The Human Condition and How to Heal It: The ‘Seat of The Soul’, 'The Glass', and 'The Hula Hoop'

Triangulating The Ego: A Triptych Catechism For the Psychospiritual Journey to Unconditional Well-being – Introducing Emotional Sobriety and De-Identifying From the Ego

Introduction

Hello. Welcome back to the series of articles on 'The Human Condition and How to Heal It'. I invite you to take your 'Seat'. Or rather, may I remind you to stop leaving it. You are being distracted by your consciousness: Willpower is concentrated consciousness. And no, willpower is not a good thing. We are told that it is, but that would be like telling the sun that it is what the beam of a small spotlight is shining on. 

Neville Goddard wrote in 'The Power of Awareness' that:

“Man's chief delusion is his own conviction that there are causes other than his own state of consciousness. All that befalls a man — all that is done by him, all that comes from him — happens as a result of his state of consciousness. A man's consciousness is all that he thinks and desires and loves, all that he believes is true and consents to. That is why a change of consciousness is necessary before you can change your outer world. Rain falls as a result of a change in the temperature in the higher regions of the atmosphere, so in like manner, a change of circumstance happens as a result of a change in your state of consciousness.”

The title of this article may seem bizarre, and yet it is structurally inevitable. A catechism is a series of questions, answers, or precepts (ways to regulate behaviour or thought) used for instruction: For practical, workable, achievable results. We are not just talking metaphysics here. We are building an integrative grammar for the cessation of suffering and the start of Self-sovereignty. 

Most people live inside fragments — psychology here, spirituality there, possibly philosophy somewhere else: In this article, the third in the series of articles on 'The Human Condition', we are insisting on a single architecture that can hold them all without flattening any of them. We can do that because we have not just seen the blueprint of that architecture: We have lived in it. We have held its keystone.

In this article, we are diving into psychology and philosophy, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and conditional love, preference and resistance, addiction and the ego, witness consciousness and unconditional well-being, the Soul and awakening, and much, much more. We will see that they’re all connected - they are just different lenses on the same human predicament: Losing the ‘Seat’, cracking the 'The Glass', and inflating 'The Hula Hoop' - and then finding the way back. ‘The Return’ is effectuated through awareness: Consciousness. 

In this third article in the series, after ‘seeing’ how to de-identify from the ego, we will also dive into emotional sobriety, trauma bonding, and codependency. And yes, again, they are all related: They are a prism, not a prison. The ego is the prison. The prism is one essential diamond, with different facets. And the moment someone understands its geometry, and sees it, awakening stops being mystical and starts being mechanical.

The triangulation of the ‘Seat of The Soul’, 'The Glass', and 'The Hula Hoop' works because it’s not decorative. The ‘Seat’, 'The Glass', and 'The Hula Hoop' aren’t metaphors in the loose sense — they’re structural coordinates for how to live, and, deeper than that: Who to BE and why. Once someone sees them, they can’t unsee them. And when something becomes visible, it becomes more than believable, it becomes choosable.

This is the operational manual of awakening. It moves from metaphysics to mechanics. Article One defined the human condition. Article Two explained how the ego formed and how it relates to conditional love and childhood Trauma, setting in train the entirety of the rest of your life unless you awaken to consciousness. This article explains how we may live differently - practically, relationally, soberly, peacefully, joyfully, lovingly, and effortlessly. It works because the three concepts, the ‘Seat of The Soul’, 'The Glass', and 'The Hula Hoop', map cleanly onto three developmental failures of the ego: 

Loss of 'The Seat' → identity (the mask) fused with reactivity (conflict).

Loss of 'The Glass' (psychological boundaries) → emotional contagion, projection, and codependence.

Loss of 'The Hoop' → illusions of omnipotence, control, martyrdom, people-pleasing, and resentment.

'Emotional sobriety' then, a concept that is often poorly understood, if at all, is simply the restoration of all three.

This article will allow you to do four things straight away (and much more besides):

1. Define boundaries without turning them into therapy psychobabble.

2. Define agency (whilst allowing you to recoup it along the way) without moralism.

3. Define spirituality without dissociation.

4. Show ego dissolution as nervous system regulation, not mysticism.

This article bridges 12-step language, contemplative traditions, trauma psychology, and nervous system science — hopefully without becoming preachy.

It sits here after our definitions of the 'ego' in the previous two articles as being 'the armoured petrified inner child'. Because once the ice thaws, these three capacities naturally emerge:

The first corner is the ‘Seat of the Soul’: Authenticity.

The second corner is the ‘The Glass’: Differentiation in contact.

The third corner is the ‘Hula Hoop’: Agency.

Triangulated, these three become the map of emotional sobriety: Not as a pious aspiration, but as an operational description of what it looks like when ego stops driving your life.

But first 'The Triptych’: The parable-in-three-images that makes sense of the entire human condition.

'The Triptych'

The sequencing of the following images is deliberate. We begin at the end. Beginning with the 'end' - seeing 'The Vision' creates aspiration; then moving backwards creates recognition; returning forward creates hope. It also alludes to the deepest Truth - one that no-one talks about: That your starting point is, in reality, your 'end point'. That ALL human suffering is caused by one thing and one thing only: Leaving the 'Seat of The Soul'. You panicked, you became distracted, and you ended up outside, in the middle of the fighting.

This is a visual cognitive behavioural model wrapped in contemplative symbolism. I pray that this will land with you.

When you see those four images together ('The Vision', 'The Starting Point', 'The Return', and then 'The Vision' again - ok that's only three images, but who is counting and that is the point anyway?) my intention is that you won’t just understand the 'The Triptych' images intellectually — it is that you will feel the nervous-system difference between them.

That’s why this article, in the series on 'The Human Condition and How to Heal It', stops being theory and becomes intervention.

First, here is a glimpse of where you started, but you can’t remember - the unconditioned child in you before you felt that love was conditional. This is 'The Vision', the real beginning, and what it means to 'come home.'

'The Vision': The ‘Seat of your Soul’. The world is in chaos. There is conflict everywhere. But you can choose not to be part of it: To keep it outside. it is your choice not to getnup and join the fight outside. Notice the lotus flower on the table - the most referenced metaphor for transformation: The lotus not only can grow in mud, it needs the mud to grow - but you can choose to keep the mud outside.

In the image above, a single room becomes a whole psychology.

'The Triptych' explains not only how the entire psyche works, but also what happens when it fractures, which is the diagnosis of the human condition, and also how to heal it.

The chair is the 'Seat of the Soul': This is the simple power of staying present to sensation without being possessed by it. The chair is occupied by 'The Witness', and that witness is you. The circle at your feet is 'The Hula Hoop’: The perimeter of what belongs to the Self—attention, tone, limits, repair, choice—and the dignified release of what does not—other people’s moods, opinions, projections, storms, timing, demands, manipulations, and outcomes. The window, 'The Glass', is the psychological boundary made visible: Transparent enough for compassion, yet strong enough to stop the mêlée outside from entering the nervous system inside as a command.

