Brian Mueller: Welcome to Follow Me to the MROP, a podcast dedicated to the journey of the masculine soul and the transformative power of initiation.
Brian Mueller: My name is Brian Mueller.
Brian Mueller: I live in suburban Dayton, Ohio, and I made my rites at Pilgrim Park in Illinois in twenty fourteen.
Brian Mueller: I am your host, and in most episodes I sit down with one man who has made his rites and I invite him to share his story.
Brian Mueller: But for this episode we're doing something different.
Brian Mueller: I'm sharing a podcast produced and hosted by my friend Jeff King called Nine Lives with Jeff King Live Your Best One.
Brian Mueller: Nine Lives is a podcast dedicated to helping people build stronger, healthier connections with others through a focus on personal growth, spirituality, and relationship skills.
Brian Mueller: The primary tool for this transformational journey is the Enneagram.
Brian Mueller: The Enneagram is a framework for understanding personality that categorizes human behavior into nine distinct interconnected types.
Brian Mueller: You've no doubt heard the term Enneagram on this podcast before.
Brian Mueller: Many of the men I've interviewed know their Enneagram number or type and have found it to be a helpful tool on their spiritual journey, especially in terms of personal understanding and improving relationships.
Brian Mueller: This episode of Nine Lives with Jeff King is titled Return to Presence and involves a conversation I had with Jeff about my own experience living life through the perspective of an Enneagram Type One.
Brian Mueller: often called the Reformer.
Brian Mueller: This podcast is truly a labor of love, inspired by my own transformative journey and experience at the Men's Rites of Passage and my ongoing commitment to the Illuman Community.
Brian Mueller: I hope you'll enjoy the special presentation of Follow Me to the MROP
Brian Mueller: and that you'll visit Jeff's website at transmuto dot
Brian Mueller: org, that's T-R-A-N-S-M-U-T-O dot org, to learn about the Narrative Enneagram and about my friend Jeff, who's devoted his life to helping others through ministry, counseling, and coaching.
Brian Mueller: My sincere thanks to Jeff for allowing me to share this episode of Nine Lives with Jeff King.
Brian Mueller: Without further ado, let's begin.
Nine Lives Announcer: Welcome to Nine Lives with Jeff King, the podcast that explores all things Enneagram.
Nine Lives Announcer: Now, here's your host, Jeff King.
Jeff King: Today, as my guest on the episode, is a new friend of mine that we met at a very fascinating festival called the Wild Goose Festival.
Jeff King: Brian, thank you so much for being a guest today.
Jeff King: Just introduce yourself, tell a little bit about who you are, where you're at, what you do, that sort of thing.
Brian Mueller: Thanks, Jeff.
Brian Mueller: It's great to be here.
Brian Mueller: I really appreciate the invitation to have this conversation.
Brian Mueller: As you said, my name is Brian Mueller.
Brian Mueller: I'm from the southwest Ohio.
Brian Mueller: I grew up in Cincinnati, but now I live in a suburb of Dayton called Centerville.
Brian Mueller: Let's see here.
Brian Mueller: I don't know even where to begin sometimes, but I do a lot of communications type of work.
Brian Mueller: I'm really privileged at this point in my life to do some work that I really feel has a lot of value.
Brian Mueller: I work within the organization of Illuman and
Brian Mueller: I work specifically for a client who wrote a book called Choosing Presence, which is about meditation and contemplative prayer.
Brian Mueller: So I work a lot on outreach for that.
Brian Mueller: So that's really my focus at this point in time.
Brian Mueller: I love the Enneagram.
Brian Mueller: The Enneagram has become very significant in my life.
Brian Mueller: In fact, just earlier this year, I was looking for a new spiritual director and I was asking around to see if I could find somebody that.
Brian Mueller: That knew the Enneagram because I thought that would be a valuable tool in relationship to the spiritual direction.
Brian Mueller: And I found a woman that did know that.
Brian Mueller: And so it's
Brian Mueller: It's come into play in spiritual direction as well.
Brian Mueller: But I think it's kind of interesting how I came upon the Enneagram about, it's been a little more than 20 years ago.
Brian Mueller: I went to see a counselor, and at that time of my life, I was.
Brian Mueller: Around 30, and I was wondering what was next in my life.
Brian Mueller: I wasn't married yet, and I was kind of feeling a little bit stuck.
Brian Mueller: And I always thought it was interesting because as I would talk to her
Brian Mueller: Over time, she would give me these little handouts with affirmations and things, and they were just so spot-on.
Brian Mueller: They seemed to fit me just right.
Brian Mueller: And in retrospect, a few years later, when I actually learned what the Enneagram was and a little bit more about it.
Brian Mueller: I realized that she had, through conversing with me, had kind of typed me and was giving me helpful clues and affirmations and things that might help me with along my journey.
Brian Mueller: And then, you know, over the course of time, it really is, it,
Brian Mueller: You have to progress, I think, through the Enneagram for it to grow and to become much deeper for you.
Brian Mueller: So eventually I did take a test and figured out my type.
Brian Mueller: I started going to Enneagram retreats.
Brian Mueller: At this point, I think I've been to four or so, but I've mainly been taught by teachers that have been certified at the Enneagram Institute.
Brian Mueller: And, you know, I've learned about it through that way.
Brian Mueller: But then this summer, I met you at the Wild Goose Festival, as you said, in North Carolina, and started learning about the Narrative Enneagram.
Brian Mueller: And I should have known about the Narrative Enneagram because my mom.
Brian Mueller: Knew about the Enneagram years and years ago, and she followed Helen Palmer.
Jeff King: Oh, cool.
Brian Mueller: And I understood that Helen Palmer always came to Cincinnati, but that was not my way into it.
Brian Mueller: So, anyway, I'm
Brian Mueller: I'm now kind of learning about the Narrative Enneagram and really benefiting from hearing people tell about their types.
Brian Mueller: It really is giving dimensionality to the types that I didn't
Jeff King: That's great.
Jeff King: So, how close are you to the Institute?
Jeff King: Is it that in Ohio as well?
Brian Mueller: No, I think that's in New York somewhere.
Jeff King: Is it in New York?
Jeff King: Oh, I think you're right.
Jeff King: Yeah, I don't know why I was thinking it was in Ohio.
Jeff King: Yeah.
Brian Mueller: There are some deep Enneagram roots here because Father Richard Rohr, who was in Cincinnati for years, taught the Enneagram.
Jeff King: Right.
Brian Mueller: And yeah, I know that there's a lot of, you know, in Southwest Ohio, there's a lot of people that were familiar with it and teaching it for years.
Jeff King: Yeah.
Jeff King: Cool.
Jeff King: So, drum roll, what type do you lead with?
Jeff King: And talk a little bit about that.
Brian Mueller: Yeah, I lead with type one on the Enneagram.
Brian Mueller: And over the years, I've never had any doubt about that.
Brian Mueller: Once I learned about my type and things like that, it just seemed to fit so naturally.
Brian Mueller: It always surprised me for many years why other people might have some confusion about their type.
Brian Mueller: For me, it seemed to be such an easy fit.
Brian Mueller: Not that I wanted to embrace everything about it, but
Brian Mueller: Yeah, you know, the way I kind of approach the world is as a type one.
Brian Mueller: It fits me if you talk about things like being a
Brian Mueller: You know, it's very cliche, but to say perfectionist, I think to be a perfectionist in very certain ways is really part of my personality.
Brian Mueller: Being a fixer.
Brian Mueller: Looking to fix things.
Brian Mueller: I have to look at things not always as in a state of needing repair, needing some sort of attention, even myself.
Brian Mueller: I think you could get addicted to self-help work if you're a one on the Enneagram because you're always trying to fix something.
