The Enneagram
A User’s Guide to the Enneagram
The potential of the Enneagram is so powerful because we do not know ourselves. I think all of us have an intuition that we are not as we could be. The Enneagram illuminates deeply unconscious drives and patterns, but they require special efforts to truly see, understand, and transform. However, as plainly as some descriptions of the types may lay things out, the extent of certain features of personality are only revealed after years of inner work.
In my view, there is no difference between using the Enneagram and understanding the Enneagram. If you’re not using the Enneagram, you don’t understand it, but if you wish to truly understand it, you must make use of it. The wisdom it conveys must be practiced and experienced. Until we are in constant vigilance in body, heart, and mind, we do not understand the Enneagram - no matter how many years we've been studying or even teaching it. As the Enneagram blows up in popularity, type descriptions proliferate with little sense of what they mean or how they’re to be used.
The Enneagram has no fixed body of knowledge. It is a work in progress, with many different voices and contributions. More importantly, the Enneagram is not merely a series of descriptions associated with a symbol. The symbol itself is a kind of cipher that must live within us in three dimensions.
Every fragment of learning is only a stepping stone in a process of internalizing the system and the cosmic laws it represents while discarding views that no longer aid understanding. To that end, I want to offer an overview of some of the principal components of the Enneagram in a way that provides context for Enneagram Work and for viewing the Enneagram beyond a fixed set of nine descriptions but as a tool for illuminating a path of development.
What is the Enneagram?
When learning about the Enneagram, most folks want to go right to a description of the types and see which one fits them best. This is only natural, but it’s easy to assume we know what a “personality” means before we even get to any information, which will skew what we understand and how the material is understood. I think having a sense of the background grounds learning about the Enneagram in a context of self-discovery rather than self-fascination.
The place to start, in my view, is with the man who introduced the Enneagram to the world, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (circa 1860-1949). Gurdjieff was born in the city of Kars, in modern day Turkey, situated near the Silk Road. His proximity to this route, where many cultures mixed and traded, exposed him to a diverse range of mystical influences and spiritual traditions. He and some friends set off to find living schools of real esoteric wisdom, and according to Gurdjieff, he found such wisdom still preserved in millennia-old orders and esoteric brotherhoods that traced their own roots back to the ancient world. After some years, Gurdjieff taught in Russia, Europe, and in the United States.
He never taught the Enneagram as a personality system. Instead, he shared it as a profound “universal hieroglyph” that represented the coming together of universal laws. Later students and those influenced by Gurdjieff applied his Enneagram of Process to human personality to arrive at the Enneagram as a typing system.
Using this universal Enneagram, a phenomenon could be “mapped” onto the Enneagram and through universal laws, one can perceive the relationship between the atemporal, essential character of that phenomenon and how its character is expressed in distinct stages in a temporal process. These laws are represented on the Enneagram by the three shapes that make it up, the circle, the triangle, and the hexad.
The principal law is the law of one. It can mean that “all is one“, but it also represents the totality of whatever phenomenon you want to “map“ onto the Enneagram. The law of three represents how any phenomenon has three fundamental parts, an active, a negative, and a reconciling force. In the human being, these forces are expressed as the body, the heart, and the mind. The law is three is the basis of all trinities in spiritual traditions. According to Gurdjieff, we are normally caught between positive and negative, and blind to the “third force”. Sensitivity to the third force brings us into a more refined quality of awareness.
The Law of Seven is described by 1-4-2-8-5-7 on the Enneagram. The direction of the inner connections between the points derives from dividing one, representing the wholeness of a phenomenon, into seven parts: 1/7 = .1428571…, 2/7 = .2857142…, 3/7 = .4285714..., and so on. The math and the metaphor correspond. It describes how the totality of the Law of One and its three aspects manifest or unfold in a process, through time and space, and how that process isn’t linear but is full of variation.