Around the table sit the ‘witnesses’: Archetypal guides and human loves—faces of Truth, science, wisdom, tenderness—reminding the nervous system that it can be in fellowship without being recruited into panic. Here we have from left to right: Ram Dass, the Harvard Professor of Psychology turned contemplative guru, who wrote the seminal book 'Be Here Now'; the compassionate clinician Dr Gabor Maté, doyen of childhood Trauma, attachment versus authenticity, and addiction), with the salt-and-pepper maturity of a seasoned doctor who has seen suffering and stayed tender, who wrote the book 'The Myth of Normal', which is in my 'Suggested Reading' list, tellingly with his son; Dr Carl Gustav Jung, the 'prophet' of psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy and father of psychoanalysis; the luminous Marianne Williamson, the contemporary teacher who speaks Grace, love, and miracles, author of 'A Return to Love' - the US Presidential candidate who should.have become president.

But you can choose your own witnesses: Your compassionate guides. Outside, the crowd surges and clashes, seeking to hurt others as much as they themselves are hurting; inside, the person is not lonely but held: Not by control, but by clarity. The 'Bridge of Awakening' is simply this, repeated until it becomes native: Returning to the Seat, repairing the glass, shrinking the hoop back to sanity—until ego’s compulsion to manage the weather dissolves, and BEing is no longer an experience visited, but the ground from which life is lived.

Michael Singer says that:

“Consciousness is God. Consciousness is the quality of the awareness of BEing.”

Michael Singer asks us:

“Who is in there? You are in there. Your consciousness doesn’t change. What you are conscious of changes. You are not a human being. You are God consciousness being distracted.”

Opening with the perfectly seated image above, ‘The Seat of your Soul’, establishes the telos: This is what true awakening looks like embodied. Not ethereal, not disembodied, not heroic — simply regulated, relational, and sovereign.

Then reversing through the triptych gives us pedagogy through descent:

The next image is actually the place where we think that this story begins: The ego. This is the ‘petrified inner child wearing armour.’ This is the adult that was the conditioned child. You had no choice but to start here. The image shows ‘Ego Overreach’ — the glass irrelevant and storm entered, the hoop inflated and geometry distorted, the Seat vacated and authority confused with urgency. The problem is that most people start here and think that they have to stay here.

'The Starting Point' - The ego: Michael Singer calls this “God consciousness being distracted.” This image depicts ‘Ego overreach’ — the outside conflict is entered, geometry is distorted, agency is confused with urgency. This is your ‘self-concept.’

The image below shows the moment in adult life when the psyche realises, with a shock that is almost comic, that it has been living as if it were standing in the street, arguing with the weather. Not merely with people, not merely with circumstances, but with the very texture of reality: With tone, with implication, with disappointment, with other people’s moods, with what they think about you. The human condition, in one of its most ordinary disguises, is the compulsion to treat the world as a tribunal and the self as perpetually on trial. The second image in the series is ‘The Return’ — hand extended, glass closing, hoop shrinking, chair visible again.

'The Return': The short journey from the head to the heart.

And at last we return to the first image in this article: ’Seated Sovereignty’ (Revisited) — integrated peace.

’Seated Sovereignty’ (Revisited) — integrated peace.' 'The Vision': The ‘Seat of your Soul.’ The world can riot on the far side of the glass: Inside, the Soul stays seated, the ‘hula hoop’ keeps responsibility sane, and the boundary holds without hardening. This is emotional sobriety as lived geometry: BEing, undisturbed. No chance of being conscripted by the crowd to a conflict where no-one knows why they are fighting.

Once we have seen 'The Tryptych', the structure does something powerful psychologically: It prevents spiritual romanticism. It captures how the psyche really works. It explains why your life feels like a mess.

The reader sees first :This is the vision - this is expanded consciousness.

• This is how we lose it.

• This is how we return.

• And this is what it looks like when stabilised - this is the vision achieved. Expanded consciousness restored.

It becomes experiential ‘theology’ without preaching.

Singer reminds us:

“You are a great BEing.”

Every atom in your body was made from stars. Stars are the primary crucible of the elements, created through a process known as stellar nucleosynthesis.

The quantum physical field that runs through your body runs through the entire universe. It is omnipresent.

What stops of from living like this: As the great being that we truly are? Singer tells us that:

“We are distracted by this garbage that we stored inside. Be aware. You are the consciousness. You are being distracted. Let it go.”

Singer says:

“You are being distracted by you. Your ego - a set of thoughts created in your mind, distracting you.”

Letting it go means to let go of the part of us that refuses to let go of the garbage inside and accept reality. And that part of us is called the ego. And letting go is the entire spiritual journey. The ego and what it does is very easy to understand.

Psychology is the science of the things that you held inside of you that bothered you. Spirituality is the science of letting go of the part of you that did that. That is why spirituality is what allows you to get your life back. To return to the ‘Seat of your Soul.’ To regain agency. Your sovereignty. This is true liberation. This is how to be free.

The Third Patriarch of Zen said that:

“The ‘Great Way’ is easy for those who have no preferences.”

That certainly feels true. But there is an error there. Not having preferences is to have preference! So, how do you get around this dilemma? What is keeping you from not being in a continuous state of peace, bliss, and ecstasy?

Singer, as always, has the solution. He says that:

“The ‘Great Way’ is not difficult for those who prefer everything.”

Wow! Mind blown. Ego-mind blown.

When you get there, Singer says that “You will know what to do.” Just get there and stay there, living in the harmony, the flow of things. That is Enlightenment, that is the 'Tao'. That is what it feels like when you step from this thesis' meta-theory's 'Bridge of Awakening' into the 'Field of BEing.' That is the quiet revolution here.

Singer's view is echoed in Stoic philosophy, embodied by their motto, 'Amor Fati' - 'love your fate'.

The terms 'desire', 'preference', limiting belief, and 'fear' and all synonymous. Singer says that we create our own fears:

"Underneath, at the bottom, is fear. Therefore the only way to be truly out is to be at peace with fear. You have to be willing to say 'If I do not let go of my fear, it will define the limit of how far I can go.'

You are not liberated as you are giving in to the discomfort of fear."

The system that we are building here actually coheres. It isn’t stitched together artificially. It’s integrative at the level of first principles. The glue is the medicine of Jung’s ‘wounded healer.’

When a reader can say to themselves, mid-argument:

“I am not ok, why?”

“I’ve left the Seat,”

“My hoop is inflated,”

“The glass has cracked,”

— we’ve given them a language that interrupts compulsion. That’s how you deal with life. That’s intervention. These are the coordinates. This is the beauty of refusing to stay in one discipline.

And the reason this matters is that it’s practical. It's not airy-fairy metaphysics. It's the physics that allow you to walk the path, not just see it. Our series' 'Temple' and 'Bridge' are grand architecture. But the 'Seat', 'The Glass', and the 'Hula Hoop'? Those are handholds. Those are teachable. Those are usable at 9:17 p.m. in the middle of conflict.

