Working with the Heart Center
The Nine types of the Enneagram are derived from nine relationships between the Mind, the Heart, and the Body. We refer to the body, heart, and mind as Centers of Intelligence because they represent three distinct modes of perception, each with their own functions and capacities. We know the experience of the body through physical sensation. We know the heart through feeling, and we experience the mind through awareness and thought.
The negative patterns and reactions of the Enneagram Types stem from nine ways that the body, heart, and mind become dysfunctional and inappropriately blended with one another when we lack presence – for example, we begin to think with our emotional reactions, or use our bodily impulses to cover over our feelings,. Therefore, real understanding of the Enneagram requires having a deep, experiential understanding of these centers and bringing them into a greater harmonious relationship.
Transformation and Freedom are terms that are often used in the context of spirituality, but these concepts only become realities when we are able to apply the insight of the Enneagram to the right use of the centers. When the centers are functioning properly, we are less identified with their functions and reactions. The waters of our consciousness become more clear and transparent, which allows for Essence to be present, and for the proper energy of the centers to be expressed in us.
The Heart
The best place to start an inquiry into the centers is in re-examining our assumptions about the body, heart, and mind. In this essay, we’ll be taking a closer look at the heart.
Typically, the most intimate we allow ourselves to be with our hearts is limited to an awareness and preoccupation with emotional reactions. Going deeper is often too vulnerable and messy, and feels like too much to process in a normal day. However, we have moments where a sense of what the heart is for becomes more clear, and this tends to be captured by many of the ways we speak of the heart. When something has deep meaning for us, we say our heart has been touched. When we don’t value something, our heart isn’t “in it”. We call the core, center, or essential characteristic of something its “heart”. In times when we’re revealing ourselves with freedom and authenticity to someone, we say we’re having a “heart to heart”. When we love someone, we feel tethered to them from the depths of our Being. They become “close to our heart”. It becomes apparent, that there’s some universal understanding that the heart is what feels personal, has discernment about what’s authentic, and is experienced as a doorway to our Essence.
The heart is the center that is probably the most challenging to work with because the heart is the part of us that embraces our authentic identity or gets identified in the falsity of the ego. The heart is what struggles with knowing what is real in us and what is false, and this confusion stems from a few paradoxes that are experienced in a deep encounter with the heart.
Image Types
The Types that stem from the core facets of the Heart Center– Types Two, Three, and Four — contribute to our understanding of the heart as the organ of knowing our authentic identity as Essence. These personality types are collectively called Heart Types, Feeling Types, or Image Types within the study of the Enneagram of Personality. The central issues of these types focus on how the Essential Heart is expressed versus how the ego tries to compensate when we become estranged from our hearts.
The term “Image Type” speaks to one of the central struggles faced by all egos, and is at the fore for these three types. When each of these types loses presence, they all become fixated on ways of trying to fashion an identity out of psychological activity and accompanying behaviors instead of more deeply inhabiting their nature as Essence. They lose their sense of what and “where” within oneself one can draw identity from. Instead of simply being themselves, they become preoccupied with “producing” a sense of identity – externally, through behaviors that correspond to a way they wish to be seen, and internally, by clinging to certain reactions, feeling states, and self-representations that correspond with how they see themselves.
This fixation on “how they see themselves” is why they’re called Image Types – they begin to relate to a self-image when they feel they’re unable to touch directly into the authentic heart. Therefore, by more closely examining these Types, we can see universal issues, points of confusion, and paths of liberation, for everyone seeking to experience their authentic heart.
Types Two, Three, and Four
First, we’ll look at the Egoic expression of the Enneagram Points of the Heart Center so as to make the contrast with Essence more apparent.
From the egoic point of view, the conflict of the heart is that things like love, value, and depth, the fundamentals of an authentic identity, seem to be something we feel as a response to our experience or that we have to generate. The paradox of the heart is that our identity doesn’t belong to us. While we “are” our identity, it is not something the ego has control over. The more the ego attempts to fashion an identity instead of allowing Essence to simply be, as the rightful source of identity, the more alienated we become from our capacity to be ourselves in a simple and direct way.