Brian Mueller: That critic, that inner critic, it's not something that I was aware that other people didn't have or didn't have so loudly.
Brian Mueller: There's always been that voice in my head that's telling me to do better.
Brian Mueller: You can do better on this.
Brian Mueller: This is driving me forward in ways.
Brian Mueller: That sometimes is just too much, you know, sometimes it is overwhelming.
Brian Mueller: So, I'm constantly trying to silence that voice in my head
Brian Mueller: And I've learned through some other kind of work that, you know, I have a very good two-wing.
Brian Mueller: You know, I have that helper type of wing.
Brian Mueller: So that kind of lends itself well to who I am as or how I manifest as a one.
Brian Mueller: Honestly, you know, learning about my codependency through some 12-step work, you know, I really realized that one with a two-wing is a very good codependent helper fixture type of person.
Brian Mueller: So, yeah.
Jeff King: Talk a little bit about that in terms of always something to fix, and we can get
Jeff King: I like that term.
Jeff King: We get addicted to fixing.
Jeff King: I'm always looking at that.
Jeff King: What helps you to kind of hold that tension between addressing what
Jeff King: legitimately needs that we want to work on to grow.
Jeff King: But then the other side of that would we become overly fixated on
Jeff King: Focusing on what needs to be fixed and just always feeling driven with that.
Jeff King: How do you work with that tension?
Brian Mueller: Wow, it's taken a long time.
Brian Mueller: You know, I'm now in my 50s, and I think it's been a journey.
Brian Mueller: You know, seeing that holy perfection is really important for me as a one, and just realizing that everything is
Brian Mueller: Is fine just as it is.
Brian Mueller: And it doesn't need my attention or me to fix it.
Brian Mueller: But on the flip side of that, too, I do want to embrace that part of myself that can come in and
Brian Mueller: To certain situations, even my work, and really try to improve something or do a good job.
Brian Mueller: I try to honor that aspect of my personality.
Brian Mueller: In different projects and things like that.
Brian Mueller: You know, in my career, I spent a lot of time in technology and working on things.
Brian Mueller: And so sometimes it's just helpful for me to pick something up, like a broken computer or something like that.
Brian Mueller: And it's very therapeutic to just kind of fix that.
Brian Mueller: But at the other side of things, you know, it's also very helpful to me to just spend time with people.
Brian Mueller: Community has been really helpful to me in kind of coming to terms with that part of my personality and just.
Brian Mueller: Seeing the ways that you know I am broken myself and other people are, and that we can just come together and kind of be human together.
Brian Mueller: So there's a great song called it was a folk musician named Joe Purdy.
Brian Mueller: And he has a song called, I wrote it down.
Brian Mueller: It's called Can't Get It Right Today.
Brian Mueller: And the lyric of the song is just like, you know, hey, I can't get it right today.
Brian Mueller: And it's kind of this surrender.
Brian Mueller: Like, I guess I'm just going to give it up.
Brian Mueller: You know, I'm just going to let it go.
Brian Mueller: And if I can do that, then I'm usually in a pretty good place.
Brian Mueller: And realizing that, you know, hey, most people are doing their best, and so am I.
Brian Mueller: And that's enough.
Brian Mueller: That really is enough.
Jeff King: Yeah, I love that.
Jeff King: I think that that idea of for type ones is what is good enough.
Jeff King: Yeah.
Jeff King: And can I live with that?
Jeff King: I know for some, some ones, when I bring that up, it's like their lips turn blue just
Jeff King: To think about it.
Jeff King: It's like, oh, it can't just be enough because that feels like I'm letting myself off the hook.
Jeff King: I got to get it right.
Brian Mueller: Right.
Jeff King: Yeah.
Brian Mueller: I think a lot about the type one on the Enneagram.
Brian Mueller: There's a couple types on the Enneagram that I think are really kind of red hot, and I think it's the one and the eight.
Brian Mueller: And I think that people that are probably close to ones in eight, they can really feel that intensity.
Brian Mueller: I liken it to the sun.
Brian Mueller: I feel like if you go near these people sometimes, especially if we're not.
Brian Mueller: Function at a really high level, you might feel burnt.
Brian Mueller: I mean, the eight radiates that heat outwards and generates that heat in the world.
Brian Mueller: And the one has that in such an internal intensity of heat.
Brian Mueller: And if you're close to a one, you're going to feel that.
Brian Mueller: You know, I'm married my second time.
Brian Mueller: I'm on my second marriage.
Brian Mueller: And then, and that was really a wonderful thing to happen to me, honestly, is divorce, because.
Brian Mueller: When that happened more than 10 years ago now, I mean, it was something that I couldn't fix.
Brian Mueller: It was something that I couldn't control.
Brian Mueller: And it was something that I just had to let go.
Brian Mueller: And moving forward, you know, and ego, you have to do some work.
Brian Mueller: When you have events like that happen in your life, you really do have parts of it for sure.
Jeff King: Yeah.
Brian Mueller: Yeah.
Brian Mueller: Thinking about it.
Brian Mueller: And so for me, what you know, I did realize: man, I am really intense, and I can be really, really hard on those people that are closer or who I'm intimate with, and that I need to shut some of that off, at least.
Brian Mueller: On the other person for sure, if I can't do it on myself.
Jeff King: Yeah.
Jeff King: I like that metaphor of the sun and the heat, how the eights radiate outward, but I do see that one taking it inward and
Jeff King: Yeah, it's just constantly churning inside.
Jeff King: And I love, too, this idea of what is mine to fix.
Jeff King: And I'm curious for you.
Jeff King: In your process of growth and exploration and discovery, how do you discern?
Jeff King: What is yours to fix?
Jeff King: And what is it for you to let go of?
Jeff King: Is there any kind of barometer within you that gives you that indication of how
Jeff King: How you discern between the two?
Brian Mueller: Yeah.
Brian Mueller: You know, and it's funny.
Brian Mueller: I want to say when you say what is mine to fix in Illuman the men's work that I've
Brian Mueller: come upon about ten plus years ago.
Brian Mueller: Illuman was an organization that was started by Father Richard Rohr, and some of your listeners will know about him.
Brian Mueller: But it's been very instrumental in my life.
Brian Mueller: And in Illuman, one of the questions that is are we are constantly posing to men and to ourselves is what is mine to do?
Jeff King: Yeah.
Brian Mueller: And then in Al-Anon, I learned the question, or I learned the expression, my own life deserves my attention.
Brian Mueller: And to me, those are very much along similar lines.
Brian Mueller: And so, you know, when I'm in a healthy frame of mind, I'm easily able to kind of discern those things, you know.
Brian Mueller: Is this something that I need to take care of?
Brian Mueller: Is this
Brian Mueller: My, you know, what really weighs heavily on me, and I wonder it might be a thing for type ones, is responsibility.
Jeff King: Oh, yes.
Brian Mueller: You know, and so I have to always ask myself: do I need to be taking responsibility for this?
Brian Mueller: Or for this person.
Brian Mueller: And when it manifests in a codependent way, I really am taking responsibility for other people and their actions in ways that are not healthy.
Brian Mueller: So usually it is a matter of, you know, in order to make healthier decisions in my life, in my relationships, you need time.
Brian Mueller: You need space.
Brian Mueller: You know, you can't do everything.
Brian Mueller: In such a hurry.
Brian Mueller: The one is I'm a very instinctual person and I trust my instincts.
Brian Mueller: You know, you can go to a restaurant with me, it doesn't take me forever to order.
Brian Mueller: You know, I look at the menu and something will hit me right away.
Brian Mueller: And, you know, others might really struggle, especially with a long menu.
Brian Mueller: But, you know, I trust my instincts, and it's usually been a fine decision for me.