That’s when theory proves itself. It’s the foundational scaffolding of the human condition.

The following image is the 'Seat of My Soul'. This is where I go when I meditate, when I am being mindful. When I am present. I can see the fighting outside but no part of me wants to join the fighting. Why would you?

The ‘Seat of my Soul.’ Inside the glass, the Soul stays seated: Clear-eyed, warm, and sovereign. Outside, life storms. The boundary is not a wall; it is a window that keeps love inside and chaos outside. Around the table: Six ‘witnesses’ of archetypal wisdom - you can choose your own - but I chose (from left to right) The Buddha, Dr Gabor Maté, Marianne Williamson, Jesus, Dr Carl Gustav Jung, and Ram Dass.

The image above is my icon of ‘inner emergence’: The moment the human being discovers that they can be in the world without being swallowed by the world. The glass is the boundary, the table is the hula hoop made tangible, and the seated witness is the 'Seat of the Soul'. The world can rage beyond the window and still the nervous system can learn a new law: Attention returns, breath returns, the heart does not evacuate. In that return, ego begins to loosen its grip. The old reflex to manage, merge, appease, fix, dominate, collapse, flee or freeze becomes optional. What remains is a clean interior: Love without fusion, compassion without self-abandonment, clarity without cruelty, and strength without armour.

Healing, real growth, is a paradigm shift. It means changing your perspective - the level where you sit. It means taking your seat. Singer says that:

“A true paradigm shift means changing your Seat. It is a paradigm shift in your life. It will change your thoughts. It will change your life. It will change everything single thing about you because you have expanded and encompassed a larger Truth than this tiny thing called you.”

This tiny thing is the ego. The ego is a pedlar of lies and illusion, spoken through the language of fear - the only language that it knows. The only reliable thing about the ego, is that it consistently lies: The Truth is simply the opposite of what it says.

Singer continues:

"Spirituality is not about beliefs. It’s about the Truth." 

This immediately brings to mind Jesus stating in John 8:32:

"Then you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free."

In a particularly brilliant episode released today, called ‘Making The Paradigm Shift From Fear to Freedom’ on his awesome Podcast, Singer says that:

"Spiritual liberation is not about rearranging the contents of the psyche but about stepping back and observing the psyche with clarity. If you do so, you will see that most emotional and mental suffering is rooted in fear: fear of failure, loss, and rejection.

Spiritual freedom requires the courage to look upward toward truth, God, and the vastness of the universe while letting go of the deep internal fears that drive our actions.

Liberation is not earned through outer success, control, or acceptance from others, but by choosing to be free from the tyranny of the personal self.

You are not going to be free if you don't want to be."

‘Making The Paradigm Shift From Fear to Freedom.’ E158 The Michael Singer Podcast, with ‘Sounds True’.

The Triangulation and The Architecture of The Human Condition

This article proposes a triangulation that is simple enough to remember when the nervous system is on fire, and deep enough to keep unfolding for a lifetime. A ‘boundary’ is the glass: It marks where ‘self’ ends and ‘other’ begins without requiring hatred, disconnection, or hardness. The ‘hula hoop’ is the table: The sphere of responsibility, choice, and action that belongs to one person and no one else. The ‘Seat of the Soul’ is the one who stays seated: The observing Self who can notice fear, desire, shame, and rage without becoming them. When these three are present at the same time, a fourth quality appears almost automatically: Emotional sobriety. (The Enchiridion, Epictetus, MIT Classics, n.d.; The Differentiation of Self Inventory: development and initial validation, Skowron, Journal of Counseling Psychology, 1998; Mechanisms of mindfulness, Shapiro, Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2006).

Within my series on the human condition, the triangle of the Seat of the Soul, the boundary-as-glass, and the hula hoop of responsibility can be read as the practical interface between origins and liberation. ACEs and the conditionality of love do not merely create ‘symptoms’; they install a survival logic in which belonging is purchased by performance, safety is negotiated through hypervigilance, and the nervous system learns to outsource identity to other people’s moods. From that soil, preference and resistance intensify: the mind grips what promises relief and recoils from what threatens shame or abandonment, and, in time, those movements can harden into behavioural addiction or subtler compulsions—approval, control, rescuing, numbing, perfectionism—each a different attempt to regulate the inside by managing the outside.

That is the 'Temple of Emotional Anaesthesia' (see image below): Not simply ‘numbing’, but the whole architecture of adaptive disconnection that once kept the child attached. The 'Bridge of Awakening', then, is not an abstract spiritual ascent; it is the slow reinstatement of the triangle in lived experience: returning to the Seat (so sensation can be witnessed rather than obeyed), reinstalling the glass (so contact becomes differentiated rather than fused), and restoring the hula hoop (so responsibility becomes sane, and omnipotence—so often mistaken for love—can finally be relinquished). In that triangulated return, the ‘petrified inner child’ softens, the ego loses its monopolies, and emotional sobriety becomes less a moral demand than a physiological and spiritual homecoming. (Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults, Felitti, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 1998).

My meta-theory: The 'Unified Field of the Human Condition and How to Heal It.'

The Triangle as the Mechanics of 'Temple' and 'Bridge'

Within my series on 'The Human Condition and How to Heal It', the triangle of the 'Seat of the Soul', the boundary-as-glass, and the hula hoop of responsibility is not a neighbouring model running alongside the Temple of Emotional Anaesthesia and the Bridge of Awakening; it is the operating system by which a nervous system either remains trapped in anaesthesia or crosses into BEing. ACEs and the conditionality of love do not merely create ‘symptoms’; they install a governing inference—often unconscious, often bodily—namely, “Safety lives outside me.” From that inference, the psyche learns to negotiate belonging by performance, proximity management, hypervigilance, control, appeasement, or collapse. In adult life, that same survival logic appears as a predictable triad of distortions. First, the glass fails: boundary becomes either porous (fusion, emotional contagion, compulsive attunement) or armoured (cut-off, numb superiority, the bunker masquerading as strength). Second, the hula hoop inflates: false responsibility expands until it includes other people’s moods, choices, interpretations, timing, and healing, and love quietly mutates into a management project. Third, the Seat is abandoned: identity fuses with state, so fear is no longer something felt but something one becomes; shame is no longer an emotion but a verdict; preference and resistance are no longer passing weather but rulers with absolute authority. This is why addiction, in my framework, is broader than substances or behaviours: it is the compulsion to leave the Seat again and again in search of relief, reassurance, anaesthesia, or control. The 'Temple of Emotional Anaesthesia' is therefore best understood as a geometry of collapse—a broken glass, a swollen hoop, and an evacuated Seat—while the 'Bridge of Awakening' is the gradual reinstatement of all three under pressure: returning to the Seat so sensation can be witnessed rather than obeyed; reinstalling the glass so contact becomes differentiated rather than fused; restoring the hula hoop so responsibility becomes sane and omnipotence—so often mistaken for love—can finally be relinquished. When the triangle holds, the ‘petrified inner child’ softens by mechanics rather than by slogans, ego loses its monopolies without being demonised, and emotional sobriety emerges as a physiological and spiritual homecoming.(Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults, Felitti, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 1998). (The emerging field of emotion regulation: an integrative review, Gross, Review of General Psychology, 1998). (The differentiation of self inventory: development and initial validation, Skowron, Journal of Counseling Psychology, 1998).