Sometimes things proceed smoothly, and sometimes there is discord and interruption. When the Law of Seven is paired with the Law of Three, it reveals “shock points” or areas where fresh energy and purpose are required to support a process in continuing toward its intended aim lest the process stagnate or deteriorate. The Law of Seven is based on the same principles as the Pythagorean Octave and has long been recognized as symbolic of process in many ancient traditions.
One could consider the Gurdjieffian Enneagram of Process is the "real enneagram" whereas the personality typology is one application of the Gurdjieffian Enneagram. While some appreciate and use it for their own inner work, many of those involved in the Gurdjieff Work, which I’ll get into more in a later section, find the Enneagram of personality to be derivative, false, or merely something that should never have been made public. While I’m partial to the latter, it’s out there, so we might as well spread the news with integrity and fidelity to its real purpose, inner freedom.
Today the Enneagram is most widely recognized as a system of character types that draws from ancient wisdom and insights from modern psychology, but it comes from a long tradition of modalities of self understanding that have had many phases of development. Oscar Ichazo used the Enneagram to synthesize several systems used for understanding an individual's obstacles to presence: the kabbalah, the work of Rodney Collins, the work of Evagrius, and more.
From Oscar Ichazo came the four fundamental “enneagons” that make up the modern Enneagram of Personality, the Passions, Virtues, Fixations, and Holy Ideas, as well as the three Instinctual Drives, Self-Preservation, Sexual, and Social, and the concept of Tri-Fixation.
In both Gurdjieff’s conception as well as Ichazo’s Enneagram of Personality, the Enneagram is, at its core, a map of the relationship of Essence and Personality.
Essence and Personality
It was Gurdjieff’s claim that human beings are asleep (unconscious) to their authentic nature, and that a great many forces - internal and external - conspire to keep us this way. The good news is that waking up our delusions is a possibility, but the keys to our awakening lie in the development of our attention and fostering the right relationship between Essence and Personality.
The Enneagram is the most powerful tool for developing awareness there is, but it is truly effective only when we have a real and experiential understanding of the relationship between Essence and Personality. Gurdjieff made this dynamic the central feature of his teachings. These terms have found their way into the mainstream study of the Enneagram of Personality, but not without some confusion and vagueness.
Personality is a more familiar concept than Essence. The everyday use of the word “personality” is used to characterize what makes us unique, what is personal and distinct about us, and what accounts for how we perceive things in the way we do, but personality is actually something more specific – it’s the psychological structure of our Enneagram Type, including the way that our temperamental and hereditary traits become crystallized into patterns, and the dynamics by which these patterns continue to be reinforced.
The personality is composed of patterns, and the more psychologically imbalanced we are, the more compulsive, disorganized, and constricted these patterns become. The more present and mindful we are, the more we can observe these patterns more impartially without becoming identified with them. The patterns of personality become more balanced, realistic, useful, and transparent, meaning we’re able to make choices in relation to these patterns instead of being wholly at their mercy.
Personality is a psychological structure, so while it is the important functional part of who we are, it is not the core. As useful as it is, it doesn’t feel personal, meaningful, nor is it capable of being intimate, original, or authentically loving. The problem human beings face is that we become psychologically identified with the personality. We think we are our personality, but the personality is merely a complex psychological tool. This mistake of identity, however, creates a lot of alienation, suffering, and estranges us from our core, Essence.
Essence is what we are born with, prior to developing psychological patterning. It is the true “substance” of what makes us unique, and it’s the part of us that feels most real, sensitive, and substantial. Some people will immediately recognize what Essence is from their direct experience, while others may feel that this is some kind of vague, “New Age” concept. Essence is something that can be easily experienced if one knows how to orient to it, but the challenge is in having a lasting and profound enough experience of Essence for us to recognize it as the rightful source of our identity. If anything within us can be said to be able to “awaken”, is Essence. A mature, stable Essence is what spiritual traditions call a “soul”.
