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February 15 - October 6, 2018
He allowed me to see myself in a way that was devastatingly true and humiliating at the same time. Yet strangely comforting too.
I soon saw that many people who loved or admired me actually loved me for my faults: my righteous zeal and being so serious and conscientious.
Each and every one of us is beautiful. Each and every one of us is beloved by God. From this starting point we can begin an honest interrogation of the depths of our identity, of who we really are. When we accept our inherent beauty, we find the courage to examine what makes us beautiful—to honestly encounter both the good and the bad, the shadow and the light.
Who am I? This is the fundamental question of our human experience, the one that compels us to search for meaning.
“Identity answers the question ‘Who am I?’, while dignity answers the question, ‘What am I worth?’”1
when we equate our dignity with the sum value of the fortification of stories we tell about our identity, we create a no-win scenario that will always lead to disillusionment and pain.
“Every unrealistic expectation is a resentment waiting to happen.”
suggested we all find ourselves bouncing around three very human lies that we believe about our identity: I am what I have, I am what I do, and I am what other people say or think about me.
Keating explains that as children we all need an appropriate amount of power and control, affection and esteem, and security and survival for healthy psychological grounding. But as we mature, our tendency is to overidentify with one of these programs for happiness, keeping us developmentally and spiritually stuck.
The word addiction comes from the Latin addico, which suggests being literally given over to something in devotion.
The contemporary Enneagram of Personality* illustrates the nine ways we get lost, but also the nine ways we can come home to our True Self. Put another way, it exposes nine ways we lie to ourselves about who we think we are, nine ways we can come clean about those illusions, and nine ways we can find our way back to God.
One of its most helpful aspects is how it exposes nine ways our human nature manages our ego’s* collection of coping addictions that we have wrapped around our most intimate and deepest pain—our Childhood Wound.
Simply put, the Enneagram offers nine mirrors for self-reflection. These nine mirrors, if we choose to gaze into them directly, can help us shake loose of our illusions that get us lost from home in the first place.
The movement from basic knowledge to principled understanding to embodied integration is the idealized essence of mastery in any growth process—including the Enneagram.
The English word personality is derived from the Latin word for “mask.” Simply put, our personality is the mask we wear. Taking off that mask, trying to get behind the mask, is the work of the spiritual journey.
A mark of spiritual growth is when we stop polishing the mask and instead start working on our character.
The Enneagram is not a tool for self-absorption but instead a map for self-liberation.
Type One The Need to Be Perfect Type Two The Need to Be Needed Type Three The Need to Succeed Type Four The Need to Be Special (or Unique) Type Five The Need to Perceive (or Understand) Type Six The Need to Be Sure/Certain (or Secure)
Type Seven The Need to Avoid Pain Type Eight The Need to Be Against Type Nine The Need to Avoid
the Holy Idea of each type is the mental clarity of the True Self that emerges when the mind is at rest, while the Virtue of each type is the emotional objectivity of the True Self that comes forward in a heart at peace.
For example, when type Ones disentangle themselves from their idealized drive for perfectionism, they realize that everything is already just as it should be; as Father Richard (a type One himself) says, “Everything belongs”—the good, the bad, and the ugly. In this case, perfectionism is no longer a cruel master but a gentle guide back to grounded presence, perfect peace, holy perfection.
Returning to type One, when the mind is set at ease that God’s perfection is enough, then the heart rests in serenity, unbothered by what seems to be imperfect. The peace-filled heart of the One is no longer driven by its inner compulsions to fix everything, but instead savors what
Today there is an urgent need to heal the divide among those who assert their explanation of the Enneagram as the only authentic way of teaching it. It’s hard to take such assertions seriously since the Enneagram of Personality is clearly a modern invention in its infancy.
The nine types of the Enneagram form a sort of color wheel that describes the basic archetypes of humanity’s tragic flaws, sin tendencies, primary fears, and unconscious needs. The understanding of these components, when shaped through contemplative practice, helps us wake up to our True Self and come home to our essential nature.
In my opinion, the best resource for locating basic descriptions of each of the nine attacks on our Enneagram Virtues is the EnneaApp created by Elan BenAmi, MA, LPC, with material provided by Lori Ohlson, MA, LPC. This list may be the clearest, but it may simply explain impressions rather than actual experiences.
Type One: These children felt heavily criticized, punished, or not good enough. Household rules may have felt inconsistent. As such, they became obsessed with being good or not making mistakes to avoid condemnation. The principal message was “You always must be better than you are.”
This is what the Enneagram shows us: that in returning to the literal organic matter of our humanity (the soil that echoes, “From dust we came and to dust we shall return”) we come to terms with not only our limitations but the miraculous potential of that which we uncover.
My first Enneagram teacher and mentor, Father Richard, has suggested that Enneagram type is one-third nature, one-third nurture, and one-third the decision we make as children to fill a role needed to survive or thrive in our families and environments.