Type Two represents Essential Love. The egoic Two in all Types experiences a lack of love and tries to perform the activity of loving. In a sense, the ego is unconsciously appointing itself as the source of love, acting out the Passion of Pride. This has the result of inflating the ego’s self-importance and the feeling that it is right and good to see the ego as one’s authentic self.
Type Four represents Essential Depth. The part of all egos that plays out the Four’s trap is to experience depth as conditional and in opposition to the common, mundane parts of life. From this point of view, depth is rare and special. The ego is therefore unconsciously coming from the assumption of a lack of Depth in the world, generating the Passion of Envy. Envy is chronic disappointment stemming from a faint recognition that the ego is an insufficient source of identity all while trying to make it special and personal without success. The ego becomes the object of fascination, preoccupation, and self-absorption that will generate Depth, while simultaneously despairing that it has the capacity to do so.
Type Three represents Essential Value. The egoic Three in all of us believes that value is conditional and must be created. Without Essential Value, the heart has no sense or orientation of what’s real. It can’t gauge what’s most important so it adapts to what other people seem to be lit up by instead of being able to listen to its own knowing. The Passion of Vanity is, when the heart has lost its bearings, trying to make an image seem real, substantial, and valuable in place of Essence. As we’ve spoken of above, valuing something means our heart is “in it”, that our heart is connected to it. The loss of Essential Value, therefore, also means the loss of that in us which values – the heart and its ability to know its authentic identity.
Love, Depth, and Value
When we’re present with the heart, we directly experience that Love is not a subject having certain feelings toward an object, Depth is not pushing away the surface, and Value is not something produced but is what we experience when we’re rooted in our Essential identity. The truly free heart is free from even “ourselves” and any attempts to control or shape the experience of the heart. The free heart is deeply vulnerable because when the heart is free, the ego has no say as to what will impact it and change it. As we have all experienced, when the heart is really touched by something, it has the effect of changing the sense of who we are and altering our ego’s plans and agendas.
For example, when we fall in love, when we are struck with great compassion, or when a child is born, the heart’s stasis is shattered and we experience a fundamental shift in who and what we take ourselves to be. The ego is not in control in such circumstances, and that’s partially why we’re both fearful and attracted to these kinds of experiences.
Love, Depth, and Value are facets of our authentic identity, not objects created by our personalities. As aspects of the true heart, they don’t “belong” to us. When we’re present in body, heart, and mind, we can experience a surrendering of the ego’s activity, which allows for the more subtle qualities of Love, Depth, and Value to be.
This is not some New Age way of ignoring the pain, darkness, and depravity routinely faced in the world, but of acknowledging there are multiple levels of identity at work. The necessity of inner work stems from the need to work against entropy, to Self-Remember, and connect higher realities with mundane ones. The law of entropy applies to not only to material things but also to consciousness, which forgets Essence and operates mechanically without presence.
The ego experiences love as an intense “liking” or attachment, but Essential Love, the unconditional love that we know on some level is what we seek, is beyond preferences. When Jesus said “love thine enemy”, he wasn’t saying like your enemy or feel good about your enemy. Jesus was making a call to not lose consciousness of the Essential identity of anything, in ourselves or in our enemies. What we call love is the experience of being conscious of something on an Essential level, like perceiving the material a thing is made of.
Essential love is the direct perception that on the Essential level, everything is deeply, intimately connected and that this connectedness has a quality of holding, warmth, and personalness. Presence bring us into this awareness, and we recognize that we’re included in this connectedness as well. The perception of Essential Love acts as a solvent for any structures that reinforce a perception of separation. When Essential love is present in us, our heart is no longer identified with emotional reactions. The heart becomes impartial, free to feel, be touched, and participate in our experience instead of being covered over by layers of the ego’s defensiveness and numbness.
Likewise, consciousness of multiple levels of identity means that there’s a direct recognition that our identity is not something we arrive at by reference to an internalized image or self-representation. We are present with the moment-to-moment unfolding and expression of identity rather than trying to put a box around it. The mistake all egos make that Point Four represents is trying to draw a very specific identity from a narrow range of impressions and reactions – trying to pin identity down to something knowable and distinct. The moment to moment unfolding is experienced as a great mystery arising out of a profound and all-encompassing depth. When we are present, we recognize our consciousness has dimensionality not usually available to use in our habitual modes of ego. Experience continuously emerges from a ubiquitous mystery, and to be with that mystery is to be ever-more saturated by it, to experience Essence as an inexhaustible depth. This quality of indeterminacy, intimate mystery, and unknowing is not the result of an inadequacy of consciousness but is itself a property of consciousness and our authentic identity.