Brian Mueller: But at times, I need to bring on board my head and really slow down and ask those questions.
Brian Mueller: Not something I like to do.
Brian Mueller: Because I like to just move through the world instinctually.
Brian Mueller: And, but if I can kind of bring along my head and heart in a positive way too, then usually I kind of show up more completely.
Brian Mueller: You know, I'll be at my best.
Brian Mueller: So, yeah, that's great.
Jeff King: Techniques, I hate the word techniques because it feels
Jeff King: Too arbitrary and manipulative sometimes, but ways that you've discovered that helps you to
Jeff King: Also, release the inner critic so that it's not always kind of chewing on you.
Jeff King: What's been helpful there for you?
Brian Mueller: You know, I think the one of the most helpful things that I did over the years is I started writing really after my divorce.
Brian Mueller: I would had trouble sleeping.
Brian Mueller: I would wake up in the middle of the night.
Brian Mueller: And I would start reading different things.
Brian Mueller: But you know, really what helped me were the mystic poets, people like Rumi and Hafiz.
Brian Mueller: And reading that kind of poetry and then trying to do that myself.
Brian Mueller: Because over the last 10 plus years, I wrote so much poetry, just getting it out of my head.
Brian Mueller: and onto paper.
Brian Mueller: And I it ended up with, oh gosh, I got like 10 self-published books of poetry.
Jeff King: Really?
Jeff King: Wow.
Brian Mueller: Yeah.
Brian Mueller: And after getting that, and I haven't written as much lately, and I need to get back to it, although my life in the last year and a half or two years has really gotten so busy for me in some ways that it's been.
Brian Mueller: Difficult for me to find time to do that.
Brian Mueller: But I still think that's a hugely valuable practice.
Brian Mueller: But yeah, I mean, I look back at, I wrote some when I was in college, you know, 30 years ago.
Brian Mueller: And I don't want to dismiss that poetry as irrelevant, but it was so romantic.
Brian Mueller: It was just kind of, I didn't feel like I had much to say.
Brian Mueller: But what happens with life and experience and things like that
Brian Mueller: It enriches everything we do if we bring it to bear on whatever we're doing.
Brian Mueller: And that poet, my poetry now is so much deeper.
Brian Mueller: It connects with other people in big ways.
Brian Mueller: Even we, you know, I got encouraged by men in Illuman a few years ago to lead a writing retreat, developed a writing retreat, because some of the men were reading my poems, which I, for about five years, I published on a daily basis.
Brian Mueller: I would publish something called Brian's Poem of the Day.
Brian Mueller: And that experience, too, to watch.
Brian Mueller: So, we've been doing this, and I have a partner, Tom, who leads these retreats with me.
Brian Mueller: We do them in Ohio.
Brian Mueller: We had the opportunity to do one in Minnesota this year, and we're going to do one in Chicago next year.
Jeff King: Great!
Brian Mueller: Um, yeah, so excited.
Brian Mueller: We bring in different poets that are influenced, but watching other men too find
Brian Mueller: I mean, it's amazing to me how many people don't think that they have the ability to write or to express themselves creatively that way.
Brian Mueller: And so much comes out.
Brian Mueller: It's just it's been rewarding for me.
Brian Mueller: And I can see it for others as well.
Jeff King: Yeah, I can see that could be
Jeff King: Almost strategically therapeutic for a type 1, because you live with that instinct.
Jeff King: You're part of the gut center.
Jeff King: So, how do you access your head?
Jeff King: And you talked about reading and thinking through things, but that poetry really ties into the heart center.
Jeff King: But you have that line to four that you can draw from that deep field, get into that.
Jeff King: Authentic expression of what's going on in my internal world.
Jeff King: And so I love that.
Jeff King: You know, it's kind of funny because when
Jeff King: Part of my type bias, I think, when I first learned about the Enneagram was type ones would be so
Jeff King: Rigid and bent on the right-wrong dualistic thinking that I wouldn't think that artistic
Jeff King: side of them would be very pleasant because art is not an exact science.
Jeff King: But that line to the one, or from the one to the four, really draws that out.
Jeff King: And actually
Jeff King: My favorite musician-songwriter Brandi Carlile identifies as a type one, too.
Jeff King: It's like, can't get much more artistic and expressive than her lyrics.
Jeff King: Anyway, so yeah, so I think that's a really unique gift in that one position there.
Brian Mueller: Yeah, I think it does free you up in a way.
Brian Mueller: I like Brandi Carlile too.
Brian Mueller: You know, one of the things that's always kind of
Brian Mueller: Baffled me about the Enneagram is why we don't have, we're not closer to people of our own type, perhaps.
Brian Mueller: And I remember
Brian Mueller: Richard Rohr was doing an Enneagram talk with Russ Hudson one time.
Brian Mueller: I was listening to that.
Brian Mueller: And I think that's where I heard it.
Brian Mueller: But Richard had said that.
Brian Mueller: We don't tend to draw close to people of the same type because we can see each other's bullshit.
Brian Mueller: We can call each other out on that sort of thing.
Brian Mueller: And, but I will say this: people of the same type as yourself, if you know that, are really good teachers for you.
Brian Mueller: They're really, really good teachers.
Brian Mueller: I think this is why I've been drawn so much to Richard Rohr and his teachings over the years.
Brian Mueller: And I find him to be so informative.
Brian Mueller: And, you know, he's, yeah, he's an intellectual.
Brian Mueller: He's written more books.
Brian Mueller: Some people joke that Richards never had an unpublished thought.
Brian Mueller: But you know, he's he's an amazing person.
Brian Mueller: And I look, and I just got finished reading Adam's Return.
Brian Mueller: This is his book about male initiation.
Brian Mueller: And I'd read it years ago, but I continue to participate in these events.
Brian Mueller: As they come up to help other men that are going through that event for the first time.
Brian Mueller: And I was reading, and I look at the bibliography and I go, oh my God, I can't believe, you know, how many books there are.
Brian Mueller: And I bet Richard has read most of them.
Jeff King: Oh, fine.
Brian Mueller: You know?
Brian Mueller: And I just am not that person to consume that much information.
Brian Mueller: I get overwhelmed by details and all that kind of stuff.
Brian Mueller: And so, you know, for me to get to me to bring my head on board, I really just need some time and space.
Brian Mueller: I was talking to my spiritual director about that, and she was talking about take some breaths and pause, but even gaps in your life.
Brian Mueller: Like, yeah, I'm self-employed, and I think a lot of people feel this way: it's if you're self-employed, it's really hard to take a weekend.
Brian Mueller: Or to be away from your work.
Brian Mueller: You know, I work at home and certainly during the pandemic, it seemed to get even worse.
Brian Mueller: And being a one, I was with a two-wing.
Brian Mueller: I was trying to save the world.
Brian Mueller: I was doing as much as I possibly could in terms of Zoom calls and connections and things.
Brian Mueller: But then I realized, yeah, just space, you know, going camping this weekend.
Brian Mueller: That actually is an invitation that comes from a close friend of mine who's a seven on the Enneagram.
Brian Mueller: You know, I draw close to a lot of sevens.
Brian Mueller: I do enjoy their energy and the freedom that they allow themselves to experience life.
Brian Mueller: It's a little overwhelming sometimes, you know, to be with sevens and things like that.
Brian Mueller: But at the same time, you know, that's the kind of freedom that I, that I want.
Brian Mueller: And so, yeah, I mean, I need to cultivate more of that.
Brian Mueller: And I'm.
Brian Mueller: I'm aware of that.
Brian Mueller: That gets me, that brings the head on board and gives me space to read, to consider, to be thoughtful.
Jeff King: Great.
