Whole-Body Integration

How the Enneagram Helps to Understand Self and Others

I was pleased to see Huffington Post's article about the Enneagram. While basic, it's a good introduction to a very deep topic. Just yesterday my friend Seattle acupuncturist Kory Kapitke and I were talking about the Enneagram, and how it can be useful to understand ourselves and others. He's an acupuncturist, I'm a Rolfer™ and craniosacral therapist, so we both work with people all day long - people in pain, people in transformation, people curious about alternatives. Sometimes a client is on a growth path and curious to hear about something like the Enneagram, curious about how Rolfing® works to bring the body into alignment in gravity, interested in the mystical aspect of craniosacral work... Other clients are working the body dimension primarily - in pain, healing from an injury - but my knowing something about the Enneagram can help me relate to them better even if we never talk about such things. It can help me understand what makes a person tick, sometimes it can help me understand how to better communicate with a person, sometimes it helps me to see my own blind spots. 

The Enneagram is ultimately a multi-faceted and multi-layered system that can be used to understand oneself on many levels, including one's evolution, and to understand reality itself. At the most commonly known level the Enneagram consists of the nine Enneatypes, which are listed in the HuffPo article (Reformer, Helper, Achiever...) These are ways we can understand our selves and how we operate, in the same way that knowing the position of planets in your astrology chart can give you information about yourself. However, if you are interested in spiritual growth, it is important to understand that the Enneatypes are ego fixations - manifestations of the ego, the personality - and not representations of reality or the potential of the true self. To get stuck thinking "I'm a Five" or "I'm a Nine" is to forget your potential and to put your being into a pigeonhole. In truth we all visit all the Enneatypes, although we have particular ones our personalities are more constellated around. 

Just as I want to keep from putting myself into an Enneatype box, I also want to give that space to my Rolfing® and craniosacral clients as I think about them and how to best help them in their processes of transformation and health. If I limit my thinking about a client to "he's blah blah blah" or "she's such a ___," I'm seeing only a limited aspect of the person's personality, and I may also be perceiving inaccurately, based on my own predispositions and projections. So if I do have an idea of a client's Enneatype or character style, I want to hold that loosely, as a way to better understand and communicate with him or her, not to think that is all s/he is.

And then there's another level of the Enneagram, the Nine Holy Ideas. From this perspective, it is understood that each  Enneatype or ego fixation is actually a misunderstanding of one of the nine Holy Ideas, which are a map of the true nature of reality, the enlightened perspective. In contrast, the Enneatypes are the ego's best and imperfect attempt to find it's way towards this truth. Thus, the Enneatype One is a "reformer" because he thinks he has to change himself and others to seek perfection, while the Holy Idea of Point One, "Holy Perfection" tells us that reality is inherently perfect as it is - as all the great mystical traditions say. So the Enneatype of Point One has it partially right - he knows it's about perfection - but he is mistaken and deluded in thinking that it is up to him to create perfection rather than to awaken to a realization of the perfection that already exists. 

The best resources I know on the Holy Ideas are the books Facets of Unity by A.H. Almaas and The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram by Sandra Maitri. Maitri has also written The Enneagram of Passions and Virtues - think the seven deadly sins and the Christian virtues, but there are nine of each, not seven. This is yet another layer of the Enneagram. The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Don Riso and Russ Hudson, mentioned in the HuffPo article, is also an excellent overall Enneagram resource. If you live in Seattle and are interested in Enneagram study, see  Enneagram classes with Ragini Michales at Facticity . 

Wisdom from Leonard Cohen

I recently watched the dvd Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, a documentary/tribute concert about singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen. He is interviewed on various topics between the songs, and at one point he talks about becoming a Zen monk and his relationship with his Zen teacher, who he refers to by the honorific "Roshi." I loved one particular comment he made about his friendship with his Zen teacher, as it speaks to spiritual and transformative work:

"[Roshi] became a part of my life and a deep friend in the real sense  

of friendship:  someone who really cared about – or didn't care, I'm  

not quite sure which it is – who deeply didn't care about who I was.  

Therefore who I was began to wither, and the less I was of who I was,  

the better I felt." 

In any work of transformation we challenge what is familiar, what we take to be "me." In transformative bodywork like Rolfing®, we shift the familiar felt sense of the body, and the challenge in the process is to let yourself become the someone who is possible in that body that feels different. Openess to the process can result not only in having a "different" body - one that is better aligned in gravity, more open to energy flow, more spacious and lifted - but in transformation rippling through your life as other old and familiar patterns shift and the possibility for what is new and authentic arises.

In spiritual work, we challenge our familiar self images, the "me" who one takes oneself to be. As Cohen indicates, the less you are identified with who you are, the less you care about (i.e., are attached to) who you take yourself to be, the more space there is for true change. Thus, our true spiritual friends are those who are deeply disinterested in our ego self images, and instead curious about what else is there when we create the space for something more - or something less? - to arise.

I had the great good fortune to see Leonard Cohen perform in Seattle last month. What an amazing singer/performer/being. Here's a video from that tour, Cohen performing his great song "Hallelujah" in London. Enjoy!