Sandra Maitri > Quotes

“The moral of the story is that seeking truth, rather than fear of pain or the desire for happiness, is the correct orientation toward inner work, since seeking happiness makes you its prisoner just as surely as does pain.”
― Sandra Maitri, The Enneagram of Passions and Virtues: Finding the Way Home

“What’s needed then is an immersion experience—allowing whatever that experience is and becoming involved in it as completely as possible, in order to understand it. Notice in your experience of understanding yourself, part of the process is this immersion, is an involvement with the experience, whether it is a belief, an emotion, a contraction in the body, a sense of frustration, a sense of attachment to something—whatever is there is experienced completely, without trying to get rid of it. When there is a complete involvement with what is there in you, then after a while an understanding arises. Without involvement, the understanding will not arise.”
― Sandra Maitri, The Enneagram of Passions and Virtues: Finding the Way Home

“In the course of working on ourselves, we learn in time that when we stay on the surface of ourselves, which is to say when we are identified with and operating from our outer shell—our personality—we suffer. The more asleep we are to the reality beneath our shells, the less we feel that life is fulfilling, meaningful, and pleasurable. Or, in the language of the enneagram, the more fixated we are, the less we partake of the loving nature of reality, for we have lost our connection with Holy Love. Our suffering is not the result of being alone or of being in the wrong relationship, is not because we don’t have enough money or because we have too much of it, or because of anything of the sort.

Nor is it because our outer surface doesn’t look as pretty as we think it should or because our personality isn’t as pleasant as we think it might be. We suffer because we are living at a distance from our depths—it’s as simple as that. The more our souls are infused with Being, the better we feel and the better life seems to us, no matter what our outer circumstances happen to be.”
― Sandra Maitri, The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram: Nine Faces of the Soul

“Implicit in paranoia is a doubting attitude, which is itself the effect of fear on the mind. When paranoia is dominant, everything is questioned by a Six through the lens of doubt. This questioning is not an open examination, an actual indecision, or a careful weighing of the facts of a situation, but rather a biased one. There is a skepticism about it, a predisposition to disbelieve, a suspiciousness. This bias is, of course, based on the cynical perspective that the world is a dangerous place filled with self-serving people who would just as soon undercut you as support you, and that this is the bottom line of reality.”
― Sandra Maitri, The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram: Nine Faces of the Soul