Introduction:
Coming up on this episode of the Doctor’s Pharmacy,
Susan Piver:
Every painful thing you feel is actually a masked form of wisdom. And the Enneagram says the same thing.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Welcome to The Doctor’s Pharmacy. I’m Dr. Mark Hyman. That’s pharmacy [inaudible 00:00:19] place for conversations that matter. And if you’ve ever wondered about why you are the way you are, well you should listen to this podcast because it’s with an extraordinary teacher, someone I’ve known since I’m 19 years old. Yes, some long time, who is incredible teacher of meditation and Buddhism. Susan Piver is in New York Time’s Best selling on author of so many books, many of which I’ve read, including the award-winning How Not to Be Afraid Of Your Own Life. That’s a good one. The Wisdom of a Broken Heart. Oh God, I’ve had that. And start here now. An open-hearted guide to the path and the practice of meditation. And of course the for Noble Truths of love, Buddhist wisdom for modern relationships, and many, many other books, including the Hard Questions, which are ones you want to ask before you get married to someone.
And I used that book and it’s very helpful. She’s been at practicing Buddhist since 1993. She’s graduated from a Buddhist seminary in 2004. She’s an internationally acclaimed meditation teacher, known for her ability to translate ancient practices into modern life. Her work has been featured on Oprah Show, The Today Show, CNN, and the New York Times Wall Street Journal and lots more. And this is really cool. In 2013, she launched The Open Heart Project, the largest virtual mindfulness community in the world with 20,000 members. Her newest book, which we’re going to talk about today, The Buddhist Enneagram: Nine Paths to Warriorship. If you’ve never heard of the Enneagram? Hold on, put your seatbelt on. This is going to be an amazing conversation about the nature of personalities, how we see the world and how it influences everything about our lives and ways we can use that information to actually create a map for how to live better and love better. And welcome, Susan.
Susan Piver:
Thank you for that beautiful introduction. I’m so happy to be with you.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So, this is really cool. I mean, I think we talked about this, but I majored in Buddhism in college and that was how I sort got into healing, was understanding Buddhism as a healing art, really as a way of healing the mind. And then of course I studied the Enneagram, which many of you probably haven’t heard about, but this is very archaic, ancient system of personality typing that helps you see where your traits are and how your personality is and why it’s like that, and how it can manifest in really positive ways, or often if you have not really kind of gotten your act together, can show up in negative ways. And we’re going to talk about how those two fields intersect, Buddhist Enneagram. So, let’s start off Susan by talking about what is the Enneagram? Just give us a kind of high level view of this concept. I think most people understand what Buddhism is, but I’m sure many people don’t even know what the Enneagram is. So, what is Enneagram? Where it come from? Who invented it? Why does it matter? And why should we care?
Susan Piver:
Yeah. Okay. No problem.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
In three sentences or less. No, just kidding.
Susan Piver:
Enea, E-N-N-E-A, is the Greek prefix for nine. So, Enneagram refers, as you’re saying, to nine personalities. Or you could also say nine ways of being that include your personality, but extend beyond it. So, you are more than your personality, you are way more than your causes and conditions. There’s some essential quality that you have that can be named and mapped and it’s extraordinarily useful to do so. Where does it come from? Now that’s a whole other story. And the honest answer, the TLDR is nobody really knows.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Nobody knows.
Susan Piver:
Nobody knows. Nobody knows.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Was some guy in a cave 4,000 years ago or something.
Susan Piver:
Some guy in a cave like a hundred years ago. So, here’s the answer, I’ll try to make it short. The first person known to teach the Enneagram is George Gurdjieff, a Greek Armenian mystic from [inaudible 00:04:07]-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yes. Oh my God, you’re kidding.
Susan Piver:
Right? Meetings with Remarkable Men. In our youth that was the thing to read. And he’s the first person to teach it. And the Meetings with Remarkable Men is actually kind of connected to this. But anyway, he didn’t teach it as a system of personality. He taught it as a way of understanding natural cycles. Mark that and fast forward 40 years. Some dude, I don’t mean to be cavalier about it, but oblivion guy named Oscar Ichazo came up with the Enneagram, somehow channeled it, was taught it by hidden mystics, nobody really knows. And he died two years ago, so it would’ve been possible to find out. He had a student, and this is coming to the end of my story named Claudio Naranjo, a Chilean psychiatrist who benefited from Oscar Ichazo’s teachings, particularly on the Enneagram. And then he became a professor at UC Berkeley, and started teaching the Enneagram to his students. And he said, you can’t write this down.
You know how that turned out. This can only be orally transmitted, because this is so powerful, has such capacity for use and misuse that you have to be trained in it by a person who actually understands it. Of course, that didn’t happen. It turns out that, and Claudia added unbelievably important things to the Enneagram, things that without his additions, I don’t think it would be as useful as it is by any means. So, it turns out that he’s also a Buddhist in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Like I am, like [inaudible 00:05:51], the whole Nyingma tradition, the ancient school of Tibetan Buddhism. So, I’m like, oh, I got to meet him and ask him where the Enneagram comes from, because people say Sophism, people say caves in the Middle East. So, I emailed him and said, “Can I come see you? I’m going to be in Berkeley. I want to talk about Buddhism in the Enneagram.” And he said, “Okay.”
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Oh wow.
Susan Piver:
Yeah, then I bought a plane ticket, Mark, because I was not planning to be in Berkley, but you got to do what you got to do. So, I went to his house, He was so thoughtful and charming and open to conversation. And I asked him, “Why do people think the Enneagram comes from Sophism? Because that was the first notion about origins.” And he said, and he may have been BS-ing me, he said, “Oh, I told my students that in the 70s so they would shut up.”
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Oh.
Susan Piver:
So, they would stop asking me where it came from.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s amazing.
