The Sacred Enneagram: Finding Your Unique Path to Spiritual Growth

by Christopher L. Heuertz

When it comes to recognizing the truth of our own identities, most of us experience a symbolic version of blindness that keeps us from seeing ourselves for who we really are.

“Identity answers the question ‘Who am I?’, while dignity answers the question, ‘What am I worth?’”1

Overidentifying with our success or failure, allowing the fragments of our identity to lay claim to the whole, and falling into the addictive loop of our mental and emotional preoccupations keep us stuck.

This is how we get ourselves lost. The challenge is to find our way home.

My own consistent struggle is to recognize my addictive tendency to validate my worth (dignity) by curating an unrealistic and unattainable projectio...

“Every unrealistic expectation is a resentment waiting to happen.” And as I constantly fail to meet my own standards, the resentment keeps me trapped.

But when these lies take hold, they don’t let go.

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 contemporary Enneagram of Personality* illustrates the nine ways we get lost, but also the nine ways we can come home to our True Self.

By revealing our illusions, the Enneagram emphasizes the urgency of inner work—the intentional focus required to prioritize the nurturing of our spirituality by facing pain from our past, exploring areas where we’ve neglected emotional healing, and consciously* examining our struggle to bring our best self forward in our vocation, relationships, and faith.

Simply put, the Enneagram offers nine mirrors for self-reflection.

The stories are really never about the story; they point to something much deeper and significantly more beautiful than the symbols they contain.

The movement from basic knowledge to principled understanding to embodied integration is the idealized essence of mastery in any growth process—including the Enneagram.

Enneagram types aren’t just buckets for unique sets of idiosyncrasies but rather offer clues to the essence of each person’s particular purpose.

our personality is the mask we wear.

In essence we are hiding. And the wound in our soul remains unhealed, infecting every aspect of our lives. We are so asleep to our reality that we don’t know we are hiding behind the masks of our [F]alse [S]elf. In our slumber we are unable to distinguish between what is true and what is false. These masks become so familiar to us, they become a part of our very identity.

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.

The Holy Ideas of the Enneagram epitomize the lucidity of a mind integrated with one’s heart and body, evidenced in the consolidation of mindfulness and self-realization.

Or take the restlessness of people dominant in type Four, always longing to discover their intriguing exceptionalism. When the delusions of their ego are confronted by their True Self, they rest in the gift of their purpose for being. Centered Fours know they were created for a reason, that God is their source, and that being inseparable from the Source displays the reality of their holy origin.

I've been here before. I want to be here again.

The Virtues of the Enneagram are the unexpected fecundity that surprises us when we are aligned with what is good, true, and beautiful within our identity. The Virtues illuminate for us the very best of what our hearts were created for, what each of us uniquely contributes to the kind of peace-filled world we all desire to live in.

Then the emotional balance of their heart allows them to be present in the extremes of all their feelings—their anguish and turmoil, as well as their effervescence and exuberance, all have a place, but don’t need to define or control them.

"All have a place, but don't need to define or control them"

First, the circle denotes eternity, unity, wholeness, and the inclusivity of all things—the

Second, the equilateral triangle within the Enneagram’s circle illustrates what is known as the Law of Three*—the three forces that guide everything in motion: active, passive, and neutral.

The three points of this equilateral triangle within the Enneagram’s circle are marked with the numbers denoting types Nine, Three, and Six.

Law of Seven overlaid on the Enneagram symbol consists of six points marked with the numbers One, Four, Two, Eight, Five, and Seven.*

The Enneagram’s nine ways or nine types describe the raw material of humanity’s integral fears and desires. 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.

This makes sense, I relate to the other types that I've read about

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.

There are real physical and emotional wounds we experience as children, but the Enneagram’s Childhood Wound idea is better understood as an attack on our original innocence or our original Virtue, not necessarily a physical or emotional trauma (though both could be true).

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 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.

These descriptions of what prompts our loss of contact with our True Self should birth in us a deep compassion for our own selves as well as others. If we understand these experiences as our caregivers’ inability to love perfectly and the ways we absorbed that, we are more capable of viewing these pains as invitations for inner growth and healing.

“It wasn’t because of anyone’s sin—not this person’s, nor the parents’. Rather, it was to let God’s works shine forth in this person.”

As you read through the materials, the type you feel most exposed by or most uncomfortable with is usually the one that ends up being yours.

The theory of what these lines between the numbers symbolize in integration or security allows our dominant type to borrow the positive traits of another type.

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.

In fact, 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.

To recognize ourselves in integration requires that we accept the best of ourselves in our dominant type.

The converse path is not exactly an inverse pattern either, so those who suggest that disintegration is merely borrowing the negative traits of the type on our path of disintegration are somewhat mistaken. This view also promotes a sense of self-condemnation when we’re not getting it “right,” but I believe there is much more grace for us here than we might first think.

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.

we can’t self-observe, then we can’t self-correct.

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.

This isn’t to suggest that the Enneagram only highlights the harmful ways we act out, but it does show us a pattern in the shape of the unique loop of our type that keeps us stuck.

In the structure of each Enneagram type, the shadow of the Holy Idea is the type’s traditional Fixation—how the mind copes with the True Self’s loss of perfection and presence. The shadow of the Virtue is the type’s Passion—how the heart aches and longs to reconnect with the Virtue of the True Self.

So the Fixation and Passion of each Enneagram type become a sort of addiction loop, a misguided attempt to find our way home, back to our True Self where we are aligned with our Holy Idea and Virtue.

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.