verbalize this stuff, you study the word, the written word, and every one of them is inerrant, you know, as dictated by God through the, you know, the shell of the writer. And it hit me that I had never learned to listen. Just always composing words in my head, always composing prayers. What's the right prayer to say for this? What's the right prayer to ensure that my disembodied soul after my, you know, after my physical demise, my disembodied ego would then be eternal, which was my perception. I remember one night sitting on the side of my bed when I had gotten to a prominent pastorate in Virginia. And I had run up against an emptiness that the career I had chosen had come to a point to where it was just not fulfilling anymore. And I realized that I knew a lot about what a lot of people had said about what a lot of other people had said about God. But if I were honest, I knew I had never heard from God myself. And at that point, cognitively, I thought, that means I have never listened. I've never been taught how to listen, which means you got to shut up. And I started relating that to my experience when I went to Austria to live and work there. In order to learn German, I had to quit speaking English. I had to learn a whole new grammar. And so cognitively, I said, I'm going to have to learn a whole new grammar. What is it? to shut up and be quiet. And somehow in the midst of all that, a church member came walking up to me a couple of weeks later. I had gone through this. I was sitting by myself in my room thinking, oh my goodness, I know all this, but there's got to be more. There's got to be more. I've never. Here I am, the senior pastor of a leading county seat, First Baptist Church, and they're all assuming I'm speaking for God. And if I'm honest, I've never heard from God myself. I'm just passing on hearsay. And this church member handed me a book by Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love, and I started reading it. And that introduced me to the discipline of silence, of centering prayer. And in the discipline of silence and centering prayer, what you do is you constantly disengage yourself from your constant thoughts that tumble through your head. what some people have called the cocktail party in your head. And whenever you stop and you try to be quiet, you'll notice your brain immediately starts making thoughts. But what Keating pointed out is that there is a device, there is a technique that you can learn to place yourself in availability. And that is using the sacred word to interrupt those thoughts, to set them aside, not to invest in them. And what that does is I noticed that there was a presence, a sense of self that arose that was observing all that process.

Drexel: And that was the nonverbal grammar of God. The silence. And that the silence was filled full of an ineffable glow. A living light, a warmth.

Drexel: And that was present for me when I set aside on a regular basis by simply returning to my sacred word, and my sacred word is Abba. What Luke tells us was Jesus called God, Abba, Daddy in Aramaic. And so I would repeat that and interrupt when I would discover myself investing in these little thoughts that would go up there. I left the oven on? Did I leave the oven on? I've got to go to this committee meeting. Stop thinking about that. Stop. And that was a process of setting ego aside, because it's the ego that creates these thoughts and wonders about whether or not you're being impressive or whether or not you're even doing the centering prayer correctly. Ego is worried about all that. And so in repeating the sacred word, you're setting ego aside. And by setting ego aside, the soul spontaneously arises through that. and becomes more and more present. It's not anything that you can engineer. You can only make yourself available to it, and then it arises on its own.

Scott: It's like that old Zen saying, enlightenment is an accident, but certain practices can make us more accident prone.

Drexel: Yeah, I like that. James Finley once said, a wonderful, wonderful teacher, James Finley said that we can't make this happen, because ego cannot do that. Ego cannot set ego aside. But what ego can do, ego, we can make, we can create conditions that are most conducive for this to arise among us. We can do that. So we create those conditions by the discipline of silence.

Scott: Yeah. It's like the ego wants to go out and acquire peace or ease or presence. It's like the ego wants to go out and acquire a God, but these aren't things to own. To me, it's like they're things that are already there. We just can't feel them. We can't hear them anymore because we're just so full of our own stuff, our own chatter, our own baggage or what have you. So that gets me to our next thought, something you mentioned before we started recording that the ego is a tenacious thing. It doesn't like its own diminishment. Yeah. And I feel there's a lot of diminishment of the ego of that continuous chatter in the practice of silence. So I wonder if you could talk a bit more about that, Drexel. Why does the ego not like its diminishment? What's up with that? What is up with that? Yeah. Well, the ego, as I said, has this profound survival instinct. And really that survival instinct serves us and serves us well, helps us navigate the world and survive the world.