Susan Piver:
It is amazing. So, that’s a few more details, but that’s as far as I got.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s incredible. So, it’s sort of an ancient map of how we work. And Buddhism is also an ancient map of how the mind works. And so they kind of go together in a way, and I never really thought of them as going together, but until I read your book, I was like, wait a minute. They actually kind of do. And just this little background. So, Susan is an old friend and her brother David is my best friend in the world. We met on top of a mountain in Canada in the Rockies backpacking a week from anywhere. And we became best friends and we’ve been friends for 44 years. And he actually in college gave me the book, Meetings with Remarkable Men by Gurdjieff. So, it’s kind of funny.
Susan Piver:
I didn’t know that.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yes. And then the books by Ouspensky, one of his students. So, it was really a very, very incredible intersection of the world. So, one thing I was struck by your book is you talk about the problem with the self help movement and it’s sort of idea of self improvement. And you suggested it might not be the best way to look at how we deal with ourselves in life. Can you explain that? Because I’ve certainly read plenty of self-help books, I’ve certainly written a lot of self-help books. So, did you, by the way, or maybe they don’t see them that way, but what are you talking about?
Susan Piver:
What am I talking about? Great question. So, this is a big one. This is a big one. Self-help starts from the perspective that there’s something wrong with you and we should fix it. And the mind that created the problem is going to be the mind that solves the problem. And that can get us someplace. But only so far, Only so far, first of all, because it begins with a kind of self aggression. Stop, fix, be different. Sometimes very appropriately. Stop being an addict, stop being impatient and so forth. Both Buddhism and the Enneagram start from the polar opposite perspective, which is there is nothing wrong with you, you’re just looking at it incorrectly. And in Buddhism-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
The perception is wrong. Your perception is wrong.
Susan Piver:
Exactly. Any idea that you are broken, of course we all have things we need to fix about ourselves on the conventional plane. But in the wisdom world, in the beyond conventional mind, there’s a kind of innate perfection that you’re born with. And doesn’t mean you’re perfect, though it’s an innate perfection. It doesn’t mean you don’t have faults obviously, but it means you’re starting from a place of wholeness. And whatever you think is broken about you is a symptom of your confusion about your worthiness.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So, we all essentially have our own true Buddha nature, which is often covered over by our beliefs, our attitude, our perceptions, our projections, the [inaudible 00:09:56] of our minds.
Susan Piver:
A hundred percent. Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt you, but once long ago someone, Sharon Salzberg, a great loving kindest Buddhist teacher, asked the Dalai Lama how she could help her students who suffered from low self-esteem. It was like four 40 years ago or something. And in her story, he’s back and forth with a translator. What does this mean, low self esteem.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
What does this mean? [inaudible 00:10:24]-
Susan Piver:
Finally, the translator said means you don’t like yourself. Something like that. He was shocked. And his answer was, “How can you not like yourself if you possess Buddha nature?” And that’s the pit. You’re awake. You’re awake.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. That’s just so beautiful. So, a lot of us live with a sense of discomfort, some level of uneasiness, and that we’re not good enough that we have to work on improving ourselves. And you talk about how this impacts our relationships, or help our creativity. So, you’re inviting us to think differently about looking at helping our lives become better. We all want to improve our lives, improve ourselves, our relationships, our contribution to the world. But you suggest that maybe there’s a different way of looking at it. It could be more helpful than this constant self flagellation really to come from a place of not enough. Right?
Susan Piver:
A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Yeah. And obviously I suffer from all of this stuff myself. I’m not saying I’m exempt from it in any way.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Wait, wait, I thought you were enlightened and that’s why I invited you on the podcast. All right. We get ready to stop right now.
Susan Piver:
Click, click. Maybe right after we hang up. I’ll become enlightened. I don’t know. Yeah. So, working on yourself, cool. But that can only get us so far. And as you say, then we just start working harder and harder and harder. And even when you get somewhere where you want to be, immediately that becomes devalued, because you were able to do it so harder, more further. Okay. Again, you can work on yourself, that’s great. It’s important. But the things that we value most, and you just named many of them, love, creativity, wisdom, true insight. These things have one thing in common. They cannot be worked on. They can only be received. And so they arise, no matter how good your plan is, I’m going to get love or I’m going to be more insightful. It doesn’t seem to work that way. What happens when you relax, a space opens up and you see what’s already there. So, relaxing can be a better way of working on yourself than working more.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Amazing. Yeah. I think you bring up something I hadn’t really thought about, which is this whole idea of self aggression. I think [inaudible 00:13:06] talked about nonviolence. Civil disobedience as a way of protesting. And that was taken up by Gandhi with his movement to free India and my Martin Luther King with the civil rights movement. And I met Bernice King who was his daughter, and we were talking about the of obesity and the African American community.
And she had a very interesting comment. She said, “No, nonviolence also means nonviolence to yourself.” And I was like, wow, okay. And it seems like that’s what you’re talking about. And the way that we look at our lives often is with a little bit of meanness to ourself.
Susan Piver:
Or a lot.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
We’re not nice. I often say to people, if you write down your inner dialogue and what you say about yourself every day and you don’t filter it and you just have a raw rendition of all the stupid things you say to yourself about yourself or about your life or the beliefs you have, like I’m this, I’m that, or I’m never going to, or I can’t, or this one, this and that. And if you just write that down, I mean, you would never say that to a friend. You wouldn’t have any friends, right?
Susan Piver:
Totally agree.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So, you offer sort of true Buddhist meditation and the Enneagram, you show there’s a way around this self aggression. It has really amazing implications. So, tell us more about that and how do we think about the Enneagram and Buddhism and meditation as a different route around this self aggression and violence to ourselves?
Susan Piver:
I will do my best, but my mind is exploding with connections and things to say.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Oh, we have time. We have time.
