E9 Conservation (Self-Preservation) – Appetite

We will end, then, with E9 conservation, for which Ichazo used the word appetite. It is obvious that these people tend to have bigger bodies, so it is very likely that they have a bigger appetite too. Sancho Panza is a literal example of E9 conservation and it is interesting that the belly was chosen by Cervantes to baptize him, being something so central to this character.

Let's explore the idea that some person can be said; "as, therefore I am". Each of the characters is open to this Cartesian approximation: "I think I am, therefore I am," an E6 would say. "I suffer, therefore I am", an E4 would say. Actually, they are very descriptive expressions about how each of the characters feels the emptiness of their being. Take the example of sexual E4, whose central theme is competitive hatred and goes around cutting heads. I could say: "I hate, therefore I am." This main feature of each subtype is the one that best responds to this equation of solving the question of being through a substitution or a mirage of being.

Human beings have all kinds of substitutes for being: a veritable fury of lollipops. We have all kinds of pacifiers that give us the impression that this or that is what we were looking for. And we miss our way because we run after these illusions that promise us to be where he is not.

In the case of the nine conservation, there is an excessive resemblance to a little animal. It is not only about "I eat, therefore I am", but also about "I sleep, therefore I am", "I have, therefore I am", "I am standing here, therefore I am"... The facts of life, everything ordinary, they have the ability to obstruct your consciousness. For him there is no metaphysical level. Somehow, the question of being has been erased from the life of a nine conservation. You can't talk about being with Sancho Panza. There is only his belly. The substitution of the mother's breast for the bottle has been so complete that there is no memory of maternal love in the vocabulary.

So these conservationists are very loving people but deep down they don't have a sense of being loved. His resignation is the most prominent. And there is in them a kind of joy, a kind of tenderness that, however, is far from the full experience of love.

Erich Fromm already says it: to have or to be. It is probably the same thing for them. In the world of the great bankers, for example, you see many friendly faces, with double chins, very practical people... This is Homo Economicus.

The transformation in the conservation E9 by Emilia Ligi

Today, March 4th, 2012, I am 55 years old and I still have an opportunity to tell things about myself.

I am a woman who lives in Florence; here are my roots and I never had the desire to get away from the beauty of it.

I was born in the center of this city and, after having changed houses several times, I bought mine, right next to the house where my life began, as if I had closed a circle, a gestalt that I had not opened. With this house I had love at first sight; I have lived here for 25 years and today I believe that it is truly my mirror. It is as if this were my real dimension, although the choice to buy a house had been made with the man I thought I would love forever. Today, he is one less lover but one more friend, and this seems more important to me!

The money to live is given to me by a job that, despite the years and healthy disappointments, I still like: I am a home helper, a public service that the municipality offers to citizens who encounter social difficulties of all kinds.

Every day I go to people's houses; They can be children whom I accompany to school or to other places, people with psychiatric problems, elderly people who need to be cleaned or lifted, or someone who requires me to do the shopping or eat for them. In short, everything that can refer to daily needs, and even more.

It is not only a job, but also a life exercise. I like it because I feel free: there is an office and there are also my colleagues, essential support, but when it comes to cases, I am autonomous and I face very different situations during the day. I have autonomy both for decisions and for methods, and I go from the houses to the streets whether it rains or shines. I couldn't work locked up in an office, always with the same faces — perhaps unbearable — and with a job that doesn't change.

How did I meet Claudio? Simple: he was doing individual therapy, gestalt. It was the year 1992 and my therapist informed me that there was the possibility of having a new experience through an American therapist who was coming to Tuscany for four days to talk about Protoanalysis.

As a good enneatype nine—but I didn't know it at the time—I accepted the experience, more to satisfy my therapist than out of any real interest or curiosity. But how well I obeyed!

From there, from Protoanalysis, I began my journey: I didn't know I was looking for something, but without a doubt it was so, because every year, without specific expectations, I never missed the opportunity to meet Claudio and his work made of experiences, which for me are easier than theory. With the passing of time, the meeting became more and more the happiness of being with Claudio, come what may...