Drexel: I mean, the ego is not a bad thing at all. It's just not the complete picture. It's only a small part of it. In fact, the ego needs to be in service of the soul. And I think we sense that, but it's like whenever somebody is asked to take a back seat and not sit shotguns or not drive. That takes a letting go. And all kinds of images come to mind at that point. Henry Nowen used to talk about the trapeze, the flying trapeze. And something that he learned is that, you know, you have your catcher who swings back and forth. If you heard this joke, Nouwen wrote beautifully about this and the catcher is swinging back and forth. He starts and then there's the flyer who comes over here and times his or her flight so that The flyer lets go and goes through the air with arms extended, and then the catcher catches the flyer. And that's one of the stunts that people on the trapeze do. And it's awe-inspiring to see that happen. But the key is that the flyer does not try to do any catching. The flyer simply throws the arms out and allows the catcher to catch. Because if the flyer tries to do the catching him or herself, she will break wrists and fall and do harm to both. What the flyer has to do in order for the flyer to do what the flyer is called to do, the flyer has to trust the catcher, has to let go and just be received. And the ego is scared of falling. Yeah.

Nanette: Naturally.

Drexel: Yeah. And the ego doesn't want to let go and allow something else to grab it and receive it. And that's what the soul does. The soul can receive the ego if the ego would just simply extend the arms. And then it's a beautiful ensemble. I also think of of how we don't want to die prematurely. I mean, you know, we are biological creatures and we don't want anybody to shoot us or stab us or, you know, we want to eat. We want to perpetuate our genes. That's part of being a physical creature and the ego helps us do that. The ego of a woman helps her to dress up in order to conform to the culture, to be able to attract a male, for instance. A male wants to look attractive in order to attract a mate. That's a very basic drive that we have. And so the ego has a function there. But the ego needs to see the bigger side of that, that that all functions within a bigger story of connection and of connectivity. And the soul is the one that can guide the ego to do that appropriately, to be able to see the whole context holographically. I think the ego sees linearly, sees the immediate, sort of like a digital watch. And the soul sees the whole, sees the analog. The ego sees, like right now, it's 311. the ego would see 3 11 written there and it's very precise but the soul says I can see it's in the afternoon and it's uh three hours afternoon and I've got four hours until the sun sets and I can see that at a glance the soul can see a glance the whole context whereas the ego sees the digital right then and there in that moment.

Scott: So the ego sees things in isolation and the soul sees things in their fullness, as it were.

Drexel: Yeah, in their connectivity. Yeah. And, you know, we talked about that earlier. Joe and I were talking earlier today about a man who took exception to Joe's. I won't tell the whole story, Joe. That might be a good story to tell some other time. Besides, we don't want to insult the guy in case he's listening. But he got very mad at Joe when Joe asked a very innocent question to the man. And Joe was generally wanting to get some legitimate information from the guy. But evidently, the guy saw something in Joe that triggers something in him. And he this is our understanding. It's my opinion. And I'm very right. He evidently saw something in Joe that reminded him of something very negative and went after him. and accused Joe of being prejudiced and bigoted, which everybody sitting in here and anybody listening who's ever met Joe Howell knows not the case. But the guy couldn't see it because he wasn't making the connection. He himself was probably too tired. Joe and I, Joe was saying he was exhausted himself, probably not in touch with himself. Couldn't see that Joe's query or inquiry was something very legitimate and beautiful. And so he used accusation to bolster himself and push Joe away. And it made me think of a time when I was accosted by some Mormon missionaries who, in their evangelizing me, told me that if I would just accept what they were saying, that I would have a life that was much, much more beautiful than anything I'd ever imagined. And both of these fellows were about 25 years younger than me. I had had a rich life up to that point, and they had not bothered to inquire about my own life. And then I realized after doing that, that I had done that in my own evangelistic efforts when I was their age, when I was living in Austria, assuming that I, as a Southern Baptist from North Carolina, knew Jesus better than the Austrians in Salzburg. And so when I got to Salzburg, I was going to let them know about Jesus they didn't know anything about. Of course, I've discovered that Jesus had been in Austria a long time before I got there. I think I've said that before. But anyway, I was old enough by that point when those missionaries hit me to realize that they're just doing what I was doing. And I could see myself in them. And that helped me have a little grace for them. Yeah. But if you had responded out of your ego, what would you have said to them? I would have told them to leave me the heck alone. Except I wouldn't have used a euphemism. Yeah, I would have told him get get lost. And I would have told him Hey, you don't know who I am. Yeah, you don't know who I am.

