The Sacred Enneagram: Finding Your Unique Path to Spiritual Growth

by Christopher L. Heuertz

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.

The Enneagram is not a tool for self-absorption but instead a map for self-liberation.

Simply put, 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.

It’s widely agreed upon that every one of us possesses bits of all nine types, but a dominant type emerges in each of us.

Perhaps the Enneagram’s Childhood Wound might be better framed as the way we absorb the burden of our caregiver(s) transferring their shadow.

As children, we internalized the pain of imperfect upbringings because we didn’t have the psychological capacity to process the impression of our caregiver’s shadow which develops when we let our pain go unprocessed and unresolved. Our shadow—and we all have one—is the part of our ego we are unable to consciously recognize. Though it is neither good nor bad, it is where we unconsciously “park” some of the worst of ourselves—destructive patterns, addictions, or other seemingly unpresentable parts.

This internalization of pain isn’t a real wound per se but a result of transmitting and absorbing our human inability to love perfect...

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.”

Type Two: These children felt loved only if they were helping or pleasing others; their personal needs felt selfish. As a result, they closed off their own needs and feelings and turned to those of others. Love became defined as giving to others—though the love often didn’t feel received or reciprocated.

Type Three: These children felt rewarded only for what they did and how well they did it. Their feelings were discounted and ignored; only their performance and what was expected of them mattered. This harmed their ability to love themselves and others. Admiration replaced real love.

Type Four: These children felt abandoned by one or both caretakers. They felt alone, cut off from the source of love for reasons they couldn’t understand. They were not “seen” or mirrored, and felt different from their parents. As a result, they turned inward to their feelings and imagination to cope in isolation.

Type Five: These children received no meaningful interaction, emotion, or affection from caretakers. Or they had intrusive, overcontrolling parent(s) and felt exposed and defenseless in the face of this intrusion. As a result, they built walls around themselves and retreated to the mental realm.

Type Six: These children were raised in an unpredictable situation with no safe place to go. They lost faith they would ever be protected. As such, they turned to their own inner defense of doubting—disbelieving reality and rejecting their own instincts and inner guidance.

Type Seven: These children were deprived of nurturing, or it was too soon removed. They handled this lack by searching for distractions to minimize or repress the fear and pain. They decided to focus on positive options and rely on themselves to fulfill their desires and gain a sense of nurturance.

Type Eight: These children often grew up in an unsafe environment (emotionally and/or physically) and had to mature way too soon. They didn’t feel safe to show any vulnerability and may have felt controlled. Weakness was used against them, so they focused only on building their strength.

Type Nine: These children were overlooked or neglected and felt unimportant or “lost.” They were ignored or attacked for having needs or expressing themselves (especially anger) and decided to keep a low profile and instead focus on the needs and experiences of others.

the very effects and limitations of our Childhood Wound are invitations to wholeness, not tragic flaws that can’t be overcome.

Temperament is an aspect of type, but it’s just one fragment that makes up the whole of who we are. For example, some of us draw energy from being around other people, which is frequently noted as a mark of an extroverted temperament, while others who acquire inner energy from being alone are assumed to be more introverted. While attitudes and moods fluctuate, our temperament is a disposition that nonetheless may change as we mature. It’s not uncommon for extremely extroverted people to move toward introversion later in life. Temperament is also exposed in people who tend to be naturally optimistic while others are pessimistic. But optimism and pessimism often fluctuate depending on our frame of mind, the kind of company we keep, or the phases of life we cycle through.

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 StrengthsFinder® results (based on Gallup University’s list of thirty-four talent themes, a weighted list of innate strengths that carry potential to increase a person’s performance success) as the way we decorate our room; but our Enneagram type as the kind of home we build (maybe some of us live in a hip urban condo, others prefer a gabl...

But let’s not get too fatalistic about the Enneagram. It’s not static like most popular profile systems; rather, it’s dynamic and constantly in motion, just like our personal patterns of progress and regress. The Enneagram’s movement hinges on the directions our type takes based on every choice we make, every action we take, every thought we have—all of these contribute either to our overall health, which brings about m...

I believe that when we spend time trying to move toward integration, we are not focusing on the real inner work of facing our dominant type. So while it is helpful to see the full picture of the type we borrow from in health, the key for all of us is to focus on health and growth in our dominant type.

It is important to note that we do not become the type we integrate toward; it is only as we become a healthy, centered version of our dominant type that we are simultaneously able to reach across the Enneagram and essentially “borrow” positive traits.

There is sometimes a bit of misunderstanding that as we become healthy we move from our dominant type into our Heart Point, but we must remember that there are beautiful aspects of every type when we are at our best. To recognize ourselves in integration requires that we accept the best of ourselves in our dominant type.

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. The path of disintegration can be understood as a subconscious self-preservation instinct to prevent an unhealthy person from falling farther down the hole they feel stuck in.

Surely our path of disintegration is an indication that we are unwell, but recognizing when we are moving in this direction helps us wake up to the destructive tendencies that keep us at our lower levels of mental and emotional health. Think of it as a warning sign or flare signal, designed not to condemn a person but to guide them back home. Being able to recognize when we’re moving in a disintegrative direction implies we have already given ourselves to the hard inner work of learning to observe our patterns, even when we’re not doing well. Because when we’re falling, the last thing we’re usually capable of is noticing the fall. That inner work is ultimately what keeps guiding us home to our True Self.

If you believe that in the earliest days of infancy we are as close to perfect as we’ll ever be in our lives—the most unencumbered from our tragic flaw and the most uncontaminated by its consequences—then the Holy Ideas and Virtues of the Enneagram types are the two fundamental aspects of our soul’s essence that reveal in us the raw material of our True Self. These two features show us the original righteousness of hearts (Virtues) and minds (Holy Ideas) fully at rest in their essence.

