The Sacred Enneagram: Finding Your Unique Path to Spiritual Growth

by Christopher L. Heuertz

So this brings us to the meaning of the Enneagram’s Passions as the ways each type manages and suffers the heart’s disconnect from its True Self—the painful emotional experience of enduring the ego’s tethering to its tragic flaw. What we are really getting at here is the anguish of having lost contact with our Holy Idea and Virtue.

the invitation here is to find the beauty in our imperfections however they manifest themselves.

This is one of the most useful ways to approach the Enneagram, learning to honestly yet compassionately observe both our attempts to return home to our True Self and our compulsions that derail us from living into our potential.

This mental and emotional loop of coping doesn’t have to control us. Instead, by learning to observe it, we learn to correct its claims on our well-being.

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 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.

those dominant in type Two, Three, or Four are clustered in the Heart Center;

Our Intelligence Center is the innate gift that indicates how God speaks to us—through our senses and the impressions we experience in our instincts, feelings, and thoughts.

What’s more, 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.

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.

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.

rather, they methodically face each of life’s problems searching for solutions.

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.

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:

Fours worry there will be no one with the particular ability to love them for what se...

Healthy heart people become a source of love in the world, doing good and bringing balance, but when unhealthy, they lose their sense of se...

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.

people in the Heart Center need to learn that their feelings are telling them something they will have a harder time figuring out in the mind or experiencing in their gut. Discernment for heart types is rooted in their fluency in accessing and trusting their emotional impulses.

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.

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 irrede...

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 ...

Father Richard suggests that those in the Body Center experience life through waves of intensity and “often experience life as too much, somewhat like a full body blow to which they develop a characteristic defense: Eights hit back, Nines back off, and Ones try to fix it.”3

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.

“a polarity of sadness [Four]

To have to bring balance to these polarities internally exhausts the Anchor Points and so in a sense they step back as the referee of the extremes of their wings and, just like any referee, force themselves to become objective observers of the compulsions of their center.

Part of the inner work invitation for the Anchor Points is to reconnect with their center (head, heart, or gut) and integrate with the other centers for wholeness.

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.

Interesting... Taking on the response of their disintegration path

Though we all have one dominant Intelligence Center, if we become stuck there without integrating the whole of who we are (including all three Intelligence Centers), then we miss the wholeness that is available to us—the wholeness for which we were originally created.

if you’re a heart type but don’t develop fluency in experiencing your gut and head, when you’re uncentered or unhealthy, your emotions will be out of sync with who you are.

When you are centered in your dominant Intelligence Center, the other two Centers ...

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.

Our personality is the mask we wear—it is part of us but not the whole.

Regardless of where they come from, it’s up to us to determine how long we’ll wear them.

Unfortunately, our tendency is to overidentify with some of the masks we put on.

The first mistake we make is misinterpreting these voices in our heads and hearts as the voice of God (though God is never as hard on us as we are on ourselves).

Our second mistake is giving away our power to the toxic and destructive control that the pains of our past hold over us.

those we’ve hurt or let down to fasten these masks to us in ways that make us feel we’ll nev...

Our Virtue is the lingering fragrance of our essential purity; it is what makes each of us beautiful. Sadly, the messiness of our human condition makes us feel distant from our Virtue.

if we can identify how we lost our way, we’re more likely to discover the way back home.

Our Childhood Wound jolted us into the pain of humanity and forced us to fall asleep, because sleeping became easier and seemingly safer than facing reality.

The Basic Desire is the primary motivation of the Enneagram type’s unconscious aspiration to return to centered presence or True Self.