The Calm and The Chaos
As I’ve looked back on the last eight-ish years of working with clients one-on-one using the Enneagram and Yoga Therapy, I can clearly see two distinct times when people reach for this kind of work. The Calm and The Chaos.
The latter seems to make the most sense to people: “There’s a crisis, I need help!”
And honestly, by virtue of being an Enneagram 8 and having lived through many of my own self-made crises, I love it. I feel a certain rush diving into the intensity of these moments with my clients. I’m good at it. It seems as though I am much more comfortable with the chaos than most people, and I have a knack for finding clarity in the midst of it and guiding my clients to develop the same.
The Chaos is when everything is turned up to 11. The challenges of life seem to be drowning out your own inner guidance. There’s a pressure and an urgency that seem to be closing in from all sides. It’s like the trash compactor scene in Star Wars—we have to do something soon, or we’ll be smooshed or, worse, devoured by this weird trash monster lurking below the surface. Sometimes the only way out is to have a friend on the outside disable all the compactors on that level of the Death Star for you.
This is what this work can do for folks. It doesn’t magically lift you out of the giant trash can you’ve found yourself in, but it does remove the intensity and urgency, and sometimes that’s all you need to find your own way out.
The Chaos has its own brand of magic. Things feel sharper, higher contrast. Despite the stress and urgency, there is a vividness that The Chaos can bring that is seldom found elsewhere. I’m sure you can see why I like it so much. When clients come to me in the chaos, they may be at their wits end, but there is also a way in which they are very much ALIVE. The Chaos also, more times than not, brings a sense of desperation—people will do anything to get out. This often makes the really wonderful students, as they take to the practices like someone clinging to a lifeboat.
And it’s precisely because of this desperation that most people who reach out to me in these times only need to work with me for a relatively short amount of time. Most of my crisis clients tend to stay working with me in a regular capacity for anywhere from 6 to 18 months. Enough time to move through the crisis and establish a new baseline. Sure, sometimes they reach back out when they’ve found themselves in a new crisis, but the cycle often repeats itself successfully. They can use this work like medicine once you’ve caught a bug.
There is however, another way to use this work, and another time folks often reach out to me, and that’s The Calm.
Now, when I say The Calm, I don’t necessarily think of a cozy fireplace scene or a field full of flowers. This kind of calm feels more like the saturation of life has been turned all the way down, and, at its worst, like a slow burn thriller where you know something is wrong, but you just don’t know what it is. The Calm is all about quiet misalignment. Things aren’t bad, but things aren’t good either. In psychological literature this has been dubbed, languishing.
This languishing finds itself in the grey area between the best of human flourishing, and all out mental illness. We know that the absence of mental illness doesn’t necessarily equate to mental/emotional health, and languishing seems to cover all that space in between. This languishing is what I call The Calm.
It’s eerily quiet, nothing seems to be happening. But there is a muffled anguish that seems to be crying into a pillow in the next room over. Sure, you could live like this the rest of your life. There isn’t anything wrong. Work is fine, relationships are okay, you might even have a hobby or two you mostly enjoy, but something just feels off. There is an overwhelming feeling of, “Is this it?”
The work in The Calm is very different. There is no urgency to undo. Instead of the high-contrast world of The Chaos, all the individual things of our lives seem to blend together—one thing leads right into another and it’s hard to tell where one starts and the other stops. In many ways, we’re trying to bring some color and vividness back into our existence without falling back into the oversaturation of The Chaos. We’re trying to light a spark without burning down the building.
This requires a slowness, a steadiness, and a deep sense of balance. The Calm allows us to develop an internal clarity that can lead us through the external fog we’re living in. Discernment is key in The Calm. When The Chaos hits, your next right move seems obvious, like it’s being shouted from the heavens. In The Calm, though, everything is quiet, and you have to tune into that still smaller voice inside yourself.
While I personally hate being in The Calm, and am currently in a state of it that is driving me nuts, walking with my clients through their Calm is beautiful and profound in a way I find hard to describe. This work is gentler, and I find myself being more cheerleader than coach. In The Chaos, it often feels like my clients and I are working on a puzzle together, both intensely focused, and exclaiming when either of us finds the piece that makes things make sense. But in The Calm, I most often find myself standing behind my clients (metaphorically) whispering encouragement as they take the dangerous and risky baby steps into their new life.
What’s interesting about these two wildly different experiences is how connected they are. Yes, The Chaos is vibrant and loud, and as we work through it, many people will experience a time of clarity and confidence as things settle and become more manageable, but if the dedication to practices doesn’t survive without the urgency and pressure of the Chaos, many people will soon find themselves in The Calm. And if we don’t thoroughly address the underlying misalignments in The Calm, we will surely find ourselves back in The Chaos.
What I love about my work as a Yoga Therapist and Enneagram coach is that these tools are incredibly well-suited to both kinds of work. My work differs from traditional talk therapy in that we aren’t looking back, we aren’t necessarily directly processing traumatic experiences or trying to find answers from the past. When I work with my clients, we’re focused on the now, and on the what’s next. We gain clarity and insight through the Enneagram and then have the tools of Yoga Therapy to build new capacities within ourselves that allow us to meet our life as it’s happening in the moment and choose our response.
If you find yourself in your own personal Calm or Chaos, and you’re looking for more support, this is your sign to reach out and set up a consultation. I have open spots for individual yoga therapy and enneagram coaching and there are still spots open for the Enneagram Expedition, the year-long cohort that starts on January 1st.
Beautifully stated
I saw my PCP the other day for my annual physical. I mentioned that my therapist had 'graduated' me from therapy, the experience of which was abrupt and confusing. I didn't feel any better. I explain what I think you must mean as 'languishing;' a sort of disconnection from the activities in my life; actually, from my life itself. My PCP said, and this felt good at the time, that neuroconnections are tricky, and if I'd felt this way most of my life then I may not have the neural capacity to make those connections. I have no internal motivation, and never really have had. Where people have drive and passion, etc. I enjoy a good discussion/argument. I guess I like engaging with people, whether it's politely or impolitely. Perhaps it's time for an intervention. I've had an enneagram interview with you but am still not sure of my number and I'm thinking yoga at a distance is not possible? Tamara, how much more vague and annoying can you be?????