The Sacred Enneagram: Finding Your Unique Path to Spiritual Growth

by Christopher L. Heuertz

Humanity’s flight, fight, and freeze responses to threatening situations or potential harm can be mapped around the Enneagram’s Intelligence Centers. For example, the head types generally flee danger as a result of having thought through the implications of harmful situations. 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. The heart types typically will freeze as a way of staying connected to their hearts and mirroring the hearts of others who also may remain in harm’s way.

The Anchor Points, however, provide clear exceptions: they take on the flight, fight, or freeze response of their disintegration path. Threes fight to save face and protect their image; Sixes freeze because they often doubt their inner instincts and natural responses; Nines flee or take flight, which is consistent with their tendency to function in the role of peacemaker, always avoiding confrontation.

Gut people who are obsessed with control, heart people who are obsessed with connections, and head people who are obsessed with competence all need to find freedom from the ways they deal with their inner dread.

Aligning contemplative practices with this self-awareness brings about incredible personal liberation. Taking time to pause and create a spirituality marked by solitude, silence, and stillness reminds us who we truly are, in the best sense of our True Self.

While we need to cultivate all three, our Intelligence Center indicates one ...

For those in the Body Center, the gut people (types Eight, Nine, and One)...

The Eight’s driving energy, the Nine’s dedication to mediation, and the One’s desire to fix what is broken in the world are all important and unique gifts. But what happens when gut people simply stop? Who are they without the good they do? When an instinctive type is forced to stop, they r...

The gift of stillness refines the Body Center’s instinctive drive to do by creating interior accountability for proper engagement in their active life. Stillness as a counterpoint to control brings forward freedom, and inner freedom loosens the grasp of gut people to impose their impassioned drive for good.

Stillness interrupts the addictions of gut people and prompts a reevaluation of their drive.

For those in the Heart Center, the feeling types, solitude is crucial.

Solitude functions as a correction to the feeling type’s dependency on connection and comparison. Heart people who find themselves constantly drawn toward others for affirmation and approval are often still very lonely because they are disconnected from their essence.

So then, who is the heart person when all alone? The Two who can’t meet the needs of another? The Three who reads and reacts to the emotional energy of others to get what they want? The Four who longs to be seen and appreciated by others? When a heart type is disconnected from their essence they never feel fully embraced by others, leading to their experience of loneliness. The challenge is for those in the Heart Center to return to their essence and bring forward their True Self in relationship. Solitude is key to this recovery.

In solitude, a heart person’s essence emerges in painfully liberating ways. Solitude teaches us how to be present—present to God, to ourselves, and to others with no strings attached. Presence in heart people allows for authentic connection to other...

For those in the Head Center, the thinking types, silence is crucial.

Is it possible for head people to turn down the inner noise—everything that serves as a distraction—to be able to really listen? Can the Five stop searching for answers long enough to hear the answer within? Can the Six stop worrying long enough to hear the quiet voice inside assuring them everything will be okay? Can the Seven dial down their anxious addiction to adventure and opportunity to hear that everything they need is already present?

Silence helps us learn how to listen to the voice of God in our lives, a voice we may have been unable to recognize before. Silence helps us listen to the people in our lives who speak loving words of truth or affirmation over us. And...

When we give ourselves to contemplative practices marked by solitude, silence, and stillness, our souls are nurtured, our Virtues blossom, and our True Self comes forward. Contemplative spirituality calms the body, stills the emotions, and quiets the mind. And in so doing, it liberates us from ego addictions, thereby giving...

One of the gifts of the contemplative life is acceptance. As we practice letting go, we learn to receive—all that is good within us as well as all that remains a challenge. Again, as Father Richard says, “Everything belongs.” By pressing into our Basic Fears, we center ourselves more deeply and find that we don’t have to react to those fears but can respond toward wholeness, toward growth, toward awakening. We also learn to receive the gift of doubt as an invitation to press deeper into faith. Moving from belief to faith can cause anxiety. It drums up fear for some people, who feel they need to control their beliefs to be able to defend them or to rest confidently in them.

At its heart, faith is making the option for the absurd. What we’re really doing is placing all our hope in the idea that these beliefs may in fact be true. The move from belief to faith is a move toward humility, a confessional move toward acceptance. Ultimately, faith is learning to rest in mystery. But that invitation is a difficult one. So many of us spend much of our time trying to defend our beliefs, to come up with better arguments to convince someone that the way we think, live, act, or worship is superior. In those efforts we tend to gravitate toward arrogance.

Who we think we are (in other words, our ideas about our identity) can be confused by the bits of our own narrative that we pick up and set down—the parts of our lives we’re able to be truthful with ourselves about as well as those we continue to hide or refuse to face. These fragments of our unintegrated self compete for dominance, and often we allow one piece or another of our identity to lay claim to the whole of it.