Susan Piver:
Oh, okay good. Yeah, What Bernice King said is everything. It is the pit of the pit. If we use self aggression to quell self aggression, it won’t work. It’s like being attached to non-attachment. Well, you’re already in Polkaville. Something else has to happen. You can’t beat yourself up to be less aggressive by saying, don’t do that. Stop. Oh, by policing your thoughts and having this hyper vigilance of, oh, that was aggressive. Well that’s already, you’re trapped. You’re trapped. It’s the same thing with compassion. The antithesis of aggression is compassion. And in the Buddhist view, as I’m sure you know, in loving kindness practice for example, it starts in a particular way. It starts with you then a loved one, then a stranger and so forth and an enemy. But without that first part, without being able to express compassion toward yourself, genuinely, all the other dominoes do not fall.
You cannot have aggression even for your loved one. I mean compassion, even for your loved ones, much less an enemy. It flowers from within from planting the seed of softness toward yourself, which can only be planted with more softness. So, if you experience gentleness, which doesn’t mean toward yourself, which doesn’t mean being nice, the practice of meditation is the practice of gentleness. Not by being like, I’m cool, everything’s cool, but by seeing what arises, I’m angry, I’m happy, I’m bored. This is icky. I love it. And letting go, letting go, letting go. To come back in this case to the breath, which is the stand in for life. It’s not about being conscious of your breath, then you experience the flow of being with your inner experience with a kind of sweetness rather than manipulation. Does that make sense?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean it’s kind of a paradox, right Susan, Because we can get all the things we want by letting go and releasing the drive that makes us often really miserable and unhappy. And I’ve actually figured this out in the last few years and it’s taken me long freaking time [inaudible 00:17:13]-
Susan Piver:
Say more.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
… over 40 years ago. And I really began to understand that the more I just released, let go and not try to force life and be alert to what’s happening and then meet it where it is as it comes that way more fun stuff happens. Way more magic happens. I get exactly what I want and I get actually even things that I couldn’t even imagine that I would ever get. And it’s easy without effort. And it’s just a weird phenomena that as soon as I sort stopped trying, everything started working out.
Susan Piver:
That’s awesome. I’m happy for you because I love you. And I also have my own way of relating to that. The older I get, the more I feel like I’m not crafting my life. Everything I do to try to make things happen. Five year plans for me that just never worked, ever. Some people maybe, but so I don’t feel like I’m crafting my life. I feel like I’m shepherding it. It wants to go somewhere, it wants to be something. It happens to include me, but it couldn’t happen without me. But it’s also not about me. Where does it want to go? What is my life trying to say to me right now? That’s been more fruitful.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, it’s such a powerful thing and it’s hard for people to really accept that, because we think we have to force our life. We have to try, we have to work hard, we have to accomplish, we have to strive. And all the striving and hustling and pushing and whether it’s around love or work or health or any aspect except for life, it often gets in the way of us actually just being free and meeting what is and having joy in our life and having happiness and having peace. All of a sudden when you let go of having things that needing to be a certain way and you get to actually witness, which is often way more amazing. And what’s so much of the time, we have the filter in front of us that doesn’t let us see the magic and beauty of what actually is.And I actually, I didn’t share this with you, but I went to a cabin in Vermont for a month last December, just [inaudible 00:19:21], it was like a retreat. And I took away all technology. Books, I had a few spiritual books that I read. Actually one of them was the Gita, which is about basically not being attached to the fruit of your work. So, just sort of doing what you got to do, but letting go basically. And it was such a profound experience. At first it was super uncomfortable. I resisted it. I was agitated, antsy. Where’s my phone? I want my text messages. Nobody loves me. I’m out of the world. And what was really quite amazing was after a little while, it all settled down and I would just sit and I would sit in the morning with my tea. I’d light the wood stove. I’d watch the mountain be the mountain.
And every day the mountain was different. And then I would take walks by myself and just be without stimulation, without constant distraction. And I just got to realize what a beautiful thing it is to be alive and what a incredible gift it is to just be and how miraculous everything is and how beautiful everything is. And all I need to do is just be and didn’t really need anything. And then when you let go of that neediness in life, then all of a sudden everything was kind of gravy. And David said that to me, we’re 19, we’re sitting on the floor of his little apartment in Ithaca where he went to college and he was like, “Mark, once you have your food and your clothes and a place to sleep. Then everything else is gravy.” I’m like, okay. And that was really stuck with me. And so the challenge around this, and I mean you and I are lucky to be able to do these practices and work on our ourselves in this beautiful way.
But for many people, and I have found this too, and looking back at my life and a lot of healing I’ve done over the last year is things happen to us. Traumas happen to us when we’re little and we kind of disconnect in a way from our body and from our experience as a way to manage that. And whether we turn to drugs or sex or food or workaholism, like I did. Guilty as charged. Then we’ve got these emotional wounds that we’ve experienced and they’re in our bodies, in our somatic systems. And it’s very hard for us to often breakthrough and heal those things, which are automatic. They’re like, they’re hardwired and they’re very difficult to undo. And so I noticed this for myself, but it really wasn’t until I really started to deal with the physiology of those experiences and to look at what happened to me and deal with those traumas of my childhood that I was able to get more free.
So, how do learning to stop and be in your body allow us to step out of these reactive patterns and engage with the things that matter to us, that we care about our values? Because all of us, you don’t want to be happy, you want to be at peace. We want to meet the world in a loving way, but there’s so much always in the way. And then we live in a world of fear and a disconnection. And I think how do we break through that?
Susan Piver:
Well, that is the question.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
You’re going to give us the answer.
