The author. Cris Bolívar.

To love the Being is to love its Vulnerability.

We all want to be happy, and not only sometimes but always.

¿What holds us back?… ¿the circumstances?, ¿the others?, ¿we ourselves?

As a matter of fact, there is nothing that is holding us back, we simply need to take an alchemic journey back home, to our essential being, to our inner wisdom.

¿How can we do this?

The ancient Greek sages already said that love and self-care go hand in hand with self-knowledge, one is not possible without the other. I cannot love myself if I don´t know me and I cannot know myself if I don´t love me, don´t accept me, if I continue judging myself and demanding how I should be. And that´s the great difficulty that we encounter in personal (or professional) development processes. One part of me, the one in charge, meaning the ego, coming along with the inner critic, is convinced that I cannot truly be happy if I am not a certain way, it tries to uphold a self-image of ourselves that is, oddly, just the one that makes us unhappy.

The ego tries to protect us from pain, but in seizing power (as long as it succeeds) it paradoxically leads us down the road of suffering that it was just trying to avoid.

It is never the finger that hurts, but the wound it is pointing to.

Therefore, the way out is a different one, it´s transcending, because the ego protects us but it does not care for us, in turn the journey passes through taking care of ourselves, and this essentially means to heal our wound, to initiate a process based on love and completeness, so in turn we can transform our ego into our talent-gift.

To spiritually grow is to build a relationship of love with oneself.

The law of 1

As Abdul Karim Baudino explains in his book “The Sufi Enneagram” there is a law of 1, where 1 represents the center, the identity, the essence, as opposed to decentralization that represents the identification with the ego.

As the center is within itself, it is stable, everything else is based on this centerpiece. Being in our essence, we are in this center, being in the ego we are off-center.

The Law of One is the Law of Love. It represents the unifying principle, acceptation (see figure 1).

This way we can already imagine that the way out of suffering has to do with being centered in oneself, precisely, being in contact with one´s being, meaning, wisdom.

The Other in me

The problem is that we go off-center trying to satisfy others´ expectations, even as adults. We have learnt that being what the Other tells us to be, everything goes well, we won´t feel any pain again. That´s the ego´s world. But it is not like that, on the contrary, the wound that the ego protects is going to be touched, it´s inevitable, and the more we are trying to avoid this out of fear, that feeds it, the more we are being trapped in alienation and suffering.

The Other created our wound, but no other can heal it.

The world from the ego

Why can´t we stay centered in completeness with our essence? Why do we go off-center to the ego?

Because the ego, which is a psychological defensive structure of social adaptation, tries to protect us from pain, the pain of our original wound. But, as said before, the ego does not take care and heal our wound, it only tries to protect it, and it does so through judgment, non-acceptance, no love, self-demand… hence the off-center, the disconnection from the essential being that we are and that we cannot accept because our inner critic, partner of the ego so we follow its rules, repeats what the Other (the primary caregiver with whom we established a relationship of dependence) “installed” within us: “don´t be like that, be like x, you have to be x to…”. And we are rejected, our vulnerability is rejected and substituted by a false identity that only covers the wound.

The ego, in its attempt to protect our vulnerability, our inner hurt child, forgets about the self, alienates to adapt to an Other that even though was needed to survive in our early childhood, this is no longer true as adults. The Other places a demand to our need and a hole opens, a void, a space of no-self that is our wound.

The wound is the sensation of “lack of”, living oneself from scarcity in the Being based on the construction that I made of my own self.

The ego permanently lives in scarcity, the essence eternally in completeness.

In feeling the void, the fear of that void and the pain it produces, the need arises to fill it, to look for something outside of ourselves via rapid and automated responses, that had been originally adaptive and sometimes successful, and that strengthen the ego which, paradoxically, in reinforcing creates more suffering. It´s like having an empty glass with a hole below (the wound) and we try and keep it full without fixing the hole. It´s exhausting and useless.

Self-knowledge converts us into limited beings,  

and this is what opens us to the greatness of Being and its possibilities.

The bi-directional process to Being

To heal the wound it is necessary to do a double process, on the one hand facilitating the reconnection with the essential being that we are and, on the other hand, facilitating the disidentification with the ego, going through a process of ego-reduction. (see figure 2)

Essentiality as a tool

This is the path that the Essentiality proposes, with its implementations: the Essential Coaching, The Essential Enneagram… they enable to disempower the ego to empower the Being, from a place of love and compassion to heal the wound that everyone of us has. (see figure 3)

When we heal our wound, inner harmony comes back and we reconnect with our rooted presence, with our silent mind and our open heart. This in turn allows us the reconnection with our inner wisdom and then the ego converts into our talent. We can truly live in completeness, with meaning, inner peace and freedom, happy.

To find oneself, re-encounter, recognize and love oneself is the immense beauty one is.

The author. Cris Bolívar.

• Founder and CEO of the Essential Institute.
• 30 years of accompanying processes of personal and organizational transformation. Essential Coach, trainer, consultant and international presenter.
• MCC, Master Certified Coach – International Coach Federation, ICF (USA), first Spaniard to obtain this certification, 2004.
• Creator of the Essential Coaching and the Essential Enneagram.
• Graduate in Psychology and Graduate in Philosophie (Barcelona University).
• Acredited Enneagram Professional by IEA (USA).
• Master Consultant in Organizational Development (Israel).
• Author of diverse books and articles.
• Reknown by the General Counsel of the Official Psychology Association among the most relevant authors of the 20th century for her contributions to coaching.
• Reknown by Vikki Brock (expert on the history of coaching) as a pioneer and a pacesetter for coaching in Spain.
• Reknown as a “Teacher of Life” by Mestresdevida.cat
• Accredited by the IEA -International Enneagram Association- as an Enneagram Professional.

Please see amplified CV on: http://essentialinstitute.org/cris-bolivar/