The Enneagram is a tool that helps us to understand ourselves more deeply and compassionately.
With origins that date back centuries and span many cultures, faiths, and traditions, as well as psychology and sociology, the Enneagram is a unique and insightful tool to help us peer into our own internal world.
Based around this nine pointed diagram, the Enneagram understands humans to be one of nine distinct types, with different underlying fears, passions, and motivations, and different pathways to health.
It leads us towards deep reflection of the unconscious stories we have internalised, and the way those messages continue to influence our experience of life.
It encourages us to pay attention to the ways that we construct protective behaviours and patterns of thinking, all of which – while keeping us safe in the short term – become increasingly rigid and solid, and manage to push us further and further away from our true essence, the pure core of ourselves.
Byron Katie calls this process “doing the work”; Eckhart Tolle calls it “activity without reactivity”; Pema Chödrön calls it “shenpa”- the urge to react; Jung calls it “the ego, super-ego and the id”.
Not only does the Enneagram provide us with a framework to understand ourselves, it also helps us to discover a deeper compassion for our fellow humans who are also on a journey, and deeper insight into conflict, disharmony and difficulties in our relationships, workplace, and parenting journeys.
Above all, the Enneagram encourages us to take responsibility for our reactivity. It challenges us to turn our focus away from the difficult interaction that has created the reactivity, and instead, examine and understand ourselves better. Its not about “letting the other person off the hook” – people are people and we all hurt others at some point, and we need to take responsibility when we do,, but also to recognise that we cannot take responsibility for the actions of another person or force others to take responsibility for their own stuff: in the end, the only thing that we can really engage with is our own thoughts, feelings, and reactions.
A lot of the content in these reflections is birthed out of this work – the task of sitting with our discomfort and reactivity, and allowing the storm of it to pass and reveal to us more of who we are when we are not efforting to try to stop the fear that rises.
As we explore the Enneagram, we have the opportunity to explore all the nuance of our internal worlds – you will hear Enneagram folk talk about wings and triads, lines of stress and growth, subtypes and soul children… and all of things just give us a framework to see ourselves and our motivations and behaviours more clearly.