Drexel: Here, here are my credentials. As a matter of fact, I did tell them about my credentials, but anyway.

Nanette: It's interesting that all egos think they already have it figured out.

Scott: Yeah. It brings me back to this thing, this idea of curiosity versus judgment, right? I feel like the ego judges and the soul is curious. Like those missionaries, They'd already made a pre-judgment on who you were, what you needed. You had made the same pre-judgment with the Austrians when you were over there. The man in the parking lot. You know, knew what Joe was all about and had already judged his intentions. Yeah. So how does the ego shift from judgment to curiosity? Like how does the ego learn to, to let go, you know, to trust the catcher? Am I off base or is it not the ego that, that has to consent to, to shutting up and the centering prayer to, uh, you know, getting out of the soul's way.

Drexel: I think the ego can cognitively, in fact, the ego needs to get there, needs to recognize that there are limits.

Scott: Yeah.

Drexel: I'm limited. I do have limits. I mean, it was my ego that said, that reasoned it out. If God created everything and created all time, the creator is always greater.

Scott: Yeah.

Drexel: than the thing it creates. It's bigger than, beyond whatever it creates. And so if all time is created by God, then God is bigger than time itself. Which means that all of our language, which is all time-bound, is inadequate for describing God. And so that if I am going to understand God, I need to move into a realm that is beyond time-bound grammar. Yes. See, that's all a cognitive process. Yes. But it's pointing towards something that's bigger than ego. And so ego can point past itself. Yes. And then ego can realize I need to regulate myself. I need to realize my boundaries and stop here and allow something else to grow bigger. And so ego can do that.

Scott: In fact, I think ego has to do that. It's the power of admitting, I don't know. Yeah. That sign of spiritual maturity you're talking about earlier.

Nanette: But we would all agree that, I mean, it takes a process to get the ego to that point. I mean, right. That doesn't happen. That didn't happen to your 30 year old self.

Scott: Yeah.

Nanette: Did you find that process in Centering Prayer? What is it that made your ego get to the point where it knew God was not time bound to have this kind of I mean, at what point did you hear from God? And I know that that's maybe kind of a, you know.

Drexel: What point did I hear? I go back to Clarence Barton. I don't know. I think I'll be the last to know. Maybe we still haven't. Yeah. But on the other hand, I think we have. You know, it was an unsettledness that I felt within. Augustine, you know, said, we are restless until we find our rest with thee. There was a restlessness inside me that was realizing that all of my verbiage wasn't fulfilling. And there was a gap there that all of the systematic theology, all the psychology, all the developmental schemes that I had learned wasn't filling, wasn't addressing. I knew a lot about God, but I didn't know God.

Nanette: So was it a restlessness in you or was it circumstances, maybe suffering, or was it both?

Drexel: All of the above. It was all happening at the same time. It's appropriate when you're in your early 20s to really be setting sail and making certain decisions about who's going to be your crew. Yes. Settling your intimacy needs. Who's going to be on my boat with me? And what baggage, what tonnage can I manage here? What course am I setting? There's a lot of saying yeses that imply a lot of nos. That's a dualistic thinking there. And it's appropriate for that time because you have to set sail, you have to chart a course and go. But eventually, you realize that the world is a heck of a lot bigger than this one destination. And also you might discover that there are, you know, shoals that you've inadvertently sailed into, and storms that can dismass your boat and swamp you and toss you up on a shore you didn't expect to go to. And when those things start happening, then you have to begin to reckon with larger forces that you can't control. And when it's out of your control, you can continue to, you can grasp for control and, you know, that fantasy of being able to have a life well-planned, as that commercial says. It's probably written by a 20-year-old marketing major. But despite your well plans, life happens to you. And as John Lennon has written, life's what happens to you when you're making plans. And you realize you have to humble yourself and say, OK, what's going on here? And that's what happened to me in my early 40s at that point. I had achieved my ambition of being the Reverend Dr. Rayford of First Baptist Church. Had a big room to preach to.