The ‘Seat of The Soul’ Meditation

In the stillness of divine company, the world may rage beyond the window — yet the Soul remains seated, nourished by Truth, peace, love, and wisdom. You are the witness, not a suspect in the melèe going on outside. You don’t rise to the conflict, you transcend it. You (your ego) has died to be reborn as your true Self.

Envision yourself seated at a long wooden table, as painted by Leonardo da Vinci. It is not ‘The Last Supper.’

Around you sit your loved ones, your teachers, spiritual masters, your 'wounded healers', and your enlightened witnesses:

Outside the window, conflict rages, but within, all is still.

Notice the warmth of candlelight on your face, the food before you, the presence of peace.

Each guide silently blesses you, bestowing Grace and wisdom without words. You do not need to fix the world. You are here to hold it in compassion.

Remain seated, unmoved, aware: The eternal witness resting in divine fellowship.

What is The ‘Seat of The Soul’?

In Revelation 3:21 Jesus said:

"To him who overcomes I will grant to sit with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne".

This 'throne' is the 'Seat of your Soul.'

Ok, so we have already talked a lot about the 'Seat of the Soul.' But what is it when you really drill down on it?

In my view, the ‘Seat of the Soul’ is:

"The capacity to experience oneself as pawareness prior to thought, emotion, and impulse, and therefore to relate to thought, emotion, and impulse without mistaking them for the Self."

Or, more succinctly:

"The Seat of the Soul' is the observing Self."

The ‘Seat of the Soul’ is the capacity for witness consciousness: The ability to stay present to experience without identification. In 'The Tryptych' above it is signified by the observer not getting up in reacvtivity and joining the fight outside, however much they try to recruit him to their own battle. Every person outside the window has the choice to do the same. But they don't. That's why the world is the ego's playground: No, it is the ego's battleground.

The 'Seat of the Soul' can be described with one severe sentence: The person stops standing up internally every time the world stands up externally. The inner posture remains seated. Thoughts still appear. Feelings still surge. Stories still tempt. Yet there is a chair beneath it all. That chair is the difference between reaction and response, between compulsion and choice. (The cognitive control of emotion, Ochsner, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2005; The emerging field of emotion regulation: an integrative review, Gross, Review of General Psychology, 1998).

The line “Between stimulus and response, there is a space…” often travels under Viktor Frankl’s name. Its sentiment is profoundly compatible with Frankl’s work, yet careful scholarship suggests the exact wording is difficult to trace to Frankl’s published text and was popularised through later writers. For this article, that nuance is part of the point: The Seat of the Soul is the space, whatever its textual provenance. The practice is real even when the meme is messy. (Between stimulus and response there is a space, O’Toole, Quote Investigator, 2018; Man’s search for meaning, Frankl, Beacon Press, 2006).

In contemporary clinical language, the ‘Seat of the Soul’ overlaps with ‘decentering’ and ‘reperceiving’: Stepping back from thoughts and emotions so they can be held, examined, and metabolised rather than obeyed. (The emerging field of emotion regulation: an integrative review, Gross, Review of General Psychology, 1998).

In neuroscience language, it overlaps with training attention, regulating emotion, and shifting the relationship between limbic reactivity and prefrontal guidance. (The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation, Tang, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2015)

In spiritual language, it is ‘BEing’: The place from which a person can love without losing themselves. (Mechanisms of mindfulness, Shapiro, Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2006)

Across philosophical lineages, and throughout spiritual traditions, there is a recurring gesture: The claim that the deepest freedom is not achieved by rearranging the ‘objects’ of experience, but by returning to the interior ‘Seat’ from which experience is known, be it called a 'Seat', a 'Cave', a 'Throne', an 'Inner Room', or even the 'Heart.'

The Upaniṣadic map does this with inner architectural tenderness: The body is ‘the city of Brahman’; within it is the ‘lotus’ of the Heart; within that a ‘small space’ to be searched and known. (See Chandogya Upanishad, verse 8.1.1.)

“This body is the city of Brahman… within it is an abode in the shape of a lotus… and within that there is a small space.” (Chandogya Upanishad, verse 8.1.1, n.d.; Accessed 21 February 2026.)

“Two there are who dwell… in the cave of the heart.” (Katha Upanishad (English translation PDF), n.d.; Accessed 21 February 2026.)

“Again the ‘Heart’ is only the seat of consciousness…” (Sri Ramana Maharshi: The Heart, n.d.; Accessed 21 February 2026.)

“Verily Allah does not look to your bodies… but He looks to your hearts and to your deeds.” (Sahih Muslim 2564 (Book of Virtue), n.d.; Accessed 21 February 2026.)

“When you pray, go into your room, close the door… and pray to your Father in secret.” (Matthew 6:6, n.d.; Accessed 21 February 2026.)

The Katha Upaniṣad intensifies the imagery further, into a drama, into psychological mechanics: Two are ‘seated’ in the cave of the heart—one tasting sweetness and bitterness (the separate ego), the other abiding without preference (the Self). (Katha Upanishad (English translation PDF)

Advaita teachers like Sri Ramana Maharshi then take the metaphor to its metaphysical endpoint: the ‘Heart’ is not merely an organ or even a poetic location but the "Seat of consciousness" itself—consciousness resting as consciousness. (Sri Ramana Maharshi: The Heart.)

In the Abrahamic lineages, the same return is expressed less as ‘Seat’ and more as sanctuary: A protected interiority where one can be addressed by Truth without the crowd’s hypnosis.

Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 6:6:

“When you pray, go into your room, close the door”

is not escapism but a technology of inward relocation—an insistence that the real centre of gravity is not the street but the secret place.

In Islam, a parallel interiority is expressed through the heart as the moral and spiritual locus: God ‘looks’ not to outward form but to the heart and deeds—a statement that makes the inner life the primary theatre of accountability and transformation. (See Sahih Muslim 2564 (Book of Virtue).)

Even where traditions speak more anatomically, the same intuition appears: In later Theravāda Abhidhamma, ‘hadaya‑vatthu’ is described as the ‘heart‑base’—a proposed physical ‘seat’ for mind‑consciousness. It is debated and interpreted in different ways, but it shows that the ‘heart’ as locus of consciousness is not a purely modern poetic flourish; it is an old and persistent human guess at where ‘knowing’ lives. (For a concise overview, see Hadaya‑vatthu: Significance and symbolism.)