Our Holy Idea and our Virtue, rooted in our original righteousness, spotlight our indispensable purpose for being.

It is the loss of our original righteousness, that Edenic state of sinless perfection and unbroken relationship with the Source of love, that creates the delusions of our Holy Idea and Virtue.

The Enneagram’s Fixations, the nine type-specific mental tactics used to convince an uncentered mind that its Passion is legitimate, are the inverse of the Enneagram’s Holy Ideas. And the Enneagram’s Passions, the nine type-specific coping skills related to each type’s state of emotional imbalance, are the inverse of the Enneagram’s Virtues.

I think of the Fixation and Passion as a tiny flashlight that our ego attempts to use to find our way home in the dark. These are the most primitive of all our coping skills, and when we rely on them they become self-destructive patterns that ironically keep us in the dark.

For many people, their Enneagram Passion is the fragment of their type to which they subconsciously give permission to lay claim to the whole of their sense of self.

It’s easy to overidentify with our Passion because it often drives so much of what we do.

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 Enneagram’s three Intelligence Centers are the core lenses through which we take in the human experience. They highlight our primary ways of perceiving the world: through our thoughts, our emotions, or our instincts—our head, heart, or body. Each of us leads with one of these in the way we live in the world.

The Intelligence Centers are the basis for how we perceive ourselves in relationship to our understanding of how the world works and how we work in the world. These centers are activated through our involuntarily physiological reactions and responses to every experience. Growing in familiarity with our primary Intelligence Center is key to helping us develop discernment.

the centers explain something about each of the nine Enneagram types by helping identify a person’s most accessible emotional response or reaction: anxiety or distress for the Head Center, fear or shame for the Heart Center, and frustration or anger for the Body Center.

I’m convinced the Intelligence Centers help shape the three levels of consciousness. The conscious mind accesses our thinking or Head Center, allowing for self-reflection and cognitive rationality. The subconscious most readily accesses our feelings or Heart Center, validating our emotions by pointing out the ways they tell us things that our minds can’t seem to sort out or explain. The bulk of our unconscious, our instinctual drives, rests in our gut or Body Center, which may be why we carry so much somatic energy that ends up stored as stress or other negative physical sensations or sometimes even illness.

Head people, those in the intellectual center, have highly developed mental faculties they use to assess and address everything in life that is experienced as a threat or an assault on their inner state. Head people believe in competency as the cure for instability. Through mastering their environment, head people think they’re able to secure their own self-preservation.

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.

Fundamentally, head people are obsessed with quieting their inner distress in an effort to create external peace and security. Head people don’t have time for the irrational impulses of the instinctive types, nor do they have the patience to truly engage the emotional complexities of the feeling types; rather, they methodically face each of life’s problems searching for solutions. Ironically, they often have a hard time activating the answers they discern

Heart people are social types who feel their way through life by leaning into their emotional intelligence. Those in the Feeling Center teeter between compulsions for connection with others and comparison with others to validate their own sense of worth.

Compared to gut people, those in the Feeling Center are likely to have an overwhelming social presence and are substantially more emotionally present than the other types. However, this emotional presence is also an unconscious coping technique; though heart people can be highly emotionally intelligent, it’s not uncommon for them to be out of touch with their own feelings or emotional needs. Thus they seek out connection with others as a way to experience their own feelings through the mirroring of others’ feelings. Through affective connections that may seem authentic, heart people externalize their interior fears of not being loved, valued, or seen. At their core they project their fears through quiet attempts to have their own needs met:

Healthy heart people become a source of love in the world, doing good and bringing balance, but when unhealthy, they lose their sense of self by comparing themselves with others.

When heart people allow comparison to lead to feelings of disconnection, they blame themselves and can be overcome with profound experiences of shame. Shame in turn produces a sense of fear—the fear that they are unworthy to experience their own needs. This fear is followed by a feeling of even more shame that comes from having needs in the first place.

For heart people to practice and grow in discernment means they must learn to trust their feelings.

Those in the Body Center are gut people who experience life through intuitive instincts and tactile engagement with their senses. People in the instinctive center engage the world through activity in an effort to assert and maintain a sense of their control. Gut people are generally more impassioned than emotional, and their great determination is often the source of their pain. As gut people ride waves of intensity, instead of shaking it off, they often project their energy onto others as an unconscious way of dissipating the constant static noise of frustration they perpetually experience. By externalizing their interior irritations, gut people assert their desire for control by becoming the solution to the drama they’ve created:

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. Usually gut people don’t know what to do with their feelings. In fact, they tend to dissociate from them. Vulnerable feelings signal to gut people that they may be the source of their own anger, leading to exasperation that somehow they are inherently and irredeemably flawed—a terrifying limiting belief. To avoid such a fear, gut people repress the core emotion so that it is transmuted into impassioned outbursts, typically anger. Coping with fear propels gut people into taking charge of their environment as a diversion tactic to maintain an illusion of control over the consequences created by their anger.

The three Anchor Points (Three, Six, Nine) have perhaps the most archetypal Holy Ideas (the fruit of each type’s mental clarity when the mind is connected with the True Self): faith for type Six, hope for type Three, and love for type Nine.

Because these Anchor Points sit in the middle of their Intelligence Centers, neither of their wings reach outside their center. Because their wings don’t reach outside their center, they ironically are the most disconnected from their center. The Threes are the most estranged from their hearts (often manifested in their loneliness), the Sixes the most detached from their minds (which explains how irrational they can sometimes be), and the Nines the most disjointed from their bodies (experienced in the ways they calm down their external environments through the mellowing energy they project).