Monthly Archives: February 2019

Deepening Understanding of Enneagram Types: Watching People of Each Type Describe Their Experience

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Dear New School Friends,

As I write, we have just completed our third day-long workshop with Beatrice Chestnut, author of The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge. The enneagram, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is a model of the human psyche generally understood as consisting of nine interconnected personality types. Here are the links to my previous writing on the enneagram, which describes the system in some depth. Here is the link to the first of Beatrice’s New School workshops, where she explored types 8-9-1 with panels of people who represented each of these types. The two remaining workshops will be posted soon on our website, iTunes, and YouTube. Continue reading →

Commonweal’s Resilience Project

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Dear TNS Friends:

The chatter of politicians and commentators continues about all manner of things. But nature bats last. The “Polar Vortex” descends on the Midwest. Here is a beautiful piece from WIRED: “And now the weather: Mars-like, with a chance of apocalypse.”

More than 70% of the planet is basically off limits without serious technological support, because you can’t breathe underwater. Get much higher than 8,000 feet and you won’t be able to breathe as well as you might like; people have lived for years at 19,500 feet, but they probably didn’t enjoy it. And temperature? Extended periods above 95 degrees or just a few minutes below -130 and you’re dead. We humans are, in a sense, polyextremophobic. So maybe that’s why it’s so existentially dreadful for the heart of the United States to be hunkered down under temperatures as low as -65 (with the wind chill, you betcha) at the same time as Australia is pushing up toward 120. That’s a 185-degree difference, and too much of an overlap with the average lows and highs on Mars for any loyal Earthling to be happy with. Continue reading →