Perhaps even today I could not say what the work consists of, but I never asked myself: I only know that something moved, beyond my will, and that, for the first time, a part of me took command when I heard Claudio speak about enneatypes. He offered me a thread, called

indolence, which I took in my hands to enter my labyrinth and not get lost, and to wind it until I found the end, that is, the emptiness that is in the center of my labyrinth: a place to rest.

From when, for wishing, I paid too high a price... And then, in order not to make any more mistakes, I gave up pursuing my desires: “better try not to truly exist, better sleep, perhaps dream, and show me little”

A girl abandoned to herself in pain, frustration and rage, in order to survive and not go crazy, changes her true self for the illusion of being. The soul, defeated and betrayed, falls asleep, forgetting itself. From that moment on, enneatype nine will experience the illusion of being able to live without existing, without desires to pursue.

That memory is that of a six or seven year old girl: my mother gives me a disproportionate punishment for having bought some sweets on credit at the bar without her knowing. Her reaction to the embarrassment my desire had caused her was to annihilate me— mostly with words, rather than physical violence. Her desperate rage washed over me like a tidal wave, leaving me defeated, hurt, and, above all, alone in no man's land.

Since then, I gave up fighting and got excited about the possibility that there was a painless way to recover the gaze and love of my family; thus began my fortunate career of hyperadaptation.

Specifically, I have made myself a machine that is always on standby. If I only know how to make mistakes and create problems, I better stop: guide me!

Thus, the machine lives when it is turned on: images are seen, sounds are perceived; then, it exists and expresses itself. It can be activated simply by pressing the buttons on the remote control. You can always look for the same program without feeling the desire to change: she, obediently, always gives us what we want. If the volume of your voice is too high, just press the button to lower it gently; it can also remain mute although it continues transmitting. If it has bored us, we can turn it off leaving it on stand-by again. When she is on stand-by, she remains on hold without finding herself abandoned, rejected, or anything else, because she does not have the appropriate emotions to interpret her not living. That's why she is also alone for a long time, but when it turns on again she smiles again, cries, loves and hates.

The machine does not have a life of its own: it is whoever has the remote control in hand who chooses the intensity of its colour, its luminosity and its volume.

That's how I was before work; I had given my remote to others (parents, sister, teachers, friends, sweethearts). I let myself be carried away by others, I let them decide what was good and what was bad for me; It was enough for them to tell me what to do to be good, helpful and useful in their eyes. In short, an eternal, small and good Maya bee who was excited to love and be loved.

I also exercised remote control over myself: when I didn't like the reality I was living in, I suffered from it, and in order not to risk wanting to change it, I put myself back on standby. Laziness reassured itself and accepted boredom.

The positive note for me, E9 conservation, is that, in my almost complete cancellation, an infinitesimal part of me has not given in and has continued to believe in the pleasure and spontaneity of the girl I was. From that small flame of faith in me, everything could start over.

If I don't know black, I don't know what I'm calling white. I have to change position: this egg in which I continue to adapt is strangely transparent and small. What's going on? I feel fresh air! What a pleasure! So, there's something beyond the shell... Now I'm scared. What if I die? Lord, I remain in your hands. (This is what the worm thought before transforming into a butterfly)

The magic of work has made me start a path back in time: a path towards myself. Each memory has been a step towards something that I had forgotten: from pain to pain, like Tom Thumb, I have traveled the story of my life. Remembering me, accepting to follow the path of pain, has been the first act of love towards that disappeared girl who, unconsciously, I wanted to find again.

It has been a journey of years; I have never had any doubts about its meaning or value. For the first time I have met a man/father/teacher, and from the first day I met him, my hand has spontaneously gone towards his.

Finding the girl again means rediscovering myself with aspects of myself that I thought did not exist: the spontaneous openness towards life and experience. The girl has nothing to lose; seeing her tortured, wounded, dirty, but alive and still innocent, pure, has made me feel her sacredness, and I have discovered that there was spirituality in me too.