The personality develops around Essence as the sum of everything we learn and acquire through experience. It’s the part of us that is functional and self-protective, that helps us organize our experience and to accomplish goals, big or small. Essence needs a healthy, strong, and adaptable personality rather than rigid, disorganized, and opaque so that we can function, survive, and thrive.
The Enneagram has a lot of applications, but it is especially useful in navigating the right relationship between Essence and personality in a way no other system does. We don’t want to get rid of our personality - we couldn’t if we tried anyway. It’s the part of who we are that helps us survive and fulfill our instinctual goals, but our consciousness can’t be ruled by the personality if we’re to grow beyond the compulsive and automatic patterns that the personality is composed of.
In the context of Enneagram studies, the term “personality” and “ego” are often erroneously used interchangeably. Ego means “I am”, and it is the sense that we are our personality that comes from an identification with the personality. In other words, the personality is just a part of who we are, but the difficulties we face from our lack of presence comes from when we think the personality is who we are, and this identification is the ego. When we believe we are the personality, Essence goes unrecognized and unintegrated.
The right relationship between Essence and Personality is found when we are able to cultivate a robust and strong Essence that can stand independently in itself, apart from the ups and downs of the Personality. We must foster something in us that can be inwardly free, which means something in us that can remain unidentified.
The Essential Enneagram
Before diving into the different personality styles, we must understand what the Enneagram is actually describing. The Enneagram Typology describes nine basic, irrelated qualities of presence itself as they organize in accord with the Enneagram symbol. Our Enneagram Type is not just a list of contrasting positive and negative traits but a way of knowing the qualities of Essence most intimately associated with what’s central to our authentic identity as a roadmap to connecting with it and what features stand in the way.
These qualities we can experience for ourselves when we are authentically present in body, heart, and mind. They’re the texture of our consciousness when we’re present to our experience rather than on the ego’s usual “autopilot”. Depending on our type, we feel most wholly “ourselves” when we experience the Essential quality that corresponds to our point on the Enneagram. This is the basis of our Type.
The Essential Qualities can be described in these ways:
Point Eight – Power: The full, substantial, vivid, and alive quality of our presence
Point Nine – Harmony: The direct recognition of the polyphonic, integrated, diverse yet harmonized quality of presence
Point One – Integrity: The quality of our presence as being in alignment or correspondence with something greater than our individual experiences.
Point Two – Love: The quality of presence that is a recognition that everything is cherished and cared for
Point Three – Value: Everyone and everything is inestimably precious in and of itself
Point Four – Depth: The quality of presence that has inexhaustible dimensionality and indeterminate mystery.
Point Five – Insight: The vivid and immediate clear perception of reality unfolding itself fresh and anew moment by moment.
Point Six – Truth: The sense of presence as being fundamental and substantial, the sense of it being the unconditionally true and real thing.
Point Seven – Freedom: The recognition that Essence is not conditional on anything else nor determined by anything. It is fully and wholly what it is, and thus, unbound and completely free.
These qualities represent what our heart is longing for on a deep level, but we project these qualities into the external world - we think that by doing or achieving certain things, we’ll actualize our “true self” most characterized by one of the above qualities. They are what the majority of our personality is trying to achieve and experience, but this is an effort that will never satisfy. Essence is already “here”, but our attention is often anywhere but the present moment. Our attention must be trained to be sensitive and robust enough to recognize and make room for Essence in our moment to moment experience. Because the personality grows from Essence, one can see that the personality types retain a “flavor” of their Essential Quality.
Our Type, then, is like an attempt to replicate the Essential Quality through the mechanism of personality. In other words, personality is a kind of mimicry of Essence, an misguided attempt to get back to Essence.
The Enneagram of Personality, therefore, describes Nine basic, interrelated ways in which Essence is differentiated or expressed, and how these Nine facets of Essence can be covered over by identification with the personality. Knowing all this, we can better understand that our spiritual practice is not to make our personality better, but to integrate Essence and personality more intimately.