Susan Piver:
Oh yeah. Wait for it. Wait for it. Yeah. Well first of all, trauma, that’s very, very, very important thing to note. Trauma in my work as a Buddhist teacher, that’s a different category. And often people say, Well, sit with it. Bring it to the cushion. Meditate. No, no, not trauma. No, that’s your limbic system. I mean obviously way more about this than me. But you can’t say to an animal, just meditate on it. And when our animal brain is activated, that’s akin to doing that. Just stop. No, it doesn’t work that way. So, trauma needs professional care. It needs a lot of support, a lot of love. It’s a different category, but the wounds, let’s say separating for our conversation, traumas and wounds, that’s different. So, the first thing that is really useful is to stop, give up the idea of changing it through willpower and techniques.
And that means dropping self aggression. So, in the Buddhist view, there are three ways to work with very painful emotions, including depression, rage, fear, all the things and they’re all good, but they’re not all good all the time. So, the first one and the one we mostly hear in spiritual circles is pacify it. Let go. Just try not to feel it. Or anger obviously is bad for you. So, pacify, it’s afflictive, pacify afflictive emotions.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It doesn’t seem to work very good.
Susan Piver:
No, maybe, yeah, occasionally if you could do it would be great. So, it’s good advice. The second. So, if you have your childhood wound, you can’t just say stop, stop feeling reactive to that wound. The second way is connected to the Mahayana traditions, which says the pain, the sorrow, the suffering, the fear that you feel. Okay, yeah, it’s afflictive, but if you find a way to meet it, it becomes a bridge of compassion between you and others. And you know this, I know you or you know this, I see you do it all the time.
You meet someone who’s suffering with something you have also experienced. And because you didn’t brush it away, you have endless compassion for them. So, it’s the heart opening way of relating with painful feelings. And then the third way is most germane for this conversation is afflictive. Okay, bridge of confession, whatever. Make room for it, make room for it. Expand to include it. So, make friends with it. Experience gentleness toward your sorrows, your fears, which means relax with them. Just like we were talking about. When you relax with your anger, which doesn’t mean you stop feeling angry, it means you feel it. So, usually that’s in your body, your shoulders go like this or your body temperature feels hotter. If you find that feeling and then separate it from the storyline, this is the great advice of the wonderful Pema Chödrön, feel the feeling and drop the story.
It’s because of this or I have to do that, or this wouldn’t have happened, or whatever it is, let go and just head towards the feeling and sit with it like you would a parent and a child just to extend some kind of friendship toward it. Then according to this third view and the view of [inaudible 00:26:09], in fact, something starts to metabolize that is beyond your psychology and your willpower. Something starts to move. But when we just start, keep trying to box it out or use it, I’m going to learn something from this. That metabolization process doesn’t help. And finally you see that every painful thing you feel is actually a masked form of wisdom. And the Enneagram says the same thing. So, anger, for example, the most afflictive probably of the afflictive emotions, causes the most damage. In this view if you take the story away from anger, you did this, I did that, and you feel it. It’s like this unbelievably potent form of wakefulness. You can’t be angry and sleepy.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
You can’t, yeah.
Susan Piver:
So, it’s a kind of fierce clarity. And so anger and mirror-like wisdom as it’s called, are the same thing. But when we start mucking with this, this is, you don’t get this.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. Well it’s amazing. So, you basically talked a lot about a Buddhist framework for thinking about how we meet our emotions, how we meet our lives, how we are kind to ourselves, how we recognize we’re perfect already. And we just have to realize that the things that are in our way are just, are mental constructs and our beliefs and our frameworks and our perceptions that generate all these negative emotions and feelings. And there’s an ancient Buddhist path to working with that. But you wrote this book called the Buddhist Enneagram, which somehow brings in the Enneagram into the conversation. So, what do they have to do with each other and what are the ways in which we can use the Enneagram? What are the types to help us understand ourselves? And how does that complement this sort of ancient Buddhist technology? And I say Buddhist technology, because I think a lot of people think of Buddhism as a religion, but it’s actually, we’ve explored, we’ve explored outer technology, we’ve sent people the outer space, we’ve built super computers, we can do all these amazing things with technology.
And the west has really been expert at that. But in the east, especially Tibet, they went on the inside, they really explored inner technology. And they’re so advanced in understanding how to look at the nature of our mind and the nature of suffering, the nature of how we relate to our world and how to free ourselves. So, it’s really powerful. So, they’re really incredible forms of healing. It’s not really a religion, so tell us, how do we bring the Enneagram into this conversation around Buddhism? Why should we and how did it relate and how do we use it to help free ourselves?
Susan Piver:
Well, first, what you said is absolutely beautiful. And I agree and we’re so lucky in our lifetime to have been exposed to these extraordinary teachings. In the Buddhist path and then relate to the Enneagram in a second. There’s tremendous emphasis on compassion and tremendous emphasis on wakefulness, on fierce presence. So, yay, those things are great. For me, and I’ve been studying both Buddhism and the Enneagram for 30 years side by side. Nothing has helped me more to actually discover what is meant by compassion and to remain present than the Enneagram. It is my most potent, skillful means or Upaya in Sanskrit. It is how do you do all these things? That sounds so great and are. Well, the Enneagram is a roadmap for how to do these things. And also the Enneagram as Buddhism as we just discussed, passes that what you think is worst about you is the gateway to what you think is best about you. So, it’s value free in the sense that don’t do this, only do that. It’s in the mud of your difficulty is the lotus of your brilliance. Let’s look at that.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So, tell us about the Enneagram then. What are the nine types? What do they mean? How do we know what we are? How do we figure out which type we are and how to use that to help us?
Susan Piver:
So, the Enneagram, nine types around a circle. And a good place to start in figuring out what are these numbers, how do I find myself, is to note that they’re basically divided into three groups of three by what is called center of intelligence. And we all possess all three of these forms of intelligence, but one of them is predominant. Eight, nine, and one are called the intuitive triad. The people that go through the world on gut instinct. I don’t know how I knew it, I just knew it. When things don’t go their way, when you’re like, let’s go, this is right. And things don’t go their way, they get angry.
