What Exactly Is the Enneagram?
The Enneagram is a geometric symbol that maps nine basic personality types as well as the very complex interrelationships between those types. This personality assessment system is widely used by therapists, theologians and human resource management specialists. It is unique among the personality assessments systems available because it includes both the psychological and the spiritual aspects of the individual.
Everyone is a mix of these Ennea-types, although one type, in particular, is your “home base” or the best description of your personality as a whole. Knowing your Enneagram type is extremely valuable in bringing instant awareness of your core fears, desires, motivations, strengths and weaknesses. It’s also a path towards understanding and meeting the spiritual needs we all have.
Here’s how it works: Each Enneagram type has a core fear, core desire, a preferred separating strategy or vice, as well as a connecting virtue. Your ego, or physical self, tends to choose a quick fix resulting in a protecting or grasping strategy to get the things you want. This behavior is either inflating or deflating and always causes separation from what you most desire. Your connecting virtue is always grounded in love, and therefore, connects you to your spiritual essence, to others and to the things you really want to have in your life.
The more your ego engages in its vice to avoid fear and gain its desire, the closer to your core fear you come, separating from what you most want. Depending on your personality, your ego uses inflating strategies of making yourself feel bigger than you are, or deflating strategies of feeling smaller. When the “Authentic You” that is behind your ego determines to face your fear and engage your connecting virtue, the closer you come to your core desire and the life that you most want to have.
Here’s an example from my life: My Ennea-type is Seven, the Spirited Adventurer. My my behavior is heavily influenced by the Enneagram Intelligence Center known as the Mental Triad – the mind. When I’m at my best (expanded), I’m able to think quickly, provide insight and ingenuity, and offer creative and practical solutions to solve problems. Through this same mind, when at my worst (stressed), I can allow charm to replace substance, allow ideas to distract me from my real priorities, and let my head-in-the-clouds distractedness interfere with keeping commitments. It’s hard to admit these things about myself. Yet, I’ve learned that either I own my ego-reactive behaviors or they own me. I most humbly choose the former.
If I can find ways to see how my personality reacts under stress and accept these tendencies as my ego’s way of attempting to protect me from pain and vulnerability, I can change. This kind of accurate self-observation and self-honesty is the profound opportunity that is available through the Enneagram.
For me as an Ennea-type Seven, I’ve made the conscious choice to replace my tendency toward mental gluttony by escaping into future planning with what I call “sober joy”. This is practicing present moment awareness with an appreciation of the beauty, abundance and preciousness of the life I’ve been given and the happiness that is available to me.
Here’s how the enneagram made this possible for me: I begin to observe my ego’s tendency to pursue more and more exciting new opportunities without fully bringing current projects to a satisfying completion. Recognizing this, I consciously chose to embrace the enneagram recommendation for my type and started saying “NO” to all new less important things in order to more fully say “YES” to the important commitments that I was engaged in. This one decision has made all the difference.
The Enneagram personality assessment system is the combined work of many people spread over centuries. The symbol can be found in writings as old as 2,500 B.C. It was used a tool for understanding abstract and spiritual concepts by the monks and philosophers. The symbol was brought to the modern world in the early 20th century by George Gurdjieff, a priest, physician and world traveler. He used it to teach the “forces of life” and other spiritual concepts to his followers.
In the early 1950′s, Oscar Ichazo, a philosopher and founder of the Arica School, applied the nine personalities and the vices and virtues to the symbol. One of his students, Claudio Naranjo M.D., a psychiatrist, brought Ichazo’s Enneagram to the United States and added the personality work of researcher Karen Horney M.D., a psychoanalyst. It was further developed by other students of the Enneagram who added profiles for each of the personality types.
I use the Enneagram in my practice, SOULutions, to teach clients how to observe their egos and their patterns of behavior. We use this information to integrate the two parts that make up every human being: the ego and the essence — that is, the physical self and the spiritual self. I call this integration work, “wholeness.” We awaken to wholeness when we know both our ego and our essence and how they work together for the one true purpose each individual is meant to express in this world. Happiness is the natural result of finding wholeness.