The Centers - Rage, Shame, and Anxiety
There are nine basic types because each type represents a different relationship between the body, the heart, and the mind. The body, heart, and mind are three basic centers of intelligence. They represent three distinct but related means of perception, with different functions and capacities.
When we are present, the centers function as they are supposed to - the body supports our functioning, the heart is sensitive and available to feelings, and the mind is clear and perceptive. Unfortunately, the consistent right work of the centers is actually very rare in human beings.
When we are out of touch with Essence, we end up in a state where the centers are only partially functional in the style of our Enneagram Type. This pattern of dysfunction we take to be “normal”, so the study of the Enneagram is a re-education of what the centers mean and how they’re experienced.
One of the chief uses of the Enneagram is a roadmap for bringing balance to the centers. The Enneagram helps us to find the authentic capacities and qualities of the centers, beyond our habitual ideas about the centers, by it’s lucid illustration of what the dysfunctional qualities are. Working to transform the dysfunction brings us to the real nature of the centers directly.
Losing touch with our Essential Nature produces three primary reactions: Rage, Shame, and Anxiety rooted in the Body, the Heart, and the Mind, respectively. These deep affective stances are so intense that to directly experience them would be nearly unbearable, so they are largely unconscious yet exert tremendous influence on our every perception, thought, feeling, and behavior. They are more primitive and unconscious than our usual experience of emotions. Therefore, the core of our Enneagram Type is the Essential quality, but feeling disconnected from it, our Personality Type is a coping mechanism for this immense and primitive wounding.
When we are present in the body, we directly experience our sovereignty, our personal power, and we have a connection with a realistic sense of our capacities, but with the loss of contact with Essence, the vital energy of the body becomes co-opted by the ego. They are used to reinforce psychological boundaries via physical tension and numbness, which disengages the whole personality from the immediacy of experience in the body and overrides direct contact with our physical presence. When we’re able to make direct contact with these layers of tension, it’s experienced as uncoiling rage. This is universal in all egos, but Types Eight, Nine, and One exemplify three basic strategies of reinforcing ego boundaries - expansion/pushing, dissociation, and judgment.
In turn, the Feeling or Heart Center is enlisted into the maintenance of the ego. The heart is no longer free and touched by its experience. Instead, when there is dissociation in the body, the heart is forced to “take on the job” of the body center in creating a sense of separation between ourselves and our experience through strong emotional reactivity. Confining the heart to strong emotional reactions according to our likes and dislikes leads to a sense of isolation in the heart which is contrary to the heart’s authentic nature of being affected by and personalizing our experience.
Further, the heart is also the center where we are touch with the felt sense of our identity, where we feel we are “being ourselves”. However, when we’re divorced from our Essence, rather than a deeply felt and direct experience of our identity, we maintain a self-image that we prop up and represent to ourselves as who we are. This alienation leads to a sense of falsity that produces deep shame. This is universal to all egos, but Types Two, Three, and Four represent three basic strategies of managing shame - emphasizing good qualities and overlooking negative qualities, increasing the personality’s value, and reacting to the inadequacy of the personality as a source of identity.
The awake Thinking Center or Mind’s role is to be active in reception to impressions and evolving perceptions. However, when Essence is obscured, the thinking center also keeps the ego out of direct touch with its experience, living through conceptualizations, ideologies, and fantasies. Perceptions become filtered through an unconscious background of emotional, instinctual, and physical issues that distort thought and shut down what Eastern traditions refer to as “quiet mind”, the inability to take in the range of impressions needed for confident inner knowing leads to incredible anxiety and a fear that one is without support against unforeseen threats. This instills a profound and disorienting anxiety. While also universal to all egos, Types Five, Six, and Seven represent three means of compensating for anxiety - retreat into conceptualization, seeking external guidance, and keeping the mind occupied and distracted.