Jeff King: Love it.
Jeff King: Talk a bit more about Illuman.
Jeff King: Some of my listeners may not be familiar with that group and the movement of that and what its purpose and design is.
Jeff King: So tell us a bit more.
Brian Mueller: You know, Illuman is a community of men, for men, anybody who identifies as man.
Brian Mueller: You know, that has really expanded, I think, in over the years.
Brian Mueller: Richard Rohr, I'm from Cincinnati and had the, you know, I never thought this was significant, but my parents were early followers of Richard and his teachings and became part of that New Jerusalem community that he established.
Brian Mueller: Yeah.
Brian Mueller: You know, I didn't.
Brian Mueller: I honestly, I, Jeff, I really didn't appreciate that until more recent years of what that experience was.
Brian Mueller: But it had a huge impact on my life to even my understanding of.
Brian Mueller: Religion and faith.
Brian Mueller: You know, I grew up with a very progressive form of Catholicism, which, you know, I thought was more the Catholic Church.
Brian Mueller: I've been, it's been a rude awakening in some sense to see what the institutional Catholic Church is more like.
Brian Mueller: But
Brian Mueller: The neighborhood I grew up in, those experiences.
Brian Mueller: So there was a lot of trust in my family and in the community and people I knew in Richard's work.
Brian Mueller: But, you know, I wasn't really interested in any kind of church or community for most of my young adult life.
Brian Mueller: But by some chance, I had read Adam's Return, his book about male spirituality and initiation, maybe a year or so before I got divorced.
Brian Mueller: And that kind of planted some seeds.
Brian Mueller: And then
Brian Mueller: You know, I spent some time after my divorce really going deep, and I had this wonderful opportunity where I got to work at Big Bend National Park for a summer.
Brian Mueller: They have a volunteer program in the park where they provide room.
Brian Mueller: And board, and you work.
Brian Mueller: And I helped to run a visitor center at Big Bend.
Brian Mueller: And during that time, I listened to a lot of Richards' audio recordings from the CAC.
Brian Mueller: The Center for Action and Contemplation, where he, you know, he founded after he left Cincinnati and New Mexico.
Brian Mueller: And he did a whole series about men
Brian Mueller: And male spirituality.
Brian Mueller: And they really resonated with me.
Brian Mueller: And so when I left Big Bend National Park in 2014, I drove immediately to Illinois, where they were holding a men's rites of passage.
Brian Mueller: And it's a five day, four night ritual event that leads men through a series of grief and death, and all this is ritual and time in nature, and with the goal of kind of
Brian Mueller: You know, bringing some reflection on your life and that sort of thing.
Brian Mueller: And you will emerge in some sort of transformed way from that.
Brian Mueller: Although you don't necessarily know right away, you do feel immediately different after a.
Brian Mueller: An experience like a rites of passage.
Brian Mueller: But it takes some time.
Brian Mueller: But immediately after coming back to Ohio, after the men's rites of passage, I immediately began seeking out community.
Brian Mueller: And trying to find other men that had gone through that event, other men that were trying to gather men in what we call councils.
Brian Mueller: You know, these are our.
Brian Mueller: Meetings of men just where they come together and they check in.
Brian Mueller: Our councils often have like a meal associated with them, but we also have, you know, a little bit of a program where we try to
Brian Mueller: Try to draw experience and wisdom and things out of the men who are there.
Brian Mueller: So that's been deeply
Brian Mueller: And so over the 10 years that I've been involved, Illuman emerged from the CAC.
Brian Mueller: It was originally called M.A.L.Es, which is an acronym, Men As Learners and Elders.
Brian Mueller: And Richard ran that through the CAC for 15 or so years before it became its own organization.
Brian Mueller: And now we're pretty large organization nationally.
Brian Mueller: There's lots of men's organizations.
Brian Mueller: So I don't want to say that Illuman is the only
Brian Mueller: organization of its type or only community out there that is there for men.
Brian Mueller: But it's a large one, and we have chapters, maybe 15 or so chapters around the country.
Brian Mueller: Vancouver, British Columbia recently became a chapter of Illuman.
Brian Mueller: And we have fraternal organizations because Richard is such a well-known
Brian Mueller: Teacher, there's organizations in Australia and Ireland, in the United Kingdom, and Germany, and Austria, and even now Latvia.
Brian Mueller: There's an emerging region in Brazil of men that have.
Brian Mueller: Seen some benefit in doing rites of passage and things like that.
Brian Mueller: So, yeah, it's just, you know, being connected to others is such an important part of our journeys.
Brian Mueller: I think all of us that.
Brian Mueller: That's where I do my work.
Brian Mueller: And I would just urge that everybody needs to find some sort of community which feeds their soul and which they can give themselves to as well.
Jeff King: What have you discovered in terms of the like the hunger among men to have that kind of community?
Jeff King: Reflect a bit on that.
Brian Mueller: Yeah, this goes so when I because my family grew up in Cincinnati and part of the New Jerusalem community.
Brian Mueller: I watched that community kind of just flourish and flower in my early childhood.
Brian Mueller: So, you know, this is my child perspective on this.
Brian Mueller: I don't know if an adult would give you a different kind of perspective, but it was a big concern.
Brian Mueller: A big part of our regular lives, and it seemed to be flourishing and drawing a lot of people in.
Brian Mueller: And people were visiting from around the country and around the world to see what was going on.
Brian Mueller: And when Richard kind of hit his midlife, he would go.
Brian Mueller: My understanding is that he would, he takes a hermitage every Lent.
Brian Mueller: He would go away, spend time by himself to reflect.
Brian Mueller: Maybe this is him as a one realizing that he needed some space in which to kind of integrate things and move forward.
Brian Mueller: And I think my understanding is in 84, 85, he came back to Cincinnati and said it was time for him to move on.
Brian Mueller: And I don't know that he knew exactly what he was going to do next, but he tried to continue the community with lay leadership, and then he moved on to Albuquerque.
Brian Mueller: And the community sputtered and started to, you know, I don't want to disparage anybody that was part of the community at that time.
Brian Mueller: And of course, that community was affected by developments in the outside world.
Brian Mueller: I think it was born, you know, in a time in the 60s of great change, and there was change in the Catholic Church, and it moved through the 70s and civil rights and those things.
Brian Mueller: And then, you know, the 80s, different things happened, and people grew older, you know, and
Brian Mueller: So it fell apart.
Brian Mueller: But what that told me as a young person is that community is hard and it doesn't work.
Brian Mueller: And, you know, the society was kind of buffeting that same
Brian Mueller: Trumpeting that same message to me, you know, like we're all individuals.
Brian Mueller: You know how we get that message as Americans, you know, pull yourself up by the bootstraps.
Brian Mueller: We're very individualistic.
Brian Mueller: And so, yeah, I thought that's what you had to do.
Brian Mueller: And then, you know, as my life progressed and I had some difficult experiences in my life, primarily, you know, starting out with divorce, I realized you can't do this alone.
Brian Mueller: You need community.
Brian Mueller: Community is so essential to what we do and who we are as people.
Brian Mueller: And I know that there's this deep, deep hunger for community out there.
Brian Mueller: And I don't want to romanticize community either because what I learned in my involvement with Illuman is I learned, you know.
Brian Mueller: How difficult it is.
Brian Mueller: You know, there is, we try to maintain Illuman as a very flat organization without much hierarchy
Brian Mueller: You know, that's really difficult to do.
Brian Mueller: You'll find a lot of men in Illuman that take on positions of leadership.
Brian Mueller: That means running chapters or even serving on the board and those sorts of things that are
Brian Mueller: nines, ones, threes, twos on the Enneagram.
Brian Mueller: You'll have a lot of those types of people.