We’ve all known all of these people and we’re many, we are these people. Two, three, and four are the emotional triad. The people that go through the world not feeling like, oh, my feelings are so important. Although of course they are, but needing to know how one feels about something to know what it is. So, if you present this philosophy to me, it’s going to be, and this is my triad. So, I’m saying me, it will be flat until I discover what I feel about it, then it will come to life, whether I like it or not. And when things don’t go your way, and this is your triad, your emotions go out of whack and you become depressed or hysterical or graspy. This is all very broad. And then five, six and seven are the mental triad. People who need to know the history, the research, the patterns, the … I see you smiling.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It’s me.
Susan Piver:
I know. And thank God because you brought me, your ability to do that has brought [inaudible 00:32:14] to planet earth. So, it just doesn’t have any meaning. Sometimes I think, oh, I’m watching the weather report or listening to the weather report and the guy’s or the woman is saying, this front is coming. I’m like, I don’t care why it’s going to be this weather, I just want to know what the weather will be. So, it’s a terrible example of in the mental triad, the why it’s going to be this way is valuable and gives a dimension. And then when things don’t go their way, the thinking speeds up. What if I do this? What if that happens? Do we have another plan? And so that’s called anxiety. So, that’s one way to start finding yourself is which center of intelligence is mine.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
But there are also quizzes that help you identify what type you are or no, like questions? You don’t like those?
Susan Piver:
No, I don’t like those. Could you tell by my face?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
No, you didn’t clearly like them.
Susan Piver:
Yeah. There is no good test for the Enneagram. And that’s disappointing, because it would be so great if it was like Meyers’s Briggs or it was your birthday, like astrology and some tests like Myers Briggs or the Colby’s, they’re good tests, they’ll give you an accurate answer. There is no such test for the Enneagram. However, there are many tests. So, I suggest first think about your center of intelligence, then take all the tests, all the free tests, all the paid tests, whatever you feel like doing. Take all the free tests. Let’s start there and start to see, I think I’m on the emotional triad. And four and five come up a lot. Well, four’s on the emotional triad. Five’s on mental. So, let me start with four. So, these are the tests don’t give answers, but they do give data points for you to begin your investigation that is an inward exploration. So, it’s kind of hard to find out. But if you think, Oh, I took the test in number two, maybe. Keep going though.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Keep going. Well I think I’m a seven, which is an adventurer, but that’s sort of a different way of looking at it through your lens. So, the things that I’ve typically read about it are quite like, they’re not so different, but they’re a little bit different than the way you present this view with the framework of Buddhism. So, can you share a little bit about how that works. Because you’re really coming at it from a different perspective.
Susan Piver:
Yes, thank you. So, let’s say you’re seven, we’re going with that. And I could see that. I could see that for sure. But there’s also, if I may say, as someone who really loves you, there’s a heart quality in you that is not often in the seven. Or it takes a while to uncover. So, I, that’s just something to think about.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
We’re not always one fully. We can be a blend, right?
Susan Piver:
No, incorrect. You are always one.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Oh, you’re always one.
Susan Piver:
Yeah, you’re really one. And that can make people upset. I don’t want to be in a box, but you know what, you’re already in a box. You made a box already. And the Enneagrams, the numbers are connected by lines. So, you can travel the Enneagram, but your origin point is always what it is. Seven or four. Yeah. It’s like you were born in, where were you born?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Where? Yeah, Barcelona.
Susan Piver:
Oh, I didn’t know that. Interesting. Okay, so you’re never not going to have been born in Barcelona.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
True.
Susan Piver:
You can go anywhere you want, but you’re always going to have been born there. So, each type has what’s called a passion, which is bad in the Enneagram. Not the passion is bad, but that’s how it’s used here. And a virtue. That’s the spectrum. Like anger to discriminating wisdom or mirror like wisdom. Gluttony is the passion of seven.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, too much.
Susan Piver:
This is good. Let’s have a lot more.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah.
Susan Piver:
Whatever it is.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It’s 31 flavors of ice cream, right?
Susan Piver:
I need 32. Let’s go find that 32nd one.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
You mean like 20 books in 20 years? Is that what you mean?
Susan Piver:
14 New York Times best sellers, maybe.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Got it.
Susan Piver:
But I mean it’s amazing that you’ve done this, by the way, Mark. It’s incredibly inspiring. So, yeah, gluttony. And then you already described this arc, by the way, in your journey to the cabin in Vermont, sobriety, which doesn’t mean never having fun. It means holding things in perspective and not being driven reflexively by the need for more. So, if you don’t have gluttony, if you’d never have dark, you never know what light is. If you don’t have gluttony, you don’t actually know what sobriety is.
So, they’re on a spectrum. And the journey for sevens is to travel from gluttony to sobriety. And in my book I introduced a Buddhist teaching for each of those journeys. How do you let go of gluttony or not let go, how do you see the sobriety within gluttony?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Let’s make it all about me. How do I fix this?
Susan Piver:
Shall we? Okay, well seven’s-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Use me as an example.
Susan Piver:
Shall we? Okay, Sevens are able to convey magic. And by magic, I don’t mean wizard hats and that kind of thing, but to show a different point of view to help people move from point A to point B when they’ve been stuck at point A for a million years through some word, some gesture, some idea, even if you never, they can make magic. And they bring joy. Sevens can remind us that there’s always a way to be joyful, even under the most dire circumstances, not by ignoring things. But anyway, so in the Tibetan Buddhist world, there are a lot of teachings on magic. How is magic, it’s called auspicious coincidence or tendrel. Tashi Tendrel. What are the teachings on magic? So, sevens have a particular gift for these teachings on Tashi Tendrel or magic.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, interesting.