Thanks to the girl who had not lost confidence in the mystery, all those parts of me that I imagined with open eyes and that believed in the extraordinary existence of the other, began to feel that it was legitimate to live. I remember that in an SAT, during the experience of rebirth, while she interpreted the role of mother, but without being one in reality, she did not know how to recognize when it was necessary to help by stimulating the birth. I did not want to create obstacles to the rebirth of the person and I called [the therapist] Ginetta Pacella. She busied herself acting as the birth canal and I watched in fascination: what she was seeing was truly the mystery of birth. By passing through the channel, that person was leaving behind who she was: the one who was born was a blank page. And I thought: "here is what happens when we come into the world". A mystery had been revealed.

The opening process has made me know and integrate the opposites, the masculine and the feminine, and has shaped my subject. I have also given my selfishness and my pleasure permission to exist. Knowing the dark side, accepting it, has made me a three-dimensional being and not an Egyptian painting. In a shamanic work on our animal-guide, a fly appeared and

insistently perched on my hand. I accepted her as a guide animal. But how to accept this being tied, by culture, to evil, to the devil? Simply, accepting to have in me that little known and unwanted human side: by listening to his reasons, I was able to give him the freedom to act and I discovered that he did not want to kill anyone. On the contrary, it is a healthy selfishness that makes my life better and that places the sense of altruism in a less absolute place: an important step towards inner balance.

My belly has been the container for the expression of my spirituality; From the inner child I have accessed a spirituality that has allowed me to see things from another plane. And from there I have seen and understood what is my matter and my primordial chaos, and how I had come to stay there or stop, using only the part of the reptilian brain. If we want to see the imprint of our foot, we must get rid of it.

Knowing my spirituality has allowed me to recognize my materiality; only then has my soul awakened and reincarnated back into me.

The automatisms have unstructured me, but the girl, with her intuition that seems like alchemy, finds answers and solutions. Today, intuition and creativity are the instruments with which I try to replace compulsive behavior and inertia.

Honestly, many times I find myself like a stranger looking up to the sky for a way out.

Yesterday I believed that my duty was only one: to obey by staying in jail to adapt to the world; today I think that I will never be able to truly adapt to this world and to humanity: in truth, maybe I don't want to and I prefer to be on my way, alone but free, like the madman in the tarot!

Perhaps that girl, at the moment in which she saved others by drugging herself, was feeling that she did not love this world, that she did not love that family.

I can love very few people: I am not a good girl, I respect the rules but I am guided by my ethics, which go beyond the rules. I haven't had a family because I don't believe in it.

A few years ago, one night, while listening to music, I had this vision of myself: I was a small robot capable of repairing the damage of a large spaceship. My life was outside that great machine, but I was connected to it through a very long tube and, from there, I looked at the lives of the people who lived inside the spaceship. Being a robot, he felt no emotion from what he saw, but he knew he wanted no part of it; it was better to stay outside, in the darkness of that immense and silent space.

I feel the disharmony: I don't know how to find it within myself.

I am glad that I have not completely lost the Dionysian sense of life.

What is this discomfort? I can't be wrong; I have to help the world! And Superman can have no doubts! Listen, I will tell you all my symptoms, I will give you all the information that is useful to

you; you investigate and analyze for me, because I don't know how to do it and I'm busy. But he says “sit down and tell me about yourself”

For a conservation E9, the most difficult thing is to admit that the other is right. There is always a "but". Quickly, he flees from discomfort by distracting himself, covering himself with fog, perhaps losing himself in a phrase or observation. He doesn't agree, he's uncomfortable, but rather than get in touch with anger or admit his disagreement, he creates confusion and fog for himself, trying to distract himself and others.

Understanding the ability to get lost as a form of defense is essential to raise awareness.

Often there is a real difficulty in understanding specifically what the therapist is asking of us, as if the words were not known. Inner confusion and fog cloud the intuitive part of the brain.

Also, I was very good at adapting to the therapist: I tried to like her and not bore her. However, I was the one who paid her, and I often met with her because I had the clear feeling that I was helping her to get to know me, and I told her everything about herself so that she could later summarize it for me.