Brian Mueller: And some of us are looking for hierarchy and control and organization.
Brian Mueller: But at the same time, we're all trying to do our spiritual work and we're aware of these things too.
Brian Mueller: And so, you know, it doesn't mitigate all conflict and things like that, but it's real.
Brian Mueller: It's a real organization where you can do some good work.
Brian Mueller: We really try to put that at the forefront.
Brian Mueller: And, you know, and then two, you know, we all bring the baggage from our life with us, you know, and so that comes to bear in community as well.
Brian Mueller: But it's also one of the only places I think you can heal.
Brian Mueller: You know, from these sorts of things, because it's not what I've learned from other teachers is that it's not, you're not going to rationalize
Brian Mueller: And think your way through a lot of the traumas and the experiences and the pain in your life, you're going to have to have some sort of transformative, transcendent experience to forgive, to let go, to be at peace.
Brian Mueller: You'll still have those wounds.
Brian Mueller: But they may not control your life the way that they have in the past.
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Jeff King: It is kind of funny.
Jeff King: I pastored for a long time, and I think the idea of the church community
Jeff King: A lot of people come into this very idealistic, thinking what it's going to be like, and then they discover what it's actually like.
Jeff King: And the tough thing about true community, where you rub up against each other and there's friction and
Jeff King: Even from an Enneagram perspective, we're all looking for different things and we think our way is the only way.
Jeff King: And then we bump up against people who come at it from a different perspective.
Jeff King: And they're thinking the same things about us as we're thinking about them.
Jeff King: And
Jeff King: It does demand a lot of work to get through that and to really hammer out true community.
Jeff King: And I think
Jeff King: While there's a hunger for it for some people, they say, I'm sorry, it's just too much work.
Jeff King: I don't like getting hurt like that, and I'm out.
Jeff King: So go off and live isolation, but that doesn't get us anywhere either.
Brian Mueller: Yeah, when I was working at the Big Bend National Park, and that's in that area of Texas where the Rio Grande takes like a 90-degree turn, hence the
Brian Mueller: The name Big Bend, but you know, it really is off the grid.
Brian Mueller: It's one of the least visited national parks.
Brian Mueller: It's also one of the biggest, it's as big as the state of Rhode Island.
Brian Mueller: It's very hot down there in the summer.
Brian Mueller: But you'll have a lot of people that live out there that are kind of desert rats, I guess, or maybe what they call themselves.
Brian Mueller: But they also call them end of the road people is they want to be just on the border of
Brian Mueller: You know, civilization, or you know, have certain things, but they don't want to be messed with.
Brian Mueller: You know, and I'm well aware of that aspect, too.
Brian Mueller: There's that aspect in me as well that just wants to withdraw.
Brian Mueller: Wants to leave alone.
Brian Mueller: In fact, that might be my nine-wing, which I uh is more of a kind of a shadow thing for me.
Brian Mueller: I don't acknowledge that as much.
Brian Mueller: And, you know, just wants to step back and step away.
Brian Mueller: But, you know, I told myself that one of the most important things for me to do is to stay engaged in life.
Brian Mueller: And keep connecting.
Brian Mueller: In fact, that's one of the reasons I got married again eventually: is that, you know, after three years of divorce and spending some time on the road and just doing a lot of work, and I was fortunate to be able to do that, I don't have any children.
Brian Mueller: And didn't have a lot of responsibilities that kept me from taking some of those big steps in my life.
Brian Mueller: But I'd said, you know, I want to be back in relationship because I learned mainly through Illuman and some of the work I was doing is that that's what propels us forward.
Brian Mueller: Is our relationships with other people, not just necessarily a relationship with a spouse, but just being in community with other people is what's going to continue to drive you forward.
Brian Mueller: And I have to go easy on myself, though, because I, you know.
Brian Mueller: Last night, we don't even know our neighbors.
Brian Mueller: Our neighbors moved in maybe a year or so ago.
Brian Mueller: There's a house behind us.
Brian Mueller: And
Brian Mueller: And I think it might be a rental property.
Brian Mueller: So somebody new came and they have children and stuff, and they seem like very friendly people, but neither of us have made the overture of, you know, saying, you know, going over to the other house, say, hello, this is who I am, that sort of thing.
Brian Mueller: And
Brian Mueller: And I don't think it's uncommon, even in our suburban neighborhood, for that to happen anymore.
Brian Mueller: I think people are just tired.
Brian Mueller: And when they have a house, you know, or a home, it's their refuge from work and the outside world and things like that.
Brian Mueller: And so it's not like
Brian Mueller: What we might recall from when we grew up, where you knew all the neighbors and everybody was outside all the time.
Brian Mueller: But I give myself a little bit of a leeway and say, you know, you're doing your best.
Brian Mueller: You know, you'll meet them at some point, or hopefully, you know, maybe something will happen if that's to be, you know, but connection is very, very, very important.
Jeff King: Great.
Jeff King: So your role with Illuman, you have some leadership role with them.
Jeff King: How does your type one, and maybe you say you're self-employed, so there's kind of self-leadership and doing stuff like that.
Jeff King: But how does your type one kind of inform you with leadership, your overall philosophy, principles, how you approach leadership?
Brian Mueller: Well, with being self-employed and stuff, I think for, and I don't know if this is my type or just, you know, more personality or experience, but or who I am.
Brian Mueller: I guess I just got tired of being in an office.
Brian Mueller: It seemed like such a waste of time, you know, and I could do more on my own.
Brian Mueller: And I don't like, I like to do my own thing.
Brian Mueller: I mean, I think that's a real big part of me.
Brian Mueller: And so.
Brian Mueller: It's been challenging to be self-employed in a lot of ways because you have to create your own work and your own roles and your own relationships and things that are you're going to get paid, the projects and things you're going to get paid to do, make a living.
Brian Mueller: Whereas being an employee and things like that, that structure and framework is usually there, but that's not something that I like.
Brian Mueller: And so being a leader in Illuman has been kind of accidental.
Brian Mueller: I think.
Brian Mueller: A lot of the men, they just, we've needed this community in our life.
Brian Mueller: We've needed this connection with other men.
Brian Mueller: We've needed it so much that we just, you know, do what we can.
Brian Mueller: To create it.
Brian Mueller: And, you know, I am a little critical probably to a fault of other men because there's a lot of men saying, How do I do this?
Brian Mueller: Or what do I do?
Brian Mueller: Because they, because I'm like, I don't know.
Brian Mueller: You just, you, you just do it.
Brian Mueller: You, you, the very, you know.
Brian Mueller: The easiest thing to do is just call together people in what we call a council or a group and just, you know, have a meal and just try to get together in that kind of subtle form of community.
Brian Mueller: But there's no
Brian Mueller: Huge structure to this, or there's no, you have to be creative.
Brian Mueller: I think you have to be somewhat creative in order to work in community and to be in community.
Brian Mueller: And so that's what we're doing.
Brian Mueller: And I'll tell you, a lot of the guys that find themselves in leadership positions, I think there's a lot of shrugging, like, how did this happen?
Brian Mueller: You know, what am I doing?
Brian Mueller: There's a lot of different types.
Brian Mueller: And we, and but I also say too, is this is where you can really manifest your gifts.
Brian Mueller: And this is not based on your Enneagram type at all.
Brian Mueller: It's just some people have a gift for organizing.
Brian Mueller: You know, some people have a gift for teaching and leading.
Brian Mueller: I talked about the men's rites of passage.
Brian Mueller: It's a big event to put on.
Brian Mueller: And the men that feel a calling to do that, some of them have gotten into that too because they want this for their sons.
Brian Mueller: And for the other men in their life.
Brian Mueller: And they put in a lot of effort.
