The Voice Beneath the Noise

Spiritual Direction and the Neuro-Based Enneagram

May 21, 2025

“I can’t tell if it’s God’s voice—or just my own anxiety.”

In the quiet of spiritual direction, many directees whisper some version of this longing. They hope to encounter God, but often find themselves tangled in internal static: doubt, distraction, performance, and pressure.

We often struggle to discern God’s voice because our nervous systems have been trained over a lifetime to prioritize survival over presence. Many people have a constant inner monologue that is “the result of certain brain mechanisms that cause you to 'hear' yourself talk in your head without actually speaking and forming sounds.” (1)

That inner monologue tends to be—quite literally—a stream-of-consciousness string of words and phrases. In your brain’s effort to protect you from danger, it’s as if you have an “observer” commenting on everything you do or don’t do; every situation, and every fault you’ve ever regretted. If you pay attention to what this voice says, over time, you might be able to identify recurring patterns of thought.

Somewhere in the midst of all that anxious noise, you can hear, or at least sense, the still, small voice of God. It’s when the cacophony seems to fall away, and there is one lone, strong thought left alone in your mind. It may be words or it may be a feeling. Either way, God is eager to get your attention.

This is the sacred work of spiritual direction: not to silence the noise, but to sit with it, listen beneath it, and gently discern where God is already speaking. When paired with the Neuro-Based Enneagram, spiritual direction becomes a space where old patterns are named with compassion and the voice of Love is patiently rediscovered.

II. What Is Spiritual Direction?

Spiritual direction is a contemplative, Spirit-led relationship in which the director holds sacred space for the directee to notice and respond to the presence and movement of God. It is grounded in trust—trust that God is already at work and that the Holy Spirit is the true director. The human director serves as a companion, skilled in listening, holding silence, and asking questions that gently cultivate awareness of God’s invitations.

At its core, spiritual direction is a ministry of presence. The director accompanies the directee in their desire to know and love God more fully, helping them recognize the grace already at work within their heart and life. Like tending a garden, the Spirit plants the seed, and together, director and directee create space for its growth.

Key characteristics of spiritual direction include:

Deep, compassionate listening
A non-directive posture (not fixing or teaching)
Attention to the directee’s relationship with God
An atmosphere of prayerful openness
A trust in slow transformation and inner knowing

By Nicholas Felix/peopleimages.com

III. Understanding the Neuro-Based Enneagram

The Neuro-Based Enneagram (NBE) is not a personality test or labeling system. It is a relational map rooted in neuroscience—particularly Dan Siegel’s Patterns of Developmental Pathways—and draws from the Harmony Enneagram tradition.

Rather than placing people into fixed “types,” the NBE helps us identify patterns of attention and response that were formed in early relational contexts. These patterns develop to help us manage three core needs:

Agency (the need to feel competent and in control)
Bonding (the need to feel loved and connected)
Certainty (the need to feel safe and oriented)

These neuro-relational patterns shape how we perceive the world, how we relate to others, and crucially, how we relate to God.

For example:

A pattern rooted in agency might show up in prayer as striving, performing, or trying to “get it right.”
A bonding pattern might result in seeking God’s approval or fearing divine disappointment.
A certainty pattern might manifest as obsessively trying to understand God rather than trust Him.

These patterns are not wrong—they are adaptive. But over time, they can limit our capacity to be present with God. They shape not only how we pray, but what we expect to find in silence.

The integration of the Neuro-Based Enneagram into spiritual direction allows us to bring compassionate curiosity to these patterns. Rather than seeing them as obstacles, we can bless them for how they helped us, and invite God to reshape them for life-giving connection.

IV. Integration: How the Neuro-Based Enneagram Supports Spiritual Direction

The Neuro-Based Enneagram offers spiritual directors a practical, compassionate lens for attending to how directees relate—not just to God, but to the moment, to themselves, and to silence. These patterns of attention often become clearest in spiritual direction, when the “noise” of everyday life fades and deeper internal narratives emerge.

Here are several ways this integration enhances the direction process:

1. Noticing the Pattern

Many directees arrive at spiritual direction sensing they’re blocked or distant from God. The Neuro-Based Enneagram helps name how a person’s patterned focus (on bonding, agency, or certainty) may be shaping their perception of God’s presence—or absence.

“What are you paying attention to in prayer? What tends to dominate your awareness?”

Naming a pattern brings freedom. It turns vague disconnection into something visible, and therefore, workable.

2. Discerning Inner Voices

Spiritual direction often involves discerning between the voice of God and the many inner voices that speak in our hearts—voices of fear, shame, duty, or performance. The Neuro-Based Enneagram helps distinguish between the voice of a survival strategy and the Spirit of truth.