The negative states of the centers are universal, but our Enneagram Type represents which of these conditions are most emphasized and at the fore of our psychological structure. Types Eight, Nine, and One are those for whom issues of the body center, like autonomy, rage, and dissociation, are central. Types Two, Three, and Four are the types that struggle the most with issues around identity, self-image, and shame because they’re rooted in the heart center. Types Five, Six, and Seven are types based in the mental center, so their primary struggles are with anxiety, inner guidance, and a lack of inner guidance.
Each of the Nine Enneagram Types has specific ways of experiencing and expressing rage, shame, and anxiety. These powerful affects are deeper and more unconscious than our usual experience of emotion, but a lack of understanding this sometimes motivates people to attribute other emotional states to each center, losing sight of what role these powerful psychological forces have in maintaining the ego and motivating the Enneagram Types.
Enneagram Types
Type Eight most exemplifies the willfulness and vitality of the Body Center. Eights are bold, assertive, and have a strong physical presence. They have an innate resourcefulness and drive that produces a great deal of confidence and impact. Most Eights tend to be very direct, even confrontational, and enjoy challenges. They are often in the center of the action and have a playfully rebellious streak. Eights have an intuition for how to assert themselves in order to “make things happen”. Despite their apparent confidence, most Eights rarely feel safe enough to be able to share their vulnerabilities, much less acknowledge them within themselves, so Eights become fiercely protective of those who they can let their guard down around.
In wanting to maintain their autonomy, Eights resist anything they perceive as potentially having power over them, and gradually begin to fear being controlled. They become fearful of being taken advantage of, and in doing so can make everything into a confrontation, interpreting their experience as a test of wills. As they become increasingly fixated, they become manipulative, megalomaniacal, and ruthless as they try to sell others on their self-image of being strong and invulnerable.
Type Nine exemplifies the grounded-ness and connectedness of the Body Center. Nines tend to be natural harmonizers who have a multifaceted, holistic outlook on life that makes them profoundly accepting, curious, and intuitive. While quite inwardly sensitive, Nines on the outside tend to be easy-going and not easily dismayed by setbacks. Many Nines identify as being spiritual seekers of some kind, and there’s an imaginative, creative, or intellectual side to most Nines.
However, entranced Nines seek stability and grounded-ness from the fragmented lens of ego. In order to maintain a sense of wholeness they can disconnect from their direct experience by blurring distinctions and contrasts, effectively keeping their sense of themselves vague and out of focus. This leads to not allowing all of themselves to be fully engaged and present, stifling the full expression of their being and divorcing from their own personal value. They begin to use dissociation as a means of preserving boundaries and autonomy. In doing so, they “check out” and resist the arising of their own powerful and visceral physical energies outside the bounds of a narrow comfort zone. As they become more fixated, they become repressed, numb, and almost non-responsive as they fall into deep neglect of self and others.
Type One most exemplifies the integrity, purposefulness, and alignment found when we are present in the body. Ones tend to have a natural wisdom and discernment from which they strive to live from intention and with principle. They are generally idealists, which often means high standards of ethics and fairness, but it can also apply to aesthetic or intellectual excellence. This orientation gives them a sense of purpose and mission.
Ones care about upholding goodness and doing the right thing, even when everything is against them. However, in pursuit of living up to their ideals, they may begin to fear that their own needs and instinctual impulses might reveal to themselves that they are inherently flawed, even corrupt, and so they can become rigid, self-controlled, and self-critical. Their ideals become standards by which to judge others. Opinions become judgments, reinforced with frustration and righteous convictions, which unconsciously functions to reinforce their ego boundaries, keeping the bad “out”. They become intolerant, physically rigid, perfectionistic, and punitive.
Type Two represents the warmth, love, and connectedness of the heart. Awake Twos are altruistic, and supportive from a place of authenticity and recognition of the inherent worth of both themselves and others. People of this Type have a great deal of energy for maintaining and pursuing relationships. When a Two is grounded in themselves, they can put aside their own agendas for the sake of others, and have a great tenacity for caring for difficult people and seemingly lost causes.