I think that achieving a synthesis of oneself alone is a great achievement for a conservation E9.

If the nine has come to therapy, perhaps he feels that there is a problem in his machine that does not allow him to give his best, and that it has to be repaired so that everything goes back to the way it was before.

But the discomfort exists and the client does not know that that ice cube that unexpectedly slips down his back, causing him suffering, is not a cube, but the tip of an iceberg. And that suffering is nothing more than the umpteenth illusion of being so good at not allowing pain to be more than a passing discomfort, while the ice is dissolving and the water is about to overflow the dam of lies.

What to do in therapy with a nine conservation?

Give the session a sense of sacredness: feel that the space between therapist and patient, including the physical one, is a place where both will put something of themselves, and that this place is sacred because it is the line that separates the I-you.

Establish a contact form, with which to close the session; the most effective gesture is the hug. In a person who does not know introspection, experiencing it can be like entering another world where there is no certainty, and the contact has the purpose of returning him to earthly certainty after a trip to the center of that nothing that he finds inside.

A nine lives on the surface, and diving deep is enormously tiring; but he will do it if he knows that, when he emerges again, already at the edge of the air, someone will give him a hand to help him return to earth.

Inviting a conservation E9 to launch into himself means concretely asking him to remember: remember his life, his childhood, his adolescence...

For me, the work that Claudio proposed to me has been extremely important: remembering through pain, thanks to the regressive method; remember, remember, and still remember: everything is contained within this verb! Go back to recognize that you have an experience made of this and that, of pain, of frustration, of love and carelessness.

Remembering has been going against the current of the river of my life, discovering the rope that allows you to navigate always close to the shore and not in the middle of the river, where the current is stronger; each memory has been a haven where, after pain and frustration, I always found confirmation of the same crazy idea: "I'm alone, anyway, I have to do it alone, I can't ask for help, asking for time for myself is would create problems".

It has been through the memory and the story of myself that, slowly, I have begun to shape the block of clay that I was.

I think it can be useful to often ask a conservation E9 to recount his childhood, his adolescence, showing interest in his life.

To help the person go deeper, free association also helps, because it brings us closer to sincerity, and it also helps to ask again every time the person distracts himself because he is getting close to something interesting.

When Claudio told me for the first time "tell me about yourself", I felt dizzy: I was in chaos, my fog appeared in a second, I didn't understand anything, not only because of the teacher's question, but because someone was interested in me for the first time in my life.

Now that I have walked the path of the hero, now that I have overcome trials and obstacles to find myself again, now that I choose, now I feel loved by heaven and earth, now that desire drives action, now I can let go of my luggage and follow the path alone with the cane and the llama

I thought that if I found myself again, everything would be easier, that this was the cure, but no! Meeting is not healing. It is simple to meet again!

Now that I have walked the path of the hero, that I have overcome the obstacles and have rediscovered my soul and the girl in me, now that I am facing the origin of my neurosis, now that I have traveled around the world and returned to to the starting point, now it's my turn; I'm back on track for the return trip.

I take the first steps without knowing what my goal will be. I find the world again with its excesses; I live like I'm going to have an open heart operation every day without anaesthesia: it hurts too much and I feel incredibly fragile.

In the temple of Apollo it was written: "Know thyself". But also: "Nothing in exces".

Excess. This is the cause of everything. My path has been paved with excesses so far, also during the hero's journey. But now I'm back to being and I don't want to give it up. Finally, I sense that I can be for myself, by myself.

I don't know a healing journey, but I know that remembering myself every day is the only possible route, the great act of love towards myself.

When I understood that everything is an illusion, including myself, and that this presence is the only necessary truth, I had a feeling of immense freedom: I surrendered and fell on myself, as when a veil falls.

Now I can leave everything and I can stop and be. I no longer need to repeat to myself that I exist because I act, feel, think, love, desire. Am! Everything else is just a manifestation of my being.