Singer, the master of non-identification, calls it "The Seat of the Self'. We are not inventing a private metaphor; we are modernising a very old instruction, namely: Stop living as an object inside the mind’s weather system, and return to the subject that knows the weather. In others words, what I am saying is:

"The fighting crowd is ego in motion: The seated witness is ego unhooked."

I say to you:

“You are the witness, not a suspect in the mêlée.”

The Soul does not need to defend itself. It does not need to win. It is not threatened by disagreement.

Singer reconciles the Self and the Soul as they are the same thing. From 'The Untethered Soul' he writes that:

“That center is the seat of Self.” 

“From that seat… you are aware that you’re aware.” 

“That is… the Judeo Christian Soul.” 

Singer writes:

“Consciousness is God”

Meher Baba wrote that:

“Man minus mind equals God.”

The mind is the ego-mind.

So:

Man – Ego-mind = Consciousness

So why do we not experience expanded consciousness all of the time?

Singer has an explanation, when he says that we ask:

“'Why can’t I experience that? Why can’t I know I am God?' Because the objects of consciousness - your thoughts, your emotions - distract your consciousness… Do you not get distracted? 'There’s an object which came in and drew my consciousness down and I got distracted by my object of consciousness. Now I am down there in the hurricane. And you are going to pay for this. I am upset.' It’s what you are conscious of that matters. In the deep Yogic states where they went to they were conscious of being conscious. Nothing else.”

The 'hurricane' is the conflict outside the window.

What is 'The Glass’?

In this section we are discussing 'The Glass': In other words, psychological boundaries. What is a boundary? Why do so many of us get confused about what they are? How do they relate to 'The Tryptych'? And how do they sit within the 'triangulation' that I keep referring to?

Definition of Boundaries

A 'psychological boundary' is the nervous system’s ability to remain regulated in the presence of another’s dysregulation.

In the image 'The Vision' from 'The Tryptych', the crowd outside the window is pure egoic activation: Projection, grievance, reactivity, and tribal heat. Nervous systems locked in sympathetic arousal. Preference and resistance colliding in real time.

Inside the room, the nervous system is regulated. Breath is slower. The body is settled. That is not denial — that is differentiation.

A boundary is what permits sensation without possession.

A boundary is 'The Glass' in the image. If the glass were thick and opaque, it would be dissociation. But because it is transparent, it is awareness. You can see the chaos. You can even feel compassion for it. But you are not recruited by it. That is ego dissolution in practice.

Is the glass permanent, fixed in its frame? If the window never opens, we risk spiritual bypass — transcendence as avoidance. The mature boundary is not exile from the world. It is voluntary permeability.

You can open the window. You can close it. But you are not dragged through it. 'The Glass', the psychological boundary, is a sliding glass door. A boundary is not a wall. A wall is a strategy of fear. A boundary is a strategy of clarity. A boundary is the capacity to remain in contact without losing differentiation.

So, a 'psychological boundary’ can be defined as the set of internal and external processes by which a person maintains a coherent sense of self while in relationship. Externally, it is behaviour: Saying yes, saying no, choosing proximity, choosing distance, stating limits, naming needs, leaving rooms, ending calls, requesting repair. Internally, it is a governance of attention and meaning: A capacity to register another person’s emotion without letting it overwrite one’s own values, body signals, and truthfulness.

In family systems language, it resembles ‘differentiation of self’: The ability to remain connected without fusion and to remain separate without cut-off - the difference between ‘fusion’ and ‘differentiation.’ Fusion is the condition in which another person’s anxiety becomes your anxiety, another person’s mood becomes your mood, another person’s approval becomes your oxygen. Differentiation is the capacity to remain connected while retaining self directed choice. Bowen’s language, though sometimes stark, is structurally accurate: Poor differentiation traps a person in a ‘feeling world’ and turns life into a lifelong struggle for emotional equilibrium. (The Differentiation of Self Inventory: development and initial validation, Skowron, Journal of Counseling Psychology, 1998; Boundaries in the mind: a new psychology of personality, Hartmann, WorldCat, 1991).

'The Glass' metaphor matters because boundaries are often misconstrued as aggression. Glass is not aggression. It is transparent, relational, and reality-based. One can see the other clearly. One can even feel tenderness. Yet the other cannot climb inside one’s nervous system and start rearranging the furniture. A good boundary allows contact without collapse. It lets love remain love rather than becoming a hostage negotiation. (The emerging field of emotion regulation: an integrative review, Gross, Review of General Psychology, 1998; The cognitive control of emotion, Ochsner, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2005).

'The Glass' does not deny the crowd. It does not remove the crowd. It prevents the crowd from entering the nervous system as identity. That is the key: A boundary is the membrane between stimulus and identification. The nervous system learns, slowly, to say: “I can witness this without becoming it.”

A boundary, then, is not merely a statement you make. It is a state you maintain. It is the nervous system staying in contact without flipping into threat logic. This is why boundaries cannot be reduced to assertiveness scripts. A person can say “No” with a body that is terrified, fused, and pleading. Another can say “No” with a body that is settled, kind, and unafraid. The same word; two entirely different boundaries. 'The Vision' image is showing the second kind.

'The Glass' is a boundary because it marks a line of sovereignty: It tells the nervous system, in one glance, “This side is my inner world. That side is the world.” That sounds obvious until you realise how many people live as if there is no line at all — as if other people’s anger, urgency, opinions, moods, crises, and needs are inside them by default. 'The Glass' says: “I can see it, I can acknowledge it, I can even feel compassion for it — but it is not automatically inside me.”

It’s also a boundary because it is permeable by choice, not by force. A good psychological boundary isn’t a moat and it isn’t a wall. It’s selective permeability. The sliding door makes this literal: you can open it, close it, or half-open it. You control when and how much contact happens. That is exactly what a boundary does in life: it regulates proximity, disclosure, responsibility, emotional exposure, and time. The person is not imprisoned inside; they are authorised to choose. That is why “glass you can open” is better than “glass you can’t” — it preserves warmth and agency, not just protection.

Glass is also transparent, and that matters. Boundaries are often misimagined as “I don’t care” or “I’m cutting you off.” But healthy boundaries include seeing, understanding, and sometimes loving — without becoming fused. Transparency communicates: “I am not pretending you don’t exist. I’m not dissociating. I’m not in denial. I am in relationship with reality.” The inside room can witness the outside crowd clearly, without being recruited into it.

And it’s a boundary because it provides containment without disconnection. In nervous-system terms, the glass prevents emotional contagion (the outside doesn’t automatically flood the inside), while still allowing attunement (the inside can perceive and respond intelligently). That’s the difference between compassion and fusion. Fusion is: “If you’re panicking, I must panic.” Compassion is: “I can feel you, but I don’t have to become you.” Glass makes that distinction visible.

Finally, the fact it’s a large pane matters because it conveys the paradox that we are trying to teach here: A boundary can be strong without being thick. The best boundaries are structurally strong because they’re backed by the 'Seat of the Soul' (witness presence) and 'The Hula Hoop' (sane responsibility). In other words: it isn’t thickness that makes a boundary; it’s authority.