Susan Piver:
And so do all the numbers. For my type, the journey is from longing to equanimity. So, there’s endless teachings in the Buddhist world and equanimity that can help me and other fours understand how to make that journey. So it is for each number.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Amazing. The sobriety part sounds boring, but it’s not really boring. What do you mean by that?
Susan Piver:
What I mean by that is what you discovered in the cabin in Vermont, when you let go of your text messages and it was caused anxiety, because it would of course. And you were like blah, you fought through it and then you read some books and then something relaxed and you saw the beauty of what is without having to add anything to it or make it into something. That’s what is meant by sobriety. So, you could also say presence.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. Maybe it’s taken me 60 years to get sober then.
Susan Piver:
Hey, you’re there.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Amazing. Well it totally changed my life in such a good way.
Susan Piver:
But how would you explain the beauty of sobriety in this sense of looking at it?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Well I think for my whole life I have struggled with that sense of gluttony, just wanting to be everywhere, do everything, make everything happen. Tell the world everything I want to tell them. I mean just to overdo and overwork. And it took a toll on me. It really did. Took a physical toll, it took an emotional toll and led to a wake of destruction in my life that I now can see. And the shift has really been one of a profound relaxation where I don’t have to do anything, be anywhere, go anywhere. And yet they get to go everywhere, do everything and have everything. So, it’s a weird paradox where I’m just like, I’m just going to see what shows up and I’m just going to meet it and I’m not going to try to make anything happen that’s frictionful and just let go.
And since I’ve done that, I’ve been way more effective, way more productive in a way, more impactful in my personal life, in work, in every way. And it’s such a weird paradox because the less I do, the more happen. It’s sort of like the [inaudible 00:40:35], not doing by non-doing. I don’t know how to explain that exactly. But it’s that idea of a way which is doing by non-doing. And that’s sort of the feeling that I’ve got. And I think that’s for me what sobriety has become, which was I need to stop trying to figure things out. And it’s really been powerful. I don’t know if it’s what everybody needs. That’s certainly what I needed and it really helped me.
Susan Piver:
If that’s what sobriety is, that is really not boring.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
No, it’s definitely not boring.
Susan Piver:
That is seriously not boring.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
No, it’s not boring, I’m teasing, but I get, it’s like a whole shift. And I think that’s a really interesting way to look at my own life and my own personality and my own automatic tendencies. And I think the Enneagram, the way you use the Enneagram, and obviously we talked about me, because we only like to talk about ourselves, wanted to hear your perspective, which is actually very helpful. But for all the types, for all of us in the book with Buddhist Enneagram, there’s a map for how we begin to think about ourselves, our lives, our innate traits that aren’t necessarily bad or good, but that we can use to learn to take us from suffering to joy and happiness, right?
Susan Piver:
Absolutely.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s really what it’s about.
Susan Piver:
That is a hundred percent what it’s about. And [inaudible 00:41:56] practitioners, non-dual practitioners say the Enneagram is who you are not. It’s who you think you are, but it’s not true. So, it’s very important to find your type and it can take time. So, people should be patient. Start with the centers of intelligence. Take all the tests. And this sounds too complicated and wonky, just [inaudible 00:42:19] me. There is something in the Enneagram that’s extremely important in addition to the centers of intelligence that really helps more than anything to discover your type. And that is what are called the subtypes or instinctual drives. So, we all have all three of these drives just like we have all of the intelligences. And the first instinctual drive, and I’ll keep this short, I promise, although it’s endlessly fascinating to me, is the drive for self-preservation.
You’re wired, is this threatening, I don’t want to be too cold, I don’t want anyone to kill me. I hope I have enough money to live. These sorts of things. And second drive is social, which I want to connect. I want to be part of a tribe. I want to connect with a family or a be part of something bigger than myself. Whether it’s a neighborhood or a political party or a environmental movement. I want to find my place. Very important. We’re wired for that. And the third drive is a sexual drive, which doesn’t just mean I want to have sex with everyone all the time. It means I want to connect, I want to connect with one person, whether it’s romantic or friendship or creative connection.
And we all have all of those. So, just to start, which one is predominant, that will help you find your type. And I’ll explain what I mean by that in a second. But if you’re a self-preservation subtype person, which I am, I’m a self-preservation four. If I’m going to a professional gathering, let’s say I’ve never been to, the first things I and other self-preservation people will think about is what if I, will there be food I can eat? Or what if it’s too cold?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
What if there’s too much gluten and dairy?
Susan Piver:
What if there’s so much gluten and dairy and I’m lactose intolerant and have celiac or don’t, but I just want to eat those things. By the way, I’ve been keto for two years, it’s been life changing.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Amazing.
