The Enneagram as a Path to Your True Self

The Enneagram is having a bit of a moment. Enneagram knowledge is readily available in books, websites, seminars, retreats, workshops, and social media. Until about the 1980s the Enneagram was mostly an oral tradition. It passed from teacher to student, as the teacher discerned the readiness of the student to receive the material.

Books started appearing in the 1980s, mostly written by Claudio Naranjo and his students. Later, students of Naranjo’s students added their own books. Naranjo was the Chilean psychiatrist who brought the Enneagram to North America in the 1970s. He was, in turn, was influenced by Óscar Ichazo, a Bolivian philosopher and mystic. Ichazo developed the modern form of the Enneagram as a synthesis of various wisdom teachings in the 1960s. The Enneagram Institute has published a history of the traditional Enneagram, if you want to dig into its origins.

Enneagram-Lite

These days, we are seeing a lot of what might be called “Enneagram-lite”, the reduction of a profound wisdom tradition to a not-very-deep description of personality. (“I’m a 9w1 and can get along with almost everyone, but I just can’t get through to my friend who is a 4w3. Or maybe a 3w4? What if we worked on a creative project together? Would that help?”)

This was never the intent of the Enneagram. If you work solely on the horizontal, or material, level, you will never get beyond personality. For the Enneagram to be a guide for your spiritual journey, there must be a vertical, or spiritual, dimension to the work. This requires a groundedness in a spiritual tradition and a commitment to continued growth and work within that tradition. Work on the horizontal, or personality, level clears space for Spirit to drop in from the vertical level. The Enneagram is not specific to any one spiritual tradition, but it can inform any of them.

The Enneagram of Personality: A Tool, not an Excuse

Mostly when we talk about the Enneagram, we are talking about the Enneagram of Personality. This model describes people as having one of nine different personality types. In many formulations, these types have descriptive names that have become well-known in the Enneagram community. The descriptors are things like Perfectionist (Type One), Helper (Type Two), and so on. These characterizations are helpful simplifications when you are first learning the Enneagram – there is a lot of information to take in – but they are ultimately limiting. The descriptions are caricatures, not characters in our life stories.

The Enneagram is not a personality test or even a personality system. It is a tool to help us see and understand mistaken ideas and feelings we have about ourselves. These misconceptions manifest in various aspects of personality. The reason for becoming aware of our patterns of thought, feeling, and behaviour is so we can choose to live more consciously.

One criticism of the Enneagram is that it is just one more way to put people in boxes. If by “people” you mean “other people”, that’s not your business. The Enneagram speaks to inner motivation, not to behaviour. There is a good chance you will be wrong about someone else’s type unless you have some training and experience in Enneagram work.

For now, let’s stick with asking if the Enneagram is just another way to put yourself in a box. It can be, but only if you see your Enneagram type as a static, unevolving fact about you. In other words, it is not helpful to use the Enneagram as an excuse for your behaviour. It is more useful as a map to show you how to move beyond that behaviour.

Working Beyond Personality Type

Attaching to a type freezes you in place and does not allow for inner growth and development. Spiritual growth requires us to explore all aspects of ourselves. This will eventually require us to explore all the spaces in the Enneagram, not just the one we associate with our type. What the Enneagram provides is a map for this journey. It first shows us where we most often find ourselves getting bogged down. If you find yourself stuck at one place, even “your” space on the Enneagram, you are not alive to Spirit at that moment. As we mature, the Enneagram becomes a guide for personal transformation, showing the necessary movements through the different points on the symbol.  

Your personality is with you on this earthly journey. This is good and necessary – it is what has allowed you to survive here. What is neither good nor necessary is when your personality structure – your Enneagram type – tries to run the whole show. Spiritual growth consists of allowing the personality to take its true place in your being. The first step is to recognize that although you “are” your Enneagram type, you also “are not” – you are so much more.