As fear causes Twos to lose sight of their worth, they begin to push their needs out of their awareness and highlight their selfless intentions. This failure to love themselves renders Twos dependent on eliciting love from outside themselves, at times leading to manipulation to get their instinctual needs met in seemingly non-threatening ways that don’t directly contradict their idealized self-image. Prevented from loving and caring for themselves directly because of their own self-judgments, Twos begin to expect others to reciprocate their loving feelings. When Twos become very unhealthy, they come to believe that they have sacrificed everything for ungrateful others, which creates a sense of entitlement for others’ time, love, and attention.
Type Three represents the radiance, self-worth, and inspiration of the awake heart. Threes tend to be very motivated, skillful, goal-oriented, and adaptable. They intuitively see potential and use their considerable gifts, talents, and energy to make sure that potential is realized. Awake Threes are paragons of whatever they strive for. Threes have an amazing capacity to direct their energy and attention at a particular goal so fully that they can quickly adapt the skills necessary to accomplish their aims and look good doing it.
Three’s gift to recognize and actualize potential has obvious benefits, but it can create drawbacks by devaluing their present condition. Their natural adaptability means that young Threes typically internalize, overtly or covertly, familial and cultural ideas of value. In trying to embody someone else's vision of value, they lose touch with a sense of their innate worth. They can get caught up in trying to project an image of success, hoping to regain a connection with the value they lost touch with. This can begin an inner split between their authentic feelings and their public persona. As a sense of their own value and identity is lost, Threes begin to chase success, becoming inauthentic, self-centered, and competitive.
Type Four represents the depth and mystery of the Heart Center. Fours tend to be artistically creative, introspective, and idiosyncratic. They gravitate toward the melancholic, symbolic, and darkly beautiful. They tend to be withdrawn and highly attuned to their inner states, so most of their attention is on the nuances of their subjective impressions. Fours express themselves primarily through artistic creativity and are extremely individualistic, living according to a deeply personal outlook that they stray little from.
When they lose presence, they become increasingly preoccupied with their inner world, and the practical demands of life begin to seem at odds with this concentration. They seek to find depth by rejecting anything that seems ordinary, shallow, or mundane, but this only reinforces a sense of alienation and inability to “be themselves” in a natural way. This hyper-attunement to their subjectivity makes for an excessively narrow focus, and they can imbue their impressions with undue significance.
As Fours lose a sense of how to connect their true identity with their outer life, they become increasingly self-referential in search for something that feels distinctly their own and increasingly occupied with differentiating themselves from others. Fours become focused on acting out their suffering, rejecting the present to long for a person or circumstance they imagine will complete them or save them from their torment. They can become deeply depressed and turbulently morose, feeling profoundly misunderstood and prone to lashing out with hatred toward loved ones and against themselves.
Type Five represents the insight, vision, and fascination of the awake mind. Type Fives have a gift for concentration, with creative imaginations and an ability to conceptually break down complex subject matter. Their curiosity is easily piqued, but they tend not to take anyone’s word on anything. They prefer instead to test, probe, and experiment with what others may take for granted. Their curiosity is not so much a general obsession with learning everything but a desire to discover something never-before revealed.
However, as they begin to prioritize their inquisitiveness, Fives begin to feel distracted and overwhelmed by the practical necessities of life. Fives have thin psychological boundaries, so they feel largely unequipped to deal with life outside subjects of their interest. They tend to withdraw into their active minds rather than engage with their bodies as their interest in fresh discoveries becomes viewed as stemming singularly from the mind. The life force of Type Fives becomes diverted to their thoughts. Type Fives may not always be physically hidden away, but when out and about in the world, they will limit their experience to things that allow them to retain focus. When deeply entranced, Fives become high strung, arrogantly antagonistic, scattered, and withdrawn, at times shut down or manic.