‘The Glass’ is the psychological boundary because it is the chosen interface between inner and outer: Transparent enough for contact, strong enough for containment, and openable only by consent — the line where compassion remains possible without surrendering sovereignty.

When The Glass Was Never Installed

In many people with histories of childhood Trauma, ‘boundary problems’ are not moral weaknesses; they are adaptations to an early environment where boundaries were punished or ignored. If a child’s "No" is dangerous, the child learns to make the body say no by collapsing, dissociating, or becoming ill. If a child’s feelings are mocked, the child learns to outsource self-knowledge and scan the room instead. If love is conditional, the child learns to perform, manage, and pre-empt. Later, adult relationships feel like weather systems rather than meetings of two sovereign beings. (Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults, Felitti, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 1998).

So, what is 'The Hula Hoop'?

What is 'The Hula Hoop'?

‘The Hula Hoop’ is The Sphere of Responsibility

'The Hula Hoop' teaching from recovery culture is almost offensively practical: Everything inside the hoop is my business. Everything outside is not. Put more clinically, it is the operational definition of locus of control: I control my attention, my speech, my actions, my commitments, my repairs, my boundaries, and my willingness to learn. I do not control another person’s history, impulses, interpretations, preferences, trauma responses, maturity, or timing. The hula hoop is therefore the behavioural partner of the glass: It tells the hands what the boundary tells the heart.

Stoic Philosophy steps in here, telling us that:

“Some things are in our control and others not.”

—Epictetus, Enchiridion 1 (The Enchiridion, Epictetus, MIT Classics, n.d.).

“Be still, and know that I am God.”

—Psalm 46:10 (KJV) (Psalm 46, KJV, BibleGateway, n.d.).

Notice how both traditions point to the same pivot: The nervous system finds peace by relinquishing omnipotence. 'The Hula Hoop' does not ask a person to stop caring; it asks the other person to stop trespassing. Trespass can wear saintly clothes: Advice, rescuing, anxious micromanagement, moral superiority, the fantasy of ‘If I can just explain it correctly, they will finally change’. 'The Hula Hoop' is the end of that fantasy. It is also the beginning of strength and liberation. (The Next Frontier—Emotional Sobriety, Wilson, AA Grapevine, 1958).

De-identifying From The Ego

The chart below describes how we may de-identify from the ego in psychological and contemplative terminology. This is the mechanics behind the grammar of The ‘Seat of The Soul’, 'The Glass', and 'The Hula Hoop.'

Author’s Note: Each cell in the following chart contains a psychological reading and a contemplative reading, written to dovetail with my Human Condition series (ACEs, conditional love, preference/resistance, Temple of Emotional Anaesthesia, Bridge of Awakening, Field of BEing).

Emotional Sobriety As The End of Omnipotence – The Third Movement

Now the 12 step tradition enters with its own hard won genius. It does not speak in fMRI; it speaks in lived consequences.

Emotional sobriety is the end of the inner adolescent demand for "validation", "approval,” “total security,” and “perfect romance.” Those demands are not moral failures; they are egoic strategies for avoiding reality: Attempts to secure the inner world by controlling the outer world.

Many people achieve behavioural sobriety and then meet the next frontier: The nervous system remains reactive, grandiose, depressed, resentful, approval-hungry, terrified, or compulsively helpful. Recovery communities began naming this as ‘emotional sobriety’. The phrase carries a particular authority because it comes from inside the tradition, spoken after the ‘booze cure’ succeeded, when the deeper disquiet remained. The hula hoop is a folk diagram of Step work: Release what cannot be controlled; take rigorous responsibility for what can be lived differently. (The Next Frontier—Emotional Sobriety, Wilson, AA Grapevine, 1958; Origin of the Serenity Prayer brief summary, AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, 2008).

The Integration of The ‘Seat of The Soul’, 'The Glass', and 'The Hula Hoop': One Definition That Holds All Three

With all layers now on the table, the integrated definition can be stated plainly. A psychologically mature ‘boundary’, 'The Glass', is the capacity to stay connected without surrendering the Self. A usable ‘Hula Hoop’ is the capacity to take responsibility without attempting to govern what is not governable. The ‘Seat of the Soul’ is the capacity to witness experience without identification. Emotional sobriety is what it feels like when those three capacities operate at the same time: Warm, contained, honest, unpanicked, and free. It is not the absence of feeling; it is the presence of choice. (The emerging field of emotion regulation: an integrative review, Gross, Review of General Psychology, 1998; Mechanisms of mindfulness, Shapiro, Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2006; The Differentiation of Self Inventory: development and initial validation, Skowron, Journal of Counseling Psychology, 1998).

Philosophical and Contemplative Lineages: The Same Geometry in Different Clothes – How Does Spiritual Philosophy Fit In?

Once the triangulation is seen, it becomes difficult not to see it everywhere.

Stoicism names the hula hoop as ‘what is up to me’.

Bhakti and Karma yoga name it as action without attachment to fruits.

“You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action.”

—Bhagavad Gita 2.47 (translation as cited) (Bhagavad Gita 2.47, Prabhupada, Bhagavad Gita As It Is, n.d.).

The Psalms name it as stillness in the presence of God.

Early Buddhism names it as mind training and the cessation of reflexive retaliation.

“Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.”

—Dhammapada verse 5 (translation as cited) (Dhammapada verse 5, Tipitaka, Tipitaka.net, n.d.).

Different metaphysics, identical mechanics: A human being can be taught to remain seated within themselves - to remain in the 'Seat of your Soul.'

Why These Three Concepts Are Hard For Most of Us, and Why The Meta-Theory Helps

The human condition is not simply that people suffer. It is that suffering often arrives with a collapsed interior geometry. When early attachment is unsafe, inconsistent, humiliating, neglectful, invasive, or frightening, a child’s nervous system learns strategies that keep the bond at any cost. Those strategies can later masquerade as character: Over-functioning, people-pleasing, rescuing, compulsive caretaking, controlling, collapsing, appeasing, performing, or dissociating. In adult life, the same strategies look like boundary failure (no glass), locus failure (no hula hoop), and witness failure (no Seat of the Soul). The cost is chronic emotional intoxication: Either flooded by other people’s weather or anaesthetised against it. (Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults, Felitti, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 1998; Emotional contagion, Hatfield, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1993; The polyvagal perspective, Porges, Biological Psychology, 2007).