Drexel: And it was unfulfilling.

Nanette: It was unfulfilling. And did you find yourself in the shoals?

Drexel: Yeah. Eventually, some major shoals, yeah. You see, there's something in the midst of this that makes me think of the paradox of spiritual maturity. How often it arises in wisdom literature, like in Buddhism, in Christianity, since my tradition is a form of Christianity. I think of Jesus saying, you don't have a life unless you lose it that way. Paul writing, when I'm weak, I'm strong. and that in His weakness, His weakness is our strength, our strength is His weakness. The wisdom of God looks like foolishness to men. And it's interesting because it was after an intensive some years ago, Roger Conville, who was a part of our faculty for a while, who is now in deepening roots with ICB, he and I were having a conversation with a student. And the student's no longer with us, but the student had written us and said that she was trying the best she could, real hard, to achieve her soul. And that she was just trying and trying and trying to be the best four she could possibly be. And I am going to be a four soul, a four soul, not a poor soul, a four soul, the best four soul you ever had. She said, how can I do that? Tell me what I need to do to do that. And both Roger and I answered her in emails. We were on an email stream at this time saying, you can't accomplish this. you have to allow it to happen through your spiritual discipline. And she dropped out because she couldn't control it. And it's interesting that this spiritual maturity happens when we recognize it, but then surrender. and simply make ourselves available. We can discipline ourselves to make ourselves available, as I've already pointed out. But that's the whole paradox of the whole thing, is we can't make it happen. It's a gift. And everything about our society is that we have to be in control. We have to have a life well planned. And so we go to the financial advisor. But that's our culture monetizing everything. in order to profit off of something that's deep within us, these insecurities. But to be able to surrender to a process and realize I'm not in control, and then when things do happen, what I didn't control would end up being better than if my own plan had worked out.

Nanette: It's interesting to me that we can't orchestrate it. I can't make myself like the student desired to be the best soul she could be. But the soul gives us an opportunity to do that naturally. We know this, right? This is the theme of our institute this year is know your soul. It is that we can discover it, A life does somehow afford us the opportunity, whether you would call that God or the universe, or however you would refer to the divine, that somehow it presents itself. And normally, as we kind of said, it comes through restlessness, it comes through disaster and suffering. spurs us to curiosity. Something makes us go, oh, you know what? I'm messed up. This is not working for me. This ego's not panning out. I'm miserable. I'm dissatisfied. My life is a mess. My family's a mess. My health, my finances, something is not right. And then the soul is there to bring us an answer.

Drexel: I think of John O'Donoghue in his final interview with Christa Tippett before his untimely death, a wonderful, wonderful Irish poet, and he said, pay attention to the desire, Lassie. Pay attention to the desire. the desire that rises up in the midst of all that. Spiritual guides, sages, have all said that that desire is the actual presence of the divine in us. That desire to go deeper, that desire to have a life of peace, of equanimity, a desire to have a life of purpose. That that's going on in our souls and quite frequently what we do with our lives and what our culture encourages us to do is to paste over that, to answer it, to have, you know, state answers to because that can be controlled. That can be controlled by moneyed interests. of people who have a financial, well, I won't pound that horse anymore, but pay attention to that desire. If there's something going on deep in the soul, which needs to be released, and it's there in your heart, it's there in all of us, pay attention and let it thrive.