Susan Piver:
It’s been amazing. What am I going to sleep on? How do I get out if I don’t like it? How do I get out? Those are self-preservation concerns. Those are the first things I think about. Social concerns, going to the same gathering, not the same thoughts. How will this room be arranged? Will people be able to see me? Will I be called upon to say anything? How do I feel about being associated with this group? Does it make me proud or not? People go out to eat, will they invite me? So, those are different concerns. And then the sexual subtype people will think, will there be someone there who I can connect with and share this with, who will get me and who I can make snarky comments to or happy comments? Someone I can go through this with. So, I never would’ve thought I was a four, but I knew I was self-preservation. That was easy. And then when I read about self-preservation four as opposed to social four or sexual four, it was like ding, ding, ding. All the bells rang. All of them, every single one.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Amazing. So, how does this all help us get free from all the stories and negative emotions we have, because we talked about it earlier, but our inner dialogue is our worst enemy. These automatic negative thoughts or ants, my friend [inaudible 00:45:34] calls them, he says, don’t believe every stupid thought you have. And for me one of the most powerful things I’ve ever done-
Susan Piver:
Including that one, including that one.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Including that one. And one of the most powerful things I ever did was just write down my inner dialogue every day, for months and months and months and unfiltered. And I shared it with a friend who was a coach and it was so helpful, because I knew she wasn’t going to judge me. And I was able to be completely honest and free. Things that I wouldn’t even admit that I thought myself. But when you put them down you’re like, oh wow, I’m actually feeling that. I’m actually thinking that. And it sort of helped me kind of release it. But that was my process. How do you get rid of the things that block you from meeting your life fully, from actually the joy and happiness or your Buddha nature as you talk about it? Because all those negative thoughts and stories that create this sort of armor around us. And I think a lot of us walk around the knights of [inaudible 00:46:34] with this steel armor that prevents us from actually, it protects us, but it also prevents us from actually experiencing life fully.
Susan Piver:
Fully, totally. Right there with you on all that. And I have sort of two answers. The first is, you can’t just take the armor off, because it will just go right back. It just goes right back. And if you take a sword to it, if you hate it, if you stomp on it, you’re just recreating the negative self-talk. You’re a terrible person, because you think you’re a terrible person and you’re mean to yourself about being mean to yourself. That just will not work. Aggression never quells aggression ever. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to know that or anything else. So, the first step is always the same thing. Make friends with it. Just what you did. You wrote it down. You didn’t say, I’m writing down what I wish I thought.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
No.
Susan Piver:
You wrote down what you did think. And that in the Buddhist tradition is called shining the light of awareness on what is. And that’s the first step. So, the great zen teacher and poet, I love this thing he said, “Attention is the most basic form of love. Through it we bless and are blessed.” So, there’s no love without attention.
So, you first place your attention on the thing and that’s love. And then the edges start to soften. Could take a minute, it could take a year, usually it softens and hardens, softens and hardens. But that initiates a process. So, that Buddhism and meditation really, really helps with that. And the Enneagram helps, because it helps you reframe what you may think is awful about you as something that is maybe not awful, maybe great, or just your wiring.
So, from myself for example, I’ll give you a short example. I always was very hard on myself for not being a good friend, because I’m not. I mean love my friends, I have a lot of love in my heart, but I’ve never been the kind of person to hang out or let’s chat, let’s go somewhere to … it’s terrible. So, I’ve lost friends, they think I don’t care about them because I don’t connect in that way. And then when I realized, oh I’m a four, all of my emotional energy is going in and all these various other things about a four, I saw I was never going to be that kind of friend. But if you’re being born or dying, call me.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah.
Susan Piver:
I will be your best friend. And that’s my gift for friendship. And it may be great, it may be horrible, but it just is. So, I was able to let myself off the hook for this decades of diatribe against myself and just go, okay, this is how I extend friendship. And that’s how it is.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s amazing. Wow. So, you talk about a kind of meditation in the book that is an ancient Tibetan practice called Tonglen Meditation that helps us deal all this pain that we feel and how we meet it and how it can actually hold the key to healing. Because especially today, I think when we’re living in our villages back a hundred, 200 years ago, I mean we kind of knew it was happening with our neighbors, but we didn’t know instantly about all the horror and trauma of everything around the world. Maybe it was going on, but we weren’t just flooded every day with negative news cycles and with just all the things that we have to deal with from political strife to religious conflict to the diet wars.
Susan Piver:
Those are some serious wars.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, I’m in the middle of those.
Susan Piver:
I can imagine.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s why I wrote the Pegan diet like hey guys, let’s just kind of go off and talk about what we know. And so there’s beautiful meditation helps us kind of meet the challenges and transmute them. So, can you tell us about that? How do we do it? What is it? Where did it come from? I’d love to learn more about it and have our listeners learn a bit more about it too.
Susan Piver:
Thank you for asking. Tonglen means the practice of sending and taking or giving and receiving. And first I just want to say mostly to myself, you don’t have to stick your face in the world’s troubles 24/7. You got to be wise and prudent. You can’t ignore and you can’t bathe in it. There’s some balance for each of us in how much we open to the suffering so that we can preserve some sense of strength. And some people don’t have the privilege of making that balance. But if you do, even for a minute, be kind to yourself. So, I find this often, there’s so many terrible examples, but when you encounter someone who’s suffering, let’s say could be a nation, could be a friend, could be whoever, and you’re like overwhelmed with the pain of their pain, the practice of sending and taking Tonglen says do the opposite of what you’re normally counseled to do, which is breathe in relief and peace and breathe out stress and anxiety.
This says do the opposite for that being or that country or that situation. But first you must start with yourself. So, say you have a friend who just discovered they had a serious illness, so you start with yourself. Maybe you have or haven’t had a serious illness, but you’ve had illness and you breathe in the suffering of having an illness as a texture, not as a story sticky or claustrophobic. Whatever you associate with bad, you breathe that in and then you breathe out relief from that suffering to yourself in the form of opposing textures, light and bright and airy and spacious. And then you turn to your friend, you breathe in their suffering,
You take it and you breathe out to them, relief from that suffering in the form of textures. And then you let go of that after a minute or five minutes or however long you can do it. And you just sit with breath meditation practice because you have to close it with something spacious. And there’s a sense of I can transmute sorrows by sharing them. And I believe, I never read this, but my experience and I believe that the intention to hold others suffering with them is the filter that actually creates non suffering for yourself and others. So, sometimes you worry, well I’m going to take in this suffering, what am I going to do with it? But it’s automatically liberated through the gesture of kindness, I believe.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Isn’t that what compassion is really, Susan? I mean I think the idea of compassion is different than empathy. Empathy is where you feel the other person’s emotions and in some ways feel sort of identified with it. And compassion is where you feel the suffering from others and feel a different emotion, a different sense, which is love. I would call love, maybe something else, but it’s a way where it doesn’t become a for you. So, it’s totally really a meditation around compassion sense.