Brian Mueller: And when I go to help with one of these events, I tell you, I'm not the one that's organizing this stuff or leading.
Brian Mueller: I'm participating in a supporting role because that's not a particular gift or charism for me.
Brian Mueller: But what I can do is, I can help organize, I can help communicate.
Brian Mueller: One gift that really seems to have happened is that I'm able to help facilitate a writing retreat because it's something I do.
Brian Mueller: And so, yeah, that's my.
Brian Mueller: My message to others is just do what you can and trust that that'll be enough.
Jeff King: Yeah, that's great.
Jeff King: So, how if somebody was interested in participating in an Illuman Rites of Pass
Jeff King: Weekend?
Jeff King: Where would they go?
Jeff King: What would they do to plug in?
Brian Mueller: I think it's rare that men will just show up to a rites of passage.
Brian Mueller: It does happen.
Brian Mueller: Or that, you know, they might be ready for it, or they might have other men in their life who've gone through it and they can trust it that'll point them in that direction, but
Brian Mueller: For somebody who is totally new to this, I would say there's a couple pathways.
Brian Mueller: One, pick up Richard's book, Adam's Return, and read about what the men's rites of passage is about.
Brian Mueller: Learn about that.
Brian Mueller: And there are other organizations that do men's rites of passage, but Illuman primarily works with men in the middle passage of life.
Brian Mueller: And that's not to say that you haven't been initiated by other things that have happened in your life, but that is that, you know, we don't do youth rites generally in our culture anymore.
Brian Mueller: There are youth rites out there, but we don't do that.
Brian Mueller: And so.
Brian Mueller: We initiate men into what we call the second half of life.
Brian Mueller: Another good book by Richard is called Falling Upward, which talks about that transient to the second half of life.
Brian Mueller: The other things I would say is: if you live in a region that is served by a chapter, look to connect with those men in your region.
Brian Mueller: If you're not, for instance, Jeff, you're in Kansas, as I understand, there's not as much organization within Illuman in that part of the country.
Brian Mueller: But there are virtual councils.
Brian Mueller: So if you go to the Illuman.
Brian Mueller: org website and you look up virtual councils, there's ways to participate online in our council events.
Brian Mueller: And usually there's two or three a week.
Brian Mueller: You know, on both East Coast and West Coast times, you know, to kind of facilitate that for men.
Brian Mueller: And by doing that, you'll get a little bit of familiarity with the organization.
Brian Mueller: And maybe at some point you will want to participate in men's rites of passage.
Brian Mueller: But I will say too, it's not a requirement, you know, for your participation in Illuman.
Brian Mueller: We have, you know, quite a few men that have not gone to these events and probably never will, but we welcome them as part of our community.
Jeff King: Great.
Jeff King: Yeah.
Jeff King: Yeah, we did a men's rites of passage.
Jeff King: I don't know if we our organization that did it.
Jeff King: Was directly tied to Illuman or not, but it came out of that pattern from the guy that really spearheaded it had gone to one of the Illuman experiences, I think in Colorado.
Jeff King: And brought it back to Kansas.
Jeff King: And we had a great, great event and were in the plans for the second one.
Jeff King: And then COVID hit and brought gatherings like that to a screeching halt.
Jeff King: So, and we just never, no one's had the energy, I don't think, to pick it up and go with it yet.
Jeff King: So, but that's interesting.
Jeff King: I didn't know people that could just plug in, even if they hadn't been through the rites of passage experience.
Brian Mueller: Oh, yeah.
Brian Mueller: And there's like we do the writing retreat, we'll do Enneagram retreats.
Brian Mueller: There's all kinds of things.
Brian Mueller: Wanderings is one of the things that's really popular where
Brian Mueller: We'll meet at a park and we'll get together and we'll, you know, have set an intention, read a poem, something like that.
Brian Mueller: And the guys will go out for three or four hours and then we'll come back together and have kind of a picnic lunch.
Brian Mueller: Guys love that because.
Brian Mueller: Actually, the more time you can spend outdoors, it seems like that draws a lot of people to our events.
Brian Mueller: Yeah.
Jeff King: Yeah.
Jeff King: I love that.
Jeff King: I don't know if we talked about this when we were together this summer at the Goose, but
Jeff King: My dear friend who's worked with Richard with Illuman has kind of taken that model and has developed an elder's rites of passage.
Jeff King: And we do for like 55 and up.
Jeff King: But we do for both male and female in the elders' rites.
Jeff King: But it's a similar format, but it's specifically talking about how do we become elders in the true sense of the word.
Jeff King: Word.
Jeff King: And it's been very transformative.
Jeff King: We've done two cycles of that, planning for our third now.
Brian Mueller: Yeah, the Elder Rites has been a huge thing within Illuman and elsewhere.
Brian Mueller: You know, I know that.
Brian Mueller: That's usually for men over age 65 and up.
Brian Mueller: My father, who believe it or not, my father was a Catholic priest.
Brian Mueller: He had gone
Brian Mueller: He grew up in Chicago and he entered the Passionists, you know, this is back in the 50s, you know, at age 14.
Brian Mueller: So he started really early and
Brian Mueller: And he was ordained for just a few years before he left the priesthood and got married.
Brian Mueller: And that was common, I think, in the Vatican II times.
Brian Mueller: But he was the guy that.
Brian Mueller: He and my mom both, but he also was an early follower of Richard.
Brian Mueller: And when he saw me get involved with Illuman, I think he was always curious.
Brian Mueller: And after a couple of years of my involvement,
Brian Mueller: He started coming to our national gathering, which used to be called Solarize.
Brian Mueller: Now it's called Awaken.
Brian Mueller: And we would get together outside of Albuquerque every year.
Brian Mueller: And this year it's in Southern Illinois, just northeast of St.
Brian Mueller: Louis, in a place called Carlinville, Illinois.
Brian Mueller: And so it's moving around the country a little bit to incorporate more men.
Brian Mueller: But my dad would come to that.
Brian Mueller: And then I think in 2018, he said, I'm ready to do a rites of passage.
Brian Mueller: Well, that was the first year.
Brian Mueller: That they held an elder rites of passage up in Washington.
Brian Mueller: And he participated, and it was utterly transformative in his life.
Brian Mueller: In fact, he came home.
Brian Mueller: And he immediately changed his burial plans.
Brian Mueller: I think he just had a traditional plan for his funeral and cremation and things like that.
Brian Mueller: But he
Brian Mueller: He decided on natural burial.
Brian Mueller: And as luck would have it, my dad died in 2023, in the summer of 2023, and really unexpectedly, sort of sudden, had a cardiac event and died.
Brian Mueller: And
Brian Mueller: You know, within three or four days, you know, we had him in the ground in a wooden box in a green burial special section.
Brian Mueller: A lot of cemeteries are offering that now.
Brian Mueller: And it was a really beautiful, small
Brian Mueller: Small, small ceremony because of the sort of the urgency of having to, you know, bury an un-embalmed corpse.
Brian Mueller: But then, you know, we had a larger memorial two months later.
Brian Mueller: And
Brian Mueller: You know, it was really profound.
Brian Mueller: And so my dad's been gone a little bit more than a year now.
Brian Mueller: And it's really this, the men's work that he was involved in.
Brian Mueller: There were a lot of men from Illuman that had come to his memorial, which was deeply touching.
Brian Mueller: People that knew him and knew.
Brian Mueller: And we're supportive.
Brian Mueller: But yeah, it's caused me to, you know, consider my own relationship with him.
Brian Mueller: My dad was a nine on the Enneagram.
Brian Mueller: And, you know, he was that parent for the, you know, the.
Brian Mueller: Some of the literature where you read is that once felt alienated from one of their parents.
