Hi Brandy, I’ve often wonder if perhaps if what I experienced was a healthy detachment or a dissociation to protect myself. Could both be true at the same time?

I was reading about the Enneagram. Its suggests that you can’t change the type that you are. The task is to be mindful of your type so one might better spot its traps and gifts. A odd point they made was that though you can’t change your type it wasn’t the natural type you were born with. At some point something confronts our world view which causes us to compensate our natural type to our survival type. (Suggesting that Type can change however it seems when our blank slate of our natural being is written on its a WORM type programing – Wright Once, Read Many.) Since posting that memory I can’t help but think that moment was more impactful then I have considered. Seems detachment is the superpower of my Type  but it is also its kryptonite, more comfortable as a observer  then someone that engages in life and a hard lesson that indifference likes to disguise itself as detachment.

Enjoyed your post Tee.  Perhaps it comes down to noticing when we have emotions and when our emotions have us. I might also argue that like our emotions the ‘ego’ has a important role to play in becoming. (also need to notice when our ego has us.) Seems we are more then the sum of our parts.

Read somewhere that the SELF is a circle without circumference which center is everywhere – each person, small s self (each thing?), is the center of the circle without circumference, the SELF – (G_d, Brahman-Atman…) When we look for the self we do not find it because were It only imagining ourselves separate from It.  (Allan Watts like to joke the the Self liked to forget that it was IT so that it could delight It Self when It remembered… or something like that)

To love our neighbor as ourselves isn’t then a reflection of how we love ourselves, or not only that, but that our neighbor is also It and so also our Self.  Begs the question what is Mind? LOL