The Wisdom of the Enneagram

by Don Richard Riso

From this perspective, we can see that when we bring awareness to our habitual personality, we are healing not just our own problems but also the destructive patterns that have been taking their toll for many generations, possibly for centuries, within our bloodline. Working on ourselves therefore redeems not only our own sufferings and struggles, but the sufferings and struggles of all our ancestors, which led to producing people who could be free of them. It is the same as when people became free after generations of slavery and realized that their freedom gave meaning and dignity to the struggles of all the generations that preceded them. A further, perhaps even more compelling reason to do this Work is to prevent destructive patterns from being passed on to the next generation. For instance, we are becoming aware that many of our unconscious habits and attitudes about the environment or racism have reached a critical point. Consequently, many young parents are doing their best to embody new socially and environmentally aware values so that their children will not continue in the same destructive ways. From a personal as well as a generational perspective, therefore, working on ourselves is a noble act and parenting a child is a call to awaken—to see, to respond, and to give wholeheartedly. Raising a child is as close as most people get to being in a spiritual school, because parenting is bound to bring up all of one’s own childhood issues. Often these issues are passed...