Susan Piver:
Yes, yes it is. And compassion here is like you say, different than empathy. It’s not, oh that’s too bad, I feel sad for you. It’s you feel the other person’s pain as your own pain. It’s like a child when your kid, there’s no division. It’s not like, oh I feel sad for you. It’s, you feel the pain in your own body. So, yeah, it’s pain, but it’s also, somebody once told me this, I cannot take credit for it, so brilliant. Compassion is the willingness to hold love and pain in your heart together. And isn’t that what it feels like? Love and pain together.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. True. Right, that’s true. I think that’s an interesting way of thinking about it. So, how do we become more compassionate? I mean the world’s pretty crazy, a lot to be angry about, mean climate change and all the strife politically, the food system makes me pretty angry from time to time. I’m like, wait a minute. I mean I just spent a week in Washington and working with bipartisan senators and congressmen in the White House, USDA about trying to bring science into policy and common sense.
And it sort of made me angry in many ways, because I felt that there was such a block to doing the things that were right. I mean one, someone said, well we can’t necessarily put kid friendly labeling on, because the manufacturers are going to push back on that. I’m like, well wait a minute, who are we working for, the kids or the food companies. It really was disheartening. And I think there’s so much to be, so how do we bring more compassion into it? And I actually did understand she was doing her job and she was trying to represent the sort of constituencies she came from. And it’s complicated politics, but I really, I had to sort bring up plenty of compassion.
Susan Piver:
I bet. That is, it’s like where are your priorities? Where are the priorities here? Yeah, it’s a crazy world. I think we can sum it up by saying it’s a crazy world at best and a violent world at worst. So, I don’t know, Mark, I don’t know. I mean, can tell you what I try to do, which is practice meditation, which introduces a noticed space in my mind so that when I’m angry, everything solidifies into one point and there’s no space and there’s no sense of humor and there’s no possibility. In meditation I’m not trying to say, yeah, everything’s cool, but you just introduce space to your inner environment. So, I think a meditation or a meditative practice is important. And I know you emphasize mindset tremendously for, I imagine the same reasons, and this may sound cheesy, but I always have something to be grateful for. Even if in the worst moments of my life where I have been totally broke and destitute and sick and injured and hospitalized and all the things.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, you have. I remember that.
Susan Piver:
I have, yeah. There’s still something I got, you took care of me or the sun is very, very beautiful today. Or it’s just some, I know it sounds, maybe it sounds cheesy, but if we can direct our minds, not aggressively, because then we’ve already defeated the whole exercise. But truly you can be reminded that it’s not all one thing. And if you can hold your pains, not just as things that may defeat you and rob your energy, which they certainly can, but as things that open you to the truth of other people’s suffering, then you’re in the Bodhisattva realm, then you’re on the path and the path … I want to ask a teacher why the more I practice, the more I cry.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Oh God, yeah.
Susan Piver:
I don’t think that Dalai Lama’s running into his bedroom and throwing himself on his bed sobbing. Although maybe he is, I don’t know. And you just become more vulnerable with the spiritual practices, not less. That’s why it’s very important to be careful with trauma, because it amplifies inner states. What he said was some of the world’s greatest practitioners have cried a lot. So, that made me think, oh, crying and heartbreak and sorrow and hopelessness. Oh these are part of the practice, these are part of the journey. And we open to meet them rather than try first to get rid of them. We open. And so that’s very hard but very profound.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Well the openness is key. And I think that’s why I love your Open Heart Project, which is such a beautiful way of thinking about how to live. I’m reminded of a story, I was at Cleveland Clinic and I was having dinner at this restaurant with my colleague and I had my Cleveland Clinic phone on the table and it was a restaurant that was focused on hiring ex-convicts and it was a kind of five star fancy French restaurant. And they would grind the hamburger at your table and they would do all this fancy stuff. And they were basically teaching ex-cons how to get back in workforce and part of life. Guy comes to my table, the waiter, he’s like, “Hey.” I’m like, “Yeah.” He goes, “You work for Cleveland Clinic?” I’m like, “Yeah I do.” He says, “Are you a heart surgeon?” And I stopped for a minute and I thought, I’m obviously not a heart surgeon. I said, “Yeah, I’m a heart surgeon. I open hearts.”
Susan Piver:
Oh, Mark. That’s awesome.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And I was like, that’s what it’s about. Because a lot of us walk around with armor and closed hearts. It protects us, but it also denies us so much of what’s beautiful in life. And your book, the Buddhist Enneagram and all your other books and work are so much about helping us live life with an open heart. And I just want to thank you for your work, Susan. Thank for what you’re doing. Everybody needs to get a copy of the Buddhist Enneagram that’s out now. Nine Paths to Warriorship. The beautiful way of thinking about your life going through it, not as a victim, but as a warrior. And check out The Open Heart Project, an online community that explores how to live a mindful life and check out all Susan’s work. She’s just awesome. Not just because she’s my friends for 40 years plus a lot of years. I think we look pretty good, don’t we? For like how old we are.
Susan Piver:
It’s amazing how old we’re and not old.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Exactly.
Susan Piver:
It’s really old.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Well, thank you Susan. Thanks for being there all those years and you’re the best. And thank you for listening, everybody. If you love this podcast. Share it with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment, have you figured out how to work through your challenges? How has Buddhism or the Enneagram helped you? And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we’ll see you next week on The Doctor’s Pharmacy.
Outro:
Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you’re looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you’re looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It’s important that you have someone in your corner who’s trained, who’s a licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.
