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 .
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