Working with Reactions: The Law of Seven

Navigating Polarities in the Enneagram

Each Enneagram space has its own way of resolving conflicting demands and tensions. The Law of Three describes these movements via the affirming, denying, and reconciling forces particular to each Enneagram space. It is through the Law of Three that heaven and earth meet. The affirming and denying forces work on the horizontal, or earthly, level. When they are held in tension, they hold space for Spirit to drop in via the reconciling force.

But how do you actually do this? You can learn to navigate the polarities of each space via the Law of Seven, symbolized by the hexagram component of the Enneagram. This component incorporates thought (Five and Seven), emotion (Two and Four), and action (One and Eight). The Law of Seven is about movement and processing. It applies to your way of dealing with reactions, no matter which space on the Enneagram you identify as your personality type.

Consciously and Unconsciously Following the Law of Seven

The Law of Seven governs how we process a reaction to something that upsets our equilibrium. We face many impacts from the world every day. So much sensory, mental, and emotional energy is coming at us that we have to choose what to pay attention to. When we cannot avoid some impact – an unkind word, a frustration, a shameful thought, an injustice of some sort – the Law of Seven kicks in to deal with it. This will happen; it depends on us whether we use the Law of Seven consciously or get swept along by its action unconsciously.

Stress and Security

Many Enneagram teachings speak of stress and security points, where a person will “disintegrate to” their stress point or “integrate to” their security point in reaction to something external. The stress point of an Enneagram space is the next space in the direction of a connecting arrow. The security point is the connected space you reach when moving against the arrows. So, for example, the stress point of Five is Seven and the security point of Five is Eight.

This is an oversimplification, for several reasons. The stress and security dynamic restricts certain movements to certain Enneagram types. Five moves Seven or Eight. Six moves to Three or Nine. It doesn’t account for other movements, as described by the Law of Seven.

Integration and disintegration can move in either direction. We can consciously move to either connecting point, with a benefit in either movement. We can move to either adjoining point unconsciously, resulting in deterioration.

The description of movement to stress or security does not go far enough. There can be conscious or unconscious movement in a continuing cycle through all points on the hexagram, no matter what your identified Enneagram type is.

Finally, movement via the Law of Seven does not start from your identified personality type. It describes movement through a process for all Enneagram types, even those not included on the hexagram.

Unconscious Reaction

Reactions are meant to wake us up. However, if I approach my reaction unconsciously, I end up going “down the drain”, following the numbers of the hexagram one after the other.

• One: I react to whatever it is that has affected me. I feel this in my body as tightness, nausea, heat, paralysis, or something else that I perceive to be negative. I feel resentful of this reaction.
• Four: I reject my reaction, refuse to own it. I want an experience other than the one I am having.
• Two: I refuse to honour my own experience and to care for myself. Either I ignore the reaction, or I fixate on what I perceive to be someone else’s need, but framed by my own experience of the situation.
• Eight: I respond with anger, possibly lashing out at the source of my reaction.
• Five: I withdraw, refusing to engage with the world.
• Seven: I brush off the experience (“I’m fine!”) and distract myself without engaging the source of my reaction.

This cycle repeats, hardening and intensifying with each round, until I become so identified with my reaction, I can’t imagine any other response.

Consciously Meeting a Reaction

Working through the same path consciously, I can process a reaction more productively.

• One: I notice the reaction and I am grateful that it woke me up.
• Four: I can enter and fully feel my reaction to my experience as an emotional response, such as sadness, anger, fear, or shame. I meet my reaction with an inner knowing and clarity.
• Two: I honour my reaction, relate to, and care for it. I attend to it without feeling sorry for myself.
• Eight: I surrender to what-is. I let go of my desire for vengeance and submit my will to the greater will.
• Five: I seek to express my own voice. I detach from judgment and see my situation as it is without needing to change it. I engage with others to move forward.
• Seven: I am fully present to my experience and open to something new in the situation. I include everything and everyone, having consciousness with heart.

This sounds very enlightened and idealized, but it can be really hard to do. Noticing and feeling my reaction does not mean I have to like it. Surrendering to what-is and detaching from judgement does not mean I have to let myself be walked over. None of this takes away the pain and difficulty of a crappy situation, but by acknowledging the suffering inherent in the situation, it is possible to avoid unnecessary suffering. I bear what is mine to bear, but no more.

