The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge

by Beatrice Chestnut

Embodying innocence as an Eight means that you have examined how your lust drives you. You have worked on being more aware of your unconscious tendency to go against others and the rules they create and to lose contact with your deeper sense of emotional truth and purity as a result. Achieving a state of innocence means you are directly connected with your own life force on all levels—the intellectual, the emotional, and the physical—so that you don’t have to take refuge in a show of power or strength to assert yourself. Rather you can deeply trust in the purity of your impulses and intentions as you interact with others to get what you need.

Exodus 14:14 and Ps 46:10 and 2 Cor 12:9-11

The path of conscious self-work has been characterized in terms of “grit, grind, and grace:”40 the “grit” of our personality programming, the “grind” of our efforts to grow, and the “grace” that comes to us from doing our work in conscious and positive ways.

If you are a Self-Preservation Eight, you can grow toward an experience of innocence by slowing down, learning to rely on others more, and having more faith in your ability to get what you need without having to expend so much effort and energy.

Social Eights can travel the path from lust to innocence by learning how to take care of themselves in the same ways they feel moved to take care of others.

inner child and its needs for love and safety. These Eights grow in direct proportion to the degree to which they can see how they displace their need for love and support into taking action to be powerful in the world.

Opening up to the innocence involved in allowing themselves to be loved, taken care of, and vulnerable—which may have been impossible when they were young—allows Social Eights to reintegrate the child inside them that they had to abandon when they needed to get big fast in order to deal with the world.