Many of the great teachers caution people to steer clear of the Enneagram until they’ve entered their late twenties or early thirties.
I frequently find myself cautioning parents who think they’ve been able to type their children, sometimes even before the children could speak. Coming to terms with our type is a rite of passage, a sacred experience that should be owned by each of us when we are ready for it.
Parents do better to focus on their own type and how it affects their parenting commitments rather than typing (or mistyping) their children—a mistake that could have agonizing consequences.
Unlike temperament, our dominant Enneagram type stays with us throughout our lives; type does not change. I like to think of the various results of the profile tools and tests we appeal to in an effort to learn about ourselves as the egoic spaces we inhabit. One way to illustrate this is to view our temperament (often categorized as one of sixteen combinations of basic preferences that can be determined through the MBTI® inventory—a typology developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Briggs based on Carl Jung’s typology theory) as the specific room we stay in; our
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So it’s worse than a “party foul” to type someone; it is an intrusion or an overreach. It’s also an indication that someone doesn’t understand the power and potential of the Enneagram.
Father Richard suggests that as we mature, our wings may become more prominent and our dominant type less socially visible.
These are all different ways of describing the dynamic of each type as it presses into growth or reverts to patterns of self-sabotage. This is where we encounter the uniqueness of the Enneagram as a character-structure construct: it offers both a portrait of health and a portrait of unhealth for each type, and prompts us to identify honestly where we are functioning on that spectrum.
people will try to intentionally develop or force movement toward integration, but my sense is that true integration is an act of pure grace, an indicator of inner health and centeredness.
A newer theory that I happen to agree with is that our path of disintegration is that innate self-survival reflex that stops our fall by reaching out to the lower-level manipulation techniques of another type as a way of getting our attention—letting us know we are falling and if we don’t catch ourselves we’ll “break our arm” or worse.
If you grew up believing in original sin, you’ve probably had a hard time seeing anything “very good” in your own humanity. But the Enneagram’s Holy Ideas and Virtues may actually point to what was very good at the beginning of creation—our best and purest sense of self before sin gummed things up.
Our Holy Idea and our Virtue, rooted in our original righteousness, spotlight our indispensable purpose for being.
Naranjo translates Augustine’s notion of sin as it relates to ignorantia (ignorance) and dificultas (difficulties, distresses, embarrassments) as “a disorder of awareness and an interference with action.”2
Many of us don’t know how to hear from God in the present, so we make the mistake of believing God is somehow waiting for us in the future. This requires that we figure out what’s next or how we’ll get to where we want to go. But God is here now, closer than our very breath, and can be found in our Intelligence Centers—the Enneagram’s way of helping us recognize our primary mode of perceiving the world through either our head, heart, or body. Each of these Intelligence Centers offers us a different way of experiencing the loving presence and voice of God.
I prefer to introduce the Enneagram through the Intelligence Centers rather than through the types because when we learn to trust our primary center, we learn to discern. Listening to thoughts (head), feelings (heart), or instincts (gut) based on your dominant Intelligence Center is the beginning of learning to hear how God has always been speaking to you.
The centers, often referred to as the triadic self, demonstrate the tripartite view of humanity found in the teachings of Plato (concisely tucked into this quote often attributed to him: “Human behavior flows from three sources: desire [body], emotion [heart], and knowledge [head]”) and echoed in every major world religion. In this tripartite understanding, the composite of our existence is expressed through three distinct components of the human person, commonly referred to as the body, the soul, and the spirit. Jesus references this view in his call back to the Hebrew Scriptures’ greatest
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Head people may be the most afraid of their own pain. They think they are unable to emotionally engage their pain through their feelings, so they minimize it.
Father Richard explains that in an attempt to cope with their anxiety, “Fives try to master it by gaining more and correct knowledge. [Sixes] link up with an authority or group for security . . . or may take foolish risks or make pre-emptive strikes to overcome their fears. Sevens deny and avoid pain and create fun and fantasy. All three are clever ways of largely living in your head.”1
At their best, gut people harness this energy and direct it through their initiating ability to build a better world; at their worst, it seems everything annoys them.
Eights and Ones are more direct—Eights externalize their anger and Ones demonstrate more controlled anger—while Nines are more passive, suppressing their anger until it is finally triggered (often catching themselves and others off guard by it).
Eights hit back, Nines back off, and Ones try to fix it.”3
The body or gut types fight back as an instinctive response to control themselves and their environment, another form of domination commonly associated with the gut types.
That’s what we’re trying to do here: wake up from the dreams or illusions that often seem more real than our True Self. Dorothy’s dream of Oz is filmed in color, while her unintegrated life at home is filmed in black and white. Like Dorothy, sometimes we become so disenchanted by the ordinary that we can’t help but create a colorful illusion in which to live. Yet ironically, this fantasy-building only takes us farther from home. The Enneagram, through its unabashed truth-telling, invites us to return to our essential nature, the home for our souls.