Scott: Yeah. It's not about going out and achieving something or acquiring something that suggests that your soul is out there somewhere. Like it's gone away and you got to go get it. Good point. Same thing with God presence. Yeah. Like it's there. It's been pasted over. We've desensitized to it. How to resensitize. Right. And I wonder what role that might play in self-forgiveness. First, we have this thought that the ego will not see itself as the perpetrator in, you know, some interpersonal conflict. And then we got to thinking, you know, well, you know, there's that inner critic. And, you know, the ego can be a harsh inner critic, but nonetheless, I'd say the ego and the soul have very different approaches to our capacity to forgive ourselves. You know, maybe it's less, you know, whether or not the ego can see itself as the perpetrator and more, and the ego see the wholeness of the situation can be curious about what's going on there. But I digress enough of my words. What do you think about this topic, Drexel?

Drexel: I think that I have probably only recently been able to forgive myself for not knowing what I didn't know at the time I didn't know it. I'm part of the same dynamic that's going around all of humanity. I didn't choose to be here. I am here. The existentialists talk about being thrown. They can get awful dark about that sort of thing, but there's a truth to it. None of us chose our parents. In fact, our parents didn't choose their parents. None of us had the capacity when we were being formed from zero to about five or six years old to critique what we were being taught. And that took root in us. And I wasn't responsible. I don't need to castigate myself for the things that I wasn't responsible for being told. The same goes for all these people out here that were trained to think in certain ways about me that are injurious to me. They weren't responsible for being taught those things, just like I wasn't responsible. That doesn't mean that they're right or that I was wrong or vice versa, that they were wrong and I'm right. I have to realize that we're all in this mix together. And what we need to do, from my perspective, is realize our connection and soul in that happenstance that all of us are thrown into this, and all of us are injured, all of us are wounded. And what I can do in the midst of that is forgive myself, not hold myself responsible for the things I didn't cause. But take the initiative to be gracious. Gracious to me, gracious to others. And if I take the initiative to be gracious, maybe that will reduce the friction somewhat. Maybe that'll offer some psychological, spiritual lubrication to the rubbing that's going on out there between me and other people.

Scott: That kind of dovetails into this idea that The ego sees things in isolation and the soul perceives the connection between things. Like the ego sees a world of broken pieces and the soul honors the relationships between all things. Like the soul, for instance, is willing to acknowledge our shadow, whereas the ego can't tolerate the idea that we might have a shadow.

Drexel: Yeah. Well, I may not be responding to this in an orthodox manner. When I was about six years old, I got fascinated with the little girl next door. She came over and went in the pup tent that I had in the backyard, army surplus pup tent. And I was wearing my army surplus helmet liner, pretending to be Sergeant Saunders from combat. And I walked into the tent, and the little girl had pulled her pants down. And I saw her rear end. And I immediately felt an attraction. She pulled her pants back up. I wanted to see that rear end again. And so I encouraged her to pull her pants down. And she did. And my sister opened up the pump tent and saw me standing there looking at a little girl whose pants were down. I immediately felt shame. My sister told my mother, And my mother took me in to my bedroom, pulled out a belt and beat me until I was howling.

Drexel: That feeling of shame and dirtiness stuck with me for years.