The human condition makes the hula hoop, the boundary, and the Seat of the Soul strangely difficult to recognise because the very apparatus that would understand them is the apparatus that is most often compromised by early survival learning. When love is conditional and environments are unpredictable, the child does not have the luxury of differentiation: the nervous system learns fusion as safety (“your mood is my weather”), omnipotence as protection (“if I manage you, I will be safe”), and identification with state as identity (“if I feel fear, I am fear”). By adulthood, these adaptations feel like personality rather than programming, and culture quietly rewards them: over-functioning is called competence, people-pleasing is called kindness, emotional cut-off is called independence, and compulsive striving is called success. In that context, ‘boundaries’ get misread as hostility, the ‘hula hoop’ gets misread as selfishness, and the Seat of the Soul gets misread as detachment or denial—because most people have never been shown the middle territory where these capacities are simultaneously warm and firm, relational and sovereign. This is precisely why my meta-theory matters: it gives the psyche an architecture that is both mythic and mechanistic—ACEs and conditional love as the origin story, preference and resistance as the engine of compulsion, the Temple of Emotional Anaesthesia as the adaptive fortress, and the Bridge of Awakening as the step-by-step reinstatement of the triangle—so a reader can finally locate their suffering on a map rather than treating it as a moral defect. The importance is not academic. Without these three capacities, most of us remain vulnerable to the same loops—addiction in its many disguises, trauma bonds, codependent control, and chronic inner litigation—because we keep trying to solve an interior problem with exterior management. When the meta-theory makes the triangle intelligible, it does something quietly radical: it restores choice, and turns ‘awakening’ from an inspiring idea into a practicable form of emotional sobriety. (Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults, Felitti, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 1998).

The Instrument Panel: A Field Guide to Practising the Triangle in Real Time

A reader can admire the Temple and the Bridge as mythic architecture and still fail to cross them at 9:17 p.m. on an ordinary Tuesday, in the middle of a text exchange, a family dinner, a board meeting, or an intimate argument. The triangle is meant to prevent that failure by giving my thesis an ‘instrument panel’ that can be consulted in real time, without spiritual theatre and without self-reproach. The first dial is the Seat: the question is not “Am I calm?” but “Am I here?” If attention has been kidnapped by catastrophe, rehearsal, justification, or the fantasy of finally being understood, the Seat has been left. The return is bodily: breath, sensation, the felt fact of presence. Not to numb the feeling, but to locate the witness inside the feeling. The second dial is the glass: the question is not “Are they wrong?” but “Have they entered me?” When another person’s tone becomes a command, when their disappointment becomes a verdict, when their anxiety becomes an alarm bell inside my chest, the glass has cracked and fusion is underway. Repairing the glass is often as simple—and as difficult—as naming reality: “That is yours; this is mine.” The third dial is the hoop: the question is not “How do I get them to change?” but “What is mine to do?” If the nervous system is strategising to manage another person’s feelings, timing, decisions, or self-awareness, the hoop has inflated and omnipotence is back at the helm. Shrinking the hoop does not mean becoming cold; it means becoming accurate. It returns agency to its rightful owner: I can choose my words, my limits, my repair, my exit, my next step; I cannot choose your readiness, your interpretation, your honesty, your healing. Once those three dials are read honestly, the Bridge of Awakening becomes executable: the Seat returns, the glass clarifies, the hoop contracts to sanity, and preference and resistance lose the power to dictate behaviour. Emotional sobriety, then, is not the absence of emotion but the presence of choice within emotion; and ego dissolution is not self-destruction but the end of identification with the part that insists it must control the weather in order to be safe. (The cognitive control of emotion, Ochsner, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2005). (The emerging field of emotion regulation: an integrative review, Gross, Review of General Psychology, 1998). (Emotional contagion, Hatfield, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1993).

Practical Closing: Staying Seated Without Becoming Numb

A final nuance is required, otherwise the metaphor can be misused. Staying seated is not dissociation. Dissociation is leaving the table. Emotional sobriety is staying at the table with a regulated body and a truthful heart. A boundary that becomes a fortress is not the glass, it is a bunker. The glass remains transparent. The person can still weep, apologise, confess fear, offer tenderness, and seek repair. The difference is that these movements now come from the inside of the hula hoop, not from the compulsion to stop the storm outside. (Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself, Neff, Self and Identity, 2003; The polyvagal perspective, Porges, Biological Psychology, 2007).

The Triangle Is The Mechanics of ‘BEing’

BEing is often spoken of as if it were a mood, a mystical privilege, or a philosophical abstraction; in my work it is a mechanical condition, an embodied state in which awareness is no longer continuously conscripted by preference and resistance. The three elements—Seat of the Soul, boundary-as-glass, and hula hoop—describe, with almost surgical simplicity, how BEing becomes livable in a human nervous system. The Seat is the relocation of identity from thought-stream to witness: the capacity to remain present inside sensation without becoming identical to it. The glass is the restoration of differentiation: contact without fusion, compassion without contagion, intimacy without self-abandonment. The hoop is the return of sane agency: responsibility for what is mine, release of what is not. When these three are installed, BEing stops being a sermon and becomes a posture: the body can feel, the heart can stay open, and the mind can watch its own weather without obeying it. (The emerging field of emotion regulation: an integrative review, Gross, Review of General Psychology, 1998). (The cognitive control of emotion, Ochsner, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2005).

This is also why the triangle functions as a practical mechanism for the journey from ego to BEing. Ego, as my series frames it, is the anxious manager: The part of the psyche that believes safety is achieved by controlling the outside, perfecting the self, and pre-empting pain. Each side of the triangle quietly dismantles that regime. The Seat dissolves identification: ego can still speak, but it no longer defines the Self. The glass dissolves enmeshment: ego can still care, but it can no longer recruit the nervous system into other people’s storms. The hoop dissolves omnipotence: ego can still act, but it must act within the true limits of agency. In this way, ‘awakening’ becomes repeatable rather than rare: every time attention returns to the Seat, every time the glass is repaired by differentiation, every time the hoop is shrunk back to sanity, the Bridge is crossed again—often in inches, often under stress—until BEing is not an experience one visits but the ground from which one lives. (The Enchiridion, Epictetus, MIT Classics, n.d.).

Childhood Trauma: Why The Triangle Collapses

Trauma, especially developmental trauma, trains the body to abandon the chair. It teaches the organism that safety depends on anticipation: Reading micro-signals, forecasting danger, shrinking needs, smoothing conflict, or escalating first. In that state, ‘being seated’ feels like a threat because stillness used to invite intrusion, punishment, or neglect. So the system lives on its feet: Vigilant, scanning, braced, holding breath, living in response rather than in presence. (Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults, Felitti, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 1998; The polyvagal perspective, Porges, Biological Psychology, 2007).

The result is frequently mislabelled as a ‘personality problem’ when it is, in fact, a physiology problem wearing a personality costume. When the nervous system is outside its ‘window of tolerance’, cognition narrows, empathy collapses, and behaviour becomes either rigid or impulsive. Boundaries then fail not because the person lacks insight, but because the system has temporarily lost the capacity to choose. (The emerging field of emotion regulation: an integrative review, Gross, Review of General Psychology, 1998; The polyvagal perspective, Porges, Biological Psychology, 2007).