But, since the manifestations of being, also illusory, can be Dionysian, it is better that you live them each time they appear and make them a treasure while you are in this world.

So long live Dionisio as many times as he remembers me and I remember him!

I'm sure the healthy being of E9 conservation is very Dionysian!

If I leave myself, what happens? What happens if I start not believing in my crazy ideas anymore? I don't know, but I feel a sense of freedom. The experience of retirement calls me. There I expand, perhaps I will dissolve and once again feel part of that whole that ordinary consciousness and mind cannot see

I think that an important step in my evolution has been the fall of the dogmatic sense of the crazy idea: I had it as a commandment, as if the crazy idea, with its power, had replaced God. The work has given me self-confidence, and I have begun to take the risk of being able to live, die, cause suffering or remain alone, defying the same crazy idea; I have begun to face my walk against life, giving myself more to what is here, now, in this moment and not in another, and the result is to feel simple and spontaneous.

Appetite, in all its forms, no longer serves to exorcise the fear of emptiness tied to the neurotic lack of love. By giving myself to love, I have discovered that the void scared me only because I did not know it. I have discovered that it is a fertile void, a neutral place within me, where nothing has form and there is a timeless silence. The experience of emptiness is relaxing,

there is no anxiety and the hunger for stimuli calms down because in emptiness there is no more illusion and absence.

Now I think I am closer to the true meaning of my actions: reading is reading, eating is eating, loving is loving, thinking is thinking and living is living!

I have felt the desire to live the experience of a meditation retreat accepting not to exist for the world for eight days, whatever happened. This experience has transformed the almost omnipotent feeling of excessive responsibility, and I have admitted to myself that the world can go on without me.

Getting out of the ordinary condition of conscience, mind and heart has been a state of grace that I have reached by giving myself to contemplation. Living contemplation is like a form of mystical kidnapping of the senses, where everything appears in its simple truth; but I do not know how to describe this experience, I only know that it is a deep happiness of existing, it is discovering a natural state of happiness and love that belongs to another dimension.

In contemplation, everything dissolves, I dissolve until I become just a contact, a vibration, perhaps erotic, with the divine; but at the same time the reality of the world is there, present, as a manifestation of the here and now that does not need anything.

Loving the world through contemplation is like making love to God. And I have understood that, for me, God manifests himself in an immanent way and also in a transcendent way: they are two faces of the same manifestation.

To contemplate is to enter deeply into reality and then go further into the mystery of the spiritual, passing through expansion and not through concentration.

One morning, waking up and observing nature, I understood that there are no separate opposites, but that there is a duality that is at the same time unity, that everything begins and ends in its opposite, in a continuum, without beginning and without end.

Observing a fruit, I have asked myself where is the form and where is the substance; all aspects were present, but the fruit was an inseparable unity of both. Is this the Tao, yin and yang? Maybe yes.

Defining with words is a human need, it is the first step towards understanding that does not foresee words, because everything is in continuous manifestation, everything simply is.

I have understood that I am a neutral, infinite, indescribable and timeless mind, but at the same time an ordinary mind that lives and feeds on what it projects through its gaze.

Now I don't know anything, but through the experience of the retreat I have found the meaning of my meditation, which is not an exercise in style, but rather a state of presence and awareness.

I end my contribution with this song by Julio Numhauser, a Chilean poet, whose title is an irrefutable truth.

EVERYTHING CHANGES

Change the superficial

it also changes the depth

change the mindset

change everything in this world

The weather changes over the years

the shepherd changes his flock

and just as everything changes

that I change is not strange

change the brightest finer

from hand to hand its shine

the bird changes the nest

changes the feeling of a lover

The walker changes course

even if this hurts

and just as everything changes

that I change is not strange

Changes, everything changes

Changes, everything changes

change the sun in your career

when the night subsists

change the plant and dress

green in the spring

The beast changes its fur

change the old man's hair

and just as everything changes

that I change is not strange

But it doesn't change my love

no matter how far I am

neither the memory nor the pain

of my land and my people

And what changed yesterday

will have to change tomorrow

just as i change

in this distant land.