We overidentify with the fragments we think are most attractive, the parts of our stories that seem most successful. This fragmentation keeps our shadow in the dark, out of sight and out of mind, yet always capable of sneaking up on us.

Anchor Points – Types Three, Six, and Nine (also sometimes called the Revolutionary Types) are the midpoints or anchors of the Intelligence Center in which they are located.

Basic Desire – Each person’s Basic Desire is the unique way they want to get home to their True Self, or the ego’s yearning to return to its essence. The Basic Desire expresses itself as the core motivation behind a person’s behavior, driving their actions in day-to-day life.

Basic Fear – Each Enneagram type has an underlying fear or dread that its Basic Desire will never be truly satisfied. Each type’s Basic Fear emerges as a person begins to believe that reconnect...

Childhood Wound(s) – The lasting effect that is formed within a person when they feel they are not being loved perfectly, or a person’s inability to receive love perfectly. The devastating way that the ego internalizes the impression of the caregiver’s shadow (their unexamined and often unhealthy traits or behaviors). It’s im...

Conscious Mind – The ego’s layer of awareness that supports its ability to perceive itself through cog...

Contemplation – An intentional, introspective state of letting go...

Dominant Affect Groups – The grouping of Enneagram types correlated to their object relations, or the theory of how one’s sense of self emerges from mirroring in early childhood. These three groups include a triad of Enneagram types around frustration (types One, Four, and Seven), rejection (types Two, Five, and Eight), and attachment (types Thee, Six, and Nine) in relation to the nurturing and/or protective energy of one’s caregiver(s).

Ego – One’s identity construct, or how the self perceives the self.

False Self – The functioning pseudo-self that perpetuates self-destructive patterns, behaviors, and tendencies based on its addictions to power and control, aff...

Fixations – The Enneagram’s nine type-specific ways the uncentered mind rationalizes the uncentered behavior of the Passion. If the Holy Ideas of each type demonstrate a mind fully awake and at peace, the Fixations...

Harmony Triads – The three clusters of Enneagram types that display how the types function within the world, specifically through relationships (types Two, Five, and Eight), through idealism (types One, Four, and Seven), or through pragmatism (types Three, Six, and Nine). The Harmony Triads display ho...

Holy Ideas – The unique state of mental well-being, specific to each of the nine types, in which the mind is centered and connected with the True Self. The Holy Ideas are the fruit of each type when the mind is at peace, and stand in direct contrast to the Enneagram’s Fixati...

Inner Critic – The disapproving internal dialogue embedded in the subconscious that condemns the ego for its imperfections. The inner critic condemns the ego through messages of disappointment, doubt, guilt, regret, or shame, which are often mistaken as God’s voice. Often considered part of the superego.

Inner Work – The practice of integrating self-awareness into action toward personal growth. These efforts are largely supported by contemplative practices.

Intelligence Centers – The Enneagram’s three innate modes of perceiving reality: the head (rational faculties, thoughts, mindfulness); the heart (emotional intelligence, feelings, inner stability); and the body (gut feelings, instincts, intuition). Every Enneagram type has a domin...

Intention – A prayerful concentration on the hoped-for outcome of contemplative practice; outlined in this book as it relates to the Enne...

Non-dualism or Non-duality – The nonjudging awareness of the intrinsic oneness of all truth, resisting the reductionism that highlights the parts of a whole. An inner ability to reject classification, categorization, and compartmentalization; ...

Passions – The Enneagram’s nine type-specific emotional states of a heart disconnected from its True Self. The Passions emerge as the heart indulges the Basic Fear that it will never return to its essence and therefore seeks out coping mechanisms that ultimately compound each type’s state of emotional imbalance. The Passions are the inverse of the Enne...

Prayer Posture – The contemplative stances of solitude, silence, and stillness that...

Shadow – The unexamined or unconscious part of the ego where many of its (oftentimes perceived to be largely negative) traits are stored. Often mistaken for the False Self.

Subconscious – Influencing all aspects of our mental state, the layer of the ego’s state of awareness entrenched in the feelings. Though incognizant of its subconscious, the ego is dependent on it for emotional intelligence that can’t always be rationally explained or justified.

True Self – The integrated authentic self. Who each person is created and called to be when the heart is centered and the mind is at p...

Unconscious – The most expansive layer of the ego’s state of awareness, including intuitive self-preservation instincts that go largely unregulated but are necessary for functioning (for example, blinking, metabolizing food, and breathing are u...

Virtue – Like the nine fruits of the Spirit, the Virtues are the Enneagram’s nine type-specific gifts of a centered heart that is present, nonreactive, and at rest in the True S...