Here, Ignatius of Loyola’s discernment of spirits offers a helpful framework:

A sense of consolation draws us closer to God, brings peace, expands our hearts, and increases faith, hope, and love.
A sense of desolation turns us inward in fear or self-reliance, cuts us off from grace, and diminishes our capacity to rest in God.

Some patterns may lead us into forms of spiritual desolation—frantic doing, anxious control, emotional avoidance—all in the name of faithfulness. The Neuro-Based Enneagram gives language to those interior movements. With a director's help, directees learn to pause and ask:

“Is this voice bringing me closer to peace, presence, and God’s love, or into fear, pressure, or shame?”

In this way, discernment becomes an embodied experience, where we listen to the whole self in light of God’s unwavering love.

3. Listening with the Body

Because the NBE is grounded in neuroscience, it respects the role of the body in spiritual formation. Emotions and embodied responses often reveal more than words. Directors can help directees notice physical reactions—tightness, warmth, stillness—as indicators of God’s invitations or inner resistance.

“Where do you feel that in your body?”
“What happens in you when you sit with that image of God?”

This honors the whole person—heart, mind, soul, and body—in their encounter with the Divine.

4. Revising the Story

Each pattern in the NBE was formed around a particular story of how to stay safe, loved, or worthy. In direction, these stories can be surfaced gently and invited into the light of God’s love. When directees begin to see their pattern not as a flaw but as a long-held belief, they can begin to rest in a better story.

“When did you first learn that love had to be earned?”
“What if God meets you even here, in this fear or need?”

This is where healing often begins—not in fixing the pattern, but in receiving love within it.

5. Rewiring Through Safe Presence

As Dan Siegel and others affirm, relationships rewire the brain. Spiritual direction, with its slow pace, loving gaze, and non-judgmental space, becomes a micro-environment for secure attachment and transformation.

The directee is not being taught about God’s love—they experience it in real time, often for the first time in the deep places where unhelpful patterns used to run the show.

By Derby

V. A Brief Story: From Striving to Stillness

A woman comes to direction struggling with prayer. She’s overwhelmed in ministry, burdened by expectations, and says she “can’t hear God.” Her pattern, as we explore gently over time, orients around agency—the drive to achieve, perform, and control outcomes.

She’s not failing spiritually—her nervous system simply learned long ago that being competent and responsible was the best way to feel safe and valued.

Over time, she begins to notice how this striving shows up in her image of God: a taskmaster for whom she is never “enough.” But through reflection, silence, and the steady presence of her director, she starts to risk stillness. She imagines God not as one more voice asking her to “do more,” but as a quiet presence inviting her to “just be.”

This shift doesn’t erase her go-to pattern, but it softens it. Prayer becomes less about performance and more about resting. Her pattern hasn’t been defeated; it’s been met by love and invited to show up in moderation when it honors God and is a blessing to herself and others.

VI. The Fruit: From Pattern to Presence

The goal of this work is not self-optimization or mastery over our personality patterns. The goal is presence; being with God, and receiving God’s loving gaze in our real, messy, unfolding life.

When directees grow in awareness of their Neuro-Based Enneagram patterns, they begin to notice:

When they're operating from striving instead of trust.
When they feel God's absence, but discover it’s really their pattern's defenses.
When they’re invited into stillness rather than self-protection.

Over time, spiritual direction becomes a safe space where the false self (patterns of protection) gently makes way for the true self (belovedness in Christ). This is not instant change. It’s slow, Spirit-led transformation from the inside out.

And it is holy ground.

VII. Invitation: For Directors and Directees

For spiritual directors:

The Neuro-Based Enneagram is not a new method to master. It is a humble companion to your already sacred work. It gives language to what you already sense in the room: the ways survival strategies show up in prayer, and the way love invites us to soften.

For directees:

You are not failing if you struggle in silence. Your nervous system may be protecting you in ways that once served you well. But God is not in a hurry. Spiritual direction is a safe place to notice, rest, and return to presence.

If you long to hear God's voice again—not the voice of performance or fear, but the quiet truth of love—you are not alone. This is the path. From pattern to presence. From striving to stillness. From noise to God’s gentle whisper.

Let’s Connect

If you’d like to explore how spiritual direction with the Neuro-Based Enneagram might support your personal or spiritual growth, contact me by clicking my name at the top of this article. Let’s discern together what it could look like for you to move from pattern to presence—and from striving to joy.

Yesterday’s post was about coaching and the Neuro-Based Enneagram. Click here to read it. I will soon share about retreats with the Neuro-Based Enneagram, so stay tuned!

Also, if you would like more information about the NBE, I encourage you to subscribe to receive several free resources! (see covers below)

Sources

1 - https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/internal-monologue

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