Brian Mueller: And for me, that would have been my father.
Brian Mueller: He was really.
Brian Mueller: You know, when I would do, would upset him and things like that, he would really withdraw from me.
Brian Mueller: I don't, I don't felt like he never loved me or cared for me or things like that, but it was really hard for him to engage with me when he was displeased.
Brian Mueller: And I remember my sister on his birthday this last year saying to me, you know, I really miss dad.
Brian Mueller: I really miss dad.
Brian Mueller: And I go, I, you know, I couldn't relate to that because that voice in my head, that voice of the inner critic is my dad.
Brian Mueller: That's my dad's voice.
Brian Mueller: And it's felt like I've never been without him, even after he's passed away in some sense.
Brian Mueller: And I know that he had that voice in his head as well.
Brian Mueller: But it was a real gift for me in the last, I'd say, seven, eight years of his life to do the men's work with him.
Brian Mueller: Because one big dimension of our men's work is
Brian Mueller: Is dealing with our relationships with our father and trying to understand that.
Brian Mueller: And also for the men that have sons to deal with their relationships as fathers to their boys.
Brian Mueller: Yeah.
Jeff King: Yeah.
Jeff King: Beautiful.
Jeff King: That's great.
Jeff King: Well, Brian, what currently are you reading that's inspiring you or any other practice that you're finding inspiring at this moment?
Brian Mueller: Well, I mentioned at the top that I work for a man named Jim Heaney who wrote a book called Choosing Presence.
Brian Mueller: Jim Heaney lives in Southern California, and he's an elder in Illuman's SoCal.
Brian Mueller: And, you know, I met him and one of the Illuman weavers, and weavers in Illuman are the men that lead the men's rites of passage.
Brian Mueller: Richard Rohr was the original weaver for Illuman.
Brian Mueller: But these are men that were selected originally by Richard to lead more rites of passage.
Brian Mueller: And Jim Taylor was the weaver.
Brian Mueller: So Jim Taylor and Jim Heaney, who wrote Choosing Presence, came to me a couple of years ago and says, Can you help us build a website for Choosing Presence?
Brian Mueller: And I said, sure.
Brian Mueller: Well, I didn't know that saying yes to that was going to get me deeply, deeply involved in figuring out what choosing presence is and what that means.
Brian Mueller: Choosing Presence is a book about the practice of presence.
Brian Mueller: And Jim Heaney went through the rights back in 97 when Richard first started offering them at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.
Brian Mueller: And he was profoundly affected by that experience.
Brian Mueller: And at that time, he would have been a man in his 50s.
Brian Mueller: And he struggled with meditation and contemplative prayer, those sorts of things.
Brian Mueller: And he really struggled with that for years and years.
Brian Mueller: And he sought out teachers like Richard.
Brian Mueller: Thomas Merton, and I think he was deeply influenced by the work of Brother Lawrence, who was a 17th-century Carmelite monk, who talked about how
Brian Mueller: You can be in the presence of God no matter what you're doing.
Brian Mueller: You know, whether you're in the kitchen cooking or you're out in the fields working, whatever, you can always be.
Brian Mueller: In the presence of God.
Brian Mueller: So he started teaching, working on his own practice of meditation, and he started teaching that in prisons.
Brian Mueller: And I think he got directed to write a book.
Brian Mueller: So he wrote a book called Choosing Presence, and that was published in 2020.
Brian Mueller: And Jim's a three on the Enneagram.
Brian Mueller: And, you know, he was a businessman in life, very successful.
Brian Mueller: And choosing presence is kind of like his post-career.
Brian Mueller: Gift to both himself and to other people.
Brian Mueller: He preaches, practicing presence, choosing presence.
Brian Mueller: And Jim had a couple of real key insights around meditation and contemplative prayer.
Brian Mueller: I started
Brian Mueller: Meditating after yoga, you know, taking yoga.
Brian Mueller: My sister became a yoga teacher after she got out of college, and I would take her yoga class, and she would talk about meditation.
Brian Mueller: And so I had always kind of had this idea in my mind that meditation was this Eastern practice and that it was somehow associated with fitness, you know, and it was a mindfulness practice, you know, clearing your mind.
Brian Mueller: Taking a moment to breathe, getting some space.
Brian Mueller: It was always a morning practice, too.
Brian Mueller: You would sit in the morning.
Brian Mueller: But Jim grounded
Brian Mueller: That practice of meditation and breath and contemplative prayer in the Christian tradition said, Hey, this is a Western tradition as well.
Brian Mueller: And it brought it for me out of the head into the heart and saying it's a heart practice as well.
Brian Mueller: It's not just about mindfulness and clearing your head.
Brian Mueller: It's about, and I would say it's the mystical or incarnational heart that we're trying to move into, where we really are trying to connect with.
Brian Mueller: whatever we consider God or our understanding of God in the present moment.
Brian Mueller: And the last thing is he
Brian Mueller: He said that presence is something that you can come back to throughout the day.
Brian Mueller: It's not something you just do in the morning.
Brian Mueller: It's something that you can check in on an hourly basis, or you can do it whenever you get the sense that, you know, hey, wait a second, I'm losing contact.
Brian Mueller: Losing my, I'm getting angry, whatever.
Brian Mueller: Take some breaths, do a check-in, and return to presence.
Brian Mueller: So, right now, I'm reading long answer of I'm reading presence.
Brian Mueller: Which is a small book again about the practice of presence.
Brian Mueller: But I'm doing this in a workshop setting.
Brian Mueller: We've invited every fall, we invite men to register for this.
Brian Mueller: We give them the book of choosing presence, and we work through the chapters together.
Brian Mueller: And I've probably, you know, now read the book about seven or eight times, but, and it's not a long read or difficult read, but it goes deeper and deeper every time.
Brian Mueller: And by experiencing it in community, you know, um,
Brian Mueller: That's enriching the experience for all of us, and hopefully, expanding what it means to meditate, what it means to pray contemplatively, what it means to be mindful and take those breaths.
Brian Mueller: In our culture.
Brian Mueller: Hopefully, people are careful.
Brian Mueller: Yeah.
Brian Mueller: And I'm reading some Rumi too.
Brian Mueller: We're doing a writing retreat next year is going to be Rumi is going to be our inspiration.
Jeff King: Oh, exactly.
Brian Mueller: I picked up a lot of Rumi here to kind of, you know.
Brian Mueller: Reacquaint myself with some.
Brian Mueller: So, yeah.
Jeff King: So, I can imagine so.
Jeff King: So, Jim identifies as a type three.
Jeff King: I could see where meditation could be a bit of a challenge as a type three.
Jeff King: So, that's kind of interesting that.
Jeff King: it almost seems like uh counterintuitive that'd be his his like special gift to the to the world is the teaching how to be present so for for you as a type one what do you find uh any
Jeff King: Kind of type one challenges for being present for yourself?
Brian Mueller: Well, I think when it comes to any kind of practice for a type one, you want to make sure you're getting it right.
Jeff King: Getting it right.
Brian Mueller: Yeah.
Brian Mueller: And so.
Brian Mueller: Getting past that hurdle is probably the biggest thing.
Brian Mueller: And, you know, Jim is when Jim talks about present, he's very adamant that, hey, you need to work your way up to 20 minutes every morning of doing this, and you need to.
Brian Mueller: He also created a mobile app that will help put hourly reminders on your phone so that you can do those check-ins and things like that.
Brian Mueller: And, you know, that's it's a neat thing.
Brian Mueller: It's a free app that goes with it, and it's helpful.
Brian Mueller: But, you know, that's very, you know, for a one, that can feel very rigid and structured and things like that.
Jeff King: And so another thing to get right better.