Type Six represents the devotion to truth, attentiveness, and inquisitiveness of the awake mind. Sixes have a gift for foresight and practical intuition. They are typically curious, funny, and thoughtful, but they can also be rebellious and oppositional. Type Sixes have a profound love of the truth, not in claiming to know something as fact, but expressed as a search for authenticity, validity, and discerning the reality of something. When Sixes find that kind of clarity with a cause, relationship, or mission, they have a powerful capacity for devotion, commitment, and service.
Sixes usually have a strong sense of responsibility and are tenacious supporters of whatever they care for, so much so that they put a great deal of energy into testing and verifying something that speaks to them. As Sixes seek to manage life’s ambiguities, they rely on their minds to reason through problems and anticipate outcomes, but this develops into chronically overthinking their choices and convictions, leading to a habit of doubt and skepticism. As a consequence, they lose trust in their own ability to take independent action and make sound choices. When they begin to feel unequipped to handle things on their own, they look for external sources of guidance apart from their busy, anxious minds, but this strategy can easily backfire. They may give up their own agency by investing faith in authorities or beliefs that may be unreliable or toxic, but provide them with a facile sense of confidence, or, at least, clear guidelines of behavior. Insecure Sixes will feel a need to continuously test their supports, hastily impose order, and defend against people or things that seem to threaten their source of stability.
Type Seven represents the versatility and freedom of the awake mind. Sevens tend to be mercurial, spontaneous, optimistic, and experience-oriented. They are in love with possibilities, and have a kind of enduring hopefulness and understanding that limitations and difficulties pass to give rise to something new. Sevens are typically up for adventure and tend to jump into new situations with ease. They have a great deal of energy and enthusiasm for the unexpected and novel.
Sevens make pleasure a priority, but they can skimp on giving adequate attention to processing negative feelings, especially feelings that feel heavy or limiting, like boredom, grief, and deprivation. To avoid these anxieties, stressed Sevens will use their quick minds to mentally “jump ahead” of whatever they’re doing in anticipation of the next experience or possibility. While Sevens are typically sensitive, they can become emotional escape artists who can rationalize their way out of having to attend to the parts of their experience that feel limiting, but this means that they are limited by their own avoidances. This results in an inner restlessness and agitation that needs the next exciting adventure to stave it off. Imbalanced Sevens become selfish, flaky, manic, indulgent, and avoidant of pain, grief, and deprivation.
Inner Work, Presence, & Identification
When we first learn the Enneagram Types, most of us can immediately begin to recognize ourselves and people we know in these descriptions and traits. While it’s a lot of fun, it’s only a small part of the picture. The purpose of the Enneagram is inner transformation through deepening and practicing presence. The Enneagram is a sacred tool because it helps us to see how to become more conscious of ourselves, which aids in the transformation of our Being from its centeredness in personality toward being founded on Essence. The practice for transformation is being present. Inner Work is the training to learn how to be present more deeply.
The Nine Types represent Nine relationships between the Body, Heart, and Mind, so it aids us in experiencing presence in three centers. We can find ways around the traps and biases our personality type would inadvertently fall into in striving to be present.
When we’re present, it’s not just that we’re more in touch with what’s going on in body, heart, and mind, but that there is a sense of oneself present that is not based on the activities of body, heart, and mind. There is an “I” that is separated, but not dissociated.
For most of us, this “I” is a fleeting experience. We experience ourselves somewhat free for a few moments before we’re lost in a new thought. This “I” that can be present is Essence, and the aim of spiritual work is to increase the time and intensity that Essence can be present. Whatever it is within us that can be present or not is Essence, but because of the strength of the personality, it is very difficult to sustain or deepen the experience of presence.
If our efforts are sufficient enough, the felt sense of our identity can shift from being rooted in the personality and rested in Essence, but this is an incredibly long and difficult path of inner work. Gurdjieff says that we are born as Essence, but if we don’t water our inner life, Essence is ignored and can even die. When we’re not in touch with Essence, we feel alienated from ourselves and that life is without meaning or texture.