The Story of You
The Enneagram is a mysterious map of a human journey with nine paths. Discovering which path is yours can be the beginning of a whole new understanding of your life. Seeing how this is also true for others can bring insight and compassion to your relationships.
This mysterious life journey is already happening. Understanding the Enneagram illuminates this reality and allows you to bring more self-awareness and consciousness to your life path.
“You have an appointment with your soul and the only question is whether you’re going to keep it. ”
Essence and the Nine Types
In their true nature or essence, the nine Enneagram personality types are each associated with one of nine essential qualities. Each one of us identifies with a particular Enneagram type and is naturally attuned to the essential quality associated with that type.
You were born with an innate connection to one of nine beautiful essential qualities, which you have remained sensitive to throughout your life. As you will discover, this connection is both the origin of your personality type pattern and represents the core aspect of who you are.
You might think of your essential nature like this: As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, you were “sent out beyond your recall.” Though we are born in our true essence, our lives begin with a forgetting; we don’t remember our original nature. Although you don’t remember your innate connection to the world, it remains part of you, nonetheless. Your sensitivity to this essential quality is the North Star that guides you to rediscover who you really are.
These are the nine types and their essential quality or sensitivity- does one of these qualities resonate with you more than the others?
Type 9 - Peace, Harmony, “All is One”
Type 1- Goodness, Perfection
Type 2- Loving Kindness
Type 3- Value, Preciousness
Type 4- Originality, Uniqueness
Type 5- Deep Knowing, Understanding
Type 6- True Guidance, Trust
Type 7- Joy
Type 8- Strength, Power
The Personality, “The Fall”
Our retained sensitivity to an essential quality governs the development of the personality. This is how the nine essential qualities form the roots of the nine Enneagram types.
Having lost connection to your original nature, as you grew and developed your personality, the quality your soul loves became the ideal of your ego and the quality you are trying to create in the world. Your personality is organized around this quality- what you are after, what you avoid and how you experience the world. The gifts and strengths of your personality will have the flavour of this quality, the story of your life will be built around this quality, and the difficulties and challenges you encounter can be understood in terms of this quality and how it became distorted.
We don’t see this essential connection in ourselves because we are unconscious. We lose touch with our original essence and become identified with our personalities. This is why we say the human journey is a “fall” into personality, or that in becoming our personalities we “fall asleep” to our true nature.
Our personality is a survival strategy in the world and an operating system to manage life with all its difficulties. In our first decades we accomplish many tasks of life through our personality- we move out into the world, go to school, get a job, form relationships and so on.
There is nothing wrong with having a personality, it is necessary and valuable- it’s what got you here. But you are not your personality.
Waking Up, The Return Journey
As adults with a solid identity, especially by mid-life, we may find our personality starts to feel too restrictive, inflexible and limiting. We have a familiar, repetitive approach to everything. Then, when we encounter challenges in life, we double down on our usual, habitual approach- even more of the same. We find ourselves confused when we don’t get the outcomes we want. We may feel dissatisfied, stuck, or overwhelmed. Somehow, we feel off track and want a deeper understanding.
When something tugs at us to go deeper, we say we have received a “wake-up call” or a call to be more conscious and aware. The fact that you are here probably means you have felt this pull in some way and you are curious about what the Enneagram can offer.
The starting point is to realize you are living with a case of mistaken identity. In your true nature, you are not who you have taken yourself to be.
Knowing the Enneagram will help you discover what’s really going on with your personality, even beneath your conscious awareness. Seeing your personality with growing self-awareness begins the process of disidentifying and loosening habitual patterns. When you observe your personality in action you experience yourself outside of your personality, you know yourself as the “witness.” This begins the process of waking up from the sleep of personality.
The Enneagram is also a moving system that maps the process of growth for each type. As you continue working with the Enneagram and deepening your awareness, your personality will “loosen” and you can reclaim lost parts of yourself. This is what we call the Return Journey because it takes us back to our essence and wholeness.
There is one human journey - we begin in essence, we fall asleep, we live in our personalities until we wake up and recover our true nature.
But there is not one path- there are nine.