Jeff King: I don't, that's that alert.
Jeff King: Yeah.
Brian Mueller: Yeah.
Brian Mueller: So to me, it's about, you know, to me, it's, you know, I have no qualm with the idea that we need to do, you know, you come to a point in your life where you go, this is just essential.
Brian Mueller: It's what I do.
Brian Mueller: It's like getting up in the morning.
Brian Mueller: And I usually start off my morning with some stretching.
Brian Mueller: And I wish I could stop doing it.
Brian Mueller: But at my age and with some of the injuries and things I've had, I have no choice.
Brian Mueller: It gets more important as you get older, too.
Brian Mueller: I'll tell you.
Brian Mueller: Yeah.
Brian Mueller: But that's the same thing with doing some sort of prayer and meditation on a daily basis and throughout the day.
Brian Mueller: I just think it's essential because.
Brian Mueller: Life doesn't get easier, but hopefully if you're on a spiritual path, the tools and the things that you have, the resources, even the community that you have to support you, that grows.
Brian Mueller: And so you're able to take on bigger things and deal with bigger challenges.
Jeff King: Great.
Jeff King: Yeah.
Jeff King: Well, very good.
Jeff King: Well, Brian, this has been a great conversation.
Jeff King: I'd love just to keep on going, but I'm sure you have other things you got to get to today, too.
Jeff King: But thanks so much for hopping on the show and spending time with me.
Jeff King: And
Jeff King: Talking about this stuff.
Jeff King: Where can people find you, especially if they're interested, like in the writing retreat?
Jeff King: Give some contact.
Jeff King: We'll make sure we get those in the program notes too.
Brian Mueller: Yeah, thanks so much, Jeff.
Brian Mueller: For Illuman, again, go to Illuman.
Brian Mueller: org.
Brian Mueller: That's our national website where I'm at in Ohio.
Brian Mueller: And we work closely with our chapters in Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Minnesota.
Brian Mueller: We call ourselves Illuman Great Lakes.
Brian Mueller: Our chapter website is ohio illuman dot
Brian Mueller: org.
Brian Mueller: And you can always contact me at connect.
Brian Mueller: My email is connect at ohio illuman dot
Brian Mueller: org.
Brian Mueller: I love the idea of helping people to connect with the community and with resources available.
Brian Mueller: Choosing Presence is where I do a lot of my work these days.
Brian Mueller: Go to choosingpresence dot
Brian Mueller: org.
Brian Mueller: You'll find out a lot about us.
Brian Mueller: We do a weekly email right now.
Brian Mueller: We talk about topics associated with the practice of presence for those that are.
Brian Mueller: Want to go deeper with this, that might be beneficial.
Brian Mueller: I have a website where my poetry is.
Brian Mueller: It's BrianMueller dot
Brian Mueller: com.
Brian Mueller: You can actually see that as well.
Brian Mueller: And if I may, there's fun things.
Brian Mueller: I had written down a couple things.
Brian Mueller: One of the things I always loved about Enneagram retreats is we had teachers that would mention movies or characters or songs and stuff that identify with the type.
Brian Mueller: And one of the ones that I, that is so informative to me, the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, which came out in 1957, I don't think you remember that.
Brian Mueller: It was based on a book, a really popular book, but it was Alec Ball or Alec Guinness, excuse me, the guy that played Ben Kenobi in Star Wars.
Brian Mueller: He was the lead actor in that.
Brian Mueller: And he plays a British colonel named Colonel Nicholson.
Brian Mueller: And the movie is, there's a lot more to it, but in that movie, there's a whole brigade of English soldiers that are in a Burmese prison camp, and they're asked by their enemy to build a bridge for a railway.
Brian Mueller: And he instructs his men, they're an engineering brigade, so they build this bridge, you know, and they're not doing a good job.
Brian Mueller: And when he finds out they're not doing a good job, he's so upset.
Brian Mueller: And he says, you got to do the best job you can.
Brian Mueller: You guys are British soldiers.
Brian Mueller: This is what we do.
Brian Mueller: And he makes them build this wonderful bridge, you know, for the enemy or for the Burmese army.
Brian Mueller: Going across.
Brian Mueller: And then at the end of the movie, he kind of realizes, oh my God, what have I done?
Brian Mueller: And I wonder if, I don't know that he's an Enneagram type one, but that seems like such an Enneagram type one thing is you just kind of lose sight of everything and you say, this is what I do, and this is what I do well.
Brian Mueller: And you don't have any larger context.
Brian Mueller: I think that's what it means to be doing things instinctually, but not bringing your head online.
Brian Mueller: So, if anybody wants to see a one character in action, I think that might be a movie.
Brian Mueller: And there's a great song too by this group called Ages and Ages.
Brian Mueller: The name of the song is Divisionary, but everybody knows it by its lyric.
Brian Mueller: It's called Do the Right Thing.
Brian Mueller: And that song is the voice of the inner critic for the one.
Brian Mueller: But it's a really great song because it's sung in chorus.
Brian Mueller: And if you look up the video,
Brian Mueller: Watch the live video where they have all these people singing the song together.
Brian Mueller: It's called Do the Right Thing by Ages and Ages, and it's a fun song.
Brian Mueller: But that's
Brian Mueller: It's that voice in your head is constantly saying, Do the right thing, do the right thing, do the right thing.
Brian Mueller: So, yeah, thanks for letting me mention this because I thought about that because when you did the one panel, there was a gentleman named Steve on there, and he mentioned a couple of books.
Brian Mueller: That he found were helpful.
Brian Mueller: And I've been looking into those books as well.
Jeff King: Good, good.
Jeff King: I'll pass that along to him.
Jeff King: He actually just lived about
Jeff King: Three blocks from my house.
Jeff King: We get together quite often.
Jeff King: I'll have to mention to him Ages and Ages and that movie as well.
Brian Mueller: So thank you so much, Jeff.
Brian Mueller: What you guys do with the Narrative Enneagram is really helpful because it does you know, it's easy to kind of see the types in our in the context of who we are and in a very narrow space.
Brian Mueller: But by having people share stories and do panels and things,
Brian Mueller: It really gives dimensionality to each of the types.
Brian Mueller: And yeah, great.
Jeff King: Well, thank you for contributing to the conversation.
Jeff King: This has been wonderful.
Brian Mueller: Oh, I've enjoyed it.
Brian Mueller: Thank you.
Jeff King: I think you'll agree with me that Brian gives us a great insight to the Type 1 structure and what it looks like for someone who leads with Type 1.
Jeff King: When they do their work and really push through to grow and develop and mature beyond some of the restrictions and rigidity that Type 1 can bring to us.
Jeff King: So again, thanks Brian for giving us a great insight and for being my guest on the podcast.
Jeff King: And be sure to check out his information in the program notes.
Jeff King: And if you'd like to learn more about the Enneagram and how to apply its wisdom to your life, I'd love to be a companion with you on that journey.
Jeff King: I provide a variety of services, including typing interviews that help you identify
Jeff King: Which Enneagram type you lead with, as well as follow-up coaching and consulting to help you apply the wisdom of the Enneagram to whatever area of life that you would like to work on.
Jeff King: Whether that's your own personal growth and development, in your key relationships, or in your professional life.
Jeff King: I also provide a variety of workshops and trainings for organizations.
Jeff King: to help develop better staff relations as well as workplace culture.
Jeff King: So check me out.
Jeff King: Find me at my website at transmuto dot
Jeff King: org
Jeff King: You can also follow me on my Facebook page at Transmuto or on my Instagram account, TransmutoKC.
Jeff King: So thanks again for tuning into this episode of Nine Lives.
Jeff King: Be sure to check out our next episode.
Jeff King: And until then, live your best life.