An Example: Reacting in the Nine Space

During my spiritual direction training, I had an experience that illustrates how the Law of Seven can process a reaction, positively or negatively. As part of the training, each of us was paired with a colleague to practice spiritual direction with each other for a couple of short supervised sessions. I walked in thinking, “Well, how hard could this be? I’ve been seeing a spiritual director myself for a few years. It’s just from the other side.”

Meeting My Reaction Unconsciously

It turned out to be harder than it looked. I felt responsible for “making” something happen in the session rather than just listening. I kept prodding my colleague – a Five – for some kind of response. She responded by withdrawing. The rules of the session allowed either party to stop for a break, a clarification, or to debrief. My partner stopped the session, saying she felt very “directed” and that she was just “answering questions”. I panicked a bit. We kept going, but my confidence was shaken.

Essential and Inessential Action

The virtue of my Enneagram space (Nine) is action, or more specifically, essential action. If it is not essential, action can also be a way of going to sleep. I can get so caught up in “doing” something that I have no time to attend to what really matters.

In this case, I had focused so much on making sure the session was going to work and hoping I would not look foolish that I fell asleep to what was actually going on in the room. It was more about me feeling (and looking) competent than offering a listening ear.

Down the Drain

How did I approach this experience in an unconscious way? I reacted (One) to the practice session with a sense of despair and failure. Hanging out rather morosely in the Four space, I felt sorry for myself and was about ready to quit the whole program. I did not want to have the experience that I was having. At lunch, I thought everyone else had had a better practice session than I did and they told better stories, too.

I did not really participate in the conversation. I felt that I had nothing to say and that everyone else’s experiences mattered more than mine did (sulky Two). I nursed a little anger (Eight) toward my practice partner for being so impenetrable. In other words, I acted as if my experience was someone else’s fault. I withdrew (Five) for the rest of the day and spent the evening in some distracting activity (Seven).

Meeting My Reaction Consciously

In the next day’s morning practice, we began with a lectio divina (sacred reading) on the parable of the Good Shepherd in the Gospel of John. I was struck by the word “voice” in the phrase, “My sheep hear my voice.” During the morning teaching session, I wrote down, “A time of contemplation leads to a change of consciousness and a change of understanding.”

Walking Meditation

I was still holding on to my reaction from the previous day (One), but I was ready to own it. I allowed myself to go into the depth of the experience of inadequacy and really feel how it felt not to be up to a task that I thought I should have been able to do (Four).

We had time in the morning to do a walking meditation. It was a windy day. Taking care of my own needs and relating in a heartfelt way to my own experience (Two), I went outside and surrendered myself (Eight) to the different “voices” of the wind. I climbed the bluff overlooking the lake and just listened to the different sounds for a while. Later, I wrote in my journal:

Voices in the wind. More than one wind-voice. Deep oragan-pipe roar of the wind in my ears, behind my head. Wind whistling through slats on a shed. Whooshing sound through branches and leaves. The rustling sound of trembling aspen.

The world is made from the ten thousand things – they say precisely nothing. (Annie Dillard)

Seeing is hearing, too – pelicans, turning leaves, blue water, brialliant sky.

Where is the voice? It is here to hear, if only you will.

I was able to go inside myself and engage with my experience as it was (Five).

When I returned to the building and went into a second practice session, I was able to carry that experience of listening into a greater presence (Seven) and the session went much better. So, paradoxically, the busy-ness in the first session was all inessential action. In the second session, the listening (“doing nothing”) turned out to be the essential action.

Reactions in the Unawakened and Awakened States

Many spiritual traditions speak of us all being asleep and needing something to wake us up. We can use our emotional reactions for this purpose, or we can ignore them and remain asleep.

In the unawakened, or egoic, state, we have some vague sense of what the awakened, or transformed, state of our souls would be, so we try to replicate it somehow. But the ego has no tools for operating in the transformed state; it must operate in a limited version of reality. I know that the task of the Nine is to wait consciously, and then move forward with right action. All my ego sees, however, is the action part or the waiting part. This leads to inessential action (busy-ness) or no action at all (sloth).

The polarities of the Nine space are sacred versus profane or if you prefer, the world of spirit versus the world of matter. The pole of the sacred is the listening to Spirit until you know what to do. The pole of the profane is action in the world. If you can balance these polarities, the spirit that can drop in is the Spirit of Enlightenment, leading to the virtue of Right Action. Each Enneagram space has its own set of polarities, which each invite the spirit of that place. The Law of Seven, followed consciously, offers a practical way to navigate these poles.