Drexel: My sister told me about 20 years ago, we were talking about our parents sharing stories about how they had messed us up as we were thinking about how we had messed up our own children. And she said she stood outside the bedroom and listened to that and ate that she told my mom that that had happened. My sister had gone through graduate studies in childhood development and realized it was a very natural thing for little boys and little girls to be curious about what the other looked like, and that it was not perverted, and that it wasn't a bad thing. It just simply needed to be channeled wisely by a wise overseer. My mother, on the other hand, had been born into a very fundamentalistic culture that was sexually repressed. She herself had been abused by her father and her brother, her stepbrother. She had been abused. And so she saw something right there that was terrible to this little girl, and she did not want her son doing to this little girl what her father and brother had done to her. And so the only way she knew to do that was to take the belt out and whip me within an inch of my life. She wasn't responsible for the sexual abuse that she got. And she wasn't responsible for the culture that shielded her, that looked down upon any sort of sexual expression whatsoever. She wasn't responsible for that. When I finally came to see that, and I came to see that, really faced that during our master's process in ICD, actually, and was talking with some of the other students and finally was vulnerable enough to tell the story to them. I had never told it to anybody. I told it to them and I even hesitated to say it here. I feel a little weird about talking about it and thinking that a bunch of people I've never seen before might hear it. Nevertheless, that's where the shame encrusted itself around me and stayed there. Just hung on. And I never really could figure that out. Finally, got to the point of realizing that that was the shadow I was denying. And that shadow had been forced on me by a twisted, broken, wounded system. It's not just one person. It's a system that's twisted and broken. And we need to look at it and see it for what it is and forgive it. Be gracious to it. Feel the tears, feel the grief, feel the shame, but realize that that's the shadow. And when you acknowledge it, then you can tell a story about it. And then maybe you can forgive the people who perpetuated the wound. And in doing that, I can forgive myself for the way I may have unconsciously wounded my own daughter. That's the way the shadow works, it seems to me. Does that make sense?

Scott: Absolutely. It's my sense that our shadows take up space in us. And when we refuse to feel them and we refuse to integrate them, like they take up space like a bell that's clogged up. like the opposite of that silence you were talking about earlier.

Drexel: It's a howling presence, an accusation sits there pointing its finger at you and you want to deny that it's not there doing anything.

Nanette: What I find in response to Drexel's story is just the commonality that we all have of childhood stories that keep us wrapped in silence and shame. And that, you know, you were decades old by the time you got to masters and finally told this story out loud. So first, I just want to thank you for being willing to share a very personal story. But I also know that your story is everybody's story, that we all we all have. And I understand what you're saying. You're saying that We're all born into this common humanity that we didn't choose, that teaches us things that may or may not be right. And then we use them in our whole life. And it's only until we get to a certain point hopefully, that our soul can help us to begin to heal this deep woundedness in our ego. And it takes a lifetime very often for the ego to unravel what it's been trying to hold together this whole time. Because I mean, obviously, the ego offered you a way to cope with this. which is ignore it, cover it with shame, do better, be better, get better. Perform, get a degree.

Drexel: Right, exactly. Record an album.

Nanette: All those things. And then you add the complication of certain religious ideas. And for you, that was Baptist. For others, it might be something else. But you add all these layers onto it. You feel like it's impossible to ever get clear of all these things.

Drexel: And all the while, the soul is crying underneath all that to be released, to throw off all those crusts and to somehow for that authenticity to blossom forth.

Nanette: Yes. Well, and that is, I think, for us here recording this podcast, that is the beauty of Joe's fundamental teaching to us, which is in the beginning, he teaches with this little baby inside a little A toy car, a toy car, right? And we all see that mental image. We know that somehow we had to put something over this precious human and somehow had to build defenses against the world. And we've all done that. And so, that has been the beauty of the teaching that we've gotten from the Institute. So it's just been a privilege to sit under your teaching and your music and the offerings that you've given the Institute while I've been there. So I really want to thank you, Drexel, for sharing with us today, and I'm so grateful for it.

Drexel: Well, my pleasure.

Nanette: My pleasure. Thank you. I think this has been a beautiful conversation. And I hope our listeners who are tuning in today just really know that this is the kind of conversations we have all the time around tables at the Institute. And so we know that people are looking for this kind of commonality, this kind of fellowship. And it is really available, that we are not alone, and that our souls can connect, truly.

Drexel: Well said. Thank you. Thank you for joining us, Drexel. Thank you, Drexel. Yeah, my pleasure, guys.

Scott: Thank you for listening to The Real Enneagram, a podcast by the Institute for Conscious Being. To learn more about the Institute and its offerings, visit theicb.info. That's T-H-E-I-C-B dot I-N-F-O. The music for today's podcast was composed and performed by ICB faculty member Drexel Rayford.

Nanette: Thanks for listening today. We hope you liked what you heard. If you did, please subscribe, leave a review, and share this with your friends and family.