Neuroscience: The Triangle As Autonomic Literacy - What Changes When The Seat Returns

The modern evidence base for contemplative training can be read as a neurobiological account of reinstalling the chair. Attention training strengthens the capacity to notice distraction and return. Emotion regulation training strengthens the capacity to observe feeling without enacting it. Across studies, mindfulness practice has been associated with changes in attention, stress regulation, and brain structure, including grey matter density changes reported in longitudinal designs. The essential point for this article is not technological triumph but functional liberation: More choice, less compulsion. (The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation, Tang, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2015; Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density, Hölzel, Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 2011; Short-term meditation training improves attention and self-regulation, Tang, PNAS, 2007).

Emotion regulation research also supports the idea that there are learnable points of leverage. James Gross’s process model differentiates strategies that occur before emotion fully unfolds (selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change) from those that occur after (response modulation). That is a scientific translation of the hula hoop and the glass: One can choose where to place the body, where to place attention, what meaning to assign, and how to act. (The emerging field of emotion regulation: an integrative review, Gross, Review of General Psychology, 1998; The cognitive control of emotion, Ochsner, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2005).

“My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”

—William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890) (Chapter 11 (The Principles of Psychology), James, Psych Classics, 1890).

From Your Head to Your Heart

'The Triptcyh' describes the journey from the ego-mind (the head) back to the 'Seat of the Soul' (the heart).

In 12-step recovery, the movement from rumination into presence is sometimes distilled into a bodily metaphor: “the longest journey—‘the 18 inches from my head to my heart.’” (The Grape-SCCIN Santa Cruz County Intergroup Newsletter January 2018, Chris, Alcoholics Anonymous of Santa Cruz County, 2018). It names a pivot your ‘Seat of the Soul’ language captures with unusual precision: Attention relinquishing its compulsive pull toward the ‘objects’ of consciousness—thoughts, feelings, scenarios—and returning to the witnessing centre that can remain seated even while the world storms beyond the glass. A parallel phrase appears in Head to Heart – From ‘Need to’, to ‘Want to’, describing “my journey from head to heart” as the shift from fear-driven compliance (‘need to’) into a lived surrender that becomes voluntary (‘want to’). (Head to Heart – From ‘Need to’, to ‘Want to’, Colin, Alcoholics Anonymous Great Britain, 2025).

Trauma Bonding, Codependency, and The Compulsion to Manage

Both concepts of 'trauma bonding' and 'codependency' belong in this series of articles almost as if they were waiting in the wings. They are two common ways the triangle collapses under relational heat: The glass becomes permeable, the hula hoop swells until it includes other people’s moods and choices, and the Seat of the Soul gets outsourced to attachment, approval, and the fear of rupture.

Modern culture often names boundary and hula hoop failures as ‘codependency’. The term has helped millions, and it also has a complicated academic status. Some scholarship questions whether it is a distinct construct, while still acknowledging that the behaviours it points to are real and costly: Over-involvement, loss of self, compulsive caretaking, and the chronic attempt to regulate one’s own anxiety by regulating someone else. (Is codependency a meaningful concept?, Stafford, Journal of Mental Health Counseling, 2001; A critique of the codependency concept, Calderwood, Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 2014).

Trauma Bonding

In the clinical literature, what popular culture now calls ‘trauma bonding’ is closest to what Donald G. Dutton and Susan Painter framed as ‘traumatic bonding’: a powerful attachment forged in conditions of intermittent maltreatment and pronounced power imbalance, where cycles of threat and relief produce a nervous system hunger that can resemble ‘addiction’ to the relationship. In the language of my triangle, the glass cracks first: the other person’s storms breach the boundary and begin to occupy the interior. Then the hula hoop expands: the person starts living as if the abuser’s moods, wounds, and eruptions are ‘their business’ — something to anticipate, soothe, prevent, or earn their way out of. Finally the Seat of the Soul is traded for a seat in the dock: identity becomes “What did I do wrong?”, “How do I stop the switch?”, “How do I get back to the good version of them?” The tragedy is that this is not stupidity; it is survival intelligence turned inward, often braided with appeasement and entrapment dynamics that some authors argue are misdescribed when we romanticise them as mutual ‘bonding’. For coaching clients, this paragraph can do something ethically important: it explains the mechanism without implying blame, and it keeps the centre of gravity on safety and power, not on ‘why didn’t you just leave’.

 (Emotional attachments in abusive relationships: a test of traumatic bonding theory, Dutton, Violence and Victims, 1993).

Codependency

‘Codependency’ is related, but it is not identical. The term emerged in the addictions field and then ballooned into a broad label for over involvement, compulsive caretaking, control disguised as concern, and the slow erasure of self in relationship; scholars have repeatedly noted the definitional sprawl and the risk of pathologising culturally or relationally shaped roles, while still conceding that the behavioural pattern it points to is real enough to warrant careful clinical attention. In my triangle, codependency is the chronic inflation of the hula hoop (“I am responsible for your feelings, your stability, your outcomes”) coupled with a porous glass (“Your anxiety enters me as a commandment”), often underpinned by a Seat of the Soul that was never securely installed (“I know who I am when you are pleased with me”). Where trauma bonding is typically intensified by coercion, intermittent cruelty, and asymmetric power, codependency can appear even in relationships that are not overtly abusive: it is the nervous system’s attempt to purchase belonging through self abandonment. The bridge between the two is therefore structural: both are failures of differentiation and sane responsibility, yet trauma bonding has a sharper signature of fear, intermittency, and captivity dynamics; codependency has a broader signature of identity organised around the regulation of others. In coaching practice, that distinction helps us to stay compassionate and precise: we can address boundary and agency skills without mistakenly treating coercive control as a mere ‘relating style’.

 (Is codependency a meaningful concept?, Stafford, Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 2001; Applying the codependency concept to concerned significant others of problem gamblers: Words of caution, Calderwood, Journal of Gambling Issues, 2014).

Conclusions

This article is not 'therapy homework' or 'spiritual theatre': It's a practical guide to keeping humanity human, and yet connecting with your innermost divine Self.

To live 'The Seat' is to practice returning. The return is not one dramatic 'Enlightenment' event; it is a thousand micro-returns: To breath, to sensation, to the felt sense of "I am here" before the mind begins prosecuting reality. 'To return' becomes 'never to leave'.

To live 'The Glass', the boundary, is to notice the moment fusion begins: The tightening, the urgency, the internal compulsion to correct, convince, justify, rescue, punish, manipulate, to win. A boundary is the capacity to feel that impulse and remain seated anyway.

To live 'The Hoop' is to ask one question that ends endless suffering:

“What is mine here?”

Mine = my tone, my Truth, my choice, my exit, my repair, my love.

Not mine = your mood, your denial, your pace, your story.

When these three are practised together, something startling happens: You can engage the world more, not less. Because you are no longer trying to use engagement as a drug. Engagement becomes authentic connection. You are no longer trying to win inner safety by manipulating outer conditions. You relinquish resisting real reality.

The person who can remain seated is the person who can open the window deliberately. And when they do, they do it from love rather than need.

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