It may be apparent by now that Love, Depth, and Value are three different perspectives on the same Essential Identity, and that to experience any facet leads us into an experience of the other qualities. Therefore, Essential Value is a way of expressing the profound sense of meaning, blessedness, and unconditional value that arises from Essence. This value isn’t produced. It’s objective, meaning it requires nothing to prop it up. The Point Three aspect of Personality in all of us believes something must be done or produced to create value. From this point of view, however, we experience ourselves and our actions as deeply connected to and in sync with Essence, so our actions don’t produce value but are valuable from their resonance with a deeper identity.
So much of the heart’s confusion stems from trying to find an authentic identity in personality structures, but Essence is more subtle and less defined than personality structures. At the same time, because Essence isn’t a psychological activity or an artificial structure, it is a far stronger and more meaningful source of identity. At the beginning of our inner work journey, it’s like trying to see identity in a dark cave when our eyes haven’t adjusted to the low lighting, so we can only take the most overt, crude, and attention-capturing events before our eyes, in this case the ego’s activity, as being the truth of who we are.
Making intentional efforts to be present in body, heart, and mind allow for consciousness to become more sensitive to Essence, and over time, with enough impressions of Essence, the center of gravity of our identity can slowly relax into Essence as the rightful source of identity over the personality’s activity. Using the term “presence” over and over can sometimes desensitize us to its meaning, but it literally means that the heart has to be present – engaged, intentional, and uncovered. Presence in the heart, then, requires the ego to be “hands off” about the heart’s experience, which requires a grounded, present body, and a clear, present mind.
Conscience and Remorse
People with a spiritual interest can often end up adopting an image of what they think a spiritual person “looks like” or trying to control what emotions, thoughts, and actions they have so as to be congruent with their “spiritual values”. While being mindful of action, emotion, and thought is important, Essence and the identity we experience from Essence isn’t an image or a modification of our personality. It’s beyond personality, and therefore acquiring a “spiritual personality” is just re-arranging the ego without fundamentally altering it or working against our identification with it. While our decisions and inner experiences may change, spiritual growth isn’t a new set of values to live by. It is an actual shift in our consciousness. The personality is necessary and not opposed to Essence, but it must take its intended place of subservience to Essence.
G. I. Gurdjieff, the man who first introduced the Enneagram to the world at large, spoke of a faculty of the awakened heart called conscience. Conscience, in the way Gurdjieff meant it, is not the “inner voice” that knows what moral actions to take, but is instead the part of us that recognizes what manifestations of action and personality are true to and congruent with our Essence. Conscience is the direct knowing that engaging in certain actions, thoughts, or emotional loops can bring us into greater depth of experience with Essence or take us away, losing ourselves in ego. It is like the heart’s ability to gauge what can bring freedom to the heart or not.
Conscience, however, is contingent on authentic Remorse, which supplies us with the will to not turn our backs on our hearts again, even in the midst of difficulty. Remorse, in this sense, is not feeling bad or regret. It’s the quality of suffering that we experience when we allow ourselves to feel the cost of having let ourselves be asleep – how we’ve hurt ourselves, hurt others, how much we’ve wasted, and how we have failed to be who we are. The heart closes itself out of an impulse to self-protect, so it requires a strong will to allow the heart to remain present, even during great suffering. Remorse educates the heart about what is really important to it, and makes us aware of how allowing ourselves to fall asleep is a deep betrayal to what’s most real in ourselves. Remorse arises from the ego getting out of the heart’s way, and the heart is affected by experience without interference. The cleansing quality of Remorse instills a courage and conviction that as difficult as things may sometimes be, it is more important to have the strength of heart necessary for unconditional presence.
The relationship between the centers is one of the most important aspects of the Enneagram to understand for real growth and transformation. No matter our Type, we all have a lot of work to do to actualize the potential of these three centers by creating the inner conditions that allow them to cooperate in healthy, balanced ways. Supported by the alive body and the awake mind, the heart can come into the direct knowing of